#xii. re. ⟳ temple ，claire.

[imagineclaireandjamie]

A shoutout to @notevenjokingfic for helping me wrap the last paragraph of this one up. She is a champ and she makes me a better writer.

Part I: The Crown Equerry | Part II: An Accidental Queen | Part III: Just Claire | Part IV: Foal | Part V: A Deal | Part VI: Vibrations|Part VII: Magnolias| Part VIII: Schoolmates | Part IX: A Queen’s Speech | Part X: Rare | Part XI: Watched | Part XII: A Day’s Anticipation | Part XIII: The Location | Part XV: Motorcycle

Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.) Part XV: Cabin

Claire wondered if it was real.

How any of it could be real.

The weightless feeling pressing against her skull.

The leaden feeling in her bones, save the very tips of her fingers.

The bobbing feeling of her mind, floating above the rest of her like a balloon swollen with helium and fighting at the end of a slippery string.  

The percussive orchestra of rain against the roof and windows becoming a tight drum. The slapping of fat, cool drops coming in sheets and pinging metallic in the gutters.  The gurgling draining of water off of the eaves, dripping and soaking the brown earth until it became a saturated, life-sustaining black.  

The slurring Gaelic in her ear as she finally emerged from the haze that had cascaded over all five of her senses.

“I’ve no’ ever…” Fraser started before his voice trailed away. He swallowed (once, again, a third time) in an apparent (and unsuccessful) attempt to clear a lump in his throat.  “Bein’ wi’ ye, I couldna begin to imagine… the closeness…”

Absorbing the rise and fall of his chest beneath her fingertips, her thoughts meandered. She put random meanings to his Gaelic.  Words and phrases that she had never heard, that she could not begin to spell.

‘Live, here, in a moment,’ she thought to herself, trying to summon the mental image of an existence (however long) where all that dwelt was rain, the cabin, and the man pressed against her.  

She allowed her eyes to close (a fight that she could never have hoped to win), to just be with him.

A man.  

Fraser.  

Jamie.  

Hers.

The quiet reverence with which Fraser had touched her shoulder as she had risen to step into the bathroom after the stampede of their breathing had evened.  

The dumbfounded way she concentrated on her reflection in the mirror while performing a tender inspection of her swollen, smiling mouth behind the closed bathroom door.

The sound of him moving about the room, opening and closing a drawer, quietly coughing, hissing a curse over a toe stubbed by some dastardly piece of heavy furniture.

The finely carved, naked statue of him as she exited the bathroom, just far enough from the door that she knew he was not listening.

The holding thick robe, white gone grey from repeated washing with a too-long mismatched tie.  

The look in his eyes as he had studied her matched the warmth of the kiss he placed on her forehead.

The tenderness and care he took as he wrapped her in the robe and whispered, “there, ye’re no worse for wear now.”

The way she had fought to stop herself from whispering, “you’re wrong, you’ve destroyed me, brought me back to life.”

“I’m hungry,” she whispered instead, digits curling under the too-long cuffs of the robe. The fabric was scented with him in a way that she knew would never wash clean. His humid puff of breath at the tail end of a Scottish noise cemented the baby-fine hairs at her hairline against her temple.  

“Are ye?”  As if it required clarification or words needed to fill the moment, he added, “Hungry?”

Bowing her head, she rested her head against his chest and framing her front against his hips with her hands loose at his hips.  “I am.  I want to eat and hear all about this place, and then I want to fall back into bed with you.”

His dry palm skimmed along the curve of her throat, fingers lifting her chin and tilting her gaze up to his.  “A perfect plan, mo nighean donn.”

Eyes open, their lips met in only the briefest of touches.  “C’mon then,” she said lightly, smiling. “I would hate to starve to death before we have a chance to do that at least ten thousand more times.”

Brushing a curl from her forehead, he kissed her again. “I needta…”  His voice trailed and he gestured to the bathroom with a brief lift of his chin.

“Needta piss and clean up?” she asked, the broadness of her smile interrupted only by the quick sinking of her teeth into her lower lip.

Shaking his head, he pulled back.  The word “piss” coming from her mouth in that regulated, manicured accent somehow sounded incredibly vulgar and well mannered at the same time.  “Ye’ll no’ ever cease surprisin’ me will ye?”

Flaring her nostrils and pursing her lips as she turned away, Claire shrugged. “I hope not.”

When Fraser emerged from the bathroom clad in sleep pants and a sweater (heldover from university), he found the bedroom empty and followed the sound of clattering.

Leaning against the wall, he took in the sight of her in his kitchen for a moment.  She was entirely undone and moving about the space like she had maneuvered through it a thousand times (opened the cupboard to find a pan before, reached behind the cutlery tray for a can opener at some point in the recent past, lifted the lid on the countertop crockery not to be surprised at the sight of almost-melted room temperature butter).  The robe’s sleeves were shoved up to her elbows. She had re-tied the oversized garment so much of the length billowed over the top of the tie.  From the waist down, was all swishing terry cloth, calves and thighs, creases behind knees, finely-boned feet, and painted toenails.  

