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widowshill · 12 hours

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Things you said prompts: 10. … when I wasn’t listening? please and thank you!

thank you for your patience on this one, my friend. r/v/b ; mature content under the cut !

“Here is a talisman will remove all difficulties,” the former governess read, “and she held out a pretty gold ring.”

It was quiet, save for the steady noise of summer rain on glass and the scratch of shifting logs in a popping fire. No wind — not like the howls up on the hill. The storm had kept up all day: just like Collinsport, Burke had scoffed, to keep a steady downpour on hand for his arrival so that everything was wet and grey and bleak enough to really feel like home. Divine punishment, or something like it, in the pitiable heap of unused swimsuits and ready-folded beach blankets – suntan lotion that remained woefully unapplied by generous hands. He had enough sun in Texas, Vicki had reminded him, with a smile that awaited his arm around her waist and his promised complaint that he had no one to share it with. She’d assured him she liked sharing rain with him just as well, and that had been that. The great anger of Burke Devlin had melted away.

His chest rose and fell easy, now, and Vicki maneuvered her head to lie in the valley between neck and shoulder so-carved for this very purpose (or it seemed so) — the scent of cigarette smoke and cologne mixed with that of old, old pages. Last century’s leather. To Kitty, the inscription read, my dearest Jane.

Vicki, indolent, traced the fine gold emboss. "'Put it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand —'"

“And I am yours, and you are mine;” Burke, peaking now over her shoulder, finished for her. “And we shall leave earth, and make our own heaven yonder.’”

Their guest at her feet rolled his eyes while her husband, with the same smooth confidence of a sailor drawing into mooring, hooked a finger under her chin and drew her near to kiss her. Out there in the bay the boats pitched – kissed on the underside of the hull with breakers, decks slick, clung to by pairs of warm, knowing hands. Unsteady, thought Vicki, Burke’s grip tightening slightly at her waist, but safe. Anchored. Roger made a noise when the lull dragged on and Burke, bolstered immeasurably by the disapproving 'tch', took her left hand and kissed now the extravagant gold thing he had put there.

Vicki, delighted, flushed (and ever-so-slightly now breathless) held open Jane Eyre with her right hand and surrendered the left to capture. “She nodded again at the moon. The ring, Adele, is in my breeches-pocket, under the disguise of a sovereign: but I mean soon to change it to a ring again."

A few dollars in a Portland jewelry store, for a simple little band — a few more, for the marriage license — and, as easily as that, Adele, the moon at her fingertips; what need for fairies (or for rocket ships)? Though, she supposed, Burke’s promises were more easily fulfilled than President Kennedy’s. They had only gone as far as Manhattan for heaven (which as far as most of Collinsport was concerned, had as well been on the moon) and that first-class flight was only pocket change. Rings to sovereigns to hotel suites and negligees, and back again.

None of which had accounted for Roger — who was somehow both part of the moon and its second lasso. Her former-Rochester remained now unusually silent, toying with the fine stockinged ankles in his lap, tracing patterns — drifting occasionally upwards to where she’d begun to go threadbare at the knees. He’d been considerate enough, at least, not to put any holes in them. Yet.

Vicki, for her part, was resolved to ignore him. She adopted her best falsetto French for the little ward: "But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don't care for the fairy: you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?”

Roger raised his head. It was mademoiselle, she thought, on her tongue, loose and soft as plucked rose petals. (He had always, so he said, liked the way French sounded in the back of her throat). After a pause, considering, he slid long, gentle fingers up the back of one leg — indulgent and slow — and raised her ankle to his mouth to place his kiss there, nigh-reverent, on old-wounded tendons.

"'Mademoiselle is a fairy,” Roger supplied, when she went abruptly quiet —

And her mind drifted to conjugation charts as he began to kiss his way along her calf, up her thigh, past the line of nylon where decency ended. It was growing steadily more difficult to ignore him, now, and Burke, too, gave him a knowing look, but raised no protest.

Vicki, determined, swallowed. “Whereupon I told her not to mind his badinage; and she, on her part, evinced a fund of genuine French scepticism: denominating Mr. Rochester…” And here she slipped, and gave a (frankly) butchered approximation of the French. A true liar. Yes, she could think of a few of those.

Roger pulled back enough that she felt his absence keenly, breath warm, close, against teased flesh, but his tone was deceptively starched. “Menteur,” he corrected — disapproving. “Again, Vicki.”

“Un vrai menteur,” the former governess breathed again; this time, Roger hummed his approval. She was rewarded with a nip to the inside of her thigh, gentler than she was used to; perhaps because Burke was here observing the scene, or perhaps because too much pain served contrary to his pedagogical aims.

She looked to her husband for relief but received only a smile: hungry, she thought. “Go on, little governess.”

“Burke — ”

“You’ve got a chapter to finish, yet.”

