Release (Challenge #2 - Sensuality) - Josef/Sarah - PG13
Posted: Sun Jan 18, 2009 11:59 am
I hate long author’s notes, but some things require a bit of explanation. I began working on this piece about five months ago, long before the “sensuality over sexuality” challenge was ever brought up. I felt that there was a critical piece of Josef and Sarah’s story that I had avoided and I wanted to try to do it justice. It was almost finished, but I ended up putting it aside. Then a couple of weeks ago when the second writers’ challenge came up, I took another look at it and thought it might fit within that framework.
Disclaimer: Josef and Sarah inspire me, but I don’t own them. They belong to Trevor and Ron.
Rating: PG13
First published: 12/8/2008
Restraint
Even with his eyes closed, he could see her perfectly, seated with her back to him. He followed the graceful curve of her waist down around the flare of her hip to where it met the seat of the piano bench. Her fluid movements mesmerized him, soothed him, as her delicate fingers warmed the ivory keys of the baby grand.
He was tense, so much so that even those lovely fingers massaging his neck, rubbing the strain of forever from his shoulders, had not been enough to relax him. When she had recognized that her efforts were futile, she moved from behind his chair leaving him lost in his own darkness and settled herself at the piano. Sarah had learned that there were times when the weight of three hundred and fifty years was so great it could not be lifted – it could only be coaxed from the depths of that silent heart.
As the final notes still hung in the air, she felt his hands on her shoulders and she turned, rising with his touch until her lips lightly brushed his. She grasped the Windsor knot at his collar and with only the slightest resistance slid it down releasing the length of the silken tie. Slowly, deliberately, she began to unfasten the top buttons of his crisply starched shirt.
He closed his eyes, inhaling sharply, and breathed into her hair, “Babe –”.
A single finger pressed to his lips and halted further discussion. She raised her eyes, and with only the width of a sigh between them, said everything. “It’s time.”
What she meant was they had waited long enough. He had shared his soul, she had shared her heart and her blood, but they had never joined completely. What he wanted and what she offered were so close and yet, he feared, so far apart. Until now, it had been all about restraint. He had been in control.
Control was everything. Through lesson and loss, he knew this. He had learned to appreciate the exquisite torture of denying himself – because any feeling was better than no feeling at all. Because some risks were just too great.
It hadn’t always been this way, but she changed that. It went beyond holding himself back. He was chained to the past, the prisoner of so many voyeuristic ghosts, the eyes of ten thousand conquests watching, and judging. Who is she? And why is she any different from us? What makes this time so special? How could it be?
He knew well the crash of thunder and the white hot flash that precedes the downpour – that scarlet torrent drenching him and quenching the fire. For more than three hundred years, that was all he knew. There was no remembrance of mortal feeling, of it ever having been any other way. In the time before the eclipse, when the sun was blotted from his life, there were only shadows and murmurs - glimpses of faces and whispers of voices too distant to register. It was a time when his senses were dull and his memory duller still. It was beyond his reach.
Control was power – the power to take what he pleased, whenever he pleased, and the strength to refrain when it suited him. Restraint, like bravado, was a script he rehearsed and replayed, but the audience was growing restless.
Please her or please yourself. If she’s not like us, don’t pretend you can do both.
He had to make a decision, before he was unable to make a decision. He had to give up control.
Release
“It’s time.”
There were promises made in the whispers of wool and cotton, cashmere and silk, as fabrics gave way to the touch of living velvet. A single, shared heart beat between them.
He could not lose himself. He would not lose himself.
Maybe he would find himself – that unaffected youth who could not yet feel the sensations of the flesh so acutely, but who felt the joys of the heart more deeply – whose desire did not stir first in his mouth even before rising in his loins. There was a time, he knew, when that arousal depended on the rush of his own blood rather than the lure of another’s – a time when flesh was all he craved.
Winter’s chill had cooled the satin sheets and he fell back into them like the crisp clear waters that in a summer so long ago had refreshed his mortal body. They surrounded and supported him, and he floated there, free, unfettered with the layers of alternately loose and constricting fabrics that had usually confined him.
When she had poured herself over him and rinsed away the stains of his journey, she lulled him back again to the smell of fresh green grass, her fingers echoing the tickle of its cool, soft blades against his skin, her touch the warmth of dappled sunshine caressing his face through whispering leaves.
He stretched out among fallen apple blossoms, the pale petals teasing against his skin with the promise of such lush red fruit to come.
She breathed on his neck the light June breeze, both warm and cooling, and touched his lips with the sweetest of fruits. She offered him tender ripe berries, sweet on his tongue, and she quenched him with honey and wine.
The scents of bergamot and spice teased at his nostrils, inviting him to explore, and he moved with the music of her soft laughter, lyrical and light.
She enveloped him and wrapped him in brilliant sunshine, warming him not with fire but with light. Lost in this time before memory, nothing commanded him – only coaxed him. As they shared the rhythm of that single heartbeat, balanced on the line between shadow and sun, he smiled at her with soft brown eyes and eternity dissolved away. In that instant – for just that instant – he was young and alive and once again part of humanity.
