#♕║ v; We Built This City

[architectofhope]

A bouncing shock of brown curls emerges from behind his desk; “Ok so; Problem solved.” Sofía flips her hair back to its proper place. “Well no, not solved. Diagnosed. S o m e o n e has essentially pulled out every cable and just―” Shrugs. Flaps her arms―”Jammed them all back wherever.”

  Reeve peered over the edge of his desk with a concerned knit of his brows, watching her fiddle with the cords in the back. Someone had been in his office, messing with his workstation? That was a concerning thought for several reasons, none of which he would divulge or think too deeply on at the moment until he’d learned more. 

  “Any idea idea why someone would do such a thing? I mean, it’s no specific cable, right, you said it was all of them?” he puzzled, wondering what reason someone would have for jumbling them haphazardly like this, unless they’d attempted to pull his CPU and been caught in the process. 

  “Perhaps I should contact security — have them pull surveillance footage,” he pondered, scratching absently at the scruff of his beard. 

[architectofhope]

"Sir, you are the BEST!" Rita squealed. "I can't believe you got that project approved - if you weren't my boss, I'd hug you!" (@urbdev-assistant for fluster meme)

Fluster My Muse | status: open

 He’d just hung up with the president — a phone call Rita had patched through to him and apparently stuck around eagerly to hear the end of. Reeve’s expression cycled from skeptical to hopeful, finally landing on elated as he fumbled for words that didn’t sound overeager.

 “Yes sir, absolutely. We will get started right away, sir. Thank you, sir.”

 He hung up the phone and found Rita gazing at him expectantly, clapping his hands down on the desk with a heavy exhalation of relief, a quick nod confirming what she’d wanted to hear, he himself unable to contain the smile that ran away with his lips.

 “We did it,” he began, but her exuberant exclamation took him by surprise, dark lashes fluttering over hazel eyes as he watched her wriggle with evident reservations about throwing those arms around him. He would not have admonished her if she had — it was a hard-fought victory— but even still she had a point; it would be a bit frowned-upon for him to embrace her so wantonly.

“Ah,” he chuckled sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I’ll consider it done, then. Thank you for all your hard work. I couldn’t have done it without you, Miss Spencer.”

[architectofhope]

discrete

NSFW Prompt List | status: open

discrete. my muse reacting to yours touching them under a table.

  The holiday party had not been, to his pleasant surprise, all that bad. The President hadn’t dallied long at the gala, and in his absence the entire room seemed to let out a breath of relief. People trickled out bit by bit, but stragglers from various departments began to drift from their respective tables to mingle with one another, sitting at other tables and enjoying snippets of conversation between coworkers who were in sore need of letting their hair down every once in a while, so to speak. The Commissioner perhaps most of all. 

  He sat at the table with Mayor Domino and his granddaughter Rita, Reeve’s own assistant, as well as a few other Urb Dev members and a scattering of others — half the PR team and the head of Food Services among them. So when Quistis drifted away from Public Safety —Heidegger’s inebriated booming laughter and Palmer’s incessant wriggling that shook any table he sat at a clear enough reason for anyone to stray— Reeve welcomed her with a tug of the seat beside him, gesturing with a sociable smile for the woman to join them.

  The table had been absorbed in a bit of light-hearted banter between the one of the PR representatives and the head of Food Services, each of them taking one side or another in the matter in what would be known in months to follow as the Great Potato Salad Debate. Reeve mostly kept himself out of it, but made his support of the person that fed him well-known with a rare display of genuine amusement plastered across his face.

  He lifted the flute of seemingly bottomless champagne to his lips to take a drink when he felt a delicate palm spreading along his thigh under the table. His gaze drifted to the source of the touch, thinking it at first to be a mistake before following that arm up to the poster-child of ShinRa Public Safety herself — an elegant strawberry-blonde woman with a penchant for speaking her mind, even in the face of one of the most violent men Reeve had ever known. It was clear by the way she did not even venture a glance in his direction that she knew exactly what she was doing and took the breathless bewilderment on his face as no reason to cease.

  The drag of nails along the inner thigh of his slacks caused him to inhale deeply, taking a quick glance around the table to make sure none had noticed, finding them all mercifully absorbed in the debate at hand. He rested the champagne flute on one knee as his hand dipped beneath the table to arrest her wandering touch, withdrawing it from between his legs and rolling it within his grasp so that he clutched it gently in his fingers, palm to palm.

