Work Text:
"What have you got there, my love?"
Karamatsu's the only person whose terms of endearment actually make you feel something, unlike the amicable pet names you've been given by friends and family. Sure, they're cute and all, but when Karamatsu does it—like now, when he's leaning against the doorway with the sleeves of his hooded sweater rolled up—it's like he's practically enveloping you in himself. Kind of like how he slides next to you at the head of your bed, arms snaking around your waist as his chin rests on your shoulder.
It may have taken him a while to get to this point—reconciling respect for your person with an uncontainable love, so that he can be so casual about gestures like this, let alone being in your home or bedroom. But distantly watching him take each step toward you, literally and metaphorically, came with its worth. He's warm around you now, after all, and you find comfort in the press of his chest against your back, and the soft but quick kisses he leaves on your cheek and jawline.
"Just some poetry," you murmur; you're not sure if the gentle squeeze he gives you immediately after is out of enthusiasm, or just because he wants to. "Neruda. Want to hear one?"
When you crane your head to look at him, he's smiling, lovingly as always, and inches back to give you space to get comfortable. He sits across from you, legs crossed, patience in his eyes—and for once you can actually see them, because his sunglasses are hooked on the collar of his sweater—and says, "Go ahead."
Your heart swells, the way you'd like to think his does any time he's around you, and your eyes drop back down to your book, open to a poem called "If You Forget Me."
Whenever you read aloud, you tend to fall into a trance, where your vision tunnels to the page and the words spill from you without much notion of what they say. You almost slip into it this time, but for the splay of your fingers against cover and spine, and the fact that when you read to Karamatsu, you pay an inexplicable attention to each word, each line. Like you're telling him your own thoughts and feelings, instead of reading ones that belonged to someone else decades ago.
It's a mostly sad poem, really—maybe you should have picked one about love entirely celebrated, instead of one focused on the negative "what if"s. But at least it ends on a sweet note, maybe bittersweet. "My love feeds on your love, beloved," you finish, slowly resurfacing from that tunnel vision, "and as long as you live it will be in your arms, without leaving mine."
Silence ensues in the few seconds after you look up from your book. Which is kind of a surprise; Karamatsu is a man who people say talks too much, and with too-flowery language, but for once, he is speechless. As if he's still absorbing it all, intending to hear it the way you intended to read it. As if they really are your words.
You start to think that maybe his eyes were open the whole time, that somewhere along the line his expression shifted from loving to blank to overwhelmed. His eyes are blown wide with some emotion you can't place—the same one that you think has his lips parted in awe. Without a word, he shifts forward, leaning on his hands as he presses a long kiss to your mouth, and the book slips and falls from its place on your propped-up knees.
"It was beautiful," he says once he's broken the kiss, still close enough that you can feel his lips ghosting over yours as he speaks. "Like you."
At any other time, you might have tried (and failed) to stifle a laugh at the lines he's clearly picked out of one too many romance novels or internet searches for pickup lines. But between the traces of the trance, and the way you melted at the touch of his lips (even though you didn't mean to—he's gotten surprisingly good at it), you can't find it in you to.
You lean forward and meet him halfway instead, and this time you think he's the one who melts. He reaches up to cradle your cheek, fingers brushing over your jaw as his palm comes to rest flush on your neck, and when he shivers, you can practically taste it. Especially when he kisses you again, and again, and—
"I want to ask you something," he whispers, voice thick and heavy, once he's pulled back; his eyes are still closed, thumb caressing your neck, lips still too close but not close enough.
You think you know where this is going, but you indulge him anyway. "What's that?"
"Would you read me another poem?" A blush is crawling onto his cheeks, like there's more to what he's asking than what he's actually asking.
"Is that all?"
"Well..." He's gone from pink to red, the way he did when he first asked to be intimate with you. It's always easy to watch him constantly weigh respect against selfish love in his head, in between his words, as though he can't give you both. "I suppose not." He shifts under your gaze, slowly lifting his own to meet your eyes, and he moves closer. His hands run along your thighs all the while, until they reach your knees.
