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The first and last time Stede Bonnet tries to kiss his wife with anything approaching passion is on their wedding night.
He’d somehow thought that when presented with the actual reality of a woman, naked in his bed and fully expecting to have sex with him, something would snap into place. The clouds would part and he would understand it all, whatever it was that other men felt and did and talked about wanting from women that he seemed to be utterly lacking.
But it’s not working at all. Mary is right there, and sure, he barely knows her, but she seems like she ought to be aesthetically pleasing enough—smooth skin and pale breasts and plump thighs—and that’s all it’s supposed to take, right? And yet he feels nothing.
Kissing. That’s how it’s supposed to start. He feels like he has a solid grasp on the theory. The saucy girls who sit in young sailors’ laps down at the tavern (the one he isn’t supposed to go to, the one that is terribly déclassé) always make it look easy.
He leans in and she doesn’t pull away. Off to a good start. But then he can’t quite figure out how their lips are supposed to fit together (straight on, or is there some sort of off-center thing involved?) and they end up bonking noses, and he knows parted lips and tongues are supposed to be part of it but it really feels like he’s just…holding his mouth open next to hers, and he shifts trying to get a better angle and ends up with an elbow on her hair.
“Ow, wait, Stede—”
“Sorry, sorry—” She’s pulling back, and ah, he’s fucked this up already, hasn’t he?
“Here, just—” She sighs, rearranging them so that he’s on his back and she is lying half on top of him. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about that. Just…let me.” Her hand is wrapped around his currently unenthusiastic cock, stroking now, and the novelty of it being anyone’s hand other than his own is thankfully doing something for him, and he’s silently, wretchedly glad that at least someone had taught one of them something.
He tries to kiss her again, after he finishes inside her, but she turns her head to the side and his lips end up clumsily skirting over her cheek.
He tries to make it work. He tries so many different things. Drinking. Not drinking. Eating certain foods rumored to promote…vigor. Pornographic literature, which he keeps hidden under the mattress, and skims through while Mary is undressing for the night.
He does, finally, hit on one strategy that works with alarming reliability.
She always lies down on her back after they’re finished, legs pulled up against her chest. Finally, desperate for something to cut the horrible silent tension between them, he asks: “Why do you do that?”
“I’m trying to get pregnant,” she says through gritted teeth. “The sooner that happens, the sooner we can stop doing this. Since it’s obviously such a chore for you.”
“It’s not,” he tries, but it doesn’t even sound convincing to him.
“You always have your eyes closed.” She’s blinking a lot, and he realizes with an awful lurch that she’s trying not to cry. “Am I that repulsive to you?”
“What? No! God, no. You’re perfectly lovely. Just, um. Concentrating.”
She sniffs, and obviously that wasn’t the right thing to say, but he can’t very well tell her the truth, can he? That he’s not trying to hurt her, but it’s just so much easier to dream up elaborate fantasies about Rupert the farrier with his eyes closed.
He should roll over and kiss her cheek. He doesn’t have any illusions left at this point that he is a good husband, but he’s not trying to be cruel.
But when he looks over at her side of the bed, she’s already turned away from him. “Good night, Stede,” she says, and blows out the candle without another glance in his direction.
Ed is so terribly out of practice, when he throws caution to the wind and leans in to kiss Stede there on the beach. (He’s less willing to think about how fucking nervous he is, how this puts his heart in his throat more than seeing the entire English navy on the horizon would.)
It’s awkward, when their lips meet, a halting, chaste little press of skin against skin. Stede’s mouth is soft, the way so many parts of him are soft, unmarred by years of wind and sun and violence. He seems to have absolutely no idea what he’s doing, even when Ed puts a hand on his cheek to steady him.
It’s awkward and unsure and still sweet enough to feel like it’s slicing him open and spilling his guts out on the sand. Sweeter than anything he’d ever dared to hope for, but not nearly as sweet as Stede deserves.
He used to know how to do this. It’s just been a very, very long time.
