Work Text:
Do you think we could see each other tonight? I really... miss... you.
Edgeworth pushed his glasses convulsively up the bridge of his nose and frowned. The text had been difficult to write. Adding the ellipses had put a slight quake in his hands and a remonstration in his mind. But, still, the greater ego persisted: This was a necessary evil, it said. How else could he hope to convey the implication of his words to a man who refused to engage in telephone conversation?
Certainly, he reasoned to himself, the text was a necessity. It had been long, much too long since he and Phoenix had met in private—nearly three weeks. But with good reason; they had, both of them, been assailed with work.
In the last few days of dissolving a mountain of matters handed down from the District Attorney, Edgeworth had finally managed to investigate and delegate and assign each of them to his personal satisfaction. At last, he could begin to relax again; at last, he could begin to contemplate personal satisfaction outside the realm of names and papers, files and case numbers.
He’d sent the message on a whim. Or, rather, an impulse. The idea—the feeling—had struck him almost the moment he’d drawn his fountain pen up from its final signature, and at once flooded every vein, every artery; every capillary with itching, anxious heat.
His phone vibrated and pinged in his hand. The adrenaline that had set his heart to its uncommonly rapid tempo pooled heavily in the pit of his stomach as he read:
aww how sweet
i miss u too
but don’t think we can meet this late :(
just about to go to bed
Indignation flared into his thumb before he could even think to stop it.
It’s hardly ‘late.’ It’s barely quarter to nine.
He watched closely for a response this time, gazing as if he could glare through the screen directly into his partner’s eyes.
His phone pinged again. The glare had been useless.
yeah well i’m really tired anyway
it was super busy at the office today
sorry :(
Edgeworth barely registered his free hand clenching against the leather arm of his chair. Did he try again? Did he risk admitting the exact strain of feeling running through him? Did he risk telling his lover that his blood had effervesced; that the billions of minute touches running inside his body screamed for relief—for him to assuage them?
He did. The thought, the feeling... they were already too much. They had already exerted influence upon the direction and the course of his blood and made him feel wild things, insistent things that he’d almost never known outside his lover’s embrace. He could feel his pulse raging throughout his frame and could hear it singing in his ears.... Yes, he did ask once more.
Just for a little while? It’s been very long, after all. I can be gone before eleven.
Two agonizing minutes passed before he had a response—and this one nearly had his phone flying across the room.
no really can’t :(
just going to order dinner for Truce
then off to bed
tomorrow after work maybe?
i’ll make it up to u ;)
He glowered at the screen. No promises for “tomorrow” could assuage the feelings of the present. Edgeworth forced himself to type out some one-word reply and fell back in his chair with a heavy sigh. No doubt, tomorrow, this would all read as the raving of a pathetic, desperate man, and he would have no taste for such things once the awful haze lifted.
He passed a hand over his forehead and across his eyes. He felt nothing, still, but the beating of his heart and the inexorable pounding in his blood. He leaned back, low, in the desk chair; his knees fell instinctively apart. Sunbeams from the tall window behind his desk fell, warm, over him; the late summertime air breathed hot, sweet breaths on his face. They might have been those of his lover, there, with him... leaning close, just a centimeter away from his mouth... it might have been Phoenix’s hand, even, trailing languorously up his inseam and tracing the ridge distending his trousers—
RIIING!
“Ah!”
He cried aloud as his ringtone startled him abruptly back into sense and shame. Such shame that he didn’t dare look to see who was calling. He simply closed his eyes and made an attempt at schooling his voice into suitability.
“E-Edgeworth speak—”
“AAH!”
“What?! Phoenix?!” Edgeworth’s voice came out harsh on the realization, but dropped at once into something pleased and sonorous. “Ah, yes... Phoenix... I wondered if you might—”
“Uh... sorry, Miles, but I was just calling in a pizza for Trucy.” Phoenix laughed. Edgeworth suppressed a growl. “Pressed the wrong button. Sorry. Talk to you tomorrow!”
The phone did suffer some abuse this time, skidding across the pristine, paperless surface of Edgeworth’s desk and tumbling to the floor. His eyes closed again. He willed the feelings—the unreasonable anger, the unbidden arousal—to cease. But will could only manage so much.
