Inbox -- Genessia

[fondofapples]

Regina Mills
Queen Mayor Mother
Sorceress
Fond of Plants

"You've reached the inbox of Regina Mills. Leave a message. If it's urgent, it's probably too late."

(text, voice, video, action, ooc planning if necessary for Genessia only)

Comments

[hellorhighwater]

Neil hummed in pleasure as her hand traced down his spine again, and over his ass--Ember's Balls, why the hell was he still wearing clothes?

The hum of pleasure turned to a rumble of impatience, his hand sliding along her arm to remove her hand from his ass with no small measure of reluctance, pinning her wrist gently to the mattress for a second as he planted a hand next to her head so he could start to leverage himself off the bed.

"Hold that thought, Beautiful--exactly there." he grinned, stealing a kiss--then one more...and one more quick kiss before he got up to strip off his jeans.

Recovery time was officially over as he settled back over her again, already half hard as he reached for her hand, then wrapped her arm back around him to resume her groping.

"Okay, put that thought back." he teased, leaning down to kiss her again.

[fondofapples]

The comfort and confidence with which he moved her around, positioned her limbs where he wanted them should have been annoying, frustrating, something... and it was something. It was...funny. She found herself smiling, laughing, willingly complying and not moving even a twitch while he finally rid himself of the denim that had been tormenting them both for at least forty minutes now.

When given leave to return to her frank exploration of his posterior, she did so even more willingly. "Here, was it?" she teased as her fingertips slid down the cleft between his cheeks to follow his spine to its end. "Or here?" she suggested when one cheek filled her palm and she squeezed firmly.

The other hand equally frankly, but less remarked, made love to his shoulder and bicep, while she smiled warmly up at him. "So many thoughts to choose from."

[hellorhighwater]

Neil returned her smile with one of his own, laughing a little as she made a show of grabbing his ass--and wondering when the hell his shoulder turned into an erogenous zone as her fingers mapped the line from bicep to shoulder and back again with gusto. It reminded him of the stupid text messages from before, of wanting to wear bruises on his shoulders from her fingers...being prepared to spend the whole night memorizing every touch, every part of her body that would unmake her...

"Hundreds, from where I sit." he mused, dropping his head so he could press his forehead against hers. "Lotta thoughts..."

He tipped his head, ghosting his mouth along the bow of her upper lip.

"...lotta promises to keep yet." he murmured, nose brushing against hers as he looked into her eyes, a hand shifting up to smooth her hair back from her forehead, off her shoulder, baring the slender column of her throat for his fingers to trace, devouring the curve before mapping the delicate line of her clavicle. "And I pride myself on keeping all of my promises. No matter how long it takes."

[fondofapples]

His facial hair tickled her nose and lips every time his apparent obsession with her mouth led him to the scar above her lip, and it made her smile, pause, and rub her fingers against his the fullest part of his beard over his chin. It still smelled of her arousal, which was strangely intimate and further distorted her sense of their acquaintance--the duration and the depth of it. Already she felt as though they'd known each other months instead of weeks, as though it would be perfectly natural to reply A lot of promises still to make, when in actuality, she had cried for half an hour deciding she would even allow this to happen.

A soft sigh accompanied his mapping her throat and collarbone, and her lips pursed and then parted in offer of another kiss. A kiss that would sweep the resurfaced emotional malaise away to where it couldn't return to bother her again tonight. She stroked her fingers through his hair again, then down his arm where her fingers lingered again at his shoulder.

And instead of the easy thing, the sensual thing, she said the hard thing, or part of it. "Robin's an archer." Which, perhaps, was why her hands kept straying to Neil's arms, but she didn't think so. His body was strong in ways Robin's hadn't been. Her gaze lifted to meet his, to see if that sparked recognition. Robin Hood was probably as well known as her own story.