There is never any kissing, when it happens with Izzy. It’s always, always after a fight, both of them reeking of sweat and blood and gunpowder. That’s when Izzy can get him to snap, and he knows Izzy knows this, and he knows Izzy knows that he knows this, and yet he can’t seem to stop himself falling into the trap every time.
It’s always sudden and rushed and rough, as if they both want it to hurt—and well, okay, he knows Izzy does want it to hurt, Izzy likes it that way, and when his blood is hot enough Izzy can get him to give in to that teeth-grinding urge to crush lust and violence together. He always feels a bit weird about it later, but it’s not like they’re ever going to fucking talk about it or anything so he keeps that part to himself.
They’re rarely even facing each other. He figured out a long time ago that Izzy prefers to be spun around and slammed against the wall face first, or bent over the desk in the captain’s cabin, or some other variation on that theme. And maybe there is some part of him that finds it darkly satisfying, to give someone something they want so desperately that they cannot even look at you while getting it.
Mouths are only for biting, in those moments, or wrapping a hand over so Izzy will stop making so much fucking noise. The idea of kissing Izzy is laughable. He’d probably get a knife in the gut. There are times he’s been tempted to try, just to find out.
He thinks he probably has kissed Jack, at some point. He has vague memories of a hot, eager, rum-soaked mouth on certain parts of him, and he’s fairly sure he remembers one of those parts being his own mouth. But it could have just been the burn of a swallow from a bottle. There is very little difference, where Jack is concerned.
They are never less than blind drunk when it happens. The bits he can remember do not involve much dignity: more than once one of them has stopped in the middle of things to be sick, or passed out halfway through, or woken up with a hurricane of a hangover and fluids crusted in places that defy explanation.
But he also remembers waking up one morning (okay, afternoon) feeling pleasantly sated and sore, with a hangover that was only a medium amount of murderous and Jack lying heavy and warm on top of him, both of them stuffed in a narrow crew bunk he had no memory of getting to. The light through the porthole was what had woken him, and it lit up Jack’s hair like spun gold, and he remembers wanting to run his hand through it. But Jack woke up on a hair trigger, just like him, and often woke up swinging, just like him. So he hadn’t.
Lying there under his weight hadn’t been half bad, though.
There were others, further back in his past. A few whose names he’d never known, or willfully forgotten. The sweet boy on the first ship he’d talked his way onto, the boy who was seventeen when he was sixteen, but had been at sea for three years already. He was half a head shorter than teenage Edward Teach, but strong, strong enough to lift him up onto the barrel of salt fish in the storeroom like it was nothing, which put a swoop in his stomach the same way climbing up to the crow’s nest to watch the sunrise did. The boy’s hands had been rough with callouses already, but his mouth, when they kissed, had been soft.
He was long dead now. Most of them were.
Miguel. He’d like to tell himself he’d forgotten the boy’s name, after all these years, but he never had.
They pull off a truly spectacular raid on a Spanish merchant ship, the kind of audacious, bloody thing that made his name. It’s been a month since they raised the new flag over the ship—his ship now—and in the old familiar grip of battle adrenaline, there are whole minutes when he does not think about Stede Bonnet.
By the time they dock in Nassau, he’s roaring drunk, and he does something he hasn’t done in a long time. He takes any of the crew who want it to a whorehouse and pays for the night.
It’s been years since he did this. Sometimes he leaves the crew to have their fun and slinks off somewhere to get shitfaced. Sometimes he finds someone interesting enough to scratch an itch with for the night. Hands and mouths and bodies are really fairly interchangeable when you get right down to it. There was that one time he’d paid those two girls to make some interesting noises now and then throughout the night, while he stretched out on the bed and took a nap. It had been a quality whorehouse. The beds were nice.
Tonight, for whatever reason, he stays. He picks the girl who looks the least afraid of him and follows her upstairs.
He sits up against the headboard of the bed in the room she’s taken him to. He’s taken off his boots, jacket, gloves and gunbelt (on the bedside table, in easy reach) but nothing else.
