Old paths, newly walked.

Happy anniversary, Ali. Everything still feels brilliant, and glittering.

The air, he thought, would end up shrinking them. It was already doing it to their clothes—too much warm water on a collection of mostly-cotton could only result in an embarrassing revelation of leg and forearm and tightness in the shoulder. This did not make Ceirwan feel brawny; there was nothing like, an I-work-too-hard-for-non-reinforced-clothes-just-let-me-flex-my-manly-shoulders-and-pove-that-shall-I? sort of element to it. He just felt awkward and ill-fitting, and didn’t believe he deserved anything like the return to adolescence which that implied. He was always happy to see more of his wife’s legs, but would have preferred the privilege in an environment where flies appeared to target her especially, bringing back memories of old horrors with new nightmares.

“I’d forgotten – about the flies,” Sena had groaned, face as tight and drawn as was possible in an atmosphere where facial expression tended to drip off after more than a few minutes. Ceirwan had forgotten, too, and didn’t dare hold her in comfort.

“You should come when it’s not wet season, you have so many problems,” they were told, cheerfully and invariably. “Except in the hot season, you’d definitely die.”

Frangipanis filled the cracks of heavy air untouched by insects; they burned pink and yellow and white—alive and glossy and large, mocking their burnt faces and bent backs. Cicadas, like scent, like out-of-body tinnitus, were invisible and loud.

“Fantastic – example – diachronic – shift,” they reminded themselves on a daily basis—anything to stay sane.

Whatever the whimpering white linguists had forgotten, locals remembered them. “So, professor—” this, from the old friend who had the keys to their house—even if ‘house’, with their own semantic associations attached to it, was something of a misnomer. “Are you still madam’s Not Husband, these days?”

“We’re both professors now,” Sena said.

No matter how monumental that change was, or the changes they were there to calculate, years had kept the place familiar. Cheerful, invariable—worthy of Vulcan. The two of them slept a foot apart due to bodily necessity rather than visceral tension, and what had seemed interminable years ago now appeared, at least to Ceir, suddenly romantic in contrast to the alternative they lived now. (The bed was still glorious and unexpected in size)

“Why are we doing this again?” he asked once, and then every other day for a month.

“For love and insanity?” was the answer—and he kissed her, every time.

(“Good—less of a Not Husband,” was the general consensus.)

One night, it rained. It rained glass windows with blunt edges, it rained cats, dogs, hybrids and buckets; it rained every cliché. It rained hard, driving humid air briefly to ground and people with it. Sena and Ceir, who had been caught out, huddled clean and cold, for once, on their bed. Laughing—trapped. It was easy to turn a helping hand at getting Sena out of her wet shirt into a steady rediscovery of her breasts. He knelt behind her, shameless and adoring, always a little surprised at how she still leaned into his hand, arched into it, weight pressed against his cock, gasping as he lightly toyed with her nipples until she was crying out and would either lose patience and suck him off or demand to be sucked, herself. This time, he could pre-empt her. The rain drowning out Sena’s protests, he pulled away and pulled her down, a part of him wondering what it would feel like to do this after years or months rather than weeks, to feel this beautiful, delightful woman’s nipples harden to points under his tongue before a flick, and suck them hard and fast to make her shudder. The desperation he’d feel, if he were somehow forbidden or simply unable to feel the weight of her breasts in his hands, watch her flush and laugh and want him. “Fuck, love. You’re teasing me.” Not hearing that would break his heart.

Sena groaned, kissed him when he looked up and had breath, whimpered when he continued to tease. “Touch me, Ceirwan,” she said, a choked demand. “If you’re going to do this than touch. my. cunt.” She grinned, watching his face. “Ou lèche-moi, mon prof.”

There are some moments where multilingualism, even sexy and depraved multilingualism, is impossible. As punishment, Ceir took his time, hands teasing drags on her hips and thighs, easing her skirt down, fingers quick and never quite hard enough against the hot wetness of her cunt through her knickers—until he felt her hand, experienced at his fly, slipping through against his cock. He would be lost before long, so he acquiesced: he hurried the hell up. And Asenath, naked and desperate in front of him, had Ceirwan lost in a completely different way.

Her cunt was sweet salt, impossible to forget and yet startling and wonderful every time he licked her, every time he pressed his tongue along her slit and flicked over her lips, until her clit was hard and almost straining against his tongue, and she cried out and it almost hurt, the way she pulled his hair. She was all smell and taste and sex, and her cunt was almost as tight around the two, then three—“Oh, god, Ceir, please...”—fingers as it would feel around his cock. He was hard, uncomfortably so in pants, but he almost didn’t feel it, lost as he was. He was focused on Sena’s movements under him, on keeping her clit within reach of his tongue, on twitching his fingers inside her as he fucked her with them. She did not scream when she came—after those first demands, they had both been silent—but he felt it, the clench around him and new wetness on his face. He smiled, then, head up to look at her, and her eyes her glazed. A shift in his fingers asked a question, and she laughed, faint and breathless, shaking her head.

“No, love.” She broke the silence, but was close to it, still. “You should be inside me. I need...” the tone changed, and she smiled. “Fuck me. Now.”

She sat up, shaky, and kissed him, Ceir had her lower lip between his teeth, both tongues and bodies familiar, even if they were kissing as it had been years, or even months, instead of weeks. He pulled back, to get out of the inconvenient pants, to do as she asked, but Sena pushed him back, and the trousers were down and inelegant around his ankles and the head of his cock in her mouth before he knew which way was up. Keeping his eyes open was difficult, but worth it. She was all tongue and wet heat and sudden, impossible tightness, and the way she was looking at him, even 

without every tense, shivering feeling, had him coming in Sena’s mouth almost before Ceir realised he was going to.

“You’d never have lasted, dearest.” Sena was smirking, almost clean, voice impish and thick. “Besides. Since the weather so kindly changed for us, I was not going to be thwarted on our wedding anniversary. “

She curls up in his arms, which he tightened around her—still seeing sparks and inhaling the familiar scent of her hair, still corrupted by lingering moments of sex, and kissed her cheek. The rain continued. A small part of him worried about hail, and replacing the window—but that was a small, hardly important part of him. He was holding everything important, he felt.

“Four years, Asenath.” he said, and she kissed his shoulder.