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Melinoë inhales and exhales deeply, wiggling her fingers slightly before she opens her eyes and pulls out of her reverie. She turns a smile towards Frinos and bends to place a kiss on his head.
“I might actually be getting the hang of this, Frinos,” she murmurs. “As strange as it all is.”
The frog answers with an encouraging croak. And then, from inside her tent, she hears, “Meli? Are you up?”
“Icarus?”
She lifts the flap to find the shade standing in the center of her tent, one hand fiddling idly with the hammer on his belt. “What is it, is something wrong?”
Surprise flashes across his face. “No, no, nothing’s wrong! Sorry, I sort of let myself in. I just… wanted to see you.”
“Oh!” A little wave of warmth passes through Melinoë, and she smiles. “Well, here I am.”
“Here you are.” Icarus answers with a smile of his own. For a moment they are both caught up in it, that effervescent contentment that Melinoë remembers from when she was younger. She can’t really blame her past self for overextending for Icarus’s sake; there is such warmth and safety in this feeling. Then Icarus clears his throat, his eyes darting around the tent before he looks back at her and speaks. “To be perfectly honest, I’m here because I was wondering if you’ve had a chance to brew any more of that ectoplasmic draught. It’s not a problem if you haven’t, I just… well. I’ve been thinking about you a lot these past few nights, and…”
A slight heat comes to Melinoë’s face. And Icarus must see the flush, because he trails off with an embarrassed laugh, although he doesn’t deny the implication. When Melinoë takes a step closer to him, hope and adoration flash across his face. And a flicker of helpless desire.
Which is why it pains Melinoë to answer, “I’m sorry, Icarus, in all of this I haven’t had much time to focus on gathering reagents. But—”
“It’s all right!” he cuts her off. He may not have blood, but his face colors with an embarrassed blush anyway. “Just thought I’d check, you know. I need to make a report to Master Odysseus, besides—”
“Wait!” Melinoë lunges forward as Icarus turns away, her left hand outstretched—she meant to warn him before she tried this, but—
She makes contact with his arm and holds it.
Icarus stops mid-turn. He looks down at his arm where Melinoë is grasping it, at the ghostly greenish shimmer of light where not-skin touches not-skin. Then he looks up at her face.
“Meli?” he says in an awed whisper. “How are you doing that?”
It doesn’t feel quite like flesh. But to the ectoplasmic shape of her left hand, Icarus feels more solid, more real than he does otherwise. She squeezes lightly, and the shade gives a little shiver. She wonders what it feels like to him.
“Do you really need to report to Odysseus?” she asks, one eyebrow just slightly quirked.
“Well, no,” Icarus confesses, flustered. “Meli, your hand, I can… I can feel that…. Is it because…?”
“Because it’s made of the same sort of stuff that a shade is,” she answers softly. She releases her grasp on his forearm and instead traces her long nails up the outside of his wrist. Again he shivers, sensitive in a way that none of Melinoë’s other lovers are. Even to this half-sensation. Mortals must feel things so intensely. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. Is this all right?”
“Yeah. Yes. More than all right.” Icarus gives an aching little laugh. “Well, I admit, I’ve had a little more than this on my mind, but this is wonderful all on its own, hey?”
“Oh, don’t worry, we aren’t stopping here.” Melinoë trails her hand up Icarus’s arm, over the dyed fabric of his tunic. Or what looks like dyed fabric. But the texture of it under her fingertips tells her that it is as much a part of his ghostly being as his body is. The brace for his wings, though, that is physically real, as are the wings themselves. Melinoë lifts her physical hand to trace the leather straps, almost lost for a moment in her curiosity. But then Icarus touches her ghostly elbow with one hand, and the spark of his warmth goes through her. She laughs. Unthinkingly, she leans in, her heart beating as she longs for a kiss—
He is a breeze against her lips, nothing more.
“I’m sorry, Meli,” he says, and the longing is in his voice too.
“Don’t be. It isn’t your fault, Icarus.” She drops her hand for a moment to find his and gives it a squeeze. At least that feels real, the soft give of one body against another. “I’ll prioritize making more of that draught. But in the meantime…”
In the meantime, it isn’t as though there’s nothing they can do.
Melinoë releases Icarus’s hand and again traces her fingertips up his arm, but this time she does not stop; she runs her palm over his chest, firmly enough to miss his heartbeat but firmly enough, too, that her touch makes him shiver. She reaches further up, over the delicate shape of his throat to the soft curve of his jaw. The glow of her hand reflects in his eyes as she catches one of his curls between finger and thumb.