  It may have seemed like a knee-jerk rejection at first, but after several moments the pads of work-worn fingers began to trace small patterns against her skin, along her knuckles, thumb brushing feather-light sweeps against her own. That he did not brush her hand away, that he held to it, twined his long fingers between hers, he hoped was enough to express what he had no ability to say in that moment: not a no, but not here.

[architectofhope]

silence. our muses having to keep down during sex, due to whatever reason. (@urbdev-assistant)

NSFW Prompt List | status: open

  The soft hum of the vacuum cleaner in the adjacent room served as a near constant reminder that they were not alone on floor 63. It was a Tuesday night, as Reeve had somehow forgotten despite having shared many sociable interactions with the nice sanitation crew that came through every week and kept their work space nice and dirt-free. The ding of the elevator and the squeak of creaky mop buckets was a startling moment that had his heart leaping into his throat and the both of them scrambling at first to tug together shirts and smooth down clothes. 

  Lifting a finger to his lips he motioned for her to be quiet, gesturing for her to stay put on her perch on the desk as he slipped out from behind it and made for the door to his office, stepping out and closing it behind him. He was gone for several short minutes before returning, the crack in the door he slipped through narrow enough to keep the singular office occupant obscured from sight. He’d thanked Odin he’d drawn the privacy blinds over the windows he shared with the rest of the office earlier that day during a meeting with the Mayor. 

  He returned to her, the panic of the moment not quite entirely absent from his features, yet there was something glittering in those hues of brown and green. Something boyish and self-satisfied. “I told them to skip my office this week,” he informed her quietly, taking a seat in the leather desk chair and rolling himself toward her with the light scuff of polished shoes against the marbled floor. 

  Hands slid up along the length of her legs to her hips, pulling her down off her perch on his desk to straddle his lap, the act in and of itself causing skirt to ride up on her hips, aided by the scrape of short fingernails that left light red marks on her bare rear, her underwear tucked safely into his back pocket some time earlier. 

  “Think you can keep quiet, Miss Spencer?” he whispered against her neck, fingers picking up where mouth had been so rudely interrupted, gliding along the slick warmth between her legs, the growing impatience in the shift of his hips beneath her promising so much more. 

@urbdev-assistant

[architectofhope]

husky + silence tyyyyyyy

NSFW Prompt List | status: open

husky. my muse reacting to your whispering in their air from behind. silence. our muses having to keep down during sex, due to whatever reason.

  “You’re going to have to be more quiet than that, Aerith,” he chuckled softly in her ear from over her shoulder, barely above a whisper, reaching passed her to grab a pillow from up by the headboard of her bed and drag it down closer to them for her to muffle and bite as was needed. “I’d rather not get any more funny looks from Elmyra than I already do.”

  Moonlight sifted in through her window, spilling like a waterfall down the slope of his back from base of his spine to sharp angles of shoulders bent over her, both of them supported on knees and little else. Her body fit beneath his, tucked like petals of layered blossoms, one within the other, smaller, more delicate, held fast with a strong palm — sometimes two— grasping hip bones. One hand drifted up, gently pulling the long, soft plait of hair over one of her shoulders as he tucked his face into the crook of her neck and pressed heated kisses to her skin. The other remained steadfast, tugging those hips back against his own with steady rhythm, careful not to let those hips stray far lest they fill the air with sounds far too suggestive for the sort of discretion they sought.

  Still, even with the care being taken not to arouse suspicion, he was taking great care to arouse, now and then tugging those hips back against a deep thrust or two, testing her — challenging her— to swallow those sweet sounds down into the pit of her stomach or release them into the muffled void of her pillow, just loud enough to pick out the whimpers through the stillness of the night. 

[architectofhope]

SPOTS TO KISS + 15? Or # (from Jessie pls :]c )

SPOTS TO KISS MEME | STATUS: OPEN

15. a kiss on the jawline.

  He sat on the small couch in the living room, laptop propped on his leg, one crossed over the other, scrolling through a news feed with one hand while sipping his coffee with the other. He hadn’t heard her approach from behind him, but the telltale tickle of her hair against his neck as she bent down to kiss the scruff of his jaw was enough to alert him. A half smile creased his lips, glancing back over his shoulder at her with a notable fondness in those hazel eyes.

“Morning — I had an omelet earlier but I saved some egg mixture in the fridge. Would you like me to make you one? There should be some coffee left in the pot,” he informed her with a nod toward the kitchenette.