Karamatsu is practically trembling—with reverence, you think—as he nudges them apart.
The smile you give him is at once affectionate and amused. "With all the moving around, I don't think I could hold the book properly," you confess.
For a moment, Karamatsu laughs, and you can almost see the tension dissipate from his limbs. "Not that exactly, my darling," he says, and it's endearing how he chews his lip before he speaks again, softer and softer with each word. "I was hoping to... that is, that I could... with... with my mouth, you see..."
You blink. "Oh."
Not that Karamatsu's never given you oral before. It's just that most of the time, he tends to be more intimate with his hands. He says there's something beautiful about using the things that you rely on so frequently to tie yourself to another person. Bond with them, love them, keep you grounded in their love. But he's watching you like he's the pinnacle of patience, like he's standing at your pedestal, and his hands haven't moved from your knees. And suddenly it's a lot easier to imagine his head between them.
You nod, leaning over the edge of the bed to grab your book, and it's opened to a random page when you flip it over. You smile, coaxing one to break out onto Karamatsu's face, and little by little you guide his hands to undo the button and zipper of your shorts. His hands are still shaking a bit, but he manages to make quicker work of them than you expected, and little by little he slides them off with your underwear.
You hate how there's a strange impulse in you to snap your legs back together, but the encouraging brush of Karamatsu's thumbs against your knees stops you. He moves with such careful precision, eyes on yours with every hungry step as he lowers himself onto his stomach and hooks your knees over his shoulders.
"Read," is his breathy command, before he presses his open mouth to you.
Reading, you can handle. Oral, you can handle. But it's hard to work with both when you're trying not to slur your words, when you want to act as though nothing is out of the ordinary. You make it through a couple of short poems, and Karamatsu eases up on you, pressing soft kisses to the insides of your thighs, like he's worshiping you. He always tries to do that.
"Another one, my love," he whispers, fingertips pressing into your thighs, heated breath fanning over you. "Read me another one." His breath is already slow and ragged, like it would take everything in him to stop if you asked him to, but you won't, you can't. Not when your toes are already starting to curl, and the pages are bending in your tightening grip.
Swallowing thickly, you turn the page, and when you read out the title—"Ode to a Naked Beauty"—he shudders and moans right against your folds. Your breath catches, and your legs tense from how deeply you can feel it, and when your eyes flicker up from the pages you can see how bone and muscle ripple under his skin from how he's holding onto you. "Read," he says, his voice impossibly low, and he wraps his arms around your thighs to keep you in place.
You're not sure what's more attractive to you in the moment: the feeling of Karamatsu's mouth on you, or the fact that he's just as turned on by this as you are.
Still, you do as he asks, and try to keep the book steady in your hands. "With chaste heart and pure eyes I celebrate you, my beauty." If your mind weren't split between the need to sound focused and the slow, teasing circle of his tongue around your clit, you might have thought this would be the perfect poem for him to read to you. Instead of the other way around, when you're shivering in his grasp and subconsciously opening your legs further. "Restraining my blood so that the line"—you stop to catch your breath and run your fingers through his hair—"the line surges and follows your contour, and you bed yourself in my verse—"
He's eased up again, gone back to those soft but searing kisses against you. Probably to tease you, probably to draw this out as much as he can. Probably because, as he might say, he doesn't want to stop hearing your angelic voice, especially speaking to him. Even if it is punctuated with the occasional caught breath or jagged sigh.
You right yourself in his grip, teeth worrying your lower lip as a rush of pleasure courses out from between your legs, and continue. "In my verse, as in woodland, or wave-spume: earth's perfume, sea's music."
"Keep going, my love," Karamatsu says, voice quavering, and his nails bite into your skin as he ducks his head, tongue dipping inside you for the briefest of moments. You seize up, the book almost tumbling from your hands, but he keeps you steady, eyes falling from half-lidded to shut. If you'd blinked or looked back to the book, you would have missed the glisten of your wetness on his lips and chin.
