Work Text:
In his thirty-five years of life, Jake has experienced three kinds of thunder. The first is soft, comforting, the white noise of autumn. It’s warmth and hot coffee and turning winds and powdered donuts and quiet rainfall against his windows. The second is darker, harsher, the cold of winter. It’s blizzards and long nights and the smell of potato pancakes and hot chocolate wafting across his desk. The third is fiercer, more exciting, the joy of spring. It’s loud music and early mornings and dark hair in loose buns and soft pink blouses beneath charcoal pantsuit jackets.
But there’s a fourth, he discovers, that makes his stomach feel both weightless and lined with light itself. It rumbles, long and low and fading in and out, and it feels like warm breath, like feathery jet black hair hair drifting over his bare chest, like gentle gripping touches and soft skin. It’s the tenacity of summer, the long, slow burn of heat that pools in his tummy and bursts forth to the very tips of his extremities. It’s his fingers curling around long locks of her hair and the weight of a soft, warm body pressed against his side like she just can’t get close enough to him. It’s the feeling of safety, of acceptance, of vulnerability and affection. He nuzzles against the top of her head and inhales deeply and the thunder that rumbles outside matches the swell of something in his chest.
It morphs into too-big t-shirts and borrowed shorts; to blanket piles on his couch and constant touching and wool-sock-clad feet tucked beneath his thigh. To movies that flicker quietly on a television screen that cast long shadows across the dimmed room around them, to a tub of ice cream wrapped in its’ own blanket to avoid brushing against exposed skin. It’s a head tipping back against his shoulder and tucking in perfectly to the bend of his neck and a soft, contented sigh that makes his very soul feel like it’s glowing. To slowly, carefully, gently tracing J + A along her upper arm over and over until his short nail raises goosebumps across her skin. To her head tilting back, to a startling openness in her dark eyes, to a kiss that makes his toes curl into the blankets tangled around his feet.
The fourth kind of thunder - it’s love.