Edgeworth stood abruptly, retrieved his phone from the floor, and stowed it in his breast pocket. On turning back around, he beheld through his full-length windows a near-cloudless sky painted in the searing colors of a dying day.
Perhaps here, a decadent voice whispered in his ear, no one would know but you.
It was time to be heading home. Doubtless he should have started that way the moment he finished his work. His desk was clear; the office empty. There was nothing to remain for.
But neither was there anything awaiting him at home. Only his collection of books and teas and some staid, functional furniture. By the time he arrived there, the sky would already be black with night. Here, at least, was color; here, at least, was a small reward for weeks of diligence and denial.
He took a few slow steps in the direction of his desk chair, lowered himself into it, and turned it westward. The low cabinets and the floor beyond— the whole room, nearly, was bathed in gold. The humid breezes of summer continued to flood in through a small opening in the windows. If one looked and listened very attentively through them, one might perceive the white lines of distant beaches and the rhythmic lapping of waves on their soft, pale shores.
There was no one about. There was only the sun, the air, the phantom waves... and the effervescence, the soft, steady moans of blood in his ear, and the decadent voice just behind.
No one... the breeze, the sky, the glory of the setting sun....
Eyes fixed on the radiant colors—orange, red, pink, gold; a padparadscha dissolved in light and spilled across the sky—his hand moved again. Tentative at first, grazing along his inseam, but bolder as he gauged and gazed, determining the precise amount of pressure to draw in a tantalizing trail from his thigh to his persistent erection. Transfixed, still, he opened his hand and pressed his palm down, firm, with a shuddering breath.
His mind wandered, slowly, from present beauties into those of the past: half-remembered whisperings of his lover began to fill his ears. The vague, tender words of encouragement in Phoenix’s voice moved his fingers in unbuttoning the fine wool trousers beneath them and slipping a hand inside.
A little reflexive gasp hit the back of his throat at the first, unfamiliar touch. This was no businesslike contact, no discreet adjustment or other such thing—neither was it the hand of his beloved. It was foreign, this touch: slim, cool, and hesitant. He might have been giving himself over to a stranger. But when he closed his eyes to the marvelous sunset, when he allowed the breeze to kiss his cheek and broken, beautiful phrases to echo through his mind—all at once he was a hedonist, a voluptuary falling and subsumed into a weightless pool of gorgeous sensation. It could have been a stranger’s hand, and it would have made no difference.
The touch soon warmed, and grew less hesitant. Fingers found thick fluid already trailing down the length of him, easing their slow, sumptuous path from the crown to the base. He gasped again when the fingers encircled him fully, at last, and made their way upwards again. Breaths, once almost-silent, perfunctory noises, suddenly had voice: high, beseeching voice, caught at the very edge of his throat. His free hand raised from the arm of his chair and pressed into his warm cheek; he leaned into his own touch. Panting breaths ghosted over the heel of his hand, and he heard his own soft cries alongside long-dead words of a man miles away.
His hips rocked forward, seeking, hindered and steadied by layers of trousers and braces and underwear; his spine curved up off of the chair, bending outward, reaching, straining—
There were no words in his mouth when his climax hit him, sudden and sharp; there never really were. But there was a sound this time, another gasp, drawn out into a fading cry that quickly retreated back into the warmth at the back of his throat. The sensations—all of them—bid him stop everything for a time, everything but breathing hard into his sweating palm.
It should have been shameful. Doubtless. But, somehow, enveloped by midsummer sights and sounds, delighting in the relieving languor of a spent body—it was not.
Edgeworth opened his eyes after innumerable moments, and cast his gaze out the window once more. The chariot of the sun winked once in burning red before dropping softly beneath the horizon, and he allowed a smile to cross his lips.
Just as he thought to right himself, prepared, now, to face an empty bed, Edgeworth’s cell phone gave a few loud, metallic pings. He extracted it clumsily from his breast pocket with his left hand and was arrested by its message for some time:
the daughter decided to ditch me :(
had some food feeling pretty good now
u still want to come? ;)