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Something is off when the flower shop lights dim. Again.
Truthfully, you’ve been feeling it for a few days now. It's not exactly a piano falling from twenty stories or a plunging elevator, but that doesn't make it any better. There’s a tension that settles over the place, so palpable you could practically cut it and serve it up for dinner. Casper doesn’t ask questions while he’s taking the daily inventory of the stock in the back, or while he’s giving the flowers in the window one last drink to tide them over until morning; you don’t broach topics while you count the money in the till and empty the tip jar to decide on a post-work treat for the two of you. It’s good to get the work done.
But the silence, though. You’re not used to it. The two of you have always filled up empty nighttime spaces with words. Text messages, back-and-forth chatting, status messages off to the side, phone calls, video calls. There were words everywhere. There was talking everywhere. Not these days. Or, well, not these nights. You get on perfectly fine during the day, after all. But during the day there are customers, and there’s work to be done, orders to make and fulfill, papers to fill out. As soon as the sun goes down and Casper turns out the lights, your stomach begins its usual turn.
Tonight is no different.
But it’s fine. Really, it’s fine. The two of you will grab some dessert with your tips, and you’ll head up to the apartment that you share, and you’ll cook together with a podcast or a playlist or some reality show on in the background. (You never pegged Casper for a “reality show” guy; apparently, all it took was one commercial for The Bachelor while he was partway through his nightly skincare, and he was sat. It’s kind of funny, really. Kind of cute, really. He still finds ways to surprise you.)
You’ll eat together. Take turns washing off the day. He’ll take care of his face, and you’ll tease him affectionately about something or other, and he’ll roll his eyes and thank some circle of hell that the sheet mask covers up his blush—but really, what is your relationship without its very foundation?
And then you’ll go to bed. Share a kiss goodnight. And you’ll sleep.
Just. Sleep.
And the cycle will start again. Sunrise after sunrise. Sunset after sunset.
A small part of you wonders if Casper will ever get tired of sunrise and sunsets. If he’ll one day think you foolish for subjecting him to the monotony of humanity. More downs than ups, more boredom than thrills.
Another part of you, smaller but louder, wonders if he’ll ever get tired of just sleeping.
A jingle of keys pulls you back to attention—he’s finished locking up the backroom—and you close up the till, shoving the tips into an envelope. You have to wrap this up. You have to get out of your head. The bills are easy; they fold and slot themselves in. But the coins go spilling, because it’s dark and because your hands won’t stop twitching, and they clink and clatter guiltily across the counter and the floor.
Casper is at your side in an instant—you don’t get how despite his new limitations he manages to cross the room so fast—and he tends to the coins unprompted. “I know I’m strikingly handsome, Sunshine,” he jokes, “but dropping things every time you see me is not exactly practical.”
The nickname’s kind of grown on you. Like the sunflowers in the window. You dignify him with a shaky laugh so he doesn’t think you’re ignoring him. Even accentuate it with a half-jovial punch to his arm. “You got me,” you said; on a better day, one where you’re not so inside your head, you might have playfully swooned against him, fallen into his arms and laughed when he asked what in the nine hells you were on about now. “Just can’t help myself around you.”
Except you can. If you can call choking up the moment it’s dark and you’re alone together “an inability to help yourself.” Potato, po-tah-to.
(That’s the whole damn problem, isn’t it.)
In time, Casper drops the coins into the envelope. “Are you ready to go?”
He’s so, so close to you, and all he’s doing is standing there, rubbing reassuring little circles into the small of your back. He’s doing it just to feel you there; it’s a habit he’s developed over the last few weeks. It shouldn’t be this hard to breathe. It shouldn’t be this hard to think around him. Thank God he can’t hear your thoughts anymore. But that’s the whole problem, too, isn’t it. He can’t hear your thoughts. He can’t feel what you feel. He probably doesn’t even feel anything from touching you like this. Just fabric.
Maybe you’ve made a mistake.
