![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Title: Die Sprache der Blinden 12b/?
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom: Rammstein
Rating FRM
Pairing: Richard Kruspe/OFC
Disclaimer: Richard Z. Kruspe is a real person, with family and friends who love him. I am not one of them. I do not know him. This is a work of complete fiction, and should be read as such. No defamation is intended. For entertainment only.
Part I Part IIa Part IIb Part III Part IVa Part IVb Part V Part VIa Part VIb Part VIIa Part VIIb Part VIII Part IX Part Xa Part Xb Part XIa Part XIb Part XIIa
His good spirits had persisted through his lengthy shower, buoyed by the fact that he'd been surrounded the heady scent of her various nostrums--body washes and soap and shampoo--and by the time he'd finished, he'd been loose-limbed and relaxed, muscles soft and pliable as tallow beneath his skin. He'd ambled into the living room, still toweling his hair dry, to find Calliope sitting on the sofa with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. Another steaming mug had waited on the coffee table.
"I told you tea wasn't my thing."
"That's why it isn't tea. I found some powdered cocoa mix. If you don't want it, then leave it for me. I love drinking warm liquids on cold winter nights." Her gaze had strayed to the large window opposite the sofa, where the winter night had lain, thin and cold and sharp as silver over the sleeping streets. Snow weather, though none had fallen; he'd suspected it would come while they slept, steal into the city like an itinerant angel just passing through and leave the dust of its feathers in its wake. He'd always loved snow, the stark, eschatalogical beauty of it, and the prospect of waking to it had filled him with a small, quiet pleasure.
He'd divulged none of this to Calliope, however. He'd given his hair a final dusting with the damp towel and tossed it onto the edge of the coffee table, where it had hung like a drying skin, and settled himself beside her on the couch. "You haven't touched the food," he'd noted as he'd reached for the steaming mug. "Is it not what you wanted?"
"It's fabulous, but I thought it would be rude of me to sit here gorging myself while you were in the shower."
"What's this? An American with manners, and a New Yorker, no less."
She'd rolled her eyes and sipped her tea. "Fuck you, Kruspe."
He'd guffawed and nearly sloshed the hot contents of his mug over the rim.
She'd grinned saucily at him and leaned forward to pluck a hunk of hard salami from the platter. She'd popped it into her mouth and given an appraising chew. "Christ, that's good, or maybe I'm just glad it's not frozen airplane slop." She'd settled back against the cushions.
He'd wanted to enfold her, to rest her head against his shoulder and let her relax into him, but he hadn't quite dared. That their relationship had been redefined by their torrid romp in San Francisco was beyond doubt. He had felt the realignment as she'd shivered and spasmed and cried out beneath him atop the cool bed linens, but the shift had been subtler than he had anticipated, hardly the seismic grind and crunch of buckling barriers and bucking hips that he had previously experienced.
She'd held him when it was over, had tucked herself into his voids and negative spaces and basked in the afterglow of vigorous and therapeutic sex; she had dozed and drowsed and carded sleepy fingers through the sparse growth of chest hair that he'd been too busy and too lazy to wax, and she had succumbed to Morpheus' seductive, lilting song with her head pillowed on his arm and her hair fanned over his slack, sated palm. She had remained in his bed and his embrace long after the sweat had cooled and dried, had been something greater than an amicable morning-after regret, been there when the alarm on his portable traveler's clock had filled the still, slumberous air of four a.m. with its panicky, mechanical urgency and rousted them from the comfort of their shared bed.
For all that, there had been no discernible change in their relationship. She'd hadn't fervidly declared her undying love into the torpid, post-coital silence, hadn't begun to worry the question of what the encounter meant to their long-term future, hadn't cupped his empty balls in a possessive hand and purred that she would keep him happy, baby, just you wait and see. She hadn't sprung out of bed the next morning and announced their relationship to the rest of the band while the latter had clustered around the sentience-giving coffeepot with gummy eyes and blundering hands, empty mugs held blindly before them, worshippers come to beg bounty and knowledge from their strange and silent god. She hadn't coiled around him like a python throttling a young ibis and groped his ass in front of a taciturn cab driver, hadn't oozed over him in the backseat, all empty gabble and stupid, animal sensuality. She hadn't snaked her tongue into his ear on the flight, all teeth and instinct and predatory want, hadn't tried to coax him into the airplane bathroom for a rough and grotty initiation into the Mile-High Club, ass outthrust and hips swaying obscenely and a finger beckoning him to sin.
