wants, not needs. But at this moment, for her, maybe the two were the same.
“As my reward, I want you to fuck me with all the lights in this room blazing.” She tipped her chin higher, refusing to break eye contact. “I want you to look at me the whole time. Can you do that?”
Against her belly, his renewed desire began to make itself known, and the hardening of his cock felt like triumph. Absolute victory, over a foe she’d been battling and battling for decades now.
He laughed, even as his hands rose to cup her breasts. “Of course I can do that. I’ve done it before, and it would literally be my pleasure to do it again.” Then he hesitated. “Only . . .”
Victory slipped from her grasp, and she had to stiffen her legs to keep upright.
“Yes?” she managed to say, her sinuses burning with tears she would not, would not shed in front of him.
His hands left her breasts, and she bit back her sob.
Then he was cradling her face, his thumbs caressing her cheeks in gentle arcs as he pressed his lips to her forehead, her temple, her nose. Her damned traitorous mouth, which was trembling.
Neck bowed, forehead to forehead, he made his own request. “After I fuck you, can we make love? With the lights still on?”
When she surged up on her toes to kiss him, he took that—correctly—as a yes.
As it turned out, what she wanted and what she needed weren’t precisely the same thing.
That night, fortunately, he gave her both.
Rating: Explicit
Fandoms: Gods of the Gates – E. Wade, Gods of the Gates (TV)
Relationships: Aeneas/Lavinia
Additional Tags:Alternate Universe – Modern, Angst and Fluff and Smut, The Saddest Erection Ever, Ghost!Lavinia, Eventual Happy Ending, Even Though They’re Both Dead at the End, But Together, Which Is What Really Counts Right, Aw Man You’re All Going to Hate This Aren’t You
Aeneas has spent twenty years getting hard to a ghost. The love of his life, long dead. Lavinia, who vanishes whenever he attempts to touch her.
Then, one day, she doesn’t.
Notes:
Special thanks to my new beta. :-)
* * *
At night, she appeared before him once more. A bit more translucent than she’d been in life, but otherwise entirely, heartbreakingly herself. All sharp angles and features, lopsided smile and lank brown hair dusting her shoulders. The sweetest sight imaginable.
For twenty years now, he’d watched her float around their bedroom, clad in the same thin, short nightgown she’d worn to sleep one night, curled in his arms, never to wake again. Until she did, as a ghost. His ghost. His wife. His beloved.
As always, it felt both perverse and completely natural, how his body responded to the sight. If he could, all of him would rise to meet her, on whatever plane she still inhabited, but for now, only one part of him could. She smiled shyly at his condition, so shyly no one would suspect how she talked him through stroking himself some nights, her eyes bright and hot on him as he gasped and heaved and spurted against his belly.
They couldn’t touch. At the attempt, she’d vanish immediately, and sometimes she took days to return. When she did, she looked shaken. Ragged. Eyes bleak.
He didn’t know where she went, and she wouldn’t talk about it. But after the third time, after he spent a week despairing that she might not be able to return at all, he no longer reached out to her.
Tonight, though, something was different. As he lay in bed—awash in want, in grief, in love—his breath stuttered. She reached out for him, as she hadn’t done for two decades.
Her long, gentle fingers caressed his cheek.
They were warm.
22
“I’M STILL THINKING ABOUT HOW I WANT TO TACKLE Aeneas’s Inconvenient Boner Week.” April readjusted her rearview mirror for the thousandth time. “Yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe I could go back to modern AUs without things getting weird, as long as I kept using Wade’s version of Aeneas, rather than yours. Which, admittedly, makes him a million times less hot, but sacrifices sometimes have to be made for the greater good. And by ‘the greater good,’ I mean ‘explicit fucking in my fics.’”
Marcus snorted, but she kept rolling before he could formulate a better reply.
“Speaking of explicit fucking, I should show you my friend TopMeAeneas’s latest magnum opus, “One Top to Rule Them All,” which