Before you can answer, he pulls his hand back, and his face settles into a knowing frown. It might even be disapproval. It doesn’t look good on him, even for all the times you’ve entertained the thought of him bossing and bullying you around. (But hey, context matters, right?)
“All right,” he says. “Out with it.”
Your brow pulls together. “Out with what?”
“You haven’t been yourself lately. You aren’t sick. And you certainly aren’t soulsick.” Casper folds his arms; they really shouldn’t look so good, so toned, under that sweater you bought him. (Is that why you have so many repeat customers? God, you ought to give them a piece of your mind.) “So it must be something on your mind.” He cocks his head. “Are you going to tell me so we can put it past us, or are you going to keep it in until it festers and explodes?”
Jeez. Only human for a few months, dating for just a touch longer, and he’s already unlocking the “healthy communication” achievement. You’d ask if he had to be so direct about it, but Casper’s been nothing if not direct to the point of overly literal.
“Nothing escapes you, huh, Grimmy?” You don’t know where it came from. You haven’t used it in ages; these days, if you don’t use his full name, you settle on Cas, and he seems to like it well enough. But Grimmy felt right this time around. Like an old friend. Like a tension breaker.
Casper raises a brow. “It’s not like I haven’t been studying you for the last few years. Certainly nothing like that.” Even in the thick of conflict, he manages to make you roll your eyes, and not even in the fun way. Although… there is something sweeti about knowing he’s known you for so long. Been attached to you for so long. Maybe it’s not so far fetched that you fell into each other as quickly as you did.
“We really oughta go upstairs,” you tell him. It’s one last weak attempt to sidestep the matter. Neither of you finds it believable. “Otherwise dinner will be late, and you’ll miss your show, and then your whole routine will be off.”
“We’ll order,” he says. It’s just as straightforward as before, but soft at the edges as his hands slide cautiously over your hips, giving them a squeeze. “Just talk to me. Please.” And then, with a wry smile fighting for existence at the corner of his mouth, “You always do love it when I beg, don’t you?”
You would have laughed before. Would have known exactly the right quip to sling at him, exactly the right way to singsong my little reaper so that he’d blush and sputter and try and fail to change the subject. Your heart just isn’t in it now. No matter how much you want it to be. All you can think about is the weight of his hands. All you can think about is the electricity that isn’t there.
The smile, what little there is of it, fades from Casper’s lips. His hands twitch as if to move away again. You don’t want them to. You don’t think he wants them to, either.
“I want to ask you a question,” he says.
Your jaw clenches. “Go ahead.”
“You…” His breath hitches. You wish it would in other ways and hate that it never will. “You still… love me, correct?”
God. You’re actually the worst. How could you make him even question that? “Yeah,” you tell him, voice soft, cracking. “I still love you.”
His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. “You don’t like it when I touch you.”
“It’s not that.” It isn’t, but from his side, it makes more than enough sense why he’d think so. Here he is, finding every excuse in the book to rub your back, to rest his chin on your shoulder, to leave lazy but hopeful kisses along your cheek and your jaw and your shoulder. And here you are, all stuttered laughter, gingerly, plucking his hands from your body whenever they travel up under the hem of your shirt or along your bare thigh in bed. You can’t help it. Every time he touches you, tries to, you look for that old spark, the pleasant hum that bound you, bridged your souls, your bodies. Every time, you think back to the first night after the fireworks, the way just touching him had you rubbing your thighs together from the heat that pooled there, how you could feel every stroke of your hand, the delicate circles your thumb left behind, right between your legs, and he hadn’t even undone your pants yet. How all it took from him was one touch to have you crumpling under the weight of your own pleasure, riding it out, sending it right back to him, to you, to him, until it had exhausted you, wrung you dry. Never mind the one and only time he was ever inside you. Your brain had practically short-circuited then, and it wasn’t just because of how bold he’d been, throwing you on the bed and dragging you to the edge like that. You barely even remember what kinds of sounds and words had spilled from your mouth that night, only that they must have been filthy as sin, because to this day you can’t shake the slam of his hips or his nails in your skin or the shudder of your name on his tongue, and no amount of touching yourself in the shower even comes close to matching it.