“You know, in a way, this is all I really wanted back then,” she breathes as Icarus watches her in silent awe. “I never realized that I achieved it.”
“Just this?” Icarus asks, skeptical and amused.
“Just to be able to touch you,” Melinoë answers. “To feel you, and for you to be able to feel me.”
“Heh. Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t even think I dared to hope for even that much. Not that I didn’t think you were capable, but…” As Melinoë cups his jaw and runs a thumb over his cheekbone, he unconsciously tilts his head into her touch, his eyelashes fluttering low. “It seemed foolhardy to think I might have more. And then when… after what happened, I thought it was my fault for letting you even try.”
Melinoë remembers, greater than the pain of her devoured arm, the double blow of Hecate’s coldly impatient frustration and Icarus’s absence. “Icarus?” she says softly.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s not dwell on that right now.”
“You’re right.” Another soft laugh. He lets his eyes close entirely and lifts his right hand to run it up her forearm. Then he turns his head slightly so that his mouth brushes her palm, and the tickle of his lips against her hand feels so real, is real, even as it is blurry and strange as well. “I like to think I have a little more faith in both of us by now,” he says.
“Me too,” Melinoë agrees. She brushes her fingertips across his lips, and the shattered whimper that escapes him emboldens her; she presses down on his lower lip. He lets his mouth fall open, his eyes wide and silently pleading.
She smiles a little, her heart beating fast. “May I?” she asks.
It’s barely even a formality—more like a tease—and the tiny, desperate nod he answers with sends another shiver through her. She slides her pointer and middle fingers into his open mouth, letting her long, talon-like nails scrape lightly over his tongue. It squirms as though he’s stifling a gag. Under the pads of her fingers, she can feel the slight texture of his taste buds—do shades have taste buds?—and the wetness of his saliva. His eyelids flutter.
Then his tongue moves again, this time deliberately, dragging slowly up the undersides of her fingers, and heat rolls through Melinoë’s body. “Oh,” escapes her softly as he gently takes her wrist and sucks on her fingers, his eyes as intent as though he’s observing the effects of one of his inventions. And this is certainly effective. Lust pools in Melinoë’s core like boiling water and she is overtaken by the image of Icarus’s head between her legs. Her hips twitch unintentionally. Icarus’s eyes go soft with wonder.
When Melinoë pulls her fingers from his mouth, a trail of glimmering ectoplasmic spit hangs in the air between lip and fingertip, and then dissipates.
“Sit down on my bedroll, Icarus,” she murmurs. Her head is spinning, all her thoughts centered desperately on images of riding him, pressing her body against his, feeling his lips on every inch of skin he can find. Her right arm—her physical arm—feels limp and useless at her side for all the good it does her in this moment. She’s absolutely going to start up some shadow before she heads out tonight so she can get more of that draught brewed as soon as possible.
But she’s not heading out until Icarus has gotten what he needs. She crouches beside him, running her ghostly hand down his front. “I wish I could straddle you, Icarus,” she tells him, her body heating almost wistfully as she pictures it.
He swallows. “Technically, you could still do that, hey?” he proposes in a deliberately casual voice, his eyes eager and adoring and dizzy. His glowing visage colors slightly. “That is, if it pleases you… Your Grace.”
She could, technically, do that. But she shakes her head. “It wouldn’t be the same,” she says. “I want to feel your pulse pounding as I push you backwards, feel my thighs squeeze against the flesh of your hips…”
A whimper escapes Icarus, and Melinoë is nearly driven mad by the desire to kiss him. Instead she lets her hand drop down to his lap, brushing his groin very lightly (to a choked oh) before trailing up his thigh to push his knee outward. There is a distinctive tent between his legs. Melinoë lets her eyes linger on it, then looks to Icarus’s face—only to find that he, too, is staring at his own growing erection.
“All right, I’ll be honest,” he says, embarrassment in his voice. “I didn’t know I could… do that… in this state.”
That piques Melinoë’s curiosity. “Really? Have you never attended to yourself?”
“Erm, well…”
His hesitation confuses her for only a moment. Then it occurs to her, “Is that too forward of a question to ask a mortal? I’m sorry.”
“No! Well, yes, sort of, but—” He watches, entranced, as she dares to hitch his skirt up, revealing his standing cock. “We have made love before, so I suppose it’s not all that weird. I just have a hard time believing it’s real sometimes, hey? That you really think of me this way. So it hasn’t really felt right, to… to t-touch myself to… the thought of…”
She wraps her ghostly hand around his ghostly cock, feeling its half-real warmth, feeling how hard he’s gotten for her even without a proper body. His stammering falls silent as his hips squirm.
