He opened his mouth to beg, but Edwin was there already. One of his hands fumbled down and closed around Robin’s cock; Robin heard himself make a sound like gnh, and followed him over the edge. He was dimly aware of himself clenching around the length of Edwin still buried inside him, and even more dimly aware of Edwin’s ragged breath.
Edwin pulled himself clear and sat up, still catching his breath. Robin thought seriously about moving, and decided instead to collapse his cheek into the pillow and his body fully onto the bed. There was a large wet spot beneath him. Robin tried to care and failed.
“Bloody hell,” said Robin. “You’ve certainly done that before.”
Edwin went a darker shade of pink. “A few times. Not with—not recently. And I haven’t ever used that kind of magic on someone else.”
Perversity made Robin say the name that Edwin hadn’t. “Not even Hawthorn?”
“No, he didn’t want me to do magic around him. He liked that I didn’t.”
Robin felt warm all over at the idea that Edwin had done this with nobody else; only with him. His whole body was still coming down from the effects of it, his heart going rapidly, still trying to live out the last of the dance. “Could you slow my pulse with a spell like that?” he asked, curious and flush with daring. “My breath?”
Edwin blinked. Robin rolled onto his back, took Edwin’s hand, and guided the fingers—tacky with Robin’s own release, which had quite the opposite effect on the heart rate in question—to press beneath Robin’s jaw, where his blood was pounding away close to the surface.
“Oh,” Edwin said.
They’d begun this with Robin’s fingers at Edwin’s throat. Now here they were caught in the mirror of that, Edwin not pressing hard but not being careful either, Edwin’s eyes sharp in his flushed face and blue enough to drown in—Robin’s breath caught without any effort expended, magical or otherwise, from either of them.
Edwin pulled away. “I have done that on myself as well. To—calm myself down.” In far less pleasurable contexts, Robin assumed. “But I’d be risking your life if it went wrong.”
“As opposed to risking your own.”
Edwin said, dry, “I rather think we’ve had this argument twice this week already.”
“Yes—you say I shouldn’t risk it, I say I’m going to anyway. I told you. I’ll try anything you have up your sleeve, if it feels half as good as that blue thing does.” Robin spread his arms wide and Edwin’s eyes caught on his chest, then on the black marks of the curse, and then Edwin looked away. Into the silence leaked the small sounds of night outside the window. Faint footsteps above them could have been maids in attic rooms preparing for their own rest.
“You should be found in your own bed tomorrow morning, I think,” said Edwin.
Robin sighed and began the mildly sticky process of wiping off, gathering and re-donning his clothes. He spared a thought, bitter in a way that he thought he’d grown immune to since his schoolboy days, for all those couples who would never have to think twice about spending the night together after an evening of pleasure. As house parties and their winked-at transgressions went, it wasn’t as though Robin and Edwin were breaking any vows of marriage. Nobody was being betrayed.
But the facts of existence for men of their inclination were a sore old enough to have turned to callus. Robin threw Edwin a final smile, and let himself across the corridor. No point in dwelling.
It wasn’t until he was lying in his own bed, beneath the identical wallpaper, that he wondered if Edwin had simply wanted him out of the room. Edwin Courcey seemed to grow more layers as Robin unpeeled them; Robin didn’t know what to do with Edwin’s swings between cool reserve and that naked, affection-starved need. The way he reacted when Robin touched him. The quiet, desperate sounds he’d made as he fucked into Robin, as though he would never be sated.
Robin shifted in the bed, enjoying the ache of awareness in his backside as he enjoyed the ache of his shoulders after a long session in the boxing ring. He felt sated, certainly. Aglow with it, wanting to linger in the memory like a warm bath. He was still tired and scared and cursed, still caught up in a plot that refused to reveal itself fully, but part of him was insisting that he felt happier than he had in years.
You really must have been in desperate need of a good fuck, he told himself, feeling his mouth curve. The words landed in his mind like bad notes on a piano. Apparently Robin recognised lies even when he was telling them to himself.