"You're shaking like a leaf!" Charles said, now that he'd finished his lecture. (How dare Erik show up at his school during the day! The reporters constantly camped out across the road might see him. Worse, the students might see him, and Erik should know very well how Charles felt about the idea of his so much as looking at Charles' charges, much less the risk of him having a conversation with them.) "Or, well, a drowned kitten," he revised, looking Erik up and down as Erik continued to drip ice water onto his porch. "What happened to you?"
Erik weighed his options: admit that he had, in fact, managed to encounter one of Charles' students—Ororo, who had started out with the intention of showing Erik that she could call down flurries from the clear blue sky, and had succeeded only in calling down some very localized freezing rain—or say nothing and allow Charles to come to his own conclusions.
It was one and the same, anyway, since Charles' hand went first to his temple, then to pinch the bridge of his nose. "That's going to need some more work," he said, then rolled back several feet, enough to allow Erik passage. "You may as well come in. It'll make less of a spectacle."
"Very well," Erik said, and all the control he ordinarily possessed couldn't prevent the words from shuddering on their way out.
He wasn't at all surprised when Charles led him into the elevator, then up three floors to Charles' own suite. That was where Charles always insisted Erik stay, and if part of it was because Erik nearly always ended up in his bed anyway when he came here, the greater part of it was that no one was likely to barge in and see him.
"Take your clothes off and get under the covers," Charles said. It wasn't even close to erotic, unlike every other time he'd ever uttered those particular words. He wheeled over to the bathroom and came out with a folded towel, which he laid on the bed; then, he headed over to the closet, and came back with several extra blankets on his lap.
"Will you be joining me?" Erik managed as he stripped, a task make twice as difficult as usual between sopping wet fabric clinging to him and stiff fingers which didn't seem to want to heed him.
"Mmm," Charles said, coming close enough to help push Erik's pants down—also not nearly as erotic as usual. "I suppose. Can't have you dying of hypothermia in my bedroom, after all. People would talk."
Erik didn't feel anything like room temperature—never mind warm; there was a good chance he would never feel warm again—for several more hours. As for Charles, he spent the next several hours alternating between complaining about Erik's timing and complaining about how cold Erik's hands were, while trying to warm them between his own.
Things were going much the way they usually did when Erik came over to watch some extremely mockable movie: Halfway through, they'd both lost interest in favor of Erik ending up on Charles' lap on the couch, the movie forgotten except for all the particularly ludicrous bits that always seemed to shout out from the television at odd moments—when they paused for breath, changed positions, or decided to take this into the bedroom where all Charles' toys resided. (Somehow, he never managed to stash anything in the living room before Erik came over. Probably for the better, considering he'd be as likely to forget to put it back afterward, and he would never live it down if Raven happened to find a dildo between the couch cushions when she was over.)
Things were getting interesting, not too far off from the point when one of them would ordinarily suggest a change of venue. Charles' shirt was draped over the back of the couch, and Erik's had landed on the coffee table. Erik's pants were hanging open, too, territory Charles' hand had teased a few times now just to hear the grumble Erik made when Charles "checked on" his erection only to return to investigating above the waist moments later.
Charles was beginning to think they wouldn't make it to the bedroom this time, after all. It was in the way Erik's hips had chased his hand the fourth or fifth time he'd groped him through his underwear; it was in the way Erik was focusing on his neck, warm open-mouthed kisses which made shiver after shiver run through him. It was absolutely clear from the direction of Erik's thoughts just where his mouth planned to go next.
As usual, Charles could only take a few minutes of the torture of Erik thinking about what he hadn't had his mouth on just yet.
"Get on with it, already," he said, in a rough, breathy voice he might have felt self-conscious about if it hadn't been for how Erik's desire only rose at hearing him so overcome.
He tilted his head to give Erik easier access, and Erik complied, sucking Charles' earlobe into his mouth. He didn't tease, didn't bother to go slow; by now he knew exactly how Charles liked it, the pace which left his earlobe bright red long after they'd finished. Every time they did this, Erik challenged himself to suck a little harder, to use his teeth a little more, and every time was thus that much better than the last, Erik pulling on his ear at a rhythmic pace, his breath loud and warm, somehow more intimate than at any other time.
The closer Charles came, the more punishing Erik's rhythm. The louder Charles' breathing, the harder his grip on Erik's forearms, the higher Erik's arousal went, until he was struggling not to jerk himself off.
If you do, then I can't later, Charles protested, very much beyond being able to say anything beyond 'Don't' out loud, which was certain to make everything crash to an insanely frustrating halt as he was forced to explain exactly which action he'd prefer Erik not to do, while continuing to suck on Charles' earlobe.