She wasn’t entirely sure he was listening to the Brontë anymore, that any of them were, and she felt in some distant corner of her mind that that was unfair to the author. Her gaze pinned to the page in front of her but Roger’s hands were digging now into the muscle of her thighs, and the words were swimming. Dizzy. She felt dizzy — even the English felt foreign and daunting in her mouth. Vicki closed her eyes, and thought of the cold winds of the moors, and the cold stone of Thornfield. Though where it rose grey and dark in mind’s eye it was laid with Jeremiah’s bricks — the Yorkshire wind howling with the widows’ voices.

She cleared her throat, and found her place again. “— and assuring him that she made no account whatever of his 'contes de fée.'”

“A translation, for your husband.” Roger’s breath was spectral, ghosting heated over saturate flesh, and she shivered. Their French lessons seemed so very distant. The dutifully-taken lists of vocabulary that had trailed off into so many lazy pen lines, conversations that had always — inevitably — likewise dissolved. But she summoned up the term from distant recesses — fairytales — and squirmed when her tutor offered her his tongue as reward.

Roger laughed in that low, wicked way he did when he was teasing her, and dug his fingers in harder to keep her still. But again Burke supplied no rescue, nuzzling at her, his grip at her rib cage iron-clad. The prince, she thought, and the wolf — the golden-haired scion with his air-light kiss to wake the princess, and the desire-wet jaws that awaited them. Though it was a monstrous prince; a cultivated, slicked-back wolf.

Whispered, now, and conscious of her phonetics: “and that: du reste, il n'y avait … n’y avait pas de fees.”

“Good girl,” came the murmured praise between her legs, and when she made a pretty whine Roger stuck his tongue inside her — at which point her noises became much more pathetic. She leaned to kiss Burke, but he indulged her only a moment before deflecting, kissing instead her cheek, her jaw, with a low growl at her ear.

“What’s it mean, Vicki?”

Charlotte Brontës opinion was now a forgotten consideration, but she would think on her later, much later, when she read the chapter again for comprehension, and if she was listening somewhere on the other side of this life, to beg for her forgiveness.

“That even so, there’s …” She twitched again: a graze of teeth. This time, it was her husband who laughed, and brushed a work-worn thumb over the curve of her bottom lip. Her mouth opened slightly, expectantly. “There’s … I can’t think.”

“Focus.”

She whimpered: Roger had doubled his efforts, clearly enjoying the interruptions to this oral examination, but she tore her eyes from Burke and put her forefinger to the page nonetheless, in her very best effort to obey. “There are no fairies.”

Burke’s palms crept lower, over the curves of unresisting rose cotton, and edged up the hem of her dress further still. His fingertips danced over the bump of her hipbone, her lowest rib, there beneath her belly button, tender skin that made her breath hitch. She thought of masses of silver herring, lifted from the water in finely-woven nets — the panic as they broke the surface, gills pulsing, muscle twitching — the rope that dug destruction into skin.

“Is that right, Roger?”

“Exactly right.”

Satisfied, Burke kissed her again, long and slow — savoring her less like a lover than a meal. Vicki closed her eyes and couldn’t see which of them it was that slid his fingers inside her, but she could feel Burke’s pleasure smiled into her mouth when she arched against him. “Are you ready to give up yet?” She shook her head. “Then read the rest.”

Mrs. Devlin was missing, perhaps, only the plaid woolen skirt and buckled flats of the dutiful student, having torn herself away from her husband with extreme reluctance and digging fingers into the leather binding so as to keep them out of Roger’s hair. To keep in good health and not die was, she supposed, was the only answer for a wicked girl so very fond of her pit full of fire, and so very content to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever.

“Et quand meme … ” Her breathing had quickened, now, and she blinked at the swimming words on the page, forcing herself to give attention to the way her chest expanded, compressed, the feeling of sea air inside her lungs. She could still hear the rain, but it was no longer distinguished by individual drops; but instead, a hazy, dull, distant roar. “Quand meme … ”

Roger, kissing now and then at Burke’s hands, teased, and there was a stubborn undercurrent of want in his own voice, now, slightly muffled: “Do as your husband says, Vicki.”

“Roger, please … "

He hummed his wordless encouragements, which did nothing whatsoever for her concentration.

“Il y en avait…” Vicki trailed off, trying — and failing — to stifle a moan, as Roger’s book slid at last from her fingertips.

Burke, thankfully, was fast enough to catch it; expert thumb sliding between pages to mark their place. And he read off the last of the paragraph in quick, disinterested succession before tossing Jane Eyre to the floor: “She was sure they would never appear to him, nor ever give him rings, or offer to live with him in the moon.”

#this is. so far from perfect but i'm ready just to post and have done. and also before you get further into 1897 so you get a fun surprise.#<3 #i don't really remember what summer i intended this to be. 1969 i suppose — before vampire action makes them miss the moon landing.#➤ answered. ┊ Collinsport 4099.#➤ meme responses. ┊ boo !#tortoisesshells #➤ roger collins & victoria winters & burke devlin. ┊ to know how it ends‚ and still begin to sing it again.

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