"Nakedly beautiful—"
"Mmm," he says. It's not really speaking, but he's humming through your whole body.
"Whether it is your feet, arching at a primal touch—a-ah, yeah—o-of sound or breeze, or your ears, tiny spiral shells from—" You think he might be taking cues from your words that aren't your words, because his nails graze against your skin, and his tongue works in circles, and he presses the flat of it against you, dragging it from bottom to top.
"Keep reading," he says, desperate and whining when you rest the book on your chest and try to collect yourself. "Please, please keep reading—"
With another shaky breath, you start again. "From the splendor of... of America's oceans. Your breasts also, of equal fullness"—and one of his hands reaches up to mold itself to the shape of your chest—"overflowing with the living light and—y-yes—winged, your eyelids of silken corn that disclose, or enclose, the deep twin l-landscapes of your eyes..."
Now you're sure that he's drawing it out, because he's settled for slow, long licks that have you squirming and sighing, aching for him to move a little faster, to focus so that he can tip you over the edge. But maybe he knows that you're barely halfway through the poem, or maybe he likes how your voice dips into pleased lows and peaks with every whine. You can't tell if it's a game, or simple indulgence.
You manage to make it through another stanza, painfully long, about your spine, and your legs, and your feet. And then another, something about rose petals and wheat and bread, and you wonder what place this has in a love poem. You wonder, in between rushes that reach all the way to the tips of your fingers and toes, how well you might be able to analyze this if you weren't bubbling bit by bit with the need to come.
Maybe you shouldn't have picked this one. Maybe you should have flipped to a different page. Or maybe Karamatsu is secretly delighted that you did. Like he has the liberty to do as he pleases with all the time that you read to him with shaky breaths, that you reach down to grip his hair and tug gently. Still, he nudges your hand away, as if to tell you to pretend he isn't there, to read normally. He must know how hard that is to do, he must—with his hands slithering up to your hips, holding them down when you try to rock up against his mouth, meeting your every move to quell it as he feverishly kisses his way back up to your clit.
And now he's flicking his tongue a little more, a little faster, brows knit in concentration, giving gentle sucks here and there, his hips rutting against the mattress as he holding onto you for leverage. And he only pulls back to pant against your skin, leaving you to throb and shudder when he groans, "Finish it, my darling, please." And then his mouth latches onto you again, and it takes every fiber of your concentration to keep going, to keep your eyes open, with the book trembling violently in your grip.
"It is not so much light that falls o-over the body—f-fuck, fuck, Karamatsu, please—over theworld, extended by your body its suff—suffocating snow." He's switching between fast and slow again, flicking and circling, tongue lapping against you with abandon, and through the haze of almost coming he looks almost peaceful, with his eyes closed like that. "A-as brightness"—and you suck your breath in through your teeth, thighs quaking, words trembling as they spill from your lips—"pouring itself out of you—pleasepleaseplease, I'm so close, please—as if you were—"
All you have to say is burning inside, and Karamatsu moans deeply and tips you into coming hard, and in waves. The book tumbles from coiled fingers, bounces off the edge of the bed and falls to the floor, and your hands are on either side of Karamatsu's head as you roll your hips against his open mouth, nothing but his name on your lips. Burning inside.
With a shudder, you fall back against your headboard with an unceremonious thud, the high of your orgasm receding just slowly enough for you to tolerate it. When you manage to open your eyes again, Karamatsu is looking up at you, just as wide-eyed and worshiping as before. You can't tell if that's fire in his eyes, or stars, but you suppose they're made of the same thing.
He slithers out from under you, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand until you can spare him some tissues, and picks the book up from the floor. Slowly, he flips to the poem again, and reads the last line to you in return, sparing a kiss that tastes unequivocally of you against your tired, still-needy mouth.
"Under your skin, the moon is alive."