Title: Harbor

Author: Jade Sabre

Prompt: unexpected use of a chair

Disclaimer: Do people even still bother with these? Still don't own anything.

I have a few of these ficlets about my dear sorceress and knight floating around and figured I'd upload them for fun. Hope you enjoy! Reviews are always appreciated. :-)

tanithar/nevalle, unexpected use of a chair

Although it was a staple of his surroundings, one of the rocks upon which he anchored his life, Nevalle had never actually sat in his wife's plushy pink armchair. He had been perfectly satisfied with the sight of her sitting in it in the corner of their study, her feet tucked up underneath her dark robes, a quill stuck behind her ear as she bit her lip and read whatever report she had in her hands while he sat at his desk and snuck looks at her. She made the chair beautiful, as opposed to an affront to his austere sensibilities.

There were many such affronts in their chambers. Some, such as the lacy curtains, he merely tolerated; others, such as their delightful silk-and-goose-feather mattress, he had to concede as having appeal.

One day, while he was writing one of his many letters to Neverwinter (this one to Darmon, concerning rumors of his friend's dalliance with an ambassador from Evereska), Tanithar set down her quill and stretched. This was not unusual, nor was the fact that he stopped mid-sentence (an action he would later regret, as he always did) to watch this delightful display. Her amused glance, directed at him from half-closed eyes as she tilted her head back to increase the effectiveness of her stretch, was also nothing out of the ordinary, nor was his immediate responsive desire to carry her from the study to the bedroom and make wild sweet passionate love to her. He usually didn't so much quash the desire as file it away for future review (and it was always sweeter for the delay), but sometimes, when Tanithar had that glinting gleam in her green eyes, he felt his resolve slip, just a little.

She looked as if she wanted it to slip. That, too, was not unusual. She enjoyed watching him slip. He usually didn't mind.

Today, however, Darmon's letter was merely a brief social respite from a tedious stack of twenty letters, ten of which were more-or-less answered and another ten of which concerned matters of lesser importance which nonetheless required carefully worded answers—

"You look tense," his wife purred from her curled-up-cat pose.

He shook his head, the very motion loosening the muscles of his neck. "Just a lot of work to do," he said.

"That's all you ever do anymore, work," she said, although that was hardly true; all he'd ever done was work, and suffer her as a distraction.

"Distraction" was perhaps a light term to describe the woman who owned his heart and soul, but he was trying to distance himself from the situation. "It's important," he insisted.

This usually was enough to deter her; she compromised, and said, "At least let me rub your shoulders."

"Of course," he said with a smile, and within moments the coolness of her hands was bleeding through his tunic and onto the muscles of his shoulders, and he paused long enough to turn his head and kiss the fingers of her lifted hand before returning to chastising Darmon for being so silly as to fall for a beautiful elf who no doubt wanted nothing more than to force him into a politically embarrassing situation.

"Your wording is a little harsh," she said, propping her pointed chin on his shoulder.

"This is a private letter," he told her. It was a paradox—one of many in their marriage—that they still maintained the illusion of privacy; they both understood the fine and subtle line between private and secret, and tried to avoid the latter, and furthermore their mingled confidences only produced a more united privacy against the prying eyes of the outside world.

"Mm-hm," she said. "Please tell me Darmon was exaggerating when he said they spent four hours on the chair in his office."

"Of course he wasn't," he said, almost wistfully. "Darmon never has to lie about such things."

"What a horrible idea," she said, recoiling, her hands slipping away. "I've seen the chair in his office. It's narrow and wooden and awful, and no woman could possibly enjoy that."

"She didn't have to be sitting in it," he pointed out, only blushing a little. "Besides, who wants to have sex in a chair?"

The glint in her eyes gleamed in her voice as she said, "Oh, I don't know. It could be fun."

He sighed, set down his quill, and twisted in his chair to look at her. "All right," he said.

"Don't sound so resigned," she said, failing to frown at him. "I haven't said anything."

"You're thinking it," he said, lifting his chair off the ground and turning it until it faced her. "So, come, have at me."

"And suddenly I realize exactly how I fell in love with you," she said. "Clearly, you seduced me with your passionate words."

He reached for her hands, but she retreated. "Your chair is even worse than Darmon's," she said. "I don't care which of us is sitting in it, I refuse to waste my time trying to conjure the heights of ecstasy while confined to such a torturous device."