[architectofhope]

 SPOTS TO KISS MEME | STATUS: OPEN

@thememcry​ asked: 36. a kiss along the curve of the spine. (: 46. a kiss on the ‘v’. (YOU MADE ME DO THIS) 23. a kiss on the space between collarbones. (you reblogged it, you asked for another, i take no responsibility)

  Lazy Sundays spent watching soap operas on the couch with one another had extended to late (and considerably less lazy) Saturday nights that would find them turning off alarm clocks and hiding under blankets from the languid stretch of sunlight over the plush, king-sized bed.

  This was one such morning, Reeve still sound asleep in his usual way: stomach-down with his pillow shoved up against the headboard, blankets and sheets twisted in limbs though not nearly as fitfully as they would have been in the past. He had not been aware of her waking before him and climbing out of bed, at least not until she’d climbed back in in, pressing soft lips to a bare patch of skin at the base of his spine between the dimples of his back, the warmth of her breath tickling awareness into his sleep-addled mind.

  She would feel his muscles twitch drawing in a deep breath as if resurfacing from a deep dive, head lifting off the mattress to glance back over his shoulder at her curiously before a wide, sleepy smile painted his face. He rolled over onto his back, lips parting to bid her his usual raspy greeting when lips planted again — this time in that spot just below his navel where a very different kind of heat would pool. He huffed quietly, a ticklish anticipation causing him to squirm ever so slightly as he reached down and brushed a hand along her cheek and back through her hair, giving her a soft tug to bring her up his body.

 “Good morning to you too,” he murmured low as she placed kisses up his body on her way, lingering on his collarbone where that telltale flush began to crawl up his neck. He pulled her a little more urgently now, capturing mischievous lips with a hungry claim. He always did enjoy a good breakfast in bed.

[architectofhope]

( @urbdev-assistant​ continued from x )

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but judging by a quick glance to his watch he’d unintentionally dozed for the better part of an hour, leaving him a bit bleary-eyed and disoriented when she’d come in to find him asleep on the couch in his office, one leg hanging off the edge with an arm draped over his face to block out the pin-lights in the ceiling.

  “Deadlines,” he croaked softly, sitting up and tugging his tie back into place, though it still fit a bit loosely around his neck; he couldn’t be bothered to formalize it, the damage had already been done. “I was stuck in Directors meetings all day, I hardly had time to get anything done.”

  Part of this was true, part of it not — he’d met his deadline several hours ago, around the time he’d bid farewell to his team as they filed out of his office. It was the bits of under-the-table Slums business that had kept him long passed his usual hours utilizing access to tools and information he did not have readily at his disposal at home. 

  “What are you doing here? I thought you left hours ago,” he tossed the ball back in her court, eager to get the topic off himself. 

[architectofhope]

a flash of a grin. a work call, she knew some would come and be important enough to peel his attention. from the gardens of her home he paced out of earshot, tossing apologetic glances every so often her way. -one more minute- they said, and she smiled sweetly. but for the catch of his glance, the shift of fingers toward the hem of her sundress to lift just-so, quickly, to offer a peek of delicate lace unbidden to mossy eyes - *the wicked lady*. take your time, reeve. (fluster him, you say?)

Fluster My Muse | status: open

  He’d dedicated the day to her willingly — eagerly— helping her plot the spaces for her new flower beds and with them the sprinkler system he’d near perfected to help cut back on the workload of watering said beds every day. His team knew not to bother him on sacred weekends unless it was urgent, and so when the phone in his pocket rang he felt obliged to check it, excusing himself for a moment with a quick kiss to her cheek as he stepped away along a scaffolded path and skimmed the answer button.

 It had been important it turned out, a delivery of materials to the jobsite in sector 5 overturned on the highway. Reeve agitated the nape of his neck as he paced back and forth, nodding and ‘mhmm’ing with a periodic question or two. An order to do this, or call this person, send this email. It was a pain, but he was grateful no one was seriously hurt — including the driver. They would send another truck out of town to pick up the load and carry on, a bit off schedule but what could be done?

 He glanced up to Aerith during a lull in information, giving her a quick wink, but her idea of returned flirtation was enough to push the reset button on Reeve’s multitasking ability, that coy little peek of lace driving him to complete and utter distraction.

 ‘Sir…? Hello, Sir?’

 He snapped back to the matter at hand, quickly addressing his subordinate with a grimace and an embarrassed clap of his free hand over his eyes, pivoting on his heels away from the temptations of one positively impish Cetra who was no doubt extremely pleased with herself.

