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Amanda’s bathroom was small to give space to the other rooms in her apartment and Sarek’s things stood starkly apart from her own, even when they were mixed together.
Everything she owned was brightly colored, crumpled, the rims of products crusted over or shiny from her neglecting to wipe them off after several uses. Sarek’s own things were in ornate quasi-glass containers or utilitarian tubes that had labels printed onto them, his vulkanshu script flowing in a neat line.
Amanda liked to read them sometimes while he was away: Flower water, skin serum, anti-chapping cream, sexual lubricant, nasal spray.
He wrote in a very proper and rather out of date form of vulkanshu that he didn’t use on official documents or when out in public. He only wrote that way when others wouldn’t see it, except her.
“Do you ever have strange thoughts?” Amanda asked.
She and Sarek were in her bathroom because it was summer and her apartment was on one of the authentic-old-earth-experience lines that randomly messed with the heating or power. Her air conditioning was out and though Sarek didn’t mind, Amanda had laid on the floor complaining that she was dying until her fiancé had left wordlessly and returned to help her into the tub which had been filled with cool water.
Sarek was sitting on the lid of Amanda’s toilet seat, looking poised and almost catlike as he watched her small movements in the water.
“Define strange.”
“I guess there are two different kinds of strange thoughts. The kinds everyone has and the kinds that are truly bizarre. Though…I guess there are strange thoughts in a different sense, ones that don’t belong to you.”
“Why would thoughts that everyone has be considered strange?” Sarek asked.
Amanda shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s like being near a ledge and thinking about throwing something off or being in a quiet room and thinking of screaming. They’re acceptably strange. Do you think things like that?”
“My control over my thoughts is such that small, inconsequential things are often filtered out before they reach my conscious mind.”
Amanda smiled and thought about how far their relationship had come. Several years ago when they’d been friends and colleagues he would have answered such a question with ‘no’ and moved on and she would have smiled then too.
“Are there common Vulcan thoughts?”
Sarek paused to think then tilted his head slightly. “I suppose. Most are quite violent.”
“Like eating people?” Amanda asked, shifting so she was facing Sarek fully.
“Eating people is more of a recurrent sexual dream,” Sarek said, keeping her gaze.
Amanda smiled, refusing to blink. “Have you thought about eating me, Sarek?”
Sarek also neglected to blink. “In a sense.”
Amanda laughed at the unexpected joke, falling back into the water. “Oh my, ambassador!” she teased, pitching her voice so high it warbled.
“This lash glue expired several months ago,” Sarek informed her, squinting at the tube by his feet.
Amanda didn’t reply to that and Sarek didn’t have anything more to add to the statement so they lapsed into a comfortable silence; her gazing up at the ceiling and him watching her eyes as they moved. Her body bobbed and swayed in the water while his remained stiff and still, hands folded neatly on his lap.
“Do you know what I’m thinking right now?” Amanda asked after several minutes.
“Would you like me to guess or would you like to tell me?”
“I want to tell you.”
“What are you thinking, Amanda?” Sarek asked and for some reason her name in his mouth was like…honey. But then Amanda guessed everything was like honey when you were in love.
“I want to see your…situation,” she said, gesturing towards his lap.
Sarek slowly raised an eyebrow. “You have seen and experienced that particular situation several times before.”
“When you’re aroused,” Amanda said dismissively. “It’s different when we’re not having sex, isn’t it? If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.”
Sarek paused for a moment then said “Allow me time to think,” in a way that reminded her of a diplomatic meeting.
She tipped her hand and bowed her head. “Granted.”
Sarek closed his eyes and Amanda watched him think for several minutes before leaning up and turning on the faucet again. The water had begun to warm and there was no point sitting in a lukewarm bath - it had to be cold or hot.
She and Sarek had gone to the beach once in winter (to escape the chill) but instead of swimming her fiancé had curled up on a beach towel and promptly fallen asleep in the sun.