In fact, she'd scarcely touched him. She'd swung her feet out of the bed and wiped the sleep from her eyes and swatted his ass and scratched her own and padded towards her neatly-stacked luggage. The briefest of kisses before she'd slipped into the bathroom to scrub the puffiness from her face. She'd held his hand during the drive to the airport, but as soon as the others had gathered in the concourse, burdened beneath their baggage like dour Sherpas, she'd withdrawn her hand, all polite civility. It had unmanned him, the sudden change in demeanor, and he'd been tempted to lay a staying hand on her shoulder as she'd stalked briskly through the concourse to their intended gate and ask if everything was all right. He hadn't; he'd merely followed her and replayed the night before in his mind, searching for some bit of courtly malfeasance for which he was being duly punished.
Then the flight and her protracted sleep, and when she had been awake, her nose had been buried in a book. She'd hardly spoken, and when she had, it had been to chat with Christoph about the book in her hands. He'd felt inexplicably excluded, and a hot pang of jealousy had cramped his gut when Christoph had bent his head to further study her book. Calliope had been smiling, and Christoph's forehead had nearly grazed the temple to which his fingers were so often drawn. He'd felt, not phosphorescent anger, but a melancholy, hollow-bellied sense of loss, as though something lovely had been snatched from him before he'd had a chance to savor it. Then Calliope's hand had come to rest on his forearm, light as inchoate expectation, and the feeling had vanished. A sly, conspiratorial smile. I see you, her expression had said, and then Christoph had been in her ear, prattling avid and distracting, and her hand had drifted back to her seat, leaving only vestiges of warmth on his skin.
Shoulder to shoulder in the taxi from the airport, and then she'd kissed his cheek, but before he could respond, she'd turned to watch the city unfurl beyond the chilled windows. Companionable and comfortable, but far from the passionate, libidinous entanglements to which he'd grown accustomed, and while her ability to leave him be charmed and enchanted him, it had also unnerved him, made him wonder if he were losing his touch. He'd sat in the back of the cab and watched the clockwork turn of the driver's head as he'd negotiated the cold, bleak city streets, Calliope a lightly-jostling weight beside him.
And then that wonderful, lingering kiss in the kitchen, so full of sweetness and tenderness. When Calliope kissed him, she kissed as though it were the only moment that mattered, a single, pure breath wrested from a mouthful of silt. Time stood still when Calliope kissed him, and he went deaf and dumb, but not blind, and not numb. He could feel every breath, every brush and flexion of her body against his, every eiderdown tickle of her hair against his skin. And he could see her in her effortless splendor, milky skin and copper lashes and a sparing dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks, cream and brown sugar. She was peace and stillness and a place of sanctuary, and she enveloped him like a veil, vanilla and almonds, smoke and bells. He'd thought she felt it, too, the perfect, weightless suspension, but he could no longer be certain, and he'd been afraid, as he'd watched her pluck a handful of grapes from the bunch on the platter, that he'd deluded himself again, had rushed headlong into the affair without thinking and misjudged badly.
They had loved one another in that rented San Francisco bed, but he hadn't been sure if they'd been lovers as they'd sat in the comfortable, cradling sag of his leather sofa.
Maybe it's for the best if you did, the voice of reason had murmured. You don't have time to devote to a serious relationship right now, and won't for the foreseeable future. Once the album is finished, you might have a month to rest before you start the grind of promotion--press junkets and autograph signings and waking at three a.m. to do a radio interview in Munich. Once the album is released, you'll have warm-up gigs and magazine interviews and in-store appearances. And the tour itself, of course. Even if you could survive the rigors of self-promotion and the flurry of flashbulbs that transport you from her side for days at time, the bond you managed to forge will crumble beneath the strain of distance and time, when you don't see her for six months at a stretch and the temptation of a groupie is stronger than the memory of her kiss. To pursue her now would be an unkindness to you both, an aching illusion you can't hope to preserve, not with your rough, restless hands. Better to enjoy this time for what it is, a brief dance shared between friends, and let her go at the music's end. Put her in that deep and secret keep where you harbor your most cherished memories and get on with your life.