“And what”—a calculated slip of her robe off her shoulder as she climbs into his lap—“can I do for the legendary Blackbeard tonight?” She’s still a little afraid of him, he can tell, but it seems like the starstruck part of her is winning out.
He almost doesn’t say it. It’s stupid. But fuck it. He’s Blackbeard. He can have whatever he wants.
“I want to kiss you.” He waves a hand vaguely. “Then, y’know. Whatever.”
It’s not what she expected him to say, but she makes a quick recovery. “You know we usually charge extra for the kissing,” she says, aiming for cheeky, her hands on his shoulders.
“Pretty sure this is an all-inclusive deal.” Christ, it’s been a long time since he’s done this with anyone, let alone a woman. He has to remind himself how. Just put your hands on her waist, he thinks, and then he does it, tugging her a little closer. Her skin is warm through the thin fabric of her robe, and it’s pathetic, really, that that does anything for him at all. But he’s taken to wearing the gloves all the time now, and it’s been weeks since he touched another human skin to skin.
He doesn’t think the robe is silk. It’s definitely not a rather exquisite cashmere. He still doesn’t want to feel it under his hands.
“Take this off.” She shrugs out of it without complaint, letting the fabric slither onto the floor beside the bed, and then she lets him pull her in and kiss her.
She’s young—young enough it made him cringe a little, when he picked her—and her mouth is still soft. She is not really anything else like him: bony where he was solid, narrow where he was broad. She is not even blonde. Maybe that’s better.
He’s clumsy; he knows he’s being clumsy even though she’s very good at leading him without making it feel like she’s doing it. But he just wants to do it once, all the things he’d thought they would have time to learn not to be clumsy at together.
He’d wanted to kiss Stede again immediately, after the first time, lay him down in the sand and savor his mouth, not caring that someone could find them at any moment. It’s all right, he had told himself. There will be time later. There will be all the time in the world.
The last details have been tied up, and in about an hour Stede Bonnet will go into the center of town, where he will die very publicly, very thoroughly, and hopefully convincingly.
He takes one last look around the bedroom, the marital bed neatly made. It had felt luxurious the first night he’d been back, but by the third he’d started to find it uncomfortably soft. In truth, he’s started to miss the firm, narrow bunk in the captain’s cabin of the Revenge.
“Is that everything?” Mary asks.
“I’ve got…one more favor to ask.” He’s thought about this, and if he doesn’t ask now, he never will. “It’s kind of a big one.”
“What is it?”
“When I find him,” he says. “I’d really like to kiss him. Properly, you know.” She smiles at that, so he thinks maybe this will work. “I don’t know how.”
She laughs, but not unkindly. “Yeah, Stede. I know.”
“But I suspect,” he plunges on, “that you may have recently had a bit of practice. And maybe you could…give me a few tips?”
He can’t quite decipher the look she gives him, whether it’s wistful or sad or hopeful, or all of the above. “Come here,” she says, and steps close to him.
He kisses his wife, for the last time, her hand on his jaw and a hint or two whispered into his mouth, about his tongue and the angle of his head. It isn’t passion and it isn’t romance. But maybe it is a kind of love.
There will be another kiss, some time not too far from now.
It will be different than their first one, because they will be different. There will be scars on both of them that weren’t there before. Healed-over wounds, and a few where the sting is still fresh. But cautious hope as well. And hunger. So much hunger.
Ed will back them up against the wall in the captain’s cabin, but gently, bare hands cupping the soft skin of Stede’s jaw, body to body, passing the same breath between hot, open mouths. Stede’s hands will be at Ed’s waist, pulling him closer, fingers ghosting under the edge of his shirt to find bare skin, and there will be a little hitch in his breath at the touch, and Stede will think oh. So this is what the love songs talk about. And Ed will think maybe. Maybe this time, there will be time after all.
And there will be. Neither of them know it yet, but there will be.