You wish you’d done it one more time. Gotten to feel all those sparks, those flames, one more time, maybe in the middle of the night, maybe in the early hours of the sunless day. Right before you’d gone and made the smartest, dumbest choice in the world.
“It’s not that,” you tell him again, leaning back against the counter. Voice weighed down by memory.
Casper’s hands leave your hips, but they cage you in on either side. Firm, not predatory. It doesn’t scare you. He’s never scared you. “Then what?”
“You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“I can’t think it’s stupid if I don’t know what it is.”
Wow. Not even an it’s not stupid to assuage you. Well, that’s Casper for you, you suppose. “It’s not like before,” you tell him. It’s totally vague, but considering how much he prides himself on being good at practically everything—even, lord help him, making pancakes—you have faith that maybe he’ll figure it out.
He doesn’t, of course. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—” You gesture between the two of you. “When you touch me. When you kiss me. It doesn’t feel like it used to, because of the soul bridge, and… I dunno. I got in my own head. I figured, if… we didn’t have sex again, you wouldn’t be disappointed by how it felt. Or. Um. Didn’t feel.” Your voice grows smaller the more words you eke out. It’s perhaps the most vulnerable you’ve ever been with him. More vulnerable than the time you’d told him you’ve never gotten flowers before. Even more vulnerable than the sex itself. And you’d gone and done that with the lights on.
When you allow yourself to look at Casper, he’s studying you with those same thoughtful eyes you recognize from all those video calls. Weaving through the words, trying to know you better. You haven’t even given him anything to weave through. For once, you’ve given it to him straight. No teasing, no cheeky laughter, nothing. His gaze drifts over your face; you don’t think he’s found what he’s searching for, but it probably doesn’t matter.
“You’re right,” he says. “It is a little stupid.”
Your heart drops. “See? I told you.”
“Sunshine,” he says, and then your name. He says it so rarely; it makes you shiver, all the way down to the soles of your feet. “I don’t want those things because of how they feel. Well, not only because of how it feels. I want them because I want to do them with you.” He’s long since taken off his gardening gloves, and his hands slide over yours where they curl around the edge of the counter. There’s no spark, no hum, but your stomach does flutter, and maybe your heart does flicker to life a little. “Is that really so hard to believe?”
It is, a little. But old habits die hard, and just because Casper can lie now doesn’t mean he does. He’s more than truthful in his words, and in the touches he leaves you with before he runs to do the food shopping, and in the presses of his lips to any skin he can find when you’re up to your elbows in dishwater because as much as you hate doing the the dishes, he hates it more, and isn’t love about compromise anyway? He gave up immortality for you; the least you can do is the dishes.
(The least you can do, really, is be honest with him. Talk to him. Talk to him with your words, when you have them. Talk to him with your body, when you want to give it to him. You want to give it to him.)
Your teeth sink into your lip. Your fingers grip the counter more tightly. “You want me?” You only half-recognize the words spilling from you.
Casper swallows again. Lets his nose brush yours, daring. “Yes. Often. Always.”
You could breathe him in if you wanted to. You weigh the words in your mouth before you speak them. Whisper them. “You want to fuck me again?”
He sighs—there’s a delightful little whimper in there somewhere—and his knees almost give out on him. You sense it. He whispers back. “So badly.”
Your heart leaps up to your throat and stays there, encourages bravery and blocks it all at once, then, finally lets it through. “Then do it.”
All the blinds are drawn, thank God, when his mouth swoops in toward yours. It demands, it pleads, shocks, stokes fire, holds years of wanting. It’s a different kind of current between you, something deliciously human. It lets you read each other as the moments pass: his teeth find your neck and you shudder, fingers twisting in the sleeves of his sweater; you breathe the first syllable of his name, Cas, and he groans softly into the hollow of your throat; he kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you, and he hoists you up onto the counter, and you barely have half a mind to stop him when he unbuttons your shirt halfway and mouths his way down between your breasts.
