AN: Another Lymond story. I can't figure out why I'm so fixated on Marthe and Jerott, they are so terrible to each other and yet- GAH! Anyway, just a quick look into their destructive relationship. Spoilers up the sixth book, I suppose, but nothing major.
Disclaimer: Pfft. yeah right.
Fantasies
It isn't something they talk about, in bed or out of it. If Marthe reaches up to run her fingers through his hair and baulks at the shortness, he declines from commenting. When she reaches up to touch his chest and sighs in disappointment at the toned muscle, Jerott's just glad she's touched him there at all. She doesn't like to kiss him, seems to avoid his mouth at all costs, and Jerott knows that no two people ever kiss the same way, and Marthe isn't ready to break her private, resigned fantasy. Jerott doesn't pry her away from it.
He doesn't try, becomes sometimes he lets his mind wander as well. Instead of the smooth, hands caressing his back, he imagines the same long fingers, only calloused from hours of swordplay and riding. The soft body under his own hands loses the even flow and is interrupted with old scars and the puckered skin of an old brand. The hair may be too long when he tugs on it, but at least the color is the same. The face, the voice, the sardonic, bored blue eyes, the aloof attitude, even when he strives to give so much more pleasure than he's getting, it's all the same. It's only the soul that's different, and name that he wrestles to keep from exclaiming aloud.
It probably won't matter much, even he does break his silence. He knows the reaction he would get. The knowing eyebrows, the shinning blue eyes boring into his own with the gut-wrenching clarity of knowing exactly what he was thinking. The lips pursed as she thought back to a scented night where she accused him of just this. So he returns to the bottle, drowning his own desires and needs, hiding them behind the drunkenness that only proves to frustrate Marthe further.
He couldn't get it right with Francis, and he doesn't know why he thought Marthe could ever be easier, because she's not. She's ten times worse. With Francis, at least their was a camaraderie of a sort; two soldiers, two old- what? Friends? Brothers-in-arms? At least Francis could stand the sight of him. Marthe begrudges his affection, his friendship, his very role as her husband.
It's the story of his goddamn life, Jerott thinks as he wraps his fingers around the bottle and tilts it back. Elizabeth, Gabriel, Francis and now Marthe. He can't win, ever win, he's not destined to be happy or lucky in love. But what he wouldn't give for just one night, one night where Marthe melted away and left Francis for him to enjoy: the beautiful, hard body; the soft, golden hair, the delicate, shapely hands. But he can't block her out because she would know. She would punish him like she always did for trying to find some happiness in the very hell he sent himself spiraling down into. She would punish him because she couldn't escape either.
He knows they're trapped in pointless fantasies, each longing for what they can't have and taking the next worst thing; each other.