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It was cold. It was winter, so even though the slant of light into the room declared it to be something just before noon, of course it was cold.
Susan tugged the duvet more tightly over her head, leaving just one nostril and part of her right eye exposed. She was enjoying that beautifully fuzzy state one enters as one leaves sleep to face a day that has no responsibilities in it. Even better was the lassitude that weighted all her limbs. Despite that, inside her head, she was still floating a bit. Susan smiled a small, lazy smile.
She sighed and stretched and immediately yanked her legs back up into fetal position.
First off, the sheets toward the foot of the bed were warped with ice and wefted with what felt like the depths of the unfeeling universe.
Second off, the stretch had triggered pleasant aches, the ghosts of other stretching that had gone on the night before. Susan was no stranger to hands doing what had been done last night, but she was only accustomed to her own touch. And though the night had begun hurriedly, Teatime had kept her on the floor and breathless for ages. It had never occurred to her to be on such display, even with only herself as an audience. But seeing herself cradled against black cotton and silk and watching Teatime play her like a cello had, in fact, been instructive.
Face aflame and breathing like a bellows, Susan whipped the duvet off her head. Not for long, because bleeding hell it was cold, but long enough to regain her composure. Long enough to determine that the fire in her room had completely gone out. Long enough to realize the full 360-degree nature of her coldness.
Teatime was gone.
The pleasant aches got less pleasant and took up sudden residence somewhere in the vicinity of her sternum. Her mind, still ticking over, always calculating, indicated how unlikely it was she’d been actually abandoned - they’d gotten hands on one another, but fellows usually stuck around until they’d managed to involve more than hands, didn’t they? - and after one attempted murder, two successful homicides-in-self-defense, a resurrection, and one near-Grandfather experience, someone with a mind like Teatime’s wouldn’t run off with only a literal handful or two of orgasms to show for it.
Right?
Her ears caught the noise of the front door closing almost before it had finished opening. Her ears rather than her mind registered the noise, but her body relaxed just a microsecond before the bed behind her dipped under the weight of a frigid gust of wind and a man with a stone for an eye. One black-clad arm slung itself across her shoulder; it terminated in a distracting set of fingers clutching a discreet waxed-paper package bearing the rubber-stamp imprint of one Wallace Sonky.
“There had better not be boots on my bed.”
“There aren’t.”
Susan thought for a moment, recalibrating. She amended, “Or footwear of any sort but socks.”
“That’s all you have to say to me?” He actually sounded amused, the squirrely bastard! And she felt a discreet shift of weight.
Susan curled up a bit tighter. The duvet did not quite block the view of the sonkies.
“You might have said you were stepping out.”
“You sleep like the dead.”
“... Do you actually want to get to use those?”
Teatime shifted to his knees, taking Susan by one shoulder and rolling her onto her back. To his credit, the move was entirely matter-of-fact, and he sat back on his heels to regard her with the tilted head and pursed lips that constituted his pondering face. Finally, he asked, “Does this make me the morning person in the relationship? That’s going to be very difficult, because I don’t sleep very much.”
Wondering if all their disagreements would end not with harsh words but with non sequiturs, Susan sat up, slung an arm behind Teatime’s neck, and dragged him back down with her.
“Shoes,” she snapped between kisses. He snorted, but the wriggling he started to do seemed to imply that he was doing something about them.
Damn the cold.