“Maybe it is good that you can’t read my thoughts,” he murmurs, looking up at you through pale lashes. “You’d never know.”
On instint, your legs part, allow him to step further between them. “Know what?”
“How much I think about you. How much I think about this. All the places I’ve wanted to have you.” His lips find your neck again; there’s a prickle of pain and you wince, then sigh as he soothes the bite with his tongue. The bastard’s lucky you can get away with a turtleneck.
Out of a mild sense of revenge, your hand winds into his hair and pulls, something hopefully pleasant at the base of his skull. He moans, louder than you expected him to—you’ll keep that in mind for another time, thank God there’s another time—and his grip on your waist tightens. “Where?” you ask him. “T-tell me where.”
He breathes out hot, his touch creeping ever higher, fumbling until he can properly get his hands on your chest. “Everywhere,” he whispers against your lips; his thumbs drag over your nipples, and you arch into the touch, and your breath hitches, and God, so does his. “Your bed, again. The couch. The shower. The floor. The stockroom. Here, right here.” He shudders, still drawing those maddening patterns, panting as you squirm against the counter. “Can I have you? Right here?”
Fuck. The thought alone has you growing wet, pulling him in, dying to feel him, no pun intended. “Yeah,” you whisper back. “D’you have a condom?”
Casper stares at you. “A what?”
Oh, Jesus Christ. You’ve already debated to hell and back about soul babies. You’re not about to try and have a real one. “Go upstairs,” you tell him through your teeth. “In my nightstand drawer. The foil squares. Go. Get them.”
For a moment he opens his mouth as if in protest, but the bite in your tone quiets him, makes him blush. You’d swear you felt him throb through his pants. But then he nods, dumbly, and he grabs his keys, and he ties his apron tightly around his waist, and he stumbles out of the shop. He’s back within minutes—either he temporarily got his powers back, or he managed to climb five flights of stairs two or three at a time—and he’s nearly out of breath. The things he’d do for you.
You barely have time to thank him before he’s on you again, handsy, needy, pushing clothing aside, putting his mouth on any patch of skin he can find while he flings the apron to God knows where. In fact, he’s the one thanking you first, nosing at your neck, licking at your chest, digging his nails into your back while he holds you in place. It’s not dominance he’s displaying. It’s pure, unadulterated worship.
“Can I touch you?” he asks, his mouth reluctantly leaving your skin. You’ll just have to find out tomorrow morning how many marks he left behind. How many more pieces of him he left with you. “Please let me touch you, please.”
You’re half-dizzy. “Cas, you’ve been touching me.”
“Not there.” He’s holding onto your hips. Pulls them toward his. Rocks up, mind-numbingly slow, and catches his nails on the fabric of your jeans when you allow him a soft whine, a roll of your own. “Here.”
Oh. That’s pleasure shooting up your thighs. God, you want more of it, anything to feel more of it. “Yes.”
And then he’s fumbling with your pants, tossing them aside with the caution to the wind, and you don’t know who moans first when he touches you but God, you don’t want him to stop touching you. Why did you think you needed electricity when every time he circles your clit you make your own? Why did you ever think you weren’t still connected when you toss your head back and sigh his name the moment he slides two fingers in you? Why, why did you think you needed him to read your thoughts when all he has to do is lean in, planting a kiss behind your ear, and ask, “Is this how you like it?” Hell, isn’t it feedback too when you tell him to curl them up instead? Isn’t it feedback when he listens, when your hips buck forward and you whisper, “Yes, yes, fuck yes”?
