Morticia

"Read to me," she ordered gently, closing her eyes and turning her face into his side.

If exhaustion had robbed her of her desire to read, she was damned if she didn't at least live vicariously through her husband.

He chuckled quietly, and hummed his assent before beginning:

"And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

The fluent, delicious ease with which he read Italian subdued her over-busy brain for a moment, but the particular suitability of the extract he had read would not stop biting at her, as it always did when she came across it.

"That passage always reminds me of Wednesday," she said, her voice muffled as she pressed her face into his hip.

He set his book to the side and touched her shoulder, encouraging her to raise herself up and nearer to him.

"I fear I interrupted something rather serious earlier. Or, rather, the baby did."

She adjusted, setting her head in his lap, enjoying the gentle motion of him tracing his fingers over her hair. There was something politely romantic about it, and she indulged him for a moment.

"She's terrified of vulnerability, of being-"

"She hardly inherited that from an unrecognisable source," he interrupted.

She laughed gently and shook her head.

"Yes but she's so…" she paused, the words feeling insufficient, "so angry and so determined to be independent."

"Teenage angst, my love," he assured.

"It's more than that, certainly more," she answered, feeling the weight of having a threat in their midst that she was yet to decide how to manage.

"How can I be of assistance?"

She turned around and, sitting up, came face to face with him. She wasn't yet prepared to trouble Gomez with her suspicious around Miss Jelinskey, though at some point she would have to. There was finally some calm in their home again, some spectre of the life before their new-born son, and it seemed unfair to derail that in the absence of anything but an inkling. And anyway, in the longed-for peace, she was hardly going to let this rare opportunity – a quiet evening alone with her husband - slide through her fingers.

"Mon cher," she raked her nails gently across his cheek, mesmerised as he shuddered under her touch, "your mere presence is enough assistance."

"I have missed you Tish," he said softy, eyes black with the kind of desire that had been – by sheer necessity of circumstance – absent in the last few weeks.

"I have been right here all along," she said and, with a coy smile, began unbuttoning her night gown, enjoying the hunger in his eyes as he watched, still and enthralled. She began to raise it over her thighs, wondering when he would finally give into temptation.

"You know exactly what I mean," he murmured, hand reaching out to caress her, but stalling in mid-air.

"Touch me," she demanded, voice losing all coyness, as she straddled his hips.

He needed no more encouragement, but she was impressed by his self-restraint when he opted to cup her jaw in his hands and bring her mouth down to his.

In the easy, quiet intimacy they shared she was able to fully relax, losing all sense of time and its limitations.

He grinned against her mouth as she sighed, her body softening into his, and he took the opportunity to switch their positions, so she was underneath him.

His kiss was slow and deliberately reserved, and his hands remained on her shoulders. It was bewildering, even now, how his kiss could silence any and every question she had, that his mouth could whisper the very essence of love into her skin. How his kiss could drive her wild with an abandon even she wasn't entirely comfortable displaying.

Heat grew in her belly and she pushed her pelvis into his with an encouraging groan.

He chuckled a little and pulled back from her, to look at her face.

"I intend to savour every moment of this," he murmured, before trailing his lips down her neck.

"Are you implying something of deprivation? Because you're forgetting numerous fleeting altercations, not least of all my very accommodating mouth." She whispered, twisting his hair in her fingers as his lips laid out a hot-trail along her sternum and his hands pushed her nightgown towards her waist.

"I will never be ungrateful, I have no right," he said, raising his eyes up to look at her as she pressed her pelvis up towards him. "And for clarification I have not forgotten any of our altercations, however fleeting they may have been. Take it as the compliment it's intended to be that I want to taste every inch of you…in spite of your impatience."

He was right, of course, but she would perish before she admitted that.

He kneeled up, and began divesting himself of his pyjama shirt, pulling it up over his head to reveal his hewn chest. Though she wasn't entirely vocal about it, she was not at all immune to the aesthetic pleasures of his body – in fact quite the opposite. She admired the ripple of his pecs as he pulled his shirt and threw it on the floor, and she was suddenly thirsty to taste him. Sitting up to join him on his knees, she reached forward to kiss his abdomen, tasting the clean earthiness of his skin, and she couldn't resist the temptation to scrape her teeth over his nipple as she moved upwards. When she finally looked up into his eyes, she was met with amusement.

"It isn't all one sided," he grinned, satisfied.

"Let's not shatter any illusions now," she murmured, resting back on her heels. "I like the status quo."

She reached down to finish the painfully slow journey of her night gown, trailing it up over her own thighs and, knowing his eyes were riveted to her movements, lay back, spreading her legs open on their black sheets.

Suggestiveness was shattered in the face of explicit encouragement.

And he grinned with delighted when she raised a challenging brow.