kink_bingo – G-1 – phonesex/epistolary – from my card.
Stranded World; Autumn in a private moment. Stranded has a landing page (LJ Link)
.
The mail drop was hidden in a hole in a tree, twisted around with magic to keep the squirrels from using their letters as nesting, to keep prying eyes from seeing.
One function that Autumn and several other itinerates of her ilk served was as couriers. E-mail could be read, phones tapped, postal mail interrupted. Messages travelling by courier were far less susceptible to tampering or loss; second best were messages left in strand-locked mail drops like this, then moved to the next drop by courier.
There were seven envelopes and one small box in this load; Autumn shuffled through them before sliding them into her backpack. The Tribe in Kansas. The Barony of Thescorre in New York. Autumn, who works the inks.
She’d expected the last one, although not the fine calligraphy in which it was written or the soft rag paper it was written on. He’d been practicing, was leaving her this in lieu of flowers that would die or jewelry she might not wear. She smiled warmly, and hurried back to her camper to read it.
My autumn leaf, my harvest moon, my darkest ink, my brightest day…
She couldn’t help but smile at the hyperbole. He’d played Shakespeare at a couple festivals she worked, and done the Bard one better such that even the lit majors were often fooled. But oh, did he love his overwrought turns of phrase.
I write these words on this paper, because this is the closest I can come, right now, to touching you. If I had my way, instead of dead trees, I would be drawing these words on your skin. I would start just below that tiny scar on your ankle bone, the thin line whose story changes every time I ask…
She’d tripped and fallen on her sister’s doll as a child. But that was secondary to the full, urgent shape of his letters, the way that he’d pressed in heavily on “I would start,” the way that his ink had blotched (he was using a real pen and ink, then) at “scar.”
And, starting there, I would write my love. I would write it in every language I know, twine it into the strands of the ink, whispering as I worked up and around your calf: this flesh, here, this line, this tendon. Let this leg carry you closer to me. Let this knee bend like the willow in the wind. Let this thigh…
Oh, the things I would write on your thighs, my midnight muse. The story of our love, of our lovemaking, spiraling up and up, until my ink ran with your wetness. Until my pen brushed your labia and I was writing around your pretty clitty of our secrets, words I would never utter, words no other soul could take from me.
And there on your sex I would write my love.
She lay on the picnic table, reading his letter again and again, picturing the lines of his calligraphy wrapping around her body, imagining how the pen would feel, scratching ever so lightly into her skin while his breath blew warm and humid, so close. He had sweet breath, she recalled, and sweet sweat.
It was a beautiful gift he had left for her. She picked up her stylus and dipped it in the good ink, the deep indigo she saved for special occasions. Starting just above the scar, she wrote to him:
If I could fold myself into a letter for you, and wait here in a mail drop for your touch, then I would. If I could press my skin through the postman’s slit, stamp my love, scan it and e-mail it, I would. I would become a letter so that you could always carry me.
“Carry me” wrapped around the base of her knee, tickling her, and she giggled, laughing at herself, laughing at the tickling.
But we are people, my love, and so, in lieu of myself, I give you these words on my skin. Your name on my thigh, my highwayman, my poet, my tattercoat bard.
She wrote in lazy spirals, so that “tattercoat” drew across her hip, and “bard” on her smooth mons. The photos would have to do, until she could see him again.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/67560.html. You can comment here or there.