He’s shuddering. You notice it when you manage to crack your eyes open, while you’re teetering so close to the edge. He’s so focused on the pump of his fingers, the trembling of your thighs on either side of him. Even when you roll your hips he swallows down a soft moan, his hand twitching on the countertop beside you. All this, and he’s still got extra layers on while you’re the one almost naked. “Do you feel it?” you venture to ask him. “Do you feel what I feel?”
Casper buries his fingers to the knuckle and gasps when you do, when you clench around his touch. “No,” he sighs, reveling in the warmth, the wet. “Not exactly like before. But it—I—I feel good knowing that you feel good. Your… your pleasure is mine.” Another curl, another gasp, from you, from him. “Perhaps it’s left over.”
“I don’t think it’s that.” A silent laugh escapes you, and he draws in a breath through his teeth. He’s got to want to feel that around his cock. “You know, for someone who’s supposed to be extremely babygirl-coded, you’ve got an odd service top streak in you.”
Casper raises an eyebrow. “I don’t think any of those words are in any mortal holy texts.”
You smile, and you roll your eyes, and when you tug him closer for a kiss he melts into it as much as you do, welcomes your silent thanks. Lazily, you rock your hips up against the heel of his hand, and you moan softly into his mouth, and you break the kiss long enough to tell him, “I’m not finished yet.”
Casper’s eyes gleam with something devious, the same something that plays on his lips. “I know.”
He steals one more kiss, lingering, just as needy, and somewhere between that and sucking the taste of you off his fingers you slither to the floor and invite him down with you. “Don’t worry,” you tease as you settle in his lap, working open his pants and grabbing a condom from the countertop. “Next time you can taste it yourself.”
“Taste—” It takes him a moment to understand what you mean, and somewhere between that and the thought of a “next time” he groans and lets his head fall back against the side of the counter. “Oh, fuck me…”
That’s kind of what you’re trying to do here. And yeah, maybe you should have taken this upstairs, tumbled into your bed, enjoyed the comfort and the privacy. But he needs you, and you need him, and, well, you’ve already got the foil ripped open and his dick in your hand, flushed against the pale of his abdomen, the coarse white hair leading downward. Next time, he’ll put his mouth on you. Next time, you’ll teach him how to roll the condom on. Next time, next time, next time—
And then you’re sinking down on him, and he’s stretching you open until you forget how to think, and your whole fucking body is on fire, aching, learning how to fit him. And no, you can’t feel what he feels, and yes, it hurts just a little more this time around, but you feel him. You feel him inside you and around you and on you, consuming you, holding you to steady himself while he breathes through it. He groans, curses, and you feel the words echoing under your skin, in your bones, and you want to give them back to him. Want to ride every feeling, every nasty word out of him and claim them for your own.
“Is it…” You swallow down the dryness in your throat, gripping his shoulders for dear life. “Does it… feel good?”
Casper’s chest heaves with every breath he tries to catch, his eyes glassy from the sensation. Slowly, he trails his touch along your arms, reaches for your hands, guides them up to hold onto the counter.
Then he makes a grab for your hips. Digs his heels. Yanks down. Thrusts up. His answer is a hiss against your neck, his hands scaling your body, catching in all the right places. Yours is a gasp, a deep moan that you try to silence with nothing but your teeth.
With every thrust, every bounce, you swear you grip the counter a little tighter; there’s something thrilling about doing this here, after all, with the lights off and the blinds closed, customers and tenants none the wiser. And more than that, all you can focus on is the way Casper opens you up in every sense of the word. How his hands explore every curve and fold and angle of you, how he learns the parts of you he likes the most and lingers on them, thumbs them, kisses them feverishly. How closely he studies you when you wriggle in his lap or choke on a high-pitched whine, when you pause to grind down against his stomach and your mouth falls open. He learns, thank God, to keep his hands on your back and his mouth on your chest, to flick his tongue over each bud and hold you in place even when the sensation is too much for you to bear, because damn it, he can’t make you feel good if you won’t let him touch you.
“You like it?” you ask him again. Pant out the words, really. It’s more than a little bit for reassurance. “You like making me feel good?”
