Aventurine has a mole right below his ribs, on the left side. Sundy hadn't seen it the first or third or even fifth time they chose to lay together. It was on the sixteenth. He was a tad disappointed in himself, for the sheer longevity of the oversight. Many are the hours he has lain alone, summoning his memory between times they might meet again; every next meeting he faces just how much that is just a fuzzy, shallow thing, made up of many approximations. Until today, there has been an error, a blank in his brain in the place of this small truth of his lover's flesh. This humble revelation went like this: "You keep wandering," he chastised, holding captive the offending hand in his own. It had writhed its way down past Sunday's waistband, stole a loving tease at the open seam at the front of his boxers, brushing into humid heat beyond -- at which point, Sunday terminated the venture. "Do you recall a certain promise we've made about that...?" He brings Aventurine's bare hand to his lips to kiss the nail, the middle joint, and finally the knuckle of his slender pointer finger -- and then Sunday bites down, on the thin web of skin that joins it to the thumb. Aventurine yelps, jerks -- Sunday tightens his grip upon him, until that lit spark of motion evens out, replaced by a wave of quiet curses under the other man's breath. Aventurine's free hand flexes sympathetically where, earlier in the misadventure, Sunday had placed it at his side, and insisted, "Stay." Aventurine has a certain habit. He will shift into a mode that could be called more calculating than ever, each fresh time they enter into the theatre of intimacy. It seems to Sunday that he cannot truly help it, in a way: friendship, touch, even the semblance of "love" -- all are things Aventurine of Stratagems is accustomed to parceling out upon a scale, with one wary eye always toward how his own side dips. It's why Sunday had thought to make the demand to begin with-- "Today, if you try to disrobe me, you shall have to be punished each time. What would you like that to look like? Feel like? I will consider it an oath between us." --to give that steely mind something to chew on, weigh up and decide how it wants to test and transgress, until Aventurine-as-a-body grew more warm and pliant and then all of him could remember, while he's crying out for more on Sunday's cock: "oh, that's right. i fucking love this. this is good. i have played puzzle-blocks with calendars a disgustingly long time to make this happen to me again and i'm going to do it again in the future." ...end quote, per their private correspondence. "Now how many times?" Sunday asks. "That's my third strike," Aventurine answers, with a rising glee. "What do you think? Do I deserve extra for that?" "Hm." Sunday presses both his hands up to a new position -- purposefully more uncomfortable, harder to hold. "Stay," he repeats. Then he takes a step back, and starts to explore the plane of Aventurine's chest, his middle, his stomach... with his eyes, and fingers, gathering up the flesh in broad pinches to find where it is he happens to react most. Then, Sunday notices: Aventurine has a mole right below his ribs, on the left side. Somehow, he has never noticed it before. For a moment he blanks on his plans, stroking right below it, with the curve of Aventurine's body, pressing in so that it's lifted and accentuated. It isn't that this particular mole is especially lovely in and of itself, exactly -- though all of Aventurine surely is. But it's that... it makes him feel this furious painful breathtakingly fierce form of loving-tenderness, that Sunday sort of sways, makes a breathy sound in his throat, and absolutely does not tell Aventurine how much he loves him on the spot, because Aventurine is not the only one who requires some vital sensations be coaxed forth from him each time, until the whole of the self is able to come alive, or more accurately to even show itself as so. In a moment and all at once he is afraid of many different things. "...Hey, beautiful. You look like you've seen a ghost." Sunday looks up into sharp and calculating eyes, that he knows well have been worn dark and dull by the harsh river of time; what he also finds is a tenderness that feels... confusing. Like getting lost in a mirror-maze of his own. He finds that he feels awake. "I love you," Sunday pledges. Aventurine gets a look like he's been slapped in the face. His shoulders flex, then relax -- he drops his hands. Carefully, he uses them to frame in Sunday's face. His lips are very, very close. They seem to move in slow motion. "...Oops. Fourth time. Now what are you going to do about that?" Sunday kisses him with all the force of love and fear of life and death that he is capable of, in his limited, and lonely frame.