Reading Requirements:

Theme song: Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek

Snack: Dark chocolate

Beverage: Sparkling mineral water (you want your senses intact to take in the stimulations)

Tool (optional/ if granted): A partner who will take responsibility of tonight's consequences

Chapter Seven: Surface Tension

There are hundreds of wrapped gifts that came for her birthday, Rapunzel thinks. But when she unbuttons Eugene's vest and shirt, she knows she has found her true birthday gift. She is unwrapping it. One knows that when one can't feel one's feet and feels giddy like after being hit on the face, without the excruciating pain. But her heart stops when she sees the bruise. He is hurting and it hurts her too when he does. She tries to comfort herself. He's had worse. He'll get through this one. But still. He is strangely compliant to her instructions. In fact, he is compliant to the point of whimpering. She takes this face on. Inexperienced she is, but never naive. She can guess that he likes pain he can tolerate. He likes being submissive. He likes being treated like a naughty boy down with a scraped knee. When he's with her, at least.

She presses the ice pack on his torso, gently at the first touch and then she applies more pressure. He sucks in his breath hard.

"Happy birthday, Rapunzel," he manages to say in between moans and gasps. Rapunzel looks at him with pleading eyes and continues with her task.

"And you have no gift for me."

"You're looking at it."

Is he reading her thoughts? She asks in her heart. Still the same old Eugene Fitzherbert. Four years has passed. It seems that nothing has changed but everything.

Exposed, without the hindrance of clothing, she finally sees that his torso is long and perfectly proportional to his breadth. She who knows the properties of Pythagoras' Golden Ratio sees this in him instantly. She had suspected this the first time she saw him in his glorious bare-chestedness four years ago in his flat, with only a towel hanging on his waist. But four years is a long time. Such length of time has made her think that he is just a dream in her sleep. Touching him with the ice pack make her feel like a fool. Why is the palm of her hand and his bare skin separated by the coldest thing in the world?

She sees his spartanly sectioned abdomen and feels the artistic urge in her to touch the neat rectangulars, Pythagoras' Golden Ratio in the flesh. She moves her free hand and touches him in the torso. His breath quickens. And she feels the muscles on his solar plexus stiffen. Her fingers begin to travel along the ridges of his torso. He seems to stop breathing and draws closer to her.

"Take me," he says.

"I have nothing else to give you," he begs. He takes the ice pack from her hand and drops it to the floor.

"Give me time, give me time," she says as she begins to ease his vest and shirt off his shoulders. The frontal buttons allow her to do it with such elegance that he doesn't have to move much. The clothing items seem to slide off him like they are silk on a marble statue. When he is completely bare on top, he begins his move. But she steadies his hands.

"Be still," she warns in a whisper, breathing in intoxicated despair. She takes in the sight of his body. From the finely sculpted abdomen, her fingers trace the hollow in the middle to the plane of his chest. A scar as long as a man's thumb is etched on his left chest, under his brown nipple. She kisses it. He moans and arches his body. She kisses all the way to the wing-like collarbone that becomes the foundation of his wide and strong shoulders. She sucks on his throat.

But all the perfection that she has seen so far is the kind of perfection that she can get wholesale from models sitting for figure drawing classes. Such perfection of physique would be meaningless if it wasn't for his soul, contained in his eyes. Such beauty is only meaningful with his soul. She looks at his long, strong eyebrows framing his wide, squarish eyes with dark brown irises. He looks back at her, amazed by the adoration she has for him, as if he isn't worthy of being loved. She traces her finger on the bridge of his nose and says her thanks in silence for the instrument that allows him to breath and thus allowing him to live. Her fingers travel to his lips and he playfully traps it with his teeth. She laughs and he smiles. She gives thanks for those lips which allow him to say the right words at the right times and at the times when everything went wrong, said nothing. She remembers when he was struggling with the unspeakable suffering caused by Mother Gothel's bullet, he had said nothing. He could have begged her to do something, to help him, to call for help, but he did not. He knew that she was completely helpless and he didn't want to add to the burden she has to suffer. He could have called out names that she would later obsess about and search for, but he did not. He did not want her to live with hauntings other than she already has.

But everything leads back to his first scar. The one from Mother Gothel's bullet. Located under his right ribcage, she dives into it to pay worship to its terrifying beauty. Then there is the second scar where they cut him to take out errant shrapnel above his navel. It has perforated his stomach. It was taken out when he was stronger to have the second surgery. It took him ten days. She nibbles at it like fish to seaweed. That leads her to his navel - a perplexing spiral that ends with a small protrusion in its middle. She breathes in his aroma at his centre and he moans as she nibbles on that too. She can see that he suffers at being still when she does all these unspeakable things to him.

Underneath his navel is a trail of dark brown hair that leads to his manhood. She kisses his flat and hard lower belly, while her fingers play with the path of hair. True as it has been described by the books, especially his first gift to her, the two-dollar-on-discount bodice-ripper, My Charming Bandit, all her doings have made his manhood harden.

"Please, Rapunzel," he moans.

"What?" She asks breathlessly, apparently not done with her exploration.

"Stop," he is begging her. Rapunzel grins like a she-devil.

"Make me stop."