[architectofhope]

( @gyahahahaha​ because she couldn’t wait )

“Wake up.”

 The words were whispered in his ear in a low, husky tone, damp strands tickling at cheeks and neck as the whisper of breath retreated, waiting for the man beneath him to comply. 

---

  It had been a long day — he’d taken Heidegger to one of the job sites as he’d offered in the past, let the head of Public Safety see the inner workings of the city from another angle, let him have a hand in helping the renovation and expansion of the barracks by getting a day’s manual labor in; it was good for you, hauling some broken concrete and a jackhammer around for a few hours. He seemed to enjoy himself, much to Reeve’s pleasure, but it had been hot, the sun beating down on them from high overhead. 

  They’d taken turns in the shower back at Heidegger’s lodging — closer to the barracks than his own— Magnar going first as he had the most sweat and debris on him, Reeve to follow after settling a few work-day matters by phone in the kitchen. It was there that he found the handcuffs from some weeks before, hanging thoughtlessly from a pushpin, forgotten until now. 

  A quick cool shower would wash him clean, wrapping his towel around his waist and rolling it down to secure it. He plucked the handcuffs he’d procured from the kitchen off the sink and padded bare-foot into the bedroom where he’d find Heidegger fast asleep and heavy-breathing, clearly wiped for the moment from heat exhaustion and enjoying the wafting air conditioning of his room buck naked on his bed. 

  The sight had caused Reeve to chuckle silently to himself, but the opportunity could not have been better posed, glancing to the metal cuffs in his hand before setting about enacting his plan, gently cuffing those raised arms around a rung of his headboard and leaning down to whisper...

---

[architectofhope]

She sees Reeve on his way to who she assumes is Heidegger and stops him, placing a hand in front of his chest to cease his movement. "Give it about 20 before you go in there. He's in a mood. I was the one who put him in one. I apologize." All because she needed to report issues with the troops' new weapons experiencing malfunctions. She's not looking forward to corresponding with Scarlet about it. Thankfully as the face of SPSD's current advertising campaign, she's (somewhat) untouchable.

 Reeve had, indeed, been on his way to pay a visit to his fellow executive director, blueprints in hand for the expansion of the barracks, when a certain strawberry blonde put herself squarely in his path and halted him with a cleanly manicured hand on his chest.

 Her frankness caused dark brows to lift before glancing over her shoulder toward the door, hearing a gruff, booming voice addressing some pour soul over his telecom. Reeve gave her a look that bordered on pity and amusement, maybe a little bit admiration. 

“You really did a number on him, Miss Trepe, you’ll have to tell me your secrets some time,” he leaned in conspiratorially, handing her the folder in his hands.

“Well, in that case can I bother you to get these to him once he’s cooled off a bit? He should be expecting them. I’ve got copies if he does anything rash,” he scratched lightly at his temple with a forefinger, casting a glance back toward the General’s office door.

[architectofhope]

"Sir," Rita looks at him sternly. "You mother called again, she is quite upset you haven't called her back yet." Rita eyes narrow at him. (@urbdev-assistant for fluster meme)

Fluster My Muse | status: open

 Oh hell.  He knew he’d been forgetting something. And as if forgetting to call his own mother wasn’t bad enough, Rita was fixing him with that look — the collective burning of a thousand women’s hearts who found a streak of disappointment in the short-comings of a silly, distracted man.

 “My apologies, Miss Spencer. I will call her immediately,” as if to assuage his assistant he set aside his work and pulled out the phone from his pocket, showing it to her. “Will you please have catering put together a delivery of chocolate strawberries for her as an apology — and a half-dozen for yourself for the trouble.”

 He dialed the number he knew by heart, letting Rita hear the dial tone before holding it to his ear with a wary sense of anticipation. Nothing like a shunned mother to make a man feel five-years-old again.

[architectofhope]

Reeve’s plans and proposals were good. All of them. Some needed a little updates, some Rufus wanted done in a different way. But overall there wasn’t much to criticize. Reeve was a pleasant surprise in the board of the Directors. Rufus had expected that none of them were useful beyond their respective fields, but Reeve… laying down the last document he had been handed, Rufus just barely nodded. A smile playing around the corner of his mouth.

“You will present these plans to the public and to our investors. Right after I spoke. And you will present Heidegger’s and Scarlet’s, too. They will just sit back, while you make their work sound more appealing… you might be the only one who can do that.”