"Which proves my point exactly," he said. "Why would anyone want to have sex in a chair?"

"Well, not just any chair," she conceded, her eyes casting around the room while his stomach seized with a horrible sense of foreboding.

"Not—"

"Oh yes," she said, reaching for his hands and tugging him to his feet, her eyes so wicked that his breath stopped and his knees went weak and he nearly said Forget the chair, the floor will do (which, in his defense, was a semi-usual response on both their parts, and the reason Tanithar had insisted on the soft, plushy carpet under their feet).

She took cruel advantage of his inability to voice further protests by lightly shoving him, and he stumbled backwards into her pink plushy chair, and his immediate impression was softness, and then the sort of magical aura which he recognized as hers, so strongly cast that it made him itch. The itch combined with a sensation of slowly sinking into the fabric's no doubt carnivorous flesh, which led to an ill-planned escape attempted cut short by Tanithar's mouth roving wildly across his general facial area. He managed to catch her lips with his own and grip her waist as she hiked up her robes in order to settle on his lap; this action very nearly made him forget his desire to escape, but the situation was so unusual that he instead marshaled his strength and continued distracting her with kisses (warm, sweet kisses, with the slight metal of ink on her tongue).

He lost his grip on her waist and her mouth as her robes came over her head; it would have been less distressing had the sensation of sinking into the chair's maw not increased as she pushed herself against him. Oh, he appreciated his wife's state of dress, but the lack of blood flow to his brain prevented him from realizing that her chair had never eaten her and would probably not eat him and furthermore chairs don't actually eat people at all. Of course, he was married to a sorceress, and sometimes chairs did not behave for sorceresses in the same way they behaved for normal people. Just because it hadn't eaten her didn't mean he would be spared that fate. There was only one thing to do.

Luckily, he was married to a sorceress, and she was no match for his arms around her and the full strength of his body as he dedicated it towards rolling them over so that she could placate the hungry chair. Tanithar was busy divesting him of his clothing, so it was only the slightest of muffled cries that accompanied this motion, and then his skin no longer itched and he was no longer in danger of being eaten and they were both naked and he was able to devote his full attention to that fact.

Of course, his rolling had put them rather more across the chair than in it, and in the course of their exertions they pushed themselves to a precarious balance across the arms of the chair without really noticing until Tanithar's legs, usually positioned such that her ankles were near her ears, were suddenly flipping them over the arm of the chair, and her husband was helpless to do anything but follow her, their heads hitting the floor with rather loud and painful thuds.

They lay in a tangle of limbs, wincing and moaning into each other's mouths, until such time as Nevalle managed to free his tongue from hers. He took a breath to speak, but she said, "Don't."

"I—"

"You're right, I'm wrong, sex in chairs is a horrible idea." She wriggled her arm out from under him and turned his head, and blew gently on the swelled spot where his skull had connected with the stone through the carpet. Her icy breath soothed the pain, but she grimaced when he touched her head in return.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Oh, don't be," she said, smiling with her pain as she half-sat-up, stretching one of her legs until it disappeared under the chair as she searched for...something. Her movements revived his momentarily stunned libido, and her words did little to help. "I appreciate your enthusiasm. Ah, there it is."

He watched as she dragged a bag from under the chair with her toes; as soon as he could see what she did, he stretched his toes to help her, and the ensuing game of footsie detained them for several minutes, until she strained her neck to see better and hissed in pain again. She abandoned their game in favor of summoning the bag with a wave of her hand; from its depths she produced a healing potion, which she uncorked and drank.

"How old—"

"Don't ask," she said, wiping her mouth and tossing the flask aside. It occurred to him to tell her he might not want to kiss her for fear of—but she beat him to his protestations, and the potion was one of Sand's; he knew, because it tasted of mint and stone.

"Now," she said, "shall we try for the bed?"

Nevalle looked at his wife, pale cheeks flushing, hair stuck to the sweat on her face, limbs woven through his, eyes mischievous, mouth smiling, hands drifting across his skin. "I think," he said, brushing her hair behind her ear, lingering on its subtle point and grinning as her eyes half-closed and she hummed on instinct (and usually she called this a cheap trick, but now she didn't seem to mind), "the floor will do."