Calliope's hand, cool from the grapes, on his forearm. "Penny for your thoughts? You seem a bit pensive."
He'd shifted to look at her. Her face had been soft and drowsy in the gentle light of his flat, and her eyes had shone with amusement. "Contrary to Christoph's opinion, I am capable of deep thought."
Her eyebrows had risen in surprise, and she'd taken a long, contemplative sip of tea. "I know that. I wouldn't be here otherwise."
He'd studied her for a moment, and then he'd taken a sip of his cocoa and set the mug on the coffee table. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot." Her posture had been languid, almost a boneless sprawl. Her half-empty mug of tea had listed in the loose-fingered net of her hands.
Will you always be my friend, even if it all goes wrong? "Are you all right? Are you...comfortable here?"
Her brows had furrowed, and she'd straightened slightly, hands tightening around her mug. "Yes. Why?"
He'd shrugged diffidently and begun to tap-tap-tap on his knee, raindrops on turned earth. "Nothing." He'd smiled. "Really. It's just that you've seemed distant since San Francisco."
She'd sipped her tea. "Since we slept together, you mean?" she'd countered shrewdly.
Tap-tap-tap. "Yes."
Another sip, and then she'd leaned forward and set her mug beside his on the coffee table. Then she'd settled against the cushions once more. "I don't regret it, if that's what you're worried about. I've never regretted anything less."
"But?"
She'd shrugged, a loose, elegant twist of shoulder. "I don't want to be one of those women."
"Those women?"
"You know, the kind who make sex more than it is and start picking out curtains and baby names the second the guy pulls out. Every woman is that woman at least once, but you learn." Her tone had been casual, but her eyes had been dark with bitter memories.
Ah, looks like your little prude has a few miles on her, after all, Caron had sneered.
Shut up, you harpy, he'd thought savagely. He'd been determined that she wouldn't ruin this miraculous second chance with her bile. "So, what was it?" he'd asked carefully.
Another shrug, this one diffident and ungainly. Uncertainty had stripped her of years, and she'd looked young and awkward and hunted, a cornered fox facing the hunter's bloody snare. She'd studied the backs of her hands for a moment, and when she'd finally met his gaze, he'd seen shyness and a tinge of embarrassment. "I don't know." She'd scoffed. "Christ, I'm acting like some blushing virgin. I'm thirty-four, dammit. I know how the world works."
"What do you mean?" he'd prodded. She'd clearly been entangled in a morass of ideas too large for the small words rolling in her mouth like marbles.
Her eyes had narrowed almost imperceptibly. "Life isn't a Lifetime movie." She'd paused. "Thank God. The mousy English professor doesn't get swept off her feet by the dashing European playboy, and sex isn't love's first kiss. It's biology and hormones."
He'd waited.
"Sex is sex, except when it isn't, and oh, my God, I'm too tired to be explaining this. I sound like a madwoman."
"All right," he said. "Then you don't have to explain anything."
"It wasn't just sex. With you. In California. I'm not stupid enough to call it love, but I do care for you. If I didn't, I would've gone back to your apartment when you asked me to and let you fuck me and called it an itch most satisfactorily scratched, but I wanted to know more about you than the size of your dick and the smell of your cologne. I don't know what it was, any more than I know what this is." She'd run her fingers through her hair and gestured at the platter of cold cuts and mugs of tea and cocoa. "I just know that I like how I feel when I'm with you and want to see where it goes."
"And if it goes nowhere," he'd ventured. "If we get to the end of this trip, and we decide it's best go our separate ways?"
She'd met his gaze evenly, fearlessly, chin outthrust in defiance. A queen ferocious and dignified and burning with a fierce inner light. "Then I will be glad that I took the chance to dance with you."
Oh, meine schoene Hexe. Do your ears hiss and roar with the sound of black water? "We'll never know how the dance ends if we stay on opposite sides of the floor," he'd said, and reached out to caress her temple with his index finger.
"I told you; I don't want to be a man-drape," she'd groused, but she'd leaned into him and rested her head on his chest. Her hand had slipped beneath his undershirt to splay over his bellybutton.
"And you're not," he'd assured her. "Now, sssshhh and let me admire your lovely window treatments."
She'd sputtered laughter, and he'd dropped a kiss onto her shuddering crown and waited for the snow to fall.