@rufusofshinra​ 

Reeve stood by as Rufus read his proposals, attentive, hands clasped behind his back as if by habit of being symbolically tied while maintaining the air of a man with a broad, proud chest. The nod came at last, then the unsettling hint of a smile on the young President’s lips that caused fingers to curl into his palm tightly where nails would dig shallow crescents of anticipation.

 Rufus’ response went beyond the unexpected into strange and potentially dangerous territory, stealing any bit of excitement the director might have felt for having his proposal approved and replacing it with slight dread.

“Heidegger and S—…” he trailed off, taking a step forward as his hands came unbound with an inclination of his head. “I couldn’t, sir. I may not see eye to eye often with my fellow Directors, but they’ve worked hard for their proposals — they would take it as a slight.” But he was protesting too much, he feared, sobering himself quickly before bowing his head with due deference. “I appreciate your approval of my team’s efforts. Perhaps there is some other way…”

[architectofhope]

For the 'fluster my muse' - Heidegger grabbing Reeve's thigh and working his way up under the table while they sit beside one another at a board meeting and it's nearing the end of the meeting, he's doing it with deadly seriousness and every so often the general keeps shooting him a look like 'let's do this.'

Fluster My Muse | status: open

 It was not often that he sat next to the Director of Public Safety at board meetings, the history of animosity between the two putting distance between them like petulant children, but Reeve had been summarily displaced by Hojo who had insisted he had matters to discuss with the woman most often on the other side of him. So, Reeve had taken up an empty chair across the table next to Heidegger, careful not to cast him any unusually friendly looks — doing his best to ignore the man entirely, if we were being honest. It seemed the best way to avoid suspicion.

 But in spite of his best efforts, Heidegger had different designs entirely, that broad palm closing firm against his leg beneath the table, causing it to jerk hard enough to jostle his seat which in turn prompted a pause in discussion as all eyes turned to Reeve.

 “Leg cramp,” he explained with a sheepish duck of his head, Scarlet scoffing with a roll of her eyes at having being interrupted by something so asinine before continuing with her explanation. Reeve cast Heidegger a quick sidelong glance, meeting the man’s eyes just in time to notice the lusty glimmer in them, a sight that had Reeve exhaling a hot huff of a breath against the backs of his knuckles folded like woven armor before his mouth.

 The hand did not stop, however, in spite of the tense air around the commissioner, palm finally seeking that spot against Reeve’s inner thigh that had the male clamping those legs together hard. Stop? Don’t stop? It was impossible to tell his intention without drawing further attention to himself, eyes clamping shut as he felt the telltale signs of a flush beginning to crawl up from his chest along his neck.

 “Quinine,” a nasaly voice spat at him across the table. Eyes flashed open to find Hojo staring at him with mild annoyance. Seeing Reeve’s bewildered expression he repeated again with an impatient hiss of admonishment. “Quinine — for your leg. Take it next time.”

 Reeve swallowed the hot welling of embarrassment from his throat, nodding with an affectation of appreciation. Odin, they’d made it two weeks on Goblin Island and the General was choosing now to be the death of him? What had he done to deserve this?

[architectofhope]

( @gyahahahaha​ continued from x )

 The weeks following their adventure on Goblin Island had been strange to say the least. It had started as a single night filled with intimacies they’d swore not to speak of in favor of not freezing to death — stupid, in retrospect, the camera crew would have whisked them away before letting them die of exposure on television. But this was a testament to how stubborn the two of them truly were, throwing years of bad blood and tension to the wayside just to make it through the two weeks successfully, throwing it in the face of all who doubted they would. From there things had seemed normal at first, until they weren’t. A few drinks and it had all come rushing out — all the things they swore never to speak of that had been nagging at the backs of their minds and the pits of their stomachs, ending up in burning loins and crushing mouths and some utterly ridiculous rug burns that made days after unavoidably awkward.

 Unavoidable in the way that they simple couldn’t avoid one another after that. Running into one another after lunch, between meetings, on the side streets after hours, on doorsteps and on floors and in bedrooms over and over again. This time was hardly any different.

 Well… save for the handcuffs. That bit was extremely different.

 Reeve had just tossed the damp paper cup into the receptacle, dabbing his lips on the back of his wrist when he felt a pair of firm hands grasp his arms, and with an ease that Reeve would retrospectively find shameful, pin them behind his back. His head snapped to one side in startled search for the culprit, not having to search far for the breath tickled at the edge of his jaw and down his neck where the larger man pressed close against his back with a click of metal cuffs around his wrists.