He cups her shoulders and leads her away from his lower belly. He lays her on her back. Stars appear in her vision when he starts kissing the hollow between her breasts. He stops for a few seconds as he buries his face in the trenches of her paradise, taking in the smell of her bodily perfumery. His skilful hand travel to the back of her strapless dress and slides down the zipper. He pushes the dress down and exposes the small but shapely mounds of her breasts. The constricting pair of strapless brassieres poses no hindrance when he unclasps the frontal buckle and the deed set free her true beauty. His breaths quicken. He slides the dress further down and relishes her flat belly adorned with a small mound of beauty fat under her navel. He plants kisses on every inch of her. She has thought that the entire world has turned dark with ecstasy.

Her dress is now at her waist when he pushes it further down. He now has her only in her white panties. The dress is history now and long gone are her angel wings. He has his hand in between her thighs as he rubs against them up and down. Suddenly, she feels something slipping through the folds in the opening between her thighs. Slowly, but steadily he is working his way through her with his fingers, as if a pioneer trailblazing an unchartered path. The pleasure that he gives through such simple fondling is not possible to be properly describe in words. She is instead thinking of colours. A pandemonium-like burst of rainbow, a spectrum of light and dark mingling as one.

He touches the centre of her flower, the secret of all her secrets. She feels the subtle discomfort of being probed and let out a gasp. She hasn't mistaken that she heard him gasps too. He withdraws his finger from the folds of her centre.

"You haven't done this before," he whispers.

"Gloat then," she pants.

"No, no," he shakes his head. And kisses her.

"You have no idea how I grateful I am, Punzie. You, you – are amazing," he says and touches her face.

"I am not worthy," he continues.

"I want it to be you," she expresses the singularity of thought that has been running through her mind the whole discourse.

"But this isn't right."

"What shall we do to make it right? Tonight."

"We may not see each other again ever in our lives and you want to take this insane risk? What if you get –" he says and when he is anxious he will talk really fast.

"You flatter yourself too much, Eugene," Rapunzel moans in frustration. Never in a thousand years would she have dreamt that she and Flynnagan Rider would have this conversation, on the verge of all truths revealed.

"Well, everyone's has to live with the consequences of their actions and I don't ever want you to do this alone, if anything should happen to me," he explains in one breath. He is worried to death about the future. Rapunzel can see that and it frustrates her. She wants him to see how frustrated she is. She covers her face before she uncovers it again and speaks in a barely controlled tone of voice.

"Listen to me, Eugene."

"I am listening."

"Listen!" She yells. That makes him zip his lips. Rapunzel takes a deep breath and lays out her words. She wants him to know that it hasn't been easy for her.

"I watched you got shot and died. I was in the morgue, on the verge of identifying your body. I waited for the doctors to remove shrapnel from your body. I waited for every second for what seemed to be a hundred years to see you open your eyes. I counted each drop of chemical in your damn morphine drip. I watched you got stabbed in the fucking chest. I held you in my fucking arms as you drew your fucking dying breaths. I had to go through every fucked up second of waiting and torture for you to fucking wake up. Then you disappeared without a word except that crap you wrote in your GOD AWFUL SHITTY DIARY,"

"It's a journal," he cowers. She pays no heed to this.

"I think I have NO PROBLEM with carrying your baby to term and giving birth to him WITHOUT you around, if that's what you mean!"

At the end of the speech, she has tears in her eyes. She is supposed to cry at their long awaited love-making but she is crying now because of anger.

"It's a boy. You want a boy," Eugene says softly in reverence, his eyes thinly layered with tears.

"Yes, a boy. So he will remind me of you for the rest of my life," she confesses. This leaves Eugene awfully quiet for a few seconds.

"I don't want to have to do this, Rachel Kingsley, but you leave me no choice," Eugene says and reaches into his pants pocket. He withdraws a velvet box the colour of dark purple and opens it. Two simple gold bands are in it. He takes one and holds her left hand with his right hand.

"Will you Rachel Kingsley, or will you Rapunzel, be my wife in soul and body, in the eye of God?"

"I will, Eugene Fitzherbert."

"I marry you, I marry you, I marry you," Eugene says as he slid the gold band on her ring finger. He kisses her fingertips. Rapunzel takes the other, larger gold band from the box and holds it.

"Will you Eugene Fitzherbert, or will you Flynnagan Rider, be my husband in soul and body, in the eye of God?"

"I will, Rachel Kingsley."

"I marry you, I marry you, I marry you!" She says as she slid the gold band on his finger. They hold their gold band adorned hands and kisses each other on the lips. First, light kisses like the flapping of linnet's wings. Then the kisses turn into hungry, passionate manipulations of lips and tongues.

Author's Note: Damon – Thanks for reading. Hopefully you'll read the first DEA fic and tell me what you think. About the number of reviews, I don't think it is a problem when one believes in one's own story. We can't force people to review. But thank you very much for the vote of confidence. Aerrows Girl_07 (hang tough, girl) & Sparklewolf7000: Welcome back. An Unknown Foreign Beauty: Tangled is about Flynn getting injured all the time. Don't you think? Haha. Romance and Musical: Right now, I'm collecting all idioms and proverbs in English related to horses for your reading pleasure. PampleMousse07, CommanderNemo, the-fairy-godmother (can't wait for TRU update), Wolfram-and-Hart-Sauron, FaithRivens, TruliFrighteningMonsterAlice, Alltangledup, SWACGleekFreak, AIOFanNCRM, goatgod - hopefully you all will not freak out at the Cold Mountain reference.

Postscript: Based on my very own limited experience, I strongly believe in sex after marriage. But in Rapunzel and Eugene's point of view, I have to make them realistically in character rather than enforce my personal life experience on them. But they are fully aware of the consequences. Make sure you are too in whatever you do.