Author:
laguera25Fandom: Rammstein
Rating FRM
Pairing: Richard Kruspe/OFC
Disclaimer: Richard Z. Kruspe is a real person, with family and friends who love him. I am not one of them. I do not know him. This is a work of complete fiction, and should be read as such. No defamation is intended. For entertainment only.
Part I Part IIa Part IIb Part III Part IVa Part IVb Part V Part VIa Part VIb Part VIIa Part VIIb Part VIII Part IX Part Xa Part Xb Part XIa Part XIb Part XIIa
His good spirits had persisted through his lengthy shower, buoyed by the fact that he'd been surrounded the heady scent of her various nostrums--body washes and soap and shampoo--and by the time he'd finished, he'd been loose-limbed and relaxed, muscles soft and pliable as tallow beneath his skin. He'd ambled into the living room, still toweling his hair dry, to find Calliope sitting on the sofa with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. Another steaming mug had waited on the coffee table.
"I told you tea wasn't my thing."
"That's why it isn't tea. I found some powdered cocoa mix. If you don't want it, then leave it for me. I love drinking warm liquids on cold winter nights." Her gaze had strayed to the large window opposite the sofa, where the winter night had lain, thin and cold and sharp as silver over the sleeping streets. Snow weather, though none had fallen; he'd suspected it would come while they slept, steal into the city like an itinerant angel just passing through and leave the dust of its feathers in its wake. He'd always loved snow, the stark, eschatalogical beauty of it, and the prospect of waking to it had filled him with a small, quiet pleasure.
He'd divulged none of this to Calliope, however. He'd given his hair a final dusting with the damp towel and tossed it onto the edge of the coffee table, where it had hung like a drying skin, and settled himself beside her on the couch. "You haven't touched the food," he'd noted as he'd reached for the steaming mug. "Is it not what you wanted?"
"It's fabulous, but I thought it would be rude of me to sit here gorging myself while you were in the shower."
"What's this? An American with manners, and a New Yorker, no less."
She'd rolled her eyes and sipped her tea. "Fuck you, Kruspe."
He'd guffawed and nearly sloshed the hot contents of his mug over the rim.
She'd grinned saucily at him and leaned forward to pluck a hunk of hard salami from the platter. She'd popped it into her mouth and given an appraising chew. "Christ, that's good, or maybe I'm just glad it's not frozen airplane slop." She'd settled back against the cushions.
He'd wanted to enfold her, to rest her head against his shoulder and let her relax into him, but he hadn't quite dared. That their relationship had been redefined by their torrid romp in San Francisco was beyond doubt. He had felt the realignment as she'd shivered and spasmed and cried out beneath him atop the cool bed linens, but the shift had been subtler than he had anticipated, hardly the seismic grind and crunch of buckling barriers and bucking hips that he had previously experienced.
She'd held him when it was over, had tucked herself into his voids and negative spaces and basked in the afterglow of vigorous and therapeutic sex; she had dozed and drowsed and carded sleepy fingers through the sparse growth of chest hair that he'd been too busy and too lazy to wax, and she had succumbed to Morpheus' seductive, lilting song with her head pillowed on his arm and her hair fanned over his slack, sated palm. She had remained in his bed and his embrace long after the sweat had cooled and dried, had been something greater than an amicable morning-after regret, been there when the alarm on his portable traveler's clock had filled the still, slumberous air of four a.m. with its panicky, mechanical urgency and rousted them from the comfort of their shared bed.
For all that, there had been no discernible change in their relationship. She'd hadn't fervidly declared her undying love into the torpid, post-coital silence, hadn't begun to worry the question of what the encounter meant to their long-term future, hadn't cupped his empty balls in a possessive hand and purred that she would keep him happy, baby, just you wait and see. She hadn't sprung out of bed the next morning and announced their relationship to the rest of the band while the latter had clustered around the sentience-giving coffeepot with gummy eyes and blundering hands, empty mugs held blindly before them, worshippers come to beg bounty and knowledge from their strange and silent god. She hadn't coiled around him like a python throttling a young ibis and groped his ass in front of a taciturn cab driver, hadn't oozed over him in the backseat, all empty gabble and stupid, animal sensuality. She hadn't snaked her tongue into his ear on the flight, all teeth and instinct and predatory want, hadn't tried to coax him into the airplane bathroom for a rough and grotty initiation into the Mile-High Club, ass outthrust and hips swaying obscenely and a finger beckoning him to sin.
