From the inside of the hovel comes a slurred groan of, "wh'time izzit?"
"Yeah," Kit tells Vandelin, offering him a sheepish grin over his shoulder, but he's already bending to the task of helping a bearded, blear-eyed fellow up to his feet, dusting him off in a kindly fashion. "C'mon, Chuck, you need a hand getting home?"
There's a bit of grouchy banter--at least on the vagrant's end--but Kit, endlessly patient and good-natured, responds to the drunkard's grumpy barbs with good humour. Once they're both outside the hovel, he claps the guy gently on the shoulder and points down the lane. "That one's yours--remember?" He probably won't, and they'll definitely do this again tomorrow night, but, well. He did kind of sign up for this.
He walks the older guy most of the way back to his pad, makes sure he gets in all right. When he comes back to Vandelin, he looks sheepish, apologetic. "Um," he says, shifting, and thumbs back at his front door. "I'd say I need to get the locks changed, except I'm not rightly sure I've even got locks yet."
Vandelin watches him leave with undisguised fondness (though it's only the fact that nobody's looking that allows him to leave it undisguised.) It remains a mystery to him how Kit can possibly do it, maintain that endless gentle patience day in and day out under the most trying of circumstances, escort Chuck kindly back to his own house for what must be at least the fourth or fifth time when Vandelin would have been lining all the doors and windows with booby-trap glyphs after the first.
He takes stock of the small spartan room while Kit is gone, envisioning comforts he could procure for it, things Kit doesn't have and should--things Vandelin finds himself in the curious and unfamiliar position of wishing that Kit had, for no other reason than that he wants to imagine Kit being content and comfortable when he's here alone. When the door opens, Van reaches out to him, his smile serene.
"We'll fix that. This place has all kinds of potential, you know."
"You think?" he asks, smiling crookedly, and steps forward to first take Vandelin's hand, then draw him close for a soft kiss. A thrill runs the length of him at their closeness here in this place; this isn't an inn room, they could stay here together all night, and all of tomorrow, if they wanted to, because it's his, and he can do with it what he wants. He chuckles some, breaking the kiss to warn Vandelin, "Don't get too many ideas about dressing it up nice--we're halfway to Darktown, it'll just get pinched while I'm out."
There's a narrow, rickety staircase in one corner of the sparse room leading to a small upstairs chamber that doubles as both storage attic and bedroom. Leading Vandelin there, Kit fumbles in the darkness for a book of matches and a candlestick, which he lights. When illuminated, the room possesses a musty kind of coziness; the bed is clean, if uncomfortable looking, and what few personal possessions Kit has that he feels comfortable leaving out are sitting on top of a rudimentary dresser on the far wall. He doesn't have much. He's never needed much.
"You, um, want anything to drink?" he thinks to offer. "I've got a crap kettle downstairs, could make you some tea. Got a little left-over liquor, if you need something stronger." Another hesitant smile; he's doing an admirable job of keeping it under control, but it's impossible to miss how nervous he is, how worried he is about doing something wrong.
The idea that furnishing the place nicely would make Kit a target for robbery is not one that would have occurred to Vandelin on his own, one more thing that the Circle has left him unprepared for, but he keeps his chagrin about that to himself. Surely, he thinks, there must be other ways to make the house more comfortable. And if there aren't, he'll invent them. He follows Kit up to the bedroom, still just a little giddy about the privacy himself.
"If I need something stronger?" he echoes, teasing gently in the face of that anxiety. "You think I need to be liquored-up to enjoy your company? If that were the case, I wouldn't have come and found you again."
He gives himself the credit for that; if there's any way Vandelin can phrase a statement so that all the agency in it is on his part, he invariably will. But the underlying sentiment is no less sincere for that, and he reaches out to encircle Kit's broadly muscled waist with an arm, pulling him close and flush and nuzzling into his jawline in the way he's been talking himself out of craving for weeks.
"You think I need to be liquored-up to enjoy your company? If that were the case, I wouldn't have come and found you again."
"Hey," he chides, smiling, "there's no accounting for taste in some people, you know?" It's a self-deprecating dig, but it's a fairly harmless one, as they go. And it doesn't stop him from stepping into Vandelin's arms when he reaches forward; one hand delves into his hair, the other splaying warm against the small of his back. Kit rests his face against the crook of his neck and breathes in the clean scent of his skin. He's hungry for this closeness, this intimacy--but for a moment what he craves more than that is this, just standing still with Vandelin's arms around him, listening to his breathing.
After a moment, he admits softly, "I did miss you, salroka." His fingers curl gently in Vandelin's hair.