Erik responded to this by sucking Charles' earlobe in even harder, which, along with scraping his fingernail against Charles other earlobe, made Charles come with a shout.
"All right," he said, although Erik had already let Charles' ear slip out of his mouth, already knowing that Charles went from sixty to zero approximately one second afterward. "I'm good." He leaned his head back against the couch, panting, his heart beating wildly in his chest. "Give me a minute."
Once he'd caught his breath, Charles helped Erik push his pants and underwear down and out of the way as they kissed. He wrapped his hand around Erik's erection, teasing no longer; Erik liked the same sort of firm grip, the same kind of hard rhythm that Charles did, and Charles gave it to him, until Erik was too far gone to kiss him anymore, leaving Charles to kiss and nuzzle his neck, instead.
When his head tilted just-so, Charles couldn't resist pulling Erik's earlobe into his mouth.
If Charles had thought about it, he'd have expected Erik to startle, or demand to know what the hell Charles was doing. It wasn't as if he'd ever asked Charles for this, despite his own occasionally grating satisfaction in making Charles come by sucking on his ears, his nipples, his index finger, and several places on either side of his neck.
He certainly wouldn't have expected Erik to come, immediately, three or four minutes before Charles had expected him to; yet that was precisely what happened, Erik's come splattering over Charles' fingers, belly, and chest without any warning.
Charles let Erik's ear go, and they stared at each other a moment, each as surprised as the other.
"Well, that's new," Charles said, already knowing: They were going to be experimenting quite a bit more with this.
The bedroom window was open on all but the coldest nights. Hank might grumble about how drafts were hazardous to Charles’ health, and he might grumble about how giving certain people open access to the house was hazardous to everyone else’s health, yet Charles never could break the habit.
Most nights, Charles was as alone when he readjusted himself in the middle of the night as he’d been when he’d gone to bed. Most mornings, he was as alone when he transferred out of bed as he’d been all night long.
Sometimes, though, he’d wake to find that he had company, Erik lying beside him under the covers, or watching him from the armchair, or (never a good sign), standing by the bed wearing that helmet of his and looking inscrutable.
“Good morning, darling,” Charles said this morning as he looked up at Erik, hoping whatever was about to happen wouldn’t be too dire.
“I can’t believe you thought that commercial was a good idea.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Charles asked. He did not, of course, need to ask. It was hard to be unaware Erik’s objections when Erik had been projecting them for…well, at least the half hour he’d been within Charles’ range. The rest depended on how long ago he’d actually seen it, probably.
“What isn’t wrong with it,” Erik began.
“I’m not crying,” Erik said.
“Of course not,” Charles said. “I’m not, either. Just, well, leaking a bit.”
A bit less than Erik, actually, but only because Erik had started it, so that Charles had yet to catch up. Trust Erik to suddenly decide, after fifty years of crying together, to completely disavow the activity in the middle of their wedding ceremony; that was utterly typical of the man.
“I thought you were pregnant!” Charles said. “Really, you could have just told me you had an alternate reason for buying all these pickles.”
As Charles had discovered the moment he’d wheeled out of the elevator, the roof was now covered in pickle juice, pickle seeds, and not a small amount of shattered glass. He wasn’t entirely certain why Erik had needed to use jars of pickles instead of the usual mannequins to conduct target practice today, but the gaggle of students who’d attended today’s training session seemed to find the situation completely hilarious.
Erik, as usual, declined to explain himself, or give any indication that he intended to clean this mess up; instead, he gave Charles a disgruntled look, and said, “Why do you always think I’m pregnant?”
“Because we’ve had four babies together in the last four years?” Charles said, although he suspected logic wasn’t going to get him anywhere this time, either.
“Honey, I’m home!”
“Who are you?”
Charles rolled his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, drummed his fingers against his rims; he counted to ten, then said, “You can’t still be mad about last night.”
“What happened last night?” Erik said.
Not for the first time, Charles felt that their relationship would go a a great deal more smoothly if Erik would simply forgive the occasional accidental mind control, rather than affecting amnesia for a week afterward to prove…whatever he thought he was proving. “I told you I didn’t mean to; can’t you just let it go?”
“Let what go?”
“What do you see in her?”
“Well, she never floats in my window at three in the morning to wake me up by interrogating me about you, for one thing.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. You were already up.”
“Be that as it may, people in hideous capes shouldn’t throw stones. Really, you’re not doing yourself any favors here, Erik.”