Unadorned by jewels or makeup, expensive clothing or stacked heels, she was raw in her beauty.  Almost too pretty, her curved shapes belted into his robe putting her at maximum advantage and her hair in a snarl where he’d knotted in his hand while inside of her. On the spectrum, she was closer to the woman who came stumbling into his stables (her stables) that one night than the one freshly divested of a tiara who had kissed him back with a stunning amount of alacrity.  In his kitchen, touching his things, she was his nameless horse caper, seeking some quietude.  

Claire hummed along to the crackling radio that she had kept low (Mr. Sandman bring me a dream make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen, a sway in her hips and tilt of her shoulders so brief he would have missed it had he not been so intent on her).   He realized that his mind could smell her when his nose could not.  (It was imprinted on his mind –– clean and musky with sex, with satisfaction.)  And yet, the desire to be near enough to catch her scent along the long peach fuzz parabola of her neck propelled him forward.

“What’re ye makin’, Sassenach?”

She paused, a wooden spoon in hand suspended over a pan.  “You do not have much in this cabin in the way of food.”  Her belly groaned in protest at the mere thought of a weekend of sex and little eating, and he quirked a smile.

“I thought of that verra thing as ye were clinging to me on the back of the bike, how ye may starve.”  He ran a hand through his hair before coming up behind her, drawing her back against him as she stirred something in the pot. “I can pop out and get some things tonight or in the morning.”

“Hmmm,” she sighed, leaning her head back and against his, her steady mixing of bubbling soup straight from the tin not missing a beat. “Tomorrow, and I will come along.”

Incredulity rumbled in his chest, a volcano signaling imminent eruption. “Are ye sure that’s the best idea? Small town folk are wont to talk, Claire.”

His hands strayed, one finding its way into the gaping opening in her robe.  He found what he was looking for –– naked skin. “If this splatters and I get burnt, I will be very cross with you, Fraser.”

Dipping his chin, he rested it as a crown atop the mop of curls that his lovemaking hands and her writhing against the mattress had destroyed.  For a moment, he felt a hardy, red-blooded male jolt of pride, as though he’d conquered her usually well-coiffed locks.

“A few things, Jamie.”  She tapped the edge of the spoon’s handle on the edge of the pan before turning off the flame.  

“Aye?” he urged, again taken by his name on her lips.

“One.  I can disguise myself to some extent. You would be surprised by how much the surprise of a situational inconsistency can throw people off.  No one expects the Queen of England to come wandering into a greengrocer or butcher shop in a small village on a sleepy Saturday morning.”  She lifted the lid on a second pan, revealing some sizzling sausages he had not realized dwelled in the depths of his freezer.  “And therefore, the Queen of England has a doppelganger at a greengrocer or a butcher shop.  People will say, ‘Oh, I saw a woman who looked like the Queen, but she had such a fat arse and a slightly more pleasant face.’”

Unconsciously, he glanced down to said body part, resisted the urge to comment on how much lovelier and fatter her arse actually was in person.  “I’ll have to take yer word for it, having never before bedded a star before,” he said, voice heady with a faux exaggeration that made her pinch his forearm and hiss. He merely chuckled. “What else?”

“Two,” she continued on, his good-humored comment taken on board for what it was. “You cannot possibly know how much I want to be…”

Pausing, she set the lid back over the sausages and turned in his arms. ��He drew her back, lest the drape of his robe get too close to the open flame beneath the soup and sausages. “What is it?”

“I do not want you to think that I’m being crude somehow… like I am doing this…” Her voice faded as she searched his face, eyes like palms open, warm, and awaiting a blessing. He wanted her words. Her every thought.  “I do not want you to think that I am in love with you in some sort of fetishized way.  To get away from my life… from the formalities of it all––”

“––I would never––”

A single finger pressed into his lips as she cupped his jaw.  “I love you because I can be myself with you, but I would hate for you to think that I am using you as some sort of… outlet for a need to live a quiet life.  It is not that at all.”

He arched back from just enough to break her contact with his mouth.  “Ye’ll break my heart wi’ lovin’ ye, ye ken that, aye?”

Confusion molded her expression into one of incredulity.

“I would never think,” he began, hands tightening on her hips for emphasis, “that ye’re somehow taking advantage of me to live some dull, quiet, countryside life. Just as I ken that you would never think that I’m wi’ ye, lovin’ ye, and watchin’ ye fallin love wi’ me, just so I can bed yer... status.”

When she closed her eyes, he leaned forward and kissed the salty seam of each.  Then the tip of her nose.  One cheek, her forehead, and then the other. The contour beneath one cheekbone.  Her mouth.  Oh, her mouth.  He took it with his own.  He took her small body melting into his, let his hands find their way through the gap in her robe and to fill themselves with the soft curve of her bare buttocks, her thighs, the small of her back, and again the handfuls of her buttocks.  

“Take me again,” she mumbled against his kiss-moist lips as he broke for a breath.