 “What in Odin’s name…-“ he rasped lowly, catching the other’s eyes with what had intended to be an admonishing look — they were in the middle of the Urban Development Department! Cameras didn’t turn off just because it was after hours. But Heidegger didn’t seem to mind. No, he cared so very little that those bold, war-forged fingers picked apart his shirt, tie loosened hours ago when he’d finally been left to his own devices. The audacity of this man had him testing the bind of those handcuffs, causing them to jingle and clink between his wrists that remained firmly locked, a breath of heated consternation deflating his chest beneath that roving touch.

 “Magnar,” he uttered the other’s name in low warning through his teeth — low enough not to be noted by the audio receptors in cameras he sought out with a tilt of his head, glancing around the pillar and its potted plants up to the dark dome in the ceiling on the other side. It had a wide view of the office, but he felt himself relieved to realize it had no view of them here. There was hardly any need for it as there was no way to get to where they were standing without passing through the camera’s purview anyway; water cooler activities were not of deep interest to ShinRa… though perhaps they should have been.

 Satisfied they were relatively out of danger he sank back into the broad chest behind him, closing his eyes for a brief moment as the prickle of his fellow executive’s beard dragged down from his ear to his neck. “Some of us have work to do, you know,” he complained, not at all convincingly, breath hitching as fingers grazed over his abdomen, causing the muscles beneath to twitch and dance with sensitive response. He felt the familiar nudge of desire at his backside, a flush crawling up his neck at the shameless way Heidegger pressed it against him, asserting himself physically, sexually, dominating the tone of their interaction with his wants and needs. There was a petulant part of him that resented being restrained like this, forced to submit when Heidegger knew the power struggle that existed between them. Knew how often Reeve enjoyed flipping the narrative and taking charge; knew how passionate he was and how much he enjoyed using those hands of his… but there was a bigger part of him that found a thrill in the frustration. In the invitation to lean back and let it happen; to trust the man behind him and enjoy the ride. He’d trusted Heidegger with his life already, and the man had not lead him astray yet. What was a bit of fun?

 But he wouldn’t be Reeve if he wasn’t in possession of a bit of cunning, hands twisting within his cuffs to feel along the body of the man behind him, palming that hard length pressed so conveniently close.

“Just couldn’t wait, could you?” he murmured against the other’s ear, tipping his head back to nose at the edge of the man’s hairline, every breath, every gasp of pleasurable sensation at the other’s grip on him amplified in intimate contrast to the quiet hum of computers and appliances in the empty office.

[architectofhope]

Spots to kiss + 29 :)

  Spots to Kiss Meme | status: open

29. a kiss on the inside of the wrist.

  He’d been awake for some time prior to the rise of the sun — not something he’d seen evidence of from the windowless room at the Honeybee Inn he’d slept in, but from periodic glances at the watch on his wrist between drifting thought sessions. It had been a long, tiring, emotionally draining night following the collapse of the plate, and he’d sought to ease his troubled mind with the company of a dear friend who slept peacefully next to him. He’d been careful not to stir until now, not wishing to wake her. She had not bargained on babysitting him all night as he’d gotten quite drunk and laid the achings of his heart bare at her feet, and he’d not made it particularly uncomplicated for her either.

 But he’d outstayed his welcome, he decided, though she would never say so, drawing a deep breath into his chest and carefully extracting himself from the plush blankets, dressing himself in the cleaned and neatly pressed clothes he’d worn the night before that the girls had been so kind to tidy for him while tending to their own. Tucking his tie in his inside coat pocket and buckling his belt in the dark he turned his gaze back toward the bed where Melissa lay — a queen in her castle, elegant even with bed-head. He smiled, to himself, wandering over and reaching down to brush the tips of his fingers along her cheekbone, tracing them back into the dark hairline near her ear in an affectionate graze.

 He had just turned to step away when he felt her grasp his hand, halting his momentum with a backwards glance. He met her eyes in the semi-darkness, a silent question answered with a reassuring nod and a smile; he was alright.

 Warm lips pressed to the pulse of his wrist and small, fluttering notions of the night before tickled at his stomach. He faced her again, leaning over the bed to capture her mouth in a lingering kiss, less lonely and lost than the one she’d been met with just inside the door of that very room, but no less gracious for her companionship.

 “I’ll call you later,” he promised with a whisper against her lips, one last kiss to her forehead before his hand slipped from her own and he from the quiet sanctuary of their mutual unraveling.