"You know my taste better than that." It isn't even the terrible pun it could be; it's just a reminder that Kit knows how phenomenally attractive Vandelin has always found him. He hadn't quite succeeded, despite his best and most disciplined efforts, in convincing himself he didn't want this back.
Kit can afford honesty, while it's always been second-nature for Vandelin to obfuscate and hide. Even in his attempts to disentangle himself from all of this and drive Vandelin away, Kit had never for a second been anything but maddeningly, admirably straightforward. And to say something like that, so simple and open and bare and tender, as if it's nothing at all--how? How does anyone?
He tilts his head into a kiss, soft against the corner of Kit's lips. "I'd have come back anytime, you know."
Kit would be charmed--humbled, maybe--to know that's how Vandelin sees him, as a man for whom honesty comes easily and is second nature. In truth he hides in plain sight, and is still hiding; the secret he can't bear to share with Vandelin isn't one he's going to come clean about anytime soon. That secret isn't the only reason that this tender honesty is so hard, so terrifying to commit to, but it's definitely a large part of it.
"I'd have come back anytime, you know." Those words, the soft kiss against the corner of his mouth--Kit closes his eyes and turns his face to return that kiss warmly; already he can feel his body responding to their intimacy, and finds himself unexpectedly self-conscious in the face of it.
Vandelin has no intention of letting him be self-conscious. He'll give Kit all the more reason to respond, catching his lover's lower lip between his teeth and giving it a slow, heated suck, encouraging with a soft deliberate noise of yes, more.
His hands slide down to grasp Kit's ass and pull him in close and tight, hungry for him, making him own that mutual need. It'll be a long time before he stops marveling at how they have all the time and freedom in the world to do this now--but right now, he has no compunctions about indulging in this urgency. They can take it slow later on. They have all the time in the world. (If he doesn't run again, his mind whispers and then he won't.)
He sits on the bed and pulls Kit along, tangling his legs around behind Kit's knees, and trailing warm kisses down his chest with every undone shirt button as his lover stands in front of him.
In the face of Vandelin's evident desire for him, Kit's self-consciousness does indeed begin to slip away, and with a subdued sigh he feels more freedom to indulge in his own. He answers that kiss hungrily and buries his fingers in Vandelin's hair, following him willingly as he's led to the bed.
No; he won't run again. Perhaps it's only his desire that gives him this conviction right now, but the shared heat and need created by their intimacy holds more in it than lust. Kit wants this closeness--even as it frightens him.
It quickly becomes clear to him what Vandelin has in mind as he loosens all the buttons on his shirt and kisses a warm path down his chest and stomach. Breath catching, he drops one hand from his lover's hair to work at the clasps on his trousers.
He isn't used to this craving, this insatiate memory of the taste of someone else's skin, this need for more and more and more of another person. Nobody in Hasmal had been worth that kind of space in his mind. Even Travis had been an acquired taste. But he remembers Kit's scars already, remembers the dusting of silverblack hair under his fingertips, remembers the weight of him in his hand and against his tongue, and the reality is so very much better.
He reaches forward to help Kit work, his own hands uncharacteristically hurried, and forces patience as he takes him in hand to stroke him.
That's Kit's intelligent response when Vandelin takes hold of him, fingers reflexively tightening in his hair before he remembers himself and loosens them. He can't stop the subtle shift forward his hips make--and why should he? This is what they both want.
He shrugs his shirt from his broad shoulders and abandons it to fall to the floor. His hand, now free, shifts to his lover's cheek to trace his high cheek bones, follow his jaw, stroke across his lower lip. "I'm crap with words, salroka," he manages with a breathless smile, a winded laugh that catches on a soft moan. Oh. "I just wanted to hold you--"
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"Yeah," Kit tells Vandelin, offering him a sheepish grin over his shoulder, but he's already bending to the task of helping a bearded, blear-eyed fellow up to his feet, dusting him off in a kindly fashion. "C'mon, Chuck, you need a hand getting home?"
There's a bit of grouchy banter--at least on the vagrant's end--but Kit, endlessly patient and good-natured, responds to the drunkard's grumpy barbs with good humour. Once they're both outside the hovel, he claps the guy gently on the shoulder and points down the lane. "That one's yours--remember?" He probably won't, and they'll definitely do this again tomorrow night, but, well. He did kind of sign up for this.
He walks the older guy most of the way back to his pad, makes sure he gets in all right. When he comes back to Vandelin, he looks sheepish, apologetic. "Um," he says, shifting, and thumbs back at his front door. "I'd say I need to get the locks changed, except I'm not rightly sure I've even got locks yet."
