suit of cups | v

Hawkins and Faust were nineteen by the time they'd saved (robbed) enough funds to fix up an old cutter to get them started on their travel. You had your hands full with your family's business and were frankly too buried in books on cartography and geography to actually set sail. He kept it to himself, but Hawkins was relieved, not yet confident that he could protect you at sea like he did on land. Half the point of this journey around his home sea was testing his straw combat against more than hometown bullies.

His mother wasn't pleased, not with Hawkins' decision—she'd had something of an wild youth herself that resulted in his birth and her returning home in disgrace—but yours. "I don't know how you'll survive without her," she tutted. She stayed out of the house as he packed to spare him her fretting, and instead you sat on his bed berating him even more than she would.

"That's not enough sweaters for the 60th parallel," you were saying.

"I have thicker skin than you."

You chucked his pillow at him, and he caught it easily in one hand.

"I know you're proud of your tattoo, but it's not worth hypothermia."

You said your like you didn't have a matching one high on your back, easily hidden while Hawkins resorted to wearing turtlenecks and scarves anytime he went into town. (You dutifully shaved a cross-shaped bald spot onto Faust's hip that the mink quickly decided wasn't worth it.)

"And what if we never go that far north?" Hawkins challenged.

"Aren't you supposed to be practicing for the Grand Line?"

He started stuffing more knitwear into his sea bag before you noticed you'd won the argument.

The way you came together was incremental, like the course of Saturn.

Nothing obvious changed after that fall day, but sometimes Faust excused himself like he was intruding when as far as Hawkins could tell you were exactly as annoying as before and he only responded in kind. For your fifteenth birthday you asked for your first kiss, and he didn't need to say it was his, too, chapped and awkward in February, and again nothing changed in the aftermath, like it was transactional as reading each other's cards or charts. He was eighteen when the old neighbor witch slid him a book on synastry with dogeared pages he recognized as aspects between your horoscopes, and he passed it along like a courier, pretending not to see your pretty blush as you realized the same thing.

Hawkins knew, empirically, that young men like him were supposed to be hotblooded and greedy, but that wasn't his nature, and no one else, girl or boy, held his interest like you. He tripped over himself and tied his own tongue in knots when your eyes sparkled with excitement or your mouth ran a mile a minute with some new theory or connection you'd made. He wasn't so obtuse to pretend either of you were kids anymore, and if he thought too long about how soft you were when you leaned against him in a sailboat or as you animatedly disagreed with his interpretations, he felt warm and itchy like he never did.

You used his bed like it was your own, and even though you were both grown now—he was turning twenty soon, damn it—you still fell sleep there guilelessly, using him as a pillow as he grew too large to share. It also meant you got crumbs on his quilt and left books on his nightstand, like Seas of the World, bent at the spine at the chapter on the North Blue. It comforted him that you'd keep his mother company, if only because the woman would chase you in here to clean up after yourself.

Once he was satisfied with his luggage, Hawkins moved to escort you home one last time since he and Faust planned to leave at twilight the next morning, but you stopped him with an odd, fragile-sounding "Wait."

"What is it now?"

You closed his door and leaned against it, fidgeting your hands on the doorknob behind you.

"Can I ask you a favor?"

It was the same thing you said when you tiptoed up to kiss him three years ago.

"Speak."

You bit your lip, the color leaving it as your white teeth sank into the thin skin.

"Would you be my first?"

His breath caught.

"First mate? I thought you didn't want to be captain."

Your neck was almost bright red, and the color lurked up your jaw. "Don't make me say it." You were seventeen now and the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and he was a pirate. Couldn't he be selfish? "You can't be a pirate and a virgin, Hawkins."

"Watch me."

"It's not just for me, is what I'm saying," you said.

"Generous."

"There's no one else."

You were dangerously close to pleading, and he was unsettled by the high it gave him as he sat on the edge of his mattress.

"So your asking me for… lack of choice?"

"No, Hawkins, I—" You were looking over his shoulder instead of at his face, too embarrassed, until you weren't. "It was going to be us, wasn't it?"

The tense of it was strange, and melancholy.

He watched your chest rise and fall with heavy breaths, the sheen of nervous sweat that gathered on your brow, your bare thighs and socked calves that drove him to distraction all afternoon as you flopped about his bed without a care.

"Come here."

You moved slowly, like an animal stalking him, shy steps across his rug until he reached for your wrist and pulled you into his lap.

"Oh…!"

Oh was right. Hawkins was surprised at himself, but your eyes were dark and molten as you stared more at his neck, your hands curled on his chest, and his frequent observation that you were so small next to him was never more apparent than now. He could position you like a doll, and the thought that you'd let him made him dizzy as he cupped your jaw and tugged your lip away from your teeth. "Stop that," he said softly.

You nodded, obedient, like you never were.

He slanted his mouth over yours and sucked that lip between his own, and your surprised squeak was nearly as loud in his ears as his moan at the taste of you, at doing this right instead of the chance he'd wasted before. You tasted like the fruit juice you'd had with lunch and saliva, the first time he'd ever considered it had a taste, so sweet and bright and familiar and right for the girl who changed his gloomy young life.

Your hands bunched in his shirt and tugged, and he had the bizarre realization that you must like looking at him, too, how you reverently slid it over his head and arms and let your warm hands wander over his skin.

"You're staring," he said, confused.

"Mm."

You pressed a kiss to his collarbone, your fingers combing through a few locks of long, cornsilk hair that partially hid his body from view.

"I'll be gentle," you promised, and he chuckled.

"That's for me to say."

You pouted, and one of your fingertips ghosted across his nipple, earning a sharp hiss. "Is that okay?" you asked, worried.

"We're not making it far if you keep at it."

Your eyes widened, and you took him in as if for the first time. "When did you get so big?" You were only looking at the breadth of his shoulders and the size of his arms, and he wondered if times he'd caught you zoning out were all days his sleeves were rolled up.

"Are you scared?"

You shook your head. "I trust you."

"I don't know what I'm doing, either," he warned.

"It's you," you said, and there was something resolute and heavy in it.

"Can I?" He fingered the hem of your dress, bunched up by your hips, practically baring you against him, hot and real, and his blood rushed to meet you there.

"Please."

And Hawkins couldn't help his awe at how you held your shoulders back and your chin up against your impulse to do the opposite. His hand first searched out the black cross between your shoulder blades, not visible to him while he held you like this, but the slight difference in your skin's texture from the still-healing scar under his palm soothed some animal part of him that you'd marked yourself his. He was yours, too, lost to you since you pulled him into your world.

He kissed you again, this time holding either side of your face and stroking his thumbs over your cheeks. "It's us," he murmured against your lips.