Work Text:
I could have him if I wanted, Jon thought to himself one night when Satin was undressing himself for bed, the slow stretching he did each night before slinking into his own bed clearly intended to be an invitation of some kind. There were many such invitations, obvious even to him; the repeated questions of whether he was warm enough alone in his bed alone, if his shoulders were sore and wanted rubbing, if he needed anything else.
I could have him if I wanted, and I don’t think he would mind. What Jon didn’t know was whether that was all it was, that he wouldn’t just 'wouldn't mind'. The first night he’d taken him to steward Satin had been waiting in his bed for him, naked and artfully arranged and when he’d told him to put some clothes on and get some rest on his own pallet the expression upon his face had been more surprise than disappointment. Jon realised then that Satin had done it because he thought it was what he was there for, that it was history which had led to his selection, and he’d been appalled, because in a way it had been, but not in the way that the pretty youth had thought. Jon had just wanted to give the other boy a chance to be more, to be safer, and he’d thought he was capable of being worthy of it.
The worst thing was that when he had found the beautiful boy naked upon his bed, artfully arranged like one of the women from Theon Greyjoy’s pillow pictures there was a part of him that was tempted. He looked so dainty, soft and pretty as a girl, his skin a soft golden, still sun kissed from his days on the southron coast. He’d shivered and Jon had the notion to warm him up, to throw his cloak over the pair of them and lay naked with him. There would be more than that, of course, but that was not an area he’d made any point of studying in. Satin would have showed him though, he knew, would have done things that men had once paid for, and, if rumours were any indication, had once paid well.
Every night it became harder to ignore his beauty, the unhurried pace with which he disrobed of an evening; a torment that he had to turn his back on in order to bear, but his resolve didn’t waver. Satin expected less, but deserved better, deserved to be seen as more than a thing to warm men’s beds, and he was determined to give it to him, and so he strove to think of him as a brother, a younger brother, someone who needed to be guided and protected and taught not taken into his arms and kissed.
I could have him if I wanted him, Jon thought to himself. But he could not live with the sort of man it would make him if he did.