Amanda had come back from a swim calling his name but when she’d seen him she’d gone silent and sat down just outside the shadow of the umbrella she’d insisted they bring (while he insisted that it was unnecessary - though she’d privately thought he just didn’t like the pattern). She’d watched him for what had to be an hour and she didn’t know why.
If she’d been asked she would have said that something about the image, the tableau, was precious. It was something she wanted to keep forever.
“Are you awake?” Sarek asked and Amanda opened her eyes to see him leaning over her. For a moment she was confused and floating - the beach? No, the tub. Her request. She looked down only to find a firm but insistent hand on her chin, lifting it squarely back up.
Sarek gazed down at her, eyes slightly narrowed. Amanda blinked back, the picture of an unrepentant grasping at innocence.
“It is dangerous to fall asleep while bathing,” he scolded.
“But you were here.”
“What if I had neglected to pay proper attention?”
“You’re always paying attention to me,” she insisted with a soft smile. “I know that.”
Sarek regarded her for a few seconds more before letting her go. Amanda didn’t move her head, instead widening her eyes.
“Can I look now?” she asked.
Sarek tilted his head slightly. “Yes.”
Sarek’s body was lean, toned and hairy. Whenever Amanda looked at it she remembered what it was like to touch it, to have it looming over her, pressed against her own. When he was aroused his lok was a very prominent feature and it was strange and almost exciting to see it missing now. The hair between his legs was as soft as the hair on his head which she privately thought was unfair. Her own was coarse.
“You do not take proper care of it,” Sarek said.
Amanda didn’t mind his telepathy. She was stroking his pubic hair after all - the boundaries between them were nebulous at the best of times. “I have a…thing,” she said, miming a bottle of conditioner.
“Is this thing also several months expired?”
Amanda laughed and her bathroom was too full for it to echo. “Shut up,” she said, taking his hand and kissing it to show she didn’t mean it - so he could feel she didn’t mean it. “I want to see better. Let’s go to the bedroom.”
“Won’t you be hot?”
“I’ll be naked,” Amanda said, rising from the tub and pressing a button by the door frame to drain it.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Sarek said, his own hand shooting out to balance her as she moved a bit too quickly once her foot hit the tiled floor.
Amanda shrugged, her eyes sparkling. “Think on it.”
Sarek gazed at her. “You will be a formidable old woman.”
She waved the statement off. “I’ll look like a kitten compared to you. C’mon, carry me.”
“You can walk.”
“I can,” she agreed, wiggling her fingers. “But I might fall and you’ll have to rush me out of here in the buff.”
“In the buff?”
“In your birthday suit.”
Sarek’s eye twitched as he stopped it from rolling. “Naked.”
“Naked,” Amanda intoned, mocking him. “I don’t want the neighbors getting an eye full.”
“So this is about your jealousy rather than my modesty,” Sarek said, lifting her into his arms. “I notice your own nudity did not factor in.”
“Nothing we all haven’t seen before,” Amanda gestured airily to the world then smiled at Sarek’s fingers tensing for just a moment.
“Who exactly is included in this we?”
“You and I,” Amanda said, tilting her head and raising a brow. “Unless…oh, are you jealous?”
“No,” Sarek said, holding her closer as they made their way down the hall. “It was nullified before reaching my conscious mind.”
Amanda looked at her fiancé’s side profile and pressed her body closer to his. “Not your fingers though.”
Sarek’s eye caught her own for a moment before returning forward, focused on the task of getting them safely to the bedroom. “No, perhaps not.”
.
.
“Have you done this with any other girls?” Amanda asked.
She and Sarek were sitting on her (theirs now, everything had slowly become shared between them.
There was a moment Sarek remembered often; he and Amanda had not yet begun their more intimate relationship and she was ineffectively complaining about the cold while she used chapstick, smacking her lips together. When she was done she held the small tube out towards him without even looking, having already moved on to rummaging in her bag.
“Mm?” she’d asked and Sarek had taken it, careful not to disrupt the product’s shape. When he had given it back she hadn’t even commented on his having used it, continuing an argument about a book they’d both been reading earlier.
It was the moment Sarek had begun to believe that a relationship between them would be possible. The Vulcan