And as his cheeks were kissed with the first two drops of a gentle cleansing rain – there he found release.
-----------
Disclaimer: Josef and Sarah inspire me, but I don’t own them. They belong to Trevor and Ron.
Rating: PG13
First published: 12/8/2008
Restraint
Even with his eyes closed, he could see her perfectly, seated with her back to him. He followed the graceful curve of her waist down around the flare of her hip to where it met the seat of the piano bench. Her fluid movements mesmerized him, soothed him, as her delicate fingers warmed the ivory keys of the baby grand.
He was tense, so much so that even those lovely fingers massaging his neck, rubbing the strain of forever from his shoulders, had not been enough to relax him. When she had recognized that her efforts were futile, she moved from behind his chair leaving him lost in his own darkness and settled herself at the piano. Sarah had learned that there were times when the weight of three hundred and fifty years was so great it could not be lifted – it could only be coaxed from the depths of that silent heart.
As the final notes still hung in the air, she felt his hands on her shoulders and she turned, rising with his touch until her lips lightly brushed his. She grasped the Windsor knot at his collar and with only the slightest resistance slid it down releasing the length of the silken tie. Slowly, deliberately, she began to unfasten the top buttons of his crisply starched shirt.
He closed his eyes, inhaling sharply, and breathed into her hair, “Babe –”.
A single finger pressed to his lips and halted further discussion. She raised her eyes, and with only the width of a sigh between them, said everything. “It’s time.”
What she meant was they had waited long enough. He had shared his soul, she had shared her heart and her blood, but they had never joined completely. What he wanted and what she offered were so close and yet, he feared, so far apart. Until now, it had been all about restraint. He had been in control.
Control was everything. Through lesson and loss, he knew this. He had learned to appreciate the exquisite torture of denying himself – because any feeling was better than no feeling at all. Because some risks were just too great.
It hadn’t always been this way, but she changed that. It went beyond holding himself back. He was chained to the past, the prisoner of so many voyeuristic ghosts, the eyes of ten thousand conquests watching, and judging. Who is she? And why is she any different from us? What makes this time so special? How could it be?
He knew well the crash of thunder and the white hot flash that precedes the downpour – that scarlet torrent drenching him and quenching the fire. For more than three hundred years, that was all he knew. There was no remembrance of mortal feeling, of it ever having been any other way. In the time before the eclipse, when the sun was blotted from his life, there were only shadows and murmurs - glimpses of faces and whispers of voices too distant to register. It was a time when his senses were dull and his memory duller still. It was beyond his reach.
Control was power – the power to take what he pleased, whenever he pleased, and the strength to refrain when it suited him. Restraint, like bravado, was a script he rehearsed and replayed, but the audience was growing restless.
Please her or please yourself. If she’s not like us, don’t pretend you can do both.
He had to make a decision, before he was unable to make a decision. He had to give up control.
Release
“It’s time.”
There were promises made in the whispers of wool and cotton, cashmere and silk, as fabrics gave way to the touch of living velvet. A single, shared heart beat between them.
He could not lose himself. He would not lose himself.
Maybe he would find himself – that unaffected youth who could not yet feel the sensations of the flesh so acutely, but who felt the joys of the heart more deeply – whose desire did not stir first in his mouth even before rising in his loins. There was a time, he knew, when that arousal depended on the rush of his own blood rather than the lure of another’s – a time when flesh was all he craved.
Winter’s chill had cooled the satin sheets and he fell back into them like the crisp clear waters that in a summer so long ago had refreshed his mortal body. They surrounded and supported him, and he floated there, free, unfettered with the layers of alternately loose and constricting fabrics that had usually confined him.
When she had poured herself over him and rinsed away the stains of his journey, she lulled him back again to the smell of fresh green grass, her fingers echoing the tickle of its cool, soft blades against his skin, her touch the warmth of dappled sunshine caressing his face through whispering leaves.
He stretched out among fallen apple blossoms, the pale petals teasing against his skin with the promise of such lush red fruit to come.
She breathed on his neck the light June breeze, both warm and cooling, and touched his lips with the sweetest of fruits. She offered him tender ripe berries, sweet on his tongue, and she quenched him with honey and wine.
The scents of bergamot and spice teased at his nostrils, inviting him to explore, and he moved with the music of her soft laughter, lyrical and light.
She enveloped him and wrapped him in brilliant sunshine, warming him not with fire but with light. Lost in this time before memory, nothing commanded him – only coaxed him. As they shared the rhythm of that single heartbeat, balanced on the line between shadow and sun, he smiled at her with soft brown eyes and eternity dissolved away. In that instant – for just that instant – he was young and alive and once again part of humanity.
And as his cheeks were kissed with the first two drops of a gentle cleansing rain – there he found release.
-----------
Three hundred and fifty years is a long time. I think for the most part Josef protects himself by living in the "here and now," but there have to have been many ghosts that have haunted him in one way or another. I wonder how many times he might have thought someone was "special" in that stretch of time. To find someone who truly was -- after so long -- was the rarest of gifts.
The first bit you quoted may be one of my favorite strings of words that I've put together. 
This story is gorgeous in so many ways. 