They were both quiet during sex.
The hush was habitual. It continued through the early shyness of awkward fumblings and dreaded performance anxiety, on through the days when sex turned to fucking, to making love, and back to sex again. Breathless moans and whispers were often overwhelmed by the turning blades of a ceiling fan.
Yuki liked it that way. He liked having Natsuki above him, watching each other and pretending they weren't. Feeling him ghosting across his skin, down his thighs, his chest, in him, around him. When he'd graze teeth across the skin of his throat, smiling, dusted pink, swallowing and losing murmurs in the rustle of the sheets. Yuki liked riding Natsuki, curling down and latching onto his wrists, pinning them down against the bed; feeling a calloused thumb stroke his forearm before tensing and jerking forward, maybe hitting it just right, maybe getting that throaty gasp he could barely discern from his own breathing. He loved it.
And even when they came, minutes, sometimes seconds apart, it wrenched sounds from them that never truly rose above a hiss, the occasional guttural moan. When they arched and grasped at sheets, at each other, grazing lips and knuckles and teeth and skin, before settling at a happily sated juncture, they would unfurl relieved, content.
Yuki assumed he would be muted, not having given the matter much thought in the first place. He noticed, though, and the revelation made him curious. In the early days, Natsuki would kiss him, bite him, lick and suck his skin to the point of pain while Yuki's breath rode out in moans, feathered and soft, as a tongue moved down his neck, fingers picking at his clothes. It was in those sweltering moments that Yuki chose to listen to the gasping, the groans that bubbled and dripped in the air like warm honey. When he'd clamber beside Natsuki, leaning into him and shifting his glasses to the side. Kissing his eyes, his neck, his lips, while his hands strayed and explored, he'd listen, carefully. Looking back, it had been in namely selfish reasoning that he would try at times to find Natsuki alone, draw him into the dark, waiting to hear his voice go throaty and deep, all breathe and no body.
Yuki was grateful, incredibly so, that Natsuki was the same – that his pleasure ghosted along the twitch of his fingers, the quiver of his breath, highlighted its entrance in teeth and tongue and digging nails. It was just as well, as Yuki would've been completely baffled, intimidated by the very thought of intimacy if Natsuki were to scream at the height of his pleasure as he did with the strike of pain. They would have moved past it, certainly, he would have adjusted. But that period of suffocating awkwardness, of incredible nervousness in which his face strained and tightened, breath heaving through a closed throat that refused to swallow, lips twitching, eyes bugged, would have been so much more intense, painfully drawn out and painfully personal.
As it was, they barely made it through the first few times respectably, as Natsuki was forced to keep pausing, hesitating and biting down on a sigh before craning upward to soothe the frozen, blushing, panicked mask from Yuki with a long and drawling kiss, sucking and pulling languidly until he hooked a response; until Yuki reached down and clasped his face, pushing eagerly, anxiety dismissed. Even in later hours, when the light slipping through the curtains was neither dawn nor daybreak but a confused lapse between the two, Yuki jolted and flinched, rolling with various waves of sensation on him, in him, against him; babbling between flurries of kisses, ignoring the blush rampaging down past his neck, his embarrassment and pride, the painfully tender smile Natsuki threw him again and again until his stomach ached.
Yuki liked the quiet sounds they made at each other. It was, to him, one of the most desirable aspects of sex with Natsuki. He was fairly sure that Natsuki felt the same regarding the matter, judging by the way he moved, the way the swell of his voice dipped low when he murmured, the furrow of his brow when his focus turned from hearing to listening.
Whenever they finished, when the sucking, the gasping, the swallows and bites and jerks and twitches were all over and done with, they settled into a tranquil state in which the hush loomed in the air, tall and lush, and heat still shivered in the sheets. It was there that they retired, tossing and rolling across one another, softly kissing in the cooled air until the lull of the ocean, the clasp of skin and sated warmth, the quiet finally pushed them over the brink and into unconsciousness; the subtle grasp of the hush.