“Shall I remind you that it’s real, Icarus?” she teases, her thumb shifting slightly along his shaft.
“Please, Meli,” he says, yearning, and she begins to stroke him.
It’s enchanting, the way his ghostly form reacts exactly the way a physical body might. Some part of Melinoë even wants to be academic about the matter, wondering how much of his response is purely physiological and how much is psychosomatic, occurring because it is what a physical body would have done. But that part of her is very distant right now as Icarus moans, his hips rolling up into her hand. Pre-come begins to leak out of him, spilling onto her glowing hand, and her fingers grow sticky with it.
She works him patiently, not wanting to overwhelm him—until he whimpers and nearly flinches with pleasure and in fact she does want to overwhelm him, actually. All at once, she swings her leg over his, and even though all she can feel of his legs is a chill breath of air between her thighs, the knowledge that that is him is enough to make her shiver. She palms his balls once and then wraps her hand around his cock again, squeezing more firmly now, stroking faster. He breathes, fast and ragged, as though he needs to. He makes bitten-back sounds, reaching for her—his hands brush against her neck, her waist, nothing but a shiver—finally settling on the one place they can touch, both wrapping warm and almost real around her ghostly hand and matching her pace until she brings him to completion with one final upward stroke. He arches back with a groan as he spills. Melinoë can only see the shaking of his legs, but she can feel the way his hands tremble around hers.
He squeezes her hand once and releases it, then lets himself collapse backwards entirely, dazed and spent.
Melinoë is… buzzing. The chilly nothingness of Icarus’s form between her legs feels almost numbing, except that she is burning up with desire. She brushes her sharp nails against Icarus’s inner thigh—he mewls—but she needs more than that right now. She needs to be touched.
“Icarus,” she says, with more urgency in her voice than she intends, “would you like to watch me?”
He raises his head. “Watch you—oh.” His eyes go wide as she slides both her hands under her skirt to stroke her pubic region. “Meli, I’d—I’d be honored.”
“Just honored?”
She hasn’t usually done this with her shade hand. The difference in sensation—the heat of her skin versus the cold half-substance of ectoplasm—is strange, overwhelming, alluring. The thought that she just brought Icarus to release with this hand even more so.
Icarus swallows, watching her. “Well, I’d also… get even more hot and bothered than I already am, but that doesn’t really matter, hey?”
She smirks, then chuckles a little. Her ghostly fingers slip between her folds and she can’t tell whether the twisting of her stomach is horror or lust. “I assure you, it matters to me, Icarus,” she says, and she explores herself.
It doesn’t abate, that strange twisting feeling, as she scrapes ghostly nails over her dripping folds, circles one insubstantial finger around her clit. The way she’s bucking isn’t pure pleasure. But it is predominantly pleasure, and it’s almost enough, and the entranced look in Icarus’s eyes only makes her heat further. With her physical hand, she reaches inside her chiton to squeeze her breast, and Icarus’s eyes lock on as the fabric pushes aside.
“Oh, Meli,” he whispers. “I wish it were me doing that.”
“So do I.” She’s picturing it, Icarus’s hands starting hesitant and then growing confident as they travel her body, Icarus’s hips warm between her thighs, Icarus throbbing as she settles onto him. She pushes two fingers into herself—her entrance clenching strangely around their ghostly form—and moans at the shock of them. They are so strangely cold against the burning heat of the rest of her body. She curls her fingertips forward and strokes that spot inside her, and she imagines Icarus’s lips warm and fleshy against hers, and orgasm whirls and bursts and sparkles within her.
“Meli,” Icarus says in soft awe as she shakes.
She’s catching her breath and has no words to answer him. She only slips her fingers free, corrects the front of her chiton, and sends him a shy smile. As she disentangles her legs from his—not that they were truly entangled—he reaches once more for her ghostly hand and lifts her glistening fingertips to his mouth to gently kiss them. The way his lips linger there turns the gesture from one of polite respect into something quite different. He meets her eyes, bashful and proud of himself all at once.
“Can’t taste you like this,” he says with wistfully, “or even smell you, but… that was wonderful, Meli. Thank you.”
She chuckles and rubs her thumb over his knuckles. “This was as much for my benefit as yours, Icarus. And I will certainly be brewing more of that ectoplasmic draught as soon as I can.”
And he gives her that perfect, sweet, awestruck smile. “I’ll look forward to it. But it’s good to know we have options in the meantime.”