The heat of her cheeks, the press of her nose into the side of his face - these sensations were not new to him, but he had had little occasion to dwell on them in his life, and littler still to recall the smooth touch of horns and scales in the intervening decade since he was viceroy of Werlyt and had been in regular… physical contact with Au ra. So he had not forgotten the tactile aspect of kissing someone, but Callinectes reminded him for the first time in a long time what it felt like. He found it good.
Gaius was still preoccupied with handling her arms, back, face, hair, and ruminating on the unmistakeable shape of her, when Callinectes decided to palm his cock. She groaned directly into the seam of his mouth. This alarmed Gaius, and he pulled his face out of her reach.
“Is it-“ too much, he was about to ask - the size, the fact that he was aroused, the speed at which they had fallen into bed - before she cut him off.
“I want it,” she said, a little breathless. “I meant what I said before, about not going all the way if you don’t wanna, but if you change your mind I want… that… you…”
Callinectes sat before him, spit-glazed lips and eyes blown wide inside her glowing limbals, her pretty hairstyle halfway to ruin and mussed by his own hands. Desire and awe were writ plain on her face, enough to almost convince Gaius to put an end to the whole affair on the spot.
This was the thing Calline once said she hated about him the most: his refusal to recognize the effect he had on people. Up to that moment, Gaius scarcely believed her capable of such tempestuous fury, her glowing eyes marbled with tears. (Once, long before, Calline had stood over his body on the ground, believing she killed him, and had only looked tired and relieved.) She had shouted at him that he shirked his responsibility, tried to dodge blame and pin it on Alfonse, whose mistakes were naught but Gaius’s mistakes as both father and commanding officer. His children at the orphanage, his soldiers in Eorzea, and now even the Ala Mhigan and Werlyt Revolutionaries seemed to trust him blindly. He was trying - earnestly, now - to not take that loyalty for granted, no matter how inexplicably it was gifted to him. Calline’s naive, unrepressed longing was too close.
…But the part that she hated, she had been careful to note, was his failure to accept responsibility. Calline had no quarrel with his amassing (ill-placed, undeserved) trust. Ergo: accepting the naked want with which she looked at him would only be a crime if he pretended it was not there and offered her nothing back. It was a set of conditions he found himself willing to fulfill.
Gaius dove to kiss her, and pushed her to the bed.
Okay so what happened was I was worried people would think I didn’t know how to put together longer sentences because everything I write is dialogue for comic bubbles so I decided to write many mostly-long sentences, as a result of choosing Gaius POV for #shadowbingus #callinemachinegobrrr