Aces

Magic is equal parts coordination and distraction. It's the ability to call attention to the unnecessary wrapping around the vital and efficient machinery. It's being in control of every eye in the room. Magic has nothing to do with illusion and everything to do with careful manipulation.

Really, Spencer thinks, it's profiling's natural companion. The only thing different is the hands.

He's got good hands. Watchmaker's hands, JJ calls them. Her grandfather was one, methodical and precise. That's her frame of reference. Spencer always corrects her, tells her they're magician's hands, because that's his. And because it sounds better.

Whatever they are, whichever profession lent them its name, he is thankful for their steadiness; thankful that the trembling in his belly never reveals itself through them while he's touching her; thankful that they can hold her in place so he can watch the way she moves when she's spread out like a star across his bed, knees up and legs apart with his old down blanket clutched in her white knuckles and her back arched up like some impossible bridge. He is nothing if not grateful. Nothing.

This is his best trick. His favorite. This is the one no one else gets to see.

He leans down over her so that he can memorize her face, sweated naked of makeup but for a gray shadow where her mascara used to be; lips open for her breath, for a gasp, for his tongue if he wants to. Sometimes he does, but not now. He's watching her watch him, watching her gaze travel back and forth between his eyes and his hands: one on her hip with his thumb in the crease of her thigh, one lower, in between, inside. JJ likes to watch. She always sees the card up his sleeve, and she always pretends that she doesn't. She notices everything and lets him win regardless.

Inside, she's dangerous. Too hot, too slippery. It's easy to get lost, to settle his bones between hers and bite into her neck and lose his way when the lights go out and come so fast it leaves him breathless. The feel of her makes him ache for it, makes him remember that deep-down jones for twenty seconds of euphoria, makes him need it like he used to need a needle.

But he's all grown up now, and he won't spoil it for her. He is finished with ruin.

She's tight - tight from balancing on a moment as thin as a blade, tight from her heart pulling in to hold him and hide him and keep him safe, tight from squeezing hard to make him work for it. She's tight, and mostly she's smooth, but not everywhere. When he crooks his fingers up, he's searching for the ridged spot, for the contour lines around the highest point. He finds it and pushes in, and she jerks against his touch in one perfect spasm.

This is it. This is the secret.

JJ can't watch from here, can't keep still enough to, can't keep her eyes open, because it has to be hard and it has to be fast and it has to be rough. If he's slow, she has too much leeway, too much time to look around for the tell. If he's gentle, she can't come; she'll just skid along the edge until she howls in frustration. He knows this, and so does she, so she throws her head back and turns away and picks up her hips to meet him.

He starts with his fingertips, and he starts with two, and he waits for the moment when her toes curl under and she's panting like her lungs are on fire, and that's when he flips around to his knuckles and adds one more. Two will make her moan, but three will make her scream, and that's the distraction.

This kind of orgasm - the kind that comes from inside, the kind that's the fist instead of the glass, the kind that's the wave and not the crash - is not a myth. JJ taught him that, showed him something he didn't know, taught him that sometimes the text is wrong. It's not a myth. It's magic.

He can't ride out the whole thing this way, though, with her body one taut heartbeat around his and the sound of her so beautiful it makes his teeth hurt. If he lets her come down too far, it's over. She'll never surface, just pull him under with her, rock him into her body, make him say her name. Sometimes, that's perfect. Sometimes, but not now.

Spencer grips the round of her ass with his free hand and holds on tight. It anchors her when she's out to sea, calls her back, makes her drop her legs apart again. This part is hard, she's told him. This part is about opening when her instincts say close. This part is about trusting him not to make her disappear.

She tastes sharp and electric, and he has to wrap both arms around her thighs to keep her still. She doesn't want to run away, but her body does. She's humming with an unstable voltage he can feel along his tongue, down his throat, at the base of his trip-wired spine. He presses himself belly-down into the bed and draws cautious circles against her. He kisses instead of licks, spit-slicked to ease the friction and make it a suggestion instead of a demand.

Her muscles tick, rhythmic like time, a simultaneous upslope and down. He wants to feel her again, to slide his fingers in, to curl up against her pleasure and hold on tight, but he won't. Too much is the same as too little.

JJ reaches for him, cradles the back of his head between her hands, whispers a tentative more that is more like a question than an order. The arch has returned to her back, though, the curve reaching over his fingertips, and so he answers her with a nudge of his flattened tongue against her clit. It's enough to make her whole body twitch. She whimpers with the jolt, high and wounded-sounding, but he knows her. Knows her particular brand of bait-and-switch. That noise is her own answer to the question: yes.

Yes is what she says, too, when she starts to tremble violently against his mouth. It used to be no or stop, even though this was what she had asked him for. She used to fight it, some piece of her still struggling not to lose control and spiral into the center of herself, some piece of her terrified of coming apart, but then he pressed a kiss to her shaking thigh and said Say yes. Tell me yes instead and see what happens.

Words are powerful. What you say, you hear, and what you hear, you become.

Magic.

Yes is what she says now, has said ever since, yes, open and vulnerable and loud, a frantic affirmation of everything, yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes, and she lets it take her all the way in, lets herself be the glass now and shatter, a mirror into a thousand points of sharp light as he slides the tip of his tongue into her then pushes it against her clit and holds it there and sucks, yes.

Yes.

She still fills him with awe. She still fascinates him. She is still the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He rests his head against her belly, holds his palm tight between her legs, feels her pulse and the flutter of her heartbeat way down low. She's got handfuls of his hair, scratching against his scalp, rocking him a little with the ebbing of her body. You, she mutters, her voice shipwrecked somewhere behind his ribs, crashing right against his heart. You, you, you.

No, he mumbles back. You.

It doesn't matter, really. Spencer. JJ. Watchmaker. Magician. No. Yes.

They're all cards in the same trick deck. A whole hand of aces.

Come here, JJ whispers after a moment, pulling at the tops of his bare shoulders.

He crawls up over her and leans close, his ear to her mouth. Hm?

One more, she says, grinning with her eyes closed against his cheek. I'll use my fingers while you fuck me.

Spencer presses his own smile against hers, their lips meeting at the corners, and as she slides her hand down between their bodies, he thinks Aces. Exactly. All aces.