In fact, she'd scarcely touched him. She'd swung her feet out of the bed and wiped the sleep from her eyes and swatted his ass and scratched her own and padded towards her neatly-stacked luggage. The briefest of kisses before she'd slipped into the bathroom to scrub the puffiness from her face. She'd held his hand during the drive to the airport, but as soon as the others had gathered in the concourse, burdened beneath their baggage like dour Sherpas, she'd withdrawn her hand, all polite civility. It had unmanned him, the sudden change in demeanor, and he'd been tempted to lay a staying hand on her shoulder as she'd stalked briskly through the concourse to their intended gate and ask if everything was all right. He hadn't; he'd merely followed her and replayed the night before in his mind, searching for some bit of courtly malfeasance for which he was being duly punished.
Then the flight and her protracted sleep, and when she had been awake, her nose had been buried in a book. She'd hardly spoken, and when she had, it had been to chat with Christoph about the book in her hands. He'd felt inexplicably excluded, and a hot pang of jealousy had cramped his gut when Christoph had bent his head to further study her book. Calliope had been smiling, and Christoph's forehead had nearly grazed the temple to which his fingers were so often drawn. He'd felt, not phosphorescent anger, but a melancholy, hollow-bellied sense of loss, as though something lovely had been snatched from him before he'd had a chance to savor it. Then Calliope's hand had come to rest on his forearm, light as inchoate expectation, and the feeling had vanished. A sly, conspiratorial smile. I see you, her expression had said, and then Christoph had been in her ear, prattling avid and distracting, and her hand had drifted back to her seat, leaving only vestiges of warmth on his skin.
Shoulder to shoulder in the taxi from the airport, and then she'd kissed his cheek, but before he could respond, she'd turned to watch the city unfurl beyond the chilled windows. Companionable and comfortable, but far from the passionate, libidinous entanglements to which he'd grown accustomed, and while her ability to leave him be charmed and enchanted him, it had also unnerved him, made him wonder if he were losing his touch. He'd sat in the back of the cab and watched the clockwork turn of the driver's head as he'd negotiated the cold, bleak city streets, Calliope a lightly-jostling weight beside him.
And then that wonderful, lingering kiss in the kitchen, so full of sweetness and tenderness. When Calliope kissed him, she kissed as though it were the only moment that mattered, a single, pure breath wrested from a mouthful of silt. Time stood still when Calliope kissed him, and he went deaf and dumb, but not blind, and not numb. He could feel every breath, every brush and flexion of her body against his, every eiderdown tickle of her hair against his skin. And he could see her in her effortless splendor, milky skin and copper lashes and a sparing dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks, cream and brown sugar. She was peace and stillness and a place of sanctuary, and she enveloped him like a veil, vanilla and almonds, smoke and bells. He'd thought she felt it, too, the perfect, weightless suspension, but he could no longer be certain, and he'd been afraid, as he'd watched her pluck a handful of grapes from the bunch on the platter, that he'd deluded himself again, had rushed headlong into the affair without thinking and misjudged badly.
They had loved one another in that rented San Francisco bed, but he hadn't been sure if they'd been lovers as they'd sat in the comfortable, cradling sag of his leather sofa.
Maybe it's for the best if you did, the voice of reason had murmured. You don't have time to devote to a serious relationship right now, and won't for the foreseeable future. Once the album is finished, you might have a month to rest before you start the grind of promotion--press junkets and autograph signings and waking at three a.m. to do a radio interview in Munich. Once the album is released, you'll have warm-up gigs and magazine interviews and in-store appearances. And the tour itself, of course. Even if you could survive the rigors of self-promotion and the flurry of flashbulbs that transport you from her side for days at time, the bond you managed to forge will crumble beneath the strain of distance and time, when you don't see her for six months at a stretch and the temptation of a groupie is stronger than the memory of her kiss. To pursue her now would be an unkindness to you both, an aching illusion you can't hope to preserve, not with your rough, restless hands. Better to enjoy this time for what it is, a brief dance shared between friends, and let her go at the music's end. Put her in that deep and secret keep where you harbor your most cherished memories and get on with your life.
