Prompt: Constellations.
Alfie Solomons needed to invest in a bigger bed. Too many mornings now, right, he'd woken with a cold-toed foot pressed against the skin of his lower back. A thin arm flung over his fuckin' throat. An elbow lodged between his ribs. A mouthful of bloody copper curls between his snoring teeth making him choke awake with a splutter of suffocation. Yeah, fuckin' hell, he needed to invest in a bigger bed.
He doesn't, however, and he swears he never will. Not without being held at gunpoint by someone to do so. Knowing his luck, it would be a fuckin' Shelby to do it too.
Still, one might ask themselves why, despite the clear disadvantages of his current predicament and his own wealthy means to wipe that quandary clean from the slate, did Alfie Solomons just not buy a bigger bed?
Because his pixie of a missus, the cause of the cold feet and the crick in the neck and the fuckin' twang to his ribs, the whirlwind that was Harriet Potter who had turned up at his warehouse one day looking for employment at an actual bakery and had impossibly ended said day sitting at his desk and tidying his paperwork as if she bloody belonged there, doesn't need much room at all.
She's small. Tiny. She barely reaches his chest when she's upright, and Alfie half fears they'll walk down the road one evening and she'd fuckin' fall down a drain and disappear from his life as easy as that.
She'd get lost in a bigger bed, vanish right between the sheets and the pillows never to be found again.
Or so he tells himself.
It has nothing to do with the fact that some mornings, the best of mornings, he wakes instead to the smell of oak moss, wild flowers and honey in his nose from where she's rolled over him and perched herself on his chest like a robin on a branch, having no where else to roll in the miniscule bed. Naught to do with the fact that pressed up so close, they're legs get tangled up more often then not, knotted through and around until there's no telling, really, where one limb begins and the other ends, and she can't disappear can she, right, if she's a part of him, attached, fuckin' sewn into his skin. Not anything to do with sometimes, the very fuckin' best of times, mate, that he wakes first.
It gives him time to count the freckles on her naked shoulders, and she has plenty of them, a whole skies worth of constellations that Alfie is determined to map out in his lifetime with finger and lip and tongue if she'd let him.
Orion on a sleepy eyelid.
Aquila on the peak of a slowly rising and falling breast.
Cepheus napping in the dip of a trembling thigh.
And she's never close enough, not really. There's no such thing when it came to Harriet, his Harry, his fuckin' cold-toed pixie. There's always some space Alfie needs to quickly, quietly, obliterate.
Occasionally calculating the freckles is enough to wake her. Other times not. Alfie doesn't rightly know which one he prefers, the blinking awake of drowsy summer green eyes as he totals the ones on her neck, just the barest hint of a blown pupil, promise of more to come, or when she doesn't wake up, when he has to up his game, slip a thigh between her legs and tug her even closer, press a mouth against Ursa minor on a throat that bobs beneath the graze.
She tells him it tickles. The moan says otherwise. So does the other leg that comes around a hip to hook.
"Impatient there, treacle?"
She'll laugh through her nose with him, not at him, never at him, his Harry's too good for that, too fuckin' kind, and there's Lyra being curled over in the crinkle by an eyelash, and Lupus being swallowed by a dimple, and there's not just a hint of black in her eye but full fat midnight moons for the stars of her pink flushed skin.
She might tug on his beard then, tiny fingers coiling in to rope through, or maybe skate her nails across his scalp, and if they're lucky, really fuckin' lucky, Cyril won't jump up on the bed, tail wagging, snuffling for morning breakfast yet. Padfoot, Harry's dog he'd bought her, won't come barrelling up the stairs at her laughter, won't come jumping into the room, landing on them both, nailing Alfie in the fuckin' stomach as if he was still a puppy and not a hundred and fuckin fifty-pound beast of a Newfoundland.
How she ever walked that bloody dog, right, being so fuckin' little-
Then again, she had a leash wrapped squarely around Alfie's neck, didn't she? Had no problem at all walking him wherever she wanted to fuckin' go.
Magic, his girl.
Fuckin' magic.
His fingers would skate from the thighs and hold at the ribs, carving paths up a flank, thumbs pressing over Eridanus and Equuleus. The laughter would die then, right, die an honourable death as hips canted over hips, slotting and sliding. So close but never close enough.
It didn't really matter who kissed who first, whether teeth were knocked or heads were bumped, because his hands are over Hydrus on her lower back, and with just a tiny, so fuckin' tiny, push, he strikes fuckin' gold with a hitch of a shared breath between two mouths.
It's the groans that give him away, too soft to be grunts, all smooth and affectionate in a way Alfie never knew he could be, never knew his voice could go. But, but, right, when he dips his head to draw sharp on Caelum behind an ear with his teeth, there's nothing soft about the mewl from Harry.
It's crisp and sticky like treacle, and it rots him inside like a cavity, makes him thick and mushy and everything else he swore he'd never be.
She retaliates because of course she does, she wouldn't be his Harry if she didn't get her own licks in, and he bucks uncontrollably as she tugs at the hairs at the base of his neck, nearly fuckin' whimpers when she nips at his earlobe, and he gets another prize, a flash of Corvus peaking over a shoulder as she nearly bends in half-
Sometimes, the very, very worst of times, the bedside phone will ring.
"Fuckin' ignore it-"
She won't. They both know she won't. She won't let him either. Bleeding fuckin' heart that she is.
She'll laugh and pull away with one last nip to his throat, mutter something about Ollie perhaps needing help at the bakery, who should never be brought up in his fuckin' bed right, and she's too fast to hold, too slippery, like water in an unclasped hand, and then she's telling him to answer it while she trounces down the hall starkers to fix breakfast.
He does with a bark, and who should speak from over the line?
"Bad time, Mr. Solomons?"
"It's always a bad time when it comes to you, Tommy. What the fuck do you want? I was star-gazing."
Tommy doesn't know what he's on about. He never does.
"Star-gazing? It's ten in the morning, Alfie."
"Yeah, well, unfortunate shame for your poor fuckin' wife then, mate. Give Grace my condolences. I'm off to find Delphinus."
Tommy doesn't have time to reply before Alfie's slamming the phone back into the receiver, where he'll trace the steps of his own wife towards the kitchen, find her, still naked, pulling eggs from a cupboard.
She'll laugh, his Harry, when he comes up and flings her onto the counter, later she'll curse about the cracked eggs spilled across the floor, again, but Alfie doesn't mind.
He has stars to find.
I have never written smut before. This is my first, poor, possibly cringe attempt. I know though that in my other stories smut will eventually come in, so I want to get myself at least okay on it before I reach that stage on a multichapter fic at utterly bullocks it up.
In comes this fic! This will be a compilation of sorts of just fluffy-smutty-perhaps-angsty-filthy things. Each chapter will likely stand alone, and are based on a prompt. Which, if you feel up to it, please drop me one! It will really get me stretching the creative muscles. It can be anything. A word. A poem. A song. A whole bloody plot if you want lol. It can also be any pairing, although it has to contain a female Harry. So Tommy/FemHarry, Arthur/FemHarry, John/FemHarry, Michael/FemHarry, Ada/FemHarry, anyone from Peaky Blinders lol.
Thank you to everybody who has read this insanity. If you have the time, drop a review, they're the fuel to my mad muses. 😉