As it turned out, what she wanted and what she needed weren’t precisely the same thing.
That night, fortunately, he gave her both.
Rating: Explicit
Fandoms: Gods of the Gates – E. Wade, Gods of the Gates (TV)
Relationships: Aeneas/Lavinia
Additional Tags:Alternate Universe – Modern, Angst and Fluff and Smut, The Saddest Erection Ever, Ghost!Lavinia, Eventual Happy Ending, Even Though They’re Both Dead at the End, But Together, Which Is What Really Counts Right, Aw Man You’re All Going to Hate This Aren’t You
Collections: Aeneas’s Sad Boner Week
Stats: Words: 2267 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 39 Kudos: 187 Bookmarks: 19
Love Lifts Him Up Where He Belongs
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan
Summary:
Aeneas has spent twenty years getting hard to a ghost. The love of his life, long dead. Lavinia, who vanishes whenever he attempts to touch her.
Then, one day, she doesn’t.
Notes:
Special thanks to my new beta. :-)
* * *
At night, she appeared before him once more. A bit more translucent than she’d been in life, but otherwise entirely, heartbreakingly herself. All sharp angles and features, lopsided smile and lank brown hair dusting her shoulders. The sweetest sight imaginable.
For twenty years now, he’d watched her float around their bedroom, clad in the same thin, short nightgown she’d worn to sleep one night, curled in his arms, never to wake again. Until she did, as a ghost. His ghost. His wife. His beloved.
As always, it felt both perverse and completely natural, how his body responded to the sight. If he could, all of him would rise to meet her, on whatever plane she still inhabited, but for now, only one part of him could. She smiled shyly at his condition, so shyly no one would suspect how she talked him through stroking himself some nights, her eyes bright and hot on him as he gasped and heaved and spurted against his belly.
They couldn’t touch. At the attempt, she’d vanish immediately, and sometimes she took days to return. When she did, she looked shaken. Ragged. Eyes bleak.
He didn’t know where she went, and she wouldn’t talk about it. But after the third time, after he spent a week despairing that she might not be able to return at all, he no longer reached out to her.
Tonight, though, something was different. As he lay in bed—awash in want, in grief, in love—his breath stuttered. She reached out for him, as she hadn’t done for two decades.
Her long, gentle fingers caressed his cheek.
They were warm.
22
“I’M STILL THINKING ABOUT HOW I WANT TO TACKLE Aeneas’s Inconvenient Boner Week.” April readjusted her rearview mirror for the thousandth time. “Yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe I could go back to modern AUs without things getting weird, as long as I kept using Wade’s version of Aeneas, rather than yours. Which, admittedly, makes him a million times less hot, but sacrifices sometimes have to be made for the greater good. And by ‘the greater good,’ I mean ‘explicit fucking in my fics.’”
Marcus snorted, but she kept rolling before he could formulate a better reply.
“Speaking of explicit fucking, I should show you my friend TopMeAeneas’s latest magnum opus, “One Top to Rule Them All,” which is sort of a sexy mashup of Gods of the Gates and Lord of the Rings. She took the mount part of Mount Doom very literally.”
The closer they got to Sacramento, the chattier April became.
And yes, she was funny, and yes, he wanted to hear whatever she had to say.
But this wasn’t a happy type of chatty, or even the overly caffeinated cocroffinut type of chatty. Instead, it was the type of chatty where she seemed to want to fill any possible silence, leaving no space for extended thought.
As she talked, she was paying sufficient attention to the highway, but she was also fiddling with the climate settings, the music selection, and the angles of the air vents, restless as she drove in a way Marcus had never witnessed before.
This was anxiety. Plain and simple.
In passing, sometime during their first month together, she’d told him her father was a corporate lawyer, her mother a homemaker. At the time, he should have wondered why she’d failed to add more detail, but he hadn’t. Which was a mark against him, obviously, but also a testament to how deftly April could turn a subject away from anything too uncomfortable. Also an indication that maybe, just maybe, she handled other people’s messy emotions and history better than her own.
Still, if she wanted to chat, he’d chat. If she needed distraction, he’d provide it.
He’d give her anything she wanted or needed, something he’d been trying to prove to her in earnest for the past month, ever since she’d stood naked and shaking in front of him beneath the stark light of her bedroom and asked him to fuck her as a reward. Her reward.
She didn’t understand yet, but she would.
He loved her, loved her, and she was his reward. Touching her was a gift to him.
That night, he’d finally understood just how effectively she’d managed to shield her own vulnerabilities, despite all her seeming openness and the wattage illuminating them both.
The next morning, he’d been determined to learn more. To understand her better.
When he’d woken in darkness, an hour before her alarm was due to sound, she was already awake. At his movement, her head had turned toward him, and her eyes weren’t heavy-lidded with sleep, as they should have been following such a late night.
She was fully alert. Thinking so hard, he was surprised he couldn’t hear the friction.
“Tell me,” he’d said, and gathered her into the crook of his body, an arm under her neck, the other stroking her arm, her hip, her flank as he eased her into the unfamiliar role of little spoon. “Tell me about the call.”
The sheets smelled like them. Like sex and roses, and everything he’d dreamed of.
“My parents . . .” Unexpectedly, she laughed, the sound jarring in the predawn stillness. “The irony, Marcus. The fucking irony.”
“I don’t understand.” He nosed the crown of her head. Pressed a kiss there.
“They’re going to love you. Love you. They’ll approve of you more than they ever approved of me.” She paused. “But not just the real you. The fake you too, the public you. Even if they saw the difference, I don’t think they’d count it as important. Maybe my mom would. Not my dad, though.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to him before, but—“My parents would have killed to have you as their child, instead of me.”
Maybe that should have hurt, but somehow it didn’t. The knife’s edge of his grief had blunted since he’d shared it with April. Since he’d realized he had a choice in how his relationship with his parents would proceed in the future, if it proceeded at all. Since she’d told him he didn’t owe them forgiveness or anything he didn’t want to give.
Besides, how could he begrudge some alternate-universe version of his parents for adoring and admiring April, when he did the same?
“Thus the irony.” She wiggled closer. “All your best qualities, everything that makes you remarkable—that’s not what my father cares about. He’s all about appearances. Surfaces and selling himself to clients. We’re estranged, but my mother is absolutely loyal to him, and she has her own—” As she hesitated, her breathing became a bit ragged. “She has her own concerns. So things can get complicated.”