Work Text:
There are three constants in Gomez’s life: pain, tax evasion, and Morticia. He knew from the second he saw her, falsely demure beneath her blood-dark lashes, hands steady on the black handles of her crutches—contrary to how people outside the family always wanted to interpret the story, it wasn’t that his knees stopped hurting or his shriveled quadriceps spontaneously regrew or his hand was no longer sore when she walked in the room and he instantly looked up, familiar with the click-step pattern of her gait because it sounded the same as his own. His body was still the same map of lost causes, but the difference was, she showed him it was possible to feel something as strong as pain that didn’t hurt.
“Would you do me the honor of this dance?” he’d asked, lips curving up at one corner, not an affectation or a practiced move but a genuine desire, and he’s been desiring her ever since. Her eyes had flitted to the head of his cane, the ornate raven carved there whose wings he leaned on, and she’d tilted her head.
“Banished from the Ark,” she’d said, and he’d grinned.
“Yes, for making love at the end of the world.” And then, well. They had danced, Gomez ever a man true to his word except to priests and policemen, his free hand at her waist and their fingers tangled above where their palms bore their respective weights into their mobility aids. And after they’d danced, she’d taken him into the gardens and he’d taken her into his mouth, swallowed at the end like a sacrament and a vow.
He is the most selfish thing she’s ever done, and he revels in that like a swallow of Chateau Latour, with all the decadence it deserves. “You’ll be the death of me,” he says the first time she slides inside him, and she smiles, poised even with her hair in her face and her breath starting to come fast.
“Darling, one could only dream.”
*
He’s really more of a homebody, when it comes down to it—the rest of the world is so unnecessarily, exhaustingly bright —but they do travel, especially in their early years together before there are teachers to intimidate and homework problems to feed to the latest snarling carnivorous inhabitant of their home (which generally seems to only make them angrier). Once, in some sparkling city that Gomez dampens to an acceptable ominous gray behind a pair of tinted pince nez, they watch a wheelchair dance troupe. They’ve mastered the rhythm of their grand entrance by now, his free hand opening the door for Morticia to stride in, wine-dark evening gown flowing around her ankles and midnight black crutches polished to a shine.
There is no elevator in the building. When they take their seats on the ground level and she takes his hand, her nails are long and sharp enough to prick at the skin below his knuckles. A couple whirls across the stage, and he catches his breath; it feels like the first time he won with a card slipped from his satin sleeve, the first time she painted his nails black with all the focus of Michelangelo craning his neck towards the heavens, the first night they didn’t tumble into bed so much as sink with a steady determination. He’s never seen someone touch a wheelchair the same way they do a body, the heady reverence reserved for lovers and duet partners, but the dancer’s chair isn’t a prop or an inconvenience or an eraser mark on the stage floor. It’s got a pulse all its own, flesh and frame, and when her partner carries her in one breathtaking spin, it’s because she lets him.
There is, it turns out, nothing sexier than autonomy, and his gaze gets snagged on Morticia’s jawline and neckline equally the whole way back to their hotel room like electric barbed wire, hot and sharp, something he’s climbed more times than he can count. And he does, leg thrown around her waist, stark white pillows shoved under hips and knees and lower backs like they’re building a snow fort, his pale angel laid out on all that cool silk, smirking like she knows something the devil doesn’t.
“Such perfection,” he murmurs into her collarbone, and he kisses his way up her familiar neck with the same awe as the very first time. He cups her breasts in his warm hands, traces a stretch mark with his tongue, and when she bites his lip, his hip, he begs for more, because she understands the secret: there is good pain and bad pain, and one cannot replace the other, but it certainly can help.
Her fingers between his legs, the whine in her throat when he sinks into her with the strap she likes best, the path of her nail along his jaw, his jugular, the edge of his areola—it’s a night of a thousand reminders that their bodies are still capable of feeling something good, relief even more potent than pleasure when he cradles the back of her thigh and above the pain in his legs, singing at a higher frequency, is the well-known feeling of her skin. Her pale, brittle limbs are a picture against the sheets, dark hair tracing the distance from her mons to her ankles like the rivulets of water that cling to her in the shower and would bring him to his knees every time if they could bend or bear that kind of weight.
(For their third anniversary, they replaced the bench in their shower. It’s still a glistening black, cool to the touch, but now, it lowers at the touch of a lever, and he basks in bringing himself to the perfect height to hold her hips still and tease her with his tongue until she gasps louder than the spray of warm water. After, they relocate to the tub and add a generous cupful of epsom salts, a private ritual, a crippled Eden.)
*
“The world wasn’t built for us,” she says six weeks into their engagement, after another search for venues has failed to reveal a single Satanic temple or cursed landmark that’s wheelchair accessible.
“Damn the world!” he says, kissing her hand, each elegant knuckle. “Who needs it?”
She chuckles, but he means it, then and every proceeding year of their lives; they do damn the world, gleefully with every unsteady and prideful step. They leave events early and cancel plans with abandon and talk about their symptoms at country clubs and charity balls, and they breathe a sigh of relief in harmony when their door closes at their backs, and they make like ravens and fuck like they’re the only two alive. When her hands shake too badly to braid back her hair, he does it himself, kisses the crown of her head in sympathy and supplication. When he cannot stand, she terrorizes the neighbors in his stead. He loves her, wholly and completely, with every fatigued fiber of his aching being, and if the boat wasn’t built for their bodies, they’ll not be bound to it, they’ll make a nest that is.