“Nine hells, yes.” He groans it. Drags his nails down your back, and for a sickening second you hope he left something behind. He wants more. Needs more. Like he’d find a tenth hell if it meant making you come.
“Then touch—” He brushes up against that spot he found before, with his fingers, and you whine through closed lips. “Touch me.” You know, you know he’s going to say something about how he’s already touching you, so you grab his hand yourself and guide it between your legs. He’ll learn. You’ll show him. He presses up and you shudder, still holding onto the counter, bucking your hips with everything you have; he draws those tight, quick circles, finds just the spot you like, and his tongue finds your skin again, vibrates with a half-drunk moan, and your whole body is prickling, trembling, hungry for everything he can give and everything you can take and more. And then you’re fit to burst, babbling under your breath—“Oh, God, I’m gonna come, fuck, fuck me, Cas, fuck”—and his palm finds your hand and clamps down swiftly in spite of his own noises, and you all but scream your pleasure into it, riding out every satisfying second, every spark and lick of fire, until your body goes slack. Trembling in the aftershocks.
Casper draws his hand back and replaces it with his mouth, holding you close, soothing the roof of your mouth with his tongue. “Oh, Sunshine,” he murmurs, kissing along your jaw and rubbing circles into your back, and strangely you feel the same way you did when he hovered outside your window with a bouquet of sunflowers. Glowing. Beautiful. Loved.
He’s still hard inside you. You can feel it. “Your turn,” you shudder into his ear, moving lazily against him, with what little bones you have left. “Want you to feel good, too.”
His fingers trace up and down your back, and he presses a kiss to your shoulder. “I do feel good,” he whispers, even though he’s squirming to get comfortable. “I told you. Making you feel good makes me feel good.”
You grin, exhausted. “I’d feel even better if you came inside me,” you tell him, goading him, and his whole body tenses. He curses, and in seconds he’s got you on your back with your knees to your chest, as deep as he can get.
“You’re such a tease,” he hisses. And, well, you may as well live up to your reputation, so you spread your knees wider and you clench around him, and you may not feel how he feels, exactly, but you feel it when his hips stutter abruptly, when he grabs you by the waist to fuck you deeper, when he tangles one hand with yours and squeezes because, in his mortal words, he could be inside you like this for an eternity, he’d do this forever if you made him feel like that again. And when he finally comes it’s with a gasp, and with a thrust that fills you so profoundly you have to moan into the crook of your elbow, and a moment frozen in time before he collapses on top of you, panting.
The first thing you do when you both come down from the high is kiss him. It’s full of breath, clumsy, shaky, because you’re still somewhat outside your bodies, putting them back together and figuring out how they work again. He pulls out slowly, and you brush his hair back from where it clings to his face, and the way he looks at you, deep red eyes glittering, is almost unreadable. If you had to guess, you’d think he’s thanking every lucky star and moon out there that he got to do this with you a second time. That he gets to keep doing this with you.
“You didn’t feel it,” you murmur. It’s the loudest you can manage. “Everything I felt. You didn’t feel it, did you.”
“I didn’t,” he confesses. The room is dark save for the streaks of streetlight that peek through the blinds, and in between them he reaches for your hand, kissing your palm half-hungrily. “Would it… bother you, if I said I like it better this way?”
You look at him incredulously. “Why…?”
“I find myself… liking not knowing what you’re feeling. When everything around you is only ever predictable, surprises are more than welcome.” He props himself up on an elbow; it’s now that you’re wishing you had made it to your bed, partly because it’d be more comfortable and partly because he’d be as naked, as vulnerable, as you. “We’ll have more of that, won’t we?”
“What? Surprises? Or sex?”
Casper smiles. “Both.”
You sit up, your body starting to ache from the floor, and fix your top; everything underneath it can wait while your legs learn how to function again, while the soreness settles in. “You know,” you tell him, “I think I could be okay with both.”