Without another word, he spun them, lifting her to the counter and untying the robe. “I’ll never tire of this,” he said, though his words were lost in the incoherent moan she let loose as he took her breast in his hand, guided the peak between his lips. With his pajama pants pooled at his feet, his sweater knotted in her fingers, he entered her with the kind of blind passion that leads people to various indiscretions (to roger a woman outside of a pub in an alleyway, to allow fingers an exploration far further north beneath a wife’s skirt beneath a table draped in linen while discussing business with a colleague, or to fumble about for a space to land in a coat closet, joined among the foreign-scented winter things of strangers).  

She cried out against his throat (harder, please, oh Christ, harder), nails sinking into his shoulders as she tried to hold on.  He heard her head smack a cupboard with a hollow clack, slowed, registered her admonition to “do not stop, damn you,” and bowed his head in concentration.  

Take me again, she had implored him, eyes gilt and a gift to him.  

So he did.

Harder, she begged, her breath an invitation hastily written out so that he could have her completely.

So he obliged.

At the end of all things, her body was limp everywhere (except where it still quaked, attempting to pull him deeper and draw him closer like a siren in the form of a sparrow with a woman’s face, scaled feet and wings paired with arms).  Feeling her that way, he wondered if she would truly kill him with loving her.  As he slipped free of her body, mumbling a wasted apology about the mess he had made of her, she gathered her to him with her legs.  

“Let me listen to your breathing for a minute.”  It was the whimpered, undeniable plea of a lover.  An ask that he could not fathom disregarding. “Please.”  

He allowed her to trap him there, milky softness of her thighs on his waist. The rest of the world does not exist, the warmth of her said.  

Seek me out, his belly called back, hearing nothing more than the echo of unspoken words rattling in his head.  His softening, damp cock awkwardly pressed between them as he drew her to the edge of the counter where he could hitch her to him.  

“The sausages,” she mumbled as he lifted her, started to walk them to the living room. Her legs dangled at his waist, her forehead falling to rest against his.  She had no spare energy left with which to cling to him.  Instead, she let him carry her dead weight, kissing his jaw almost apologetically.

“Fuck the sausages,” he sighed, laying her down and covering her body on the sofa.

Some time later, after a meal of burnt sausages and too-salty tinned soup, she was studying him.  Featherlight fingers fought the heaviness of her hand to trace the outline of his chest through his sweater. “Tell me about this place.”

He did.

Quiet and watching the fire he’d built in the living room instead of looking at her.  

Even with his voice low, he had the way of a storyteller about him.  

Voices for an ensemble (mam, da, Willie, Jenny, his old grisled Uncle Murtagh).  Hands that warred between a thorough exploration of the buttes and basins of her body and to embellish the hills and valleys of his tale.  Eyes that glittered beneath thick lashes, widening and narrowing for emphasis.  

A cabin built by Brian Fraser for his new wife, Ellen, after World War I.  A place that absorb his screaming nightmares into exposed wooden rafters.  Where his family gathered for Christmas, dragging a tree down the sloping, snow-covered hills on Christmas Eve.  Decorating it with popcorn and cranberries, eating Jelly Babies until their teeth ached.  A home for weekends of hunting and fishing, where he came to drink himself into a stupor when his father passed away.

After a time, he fell silent and just held Claire, thanking God that she was there, that she did not ask questions he did not want to answer about the place where their bodies were molded into one. As the fire died, Claire hovered on the precipice of sleep, her toes just glancing over a placid pool of dreams.  He was surveying the parts of her that he had just recently discovered, staked a claim to.  Men had been along the plane of that throat before. Between her legs. And wrapped like vines around the parts of a brain that make people foolish when they believe that they’ve discovered love. Men who she thought she had loved and who she had convinced herself had loved her. Claire was certain that if she had anything whatsoever to do with it, Fraser would be her last, her only.

“Ye look as though ye could start snoring on me at any moment,” he said eventually, rolling a curl between his fingers over and over again.

“If I sleep today will be over,” she confessed, an undisguised note of longing in her voice. As much as she longed for another layer of intimacy with Fraser, she ached at the thought of loss over missing a single moment alone with him.   As if by fighting sleep, she could extend the hours in the day or suspend the passage of time.  

He hummed with appreciation at the sentiment, pressing his nose along the swoop of her neck, inhaling in a way that made her drowsy.

She had not slept with many men other than Frank, but she concluded that to actually sleep with someone did construct a sense of intimacy, as though her dreams had flowed out of her to mingle with his. It was an ultimate act of trust to sleep beside another person. The armor of clothing and status had been stripped away. She was bare, vulnerable.  The shield of a word or glance impossible behind closed eyes and a searching, dreaming mouth. It felt somehow more intimate than the joining of their bodies.

“I’m about to sleep myself, Sassenach.”

She needed to ask what that word meant, but she did not need to ask to know that he was hers now, and that she belonged to him.  She did not belong in the sense of a thing (his woman, a chattel under the law) or a concept (the royalty).  Rather, she belonged as someone having fallen completely and irrevocably.  She could not possibly dwell anywhere but inside the chambers of his heart or the memory of his skin on hers.

Closing her eyes, she closed out the nighttime ramblings of her lonely mind.  The worries about gossip in her home, the speculations of a citizenry or her own family.  By the name of the God on whose name Claire became Queen, she would have this man.

[buriaely-a-blog]

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