"We only had one night together. I want things with you..." Both sexual things, now, and other things, but those would sort themselves later. "Things that I didn't have with him. I feel..." A small, tight shrug, little more than the shift of her shoulders beneath his hands. "Like I'm losing him, faster and faster all the time. Like I'm betraying him, even though I told him to forget me."

And yet nothing in how she responded to him, how she fit her body against his whenever he shifted, said she wanted to stop or even slow. She just wanted... to talk. To have more promises than sex to keep.

[hellorhighwater]

It wasn't easy to hear about the other man, but he felt vindicated at the same time because she was sharing this with him--taking out that little piece of her heart that still belonged to Robin and showing it to him. He understood it, too--it wasn't meant to push him away or fling the other guy in his face, it was her reaching out, the closest she could come to moving forward by letting him in, letting him see.

He answered her silent request for a kiss, sliding his arm around her and rolling on his back so he could pull her on top of him. It let him look up into her eyes, dark curtain of tousled hair falling around them both--and hoped it would make her feel steadier, being in a less vulnerable position for what he wanted to say.

"Wherever this may end--or start--you're not gonna lose him, Regina. Come what may, that's not a piece of you I want--I won't let you give that to me, it's his. Told you that first night, if you didn't still miss him, still love him? It would have killed some of the appeal. Who he is to you, who you are for caring about him? That's the woman I want. Not the Regina Mills that's missing something."

Reaching up, he cradled her cheek...then rolled his eyes as he smiled up at her.

"Besides, I'm shit with a bow 'n arrow--might as well have one man in your life that can shoot an arrow straight." he teased gently.

[fondofapples]

She was fine, really she was, comfortable on top of him, stretched out full-length and feeling especially petite with his big, solid body supporting her. And she was grateful, really she was, to hear him saying that he didn't want her to give up her love of Robin, even if ordinarily she'd be snarling and raging at even the suggestion she might or that Neil could be that important to her (even if that was part of what worried her).

And if he'd stopped there, it would all have been fine. She would have pushed up from his chest to smile down at him, kiss him with the curtain of her hair screening them off from the world and everything else, and in a few minutes, they'd have plunged headlong into the heat of their passions, this moment a mere blip, forgettable.

But then he'd said 'one man in your life' as though Robin were still part of her life and not gone, for good, in New York with his wife and the son she'd loved like her own. It hit her square in the solar plexus and any chance of this being a blip vanished with Robin across the town line.

Raw pain in her eyes and written across her features, Regina shook her head slowly. She couldn't say 'he's not in my life' because Neil would say he was, always would be, but she couldn't put into words the way that wasn't, couldn't be enough. She wasn't ready to tell him she'd cursed a kingdom for her first lost love and that she had to let Robin go, because she wasn't good enough or strong enough to love him in his absence without hurting people (Emma) for taking him away.

She didn't pull away from Neil though, just lowered herself to rest her head on his chest and let him hold her a little while. He would and she knew it, even if she gave in to the urge to wail and sob, he would hold her, pet her, kiss her and not resent a second of it. But she wasn't going to do that. Not tonight. Not again.

"I made my choice when I texted you back, and I don't regret it," she told him, fingertips playing softly through his chest hair. "I want to be here with you. I just don't want to make any promises I'm not ready to keep."

[hellorhighwater]

The moment the words left his mouth and Neil saw her expression fracture, Neil regretted opening his mouth. He didn't care that he might have killed the mood, he cared that some of that light left her eyes, that resigned little shake of her head...

Before it fell to tuck against his chest.

Neil's arms immediately slid around her, one smoothing over her bare back while the other slid fingers through her hair, stroked the soft wisps at her temple, traced idle patterns on her shoulderblade--spirals and figure eights and the occasional rune of protection with no touch of magic...just the desire, the will to keep her safe from all of the heartache she'd ever suffered.