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He takes stock of the small spartan room while Kit is gone, envisioning comforts he could procure for it, things Kit doesn't have and should--things Vandelin finds himself in the curious and unfamiliar position of wishing that Kit had, for no other reason than that he wants to imagine Kit being content and comfortable when he's here alone. When the door opens, Van reaches out to him, his smile serene.
"We'll fix that. This place has all kinds of potential, you know."
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There's a narrow, rickety staircase in one corner of the sparse room leading to a small upstairs chamber that doubles as both storage attic and bedroom. Leading Vandelin there, Kit fumbles in the darkness for a book of matches and a candlestick, which he lights. When illuminated, the room possesses a musty kind of coziness; the bed is clean, if uncomfortable looking, and what few personal possessions Kit has that he feels comfortable leaving out are sitting on top of a rudimentary dresser on the far wall. He doesn't have much. He's never needed much.
"You, um, want anything to drink?" he thinks to offer. "I've got a crap kettle downstairs, could make you some tea. Got a little left-over liquor, if you need something stronger." Another hesitant smile; he's doing an admirable job of keeping it under control, but it's impossible to miss how nervous he is, how worried he is about doing something wrong.
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"If I need something stronger?" he echoes, teasing gently in the face of that anxiety. "You think I need to be liquored-up to enjoy your company? If that were the case, I wouldn't have come and found you again."
He gives himself the credit for that; if there's any way Vandelin can phrase a statement so that all the agency in it is on his part, he invariably will. But the underlying sentiment is no less sincere for that, and he reaches out to encircle Kit's broadly muscled waist with an arm, pulling him close and flush and nuzzling into his jawline in the way he's been talking himself out of craving for weeks.
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"Hey," he chides, smiling, "there's no accounting for taste in some people, you know?" It's a self-deprecating dig, but it's a fairly harmless one, as they go. And it doesn't stop him from stepping into Vandelin's arms when he reaches forward; one hand delves into his hair, the other splaying warm against the small of his back. Kit rests his face against the crook of his neck and breathes in the clean scent of his skin. He's hungry for this closeness, this intimacy--but for a moment what he craves more than that is this, just standing still with Vandelin's arms around him, listening to his breathing.
After a moment, he admits softly, "I did miss you, salroka." His fingers curl gently in Vandelin's hair.
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Kit can afford honesty, while it's always been second-nature for Vandelin to obfuscate and hide. Even in his attempts to disentangle himself from all of this and drive Vandelin away, Kit had never for a second been anything but maddeningly, admirably straightforward. And to say something like that, so simple and open and bare and tender, as if it's nothing at all--how? How does anyone?
He tilts his head into a kiss, soft against the corner of Kit's lips. "I'd have come back anytime, you know."
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"I'd have come back anytime, you know." Those words, the soft kiss against the corner of his mouth--Kit closes his eyes and turns his face to return that kiss warmly; already he can feel his body responding to their intimacy, and finds himself unexpectedly self-conscious in the face of it.
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His hands slide down to grasp Kit's ass and pull him in close and tight, hungry for him, making him own that mutual need. It'll be a long time before he stops marveling at how they have all the time and freedom in the world to do this now--but right now, he has no compunctions about indulging in this urgency. They can take it slow later on. They have all the time in the world. (If he doesn't run again, his mind whispers and then he won't.)
He sits on the bed and pulls Kit along, tangling his legs around behind Kit's knees, and trailing warm kisses down his chest with every undone shirt button as his lover stands in front of him.
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No; he won't run again. Perhaps it's only his desire that gives him this conviction right now, but the shared heat and need created by their intimacy holds more in it than lust. Kit wants this closeness--even as it frightens him.
It quickly becomes clear to him what Vandelin has in mind as he loosens all the buttons on his shirt and kisses a warm path down his chest and stomach. Breath catching, he drops one hand from his lover's hair to work at the clasps on his trousers.
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He reaches forward to help Kit work, his own hands uncharacteristically hurried, and forces patience as he takes him in hand to stroke him.
"Tell me," he murmurs, "how you missed me."
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That's Kit's intelligent response when Vandelin takes hold of him, fingers reflexively tightening in his hair before he remembers himself and loosens them. He can't stop the subtle shift forward his hips make--and why should he? This is what they both want.
He shrugs his shirt from his broad shoulders and abandons it to fall to the floor. His hand, now free, shifts to his lover's cheek to trace his high cheek bones, follow his jaw, stroke across his lower lip. "I'm crap with words, salroka," he manages with a breathless smile, a winded laugh that catches on a soft moan. Oh. "I just wanted to hold you--"
Well. Maybe a little more than just hold.