Calliope's hand, cool from the grapes, on his forearm. "Penny for your thoughts? You seem a bit pensive."
He'd shifted to look at her. Her face had been soft and drowsy in the gentle light of his flat, and her eyes had shone with amusement. "Contrary to Christoph's opinion, I am capable of deep thought."
Her eyebrows had risen in surprise, and she'd taken a long, contemplative sip of tea. "I know that. I wouldn't be here otherwise."
He'd studied her for a moment, and then he'd taken a sip of his cocoa and set the mug on the coffee table. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot." Her posture had been languid, almost a boneless sprawl. Her half-empty mug of tea had listed in the loose-fingered net of her hands.
Will you always be my friend, even if it all goes wrong? "Are you all right? Are you...comfortable here?"
Her brows had furrowed, and she'd straightened slightly, hands tightening around her mug. "Yes. Why?"
He'd shrugged diffidently and begun to tap-tap-tap on his knee, raindrops on turned earth. "Nothing." He'd smiled. "Really. It's just that you've seemed distant since San Francisco."
She'd sipped her tea. "Since we slept together, you mean?" she'd countered shrewdly.
Tap-tap-tap. "Yes."
Another sip, and then she'd leaned forward and set her mug beside his on the coffee table. Then she'd settled against the cushions once more. "I don't regret it, if that's what you're worried about. I've never regretted anything less."
"But?"
She'd shrugged, a loose, elegant twist of shoulder. "I don't want to be one of those women."
"Those women?"
"You know, the kind who make sex more than it is and start picking out curtains and baby names the second the guy pulls out. Every woman is that woman at least once, but you learn." Her tone had been casual, but her eyes had been dark with bitter memories.
Ah, looks like your little prude has a few miles on her, after all, Caron had sneered.
Shut up, you harpy, he'd thought savagely. He'd been determined that she wouldn't ruin this miraculous second chance with her bile. "So, what was it?" he'd asked carefully.
Another shrug, this one diffident and ungainly. Uncertainty had stripped her of years, and she'd looked young and awkward and hunted, a cornered fox facing the hunter's bloody snare. She'd studied the backs of her hands for a moment, and when she'd finally met his gaze, he'd seen shyness and a tinge of embarrassment. "I don't know." She'd scoffed. "Christ, I'm acting like some blushing virgin. I'm thirty-four, dammit. I know how the world works."
"What do you mean?" he'd prodded. She'd clearly been entangled in a morass of ideas too large for the small words rolling in her mouth like marbles.
Her eyes had narrowed almost imperceptibly. "Life isn't a Lifetime movie." She'd paused. "Thank God. The mousy English professor doesn't get swept off her feet by the dashing European playboy, and sex isn't love's first kiss. It's biology and hormones."
He'd waited.
"Sex is sex, except when it isn't, and oh, my God, I'm too tired to be explaining this. I sound like a madwoman."
"All right," he said. "Then you don't have to explain anything."
"It wasn't just sex. With you. In California. I'm not stupid enough to call it love, but I do care for you. If I didn't, I would've gone back to your apartment when you asked me to and let you fuck me and called it an itch most satisfactorily scratched, but I wanted to know more about you than the size of your dick and the smell of your cologne. I don't know what it was, any more than I know what this is." She'd run her fingers through her hair and gestured at the platter of cold cuts and mugs of tea and cocoa. "I just know that I like how I feel when I'm with you and want to see where it goes."
"And if it goes nowhere," he'd ventured. "If we get to the end of this trip, and we decide it's best go our separate ways?"
She'd met his gaze evenly, fearlessly, chin outthrust in defiance. A queen ferocious and dignified and burning with a fierce inner light. "Then I will be glad that I took the chance to dance with you."
Oh, meine schoene Hexe. Do your ears hiss and roar with the sound of black water? "We'll never know how the dance ends if we stay on opposite sides of the floor," he'd said, and reached out to caress her temple with his index finger.
"I told you; I don't want to be a man-drape," she'd groused, but she'd leaned into him and rested her head on his chest. Her hand had slipped beneath his undershirt to splay over his bellybutton.
"And you're not," he'd assured her. "Now, sssshhh and let me admire your lovely window treatments."
She'd sputtered laughter, and he'd dropped a kiss onto her shuddering crown and waited for the snow to fall.