There was that tension in the air--something heavy, hot, a dam about to burst--but it never did. She let him hold her, fingers mapping his chest, breath warm and soft with every exhale across his skin. When she finally did speak, her voice was quiet and steady, sure enough to make his heart stop with something heavier than hope, warmer than the promise she wouldn't let herself make.

Ember hear me--protect this woman if I can't, save her from me if I fall to your father's fury.

Staring up at the ceiling, he offered up the prayer in silence. It added more weight, stoked that warmth--soothed his soul with the belief that his prayer had been heard.

"Sounds like you just made one you can keep." he observed, tipping his head a little to look down at her with a promise of a smile. "I'd say that's as good a place as any to start, wouldn't you?"

[fondofapples]

What was he thinking while she fell quiet, took her time to come back to this place, here and now, with him? He hadn't left her, she didn't think, not from the way his fingers wrote patterns and what felt like runes across her back, not from how alert he'd been to her speaking and how promptly he responded.

Slowly recovering herself, she rubbed her cheek against his chest, and then folded her arms and rested her chin atop them. She offering him a quixotic half-smile as she let one of her legs fall to the outside of his in a minimalistic caress. "Taking this slow would be a lot easier if you weren't so kind on top of being sex on legs. One of the other, I could handle. Both is problem."

They were just words. Stupid words. But she had no practice at this kind of intimacy, or finding her way back to where they were without feeling like an insatiable, traitorous slut or worse. This was the first time any of it had ever mattered.

[hellorhighwater]

There she was--back on her version of stable ground. He'd noticed that much, how she'd sometimes flirt if he got too close, too deep, hit a nerve--especially in the right way. He had no idea what he was doing any other time--he'd never been with a woman he didn't pay for, a woman he wanted to keep, and who wanted him in return.

So he went with what had worked before and let himself laugh a little, his hand sliding from her hair to let his fingers trail over her cheek, thumb caressing the curve of her lower lip.

"Me? Have you met yourself?" he chuckled. "Body to kill for, heart as big as the sky--classiest person I've ever met...I literally have no idea what to do with a woman this good, I just know that I'm gonna keep tryin' until I figure it out."

His smile warmed with something he couldn't let himself name, something that made his chest tight and his heart race, the way it did before he was about to win a fight or finish a kill.

"And I'm not gonna stop. Not for a goddamn thing."

I've been yours since the word 'YOU' / what's a first time?

[fondofapples]

If it wouldn't lead her right back down the rabbit hole, Regina might have asked him why and how he was so sure she was what he wanted. But it would, so instead, she let herself sink back into the other pleasures of being with him.

Her head tilted into the gentle trace of his fingers against her cheek, pulled inexorably by that unnameable combination of sweetness, serenity, and sensuality, that felt like turning her face to the sun or inhaling with her arms wrapped around a horse's neck, or even hugging Henry on those days when he wasn't too old or too upset to lean in and hug her back. Something about that particular caress conveyed the safety to let down her guard and just feel for a little while. A waking space between sleep and dream, summoned in a heartbeat.

It didn't matter that Neil's thumb had found her mouth, begun to suggest an entirely different set of feelings. But even as the urge grew to taste his skin, roll her tongue around the tip of his thumb or maybe nip at it, that sweet summer warmth only grew stronger, offering a quiet bliss that could as easily be sleep as sex.

She tipped forward over her folded forearms to kiss him again, drawing that soft, certain contentment into herself and pouring it into the press of her lips to his, the slow glide of her tongue against his, the quiet exchange of breath and the eventual unfolding of one arm to stroke through the tousled mess of his hair.

There were a lot of things she might have said in that moment when her gaze finally meshed with his again. Playful responses to playful compliments. Rejoinders about her being anything but 'good', some more playful than others. But in the moment, the only thing she wanted to respond to was his promise that he wasn't going to stop (and it was a promise, that was just how he was).

So she chased another kiss, quick and sweet, and spoke her heart's desire of the moment in just two words: "Please don't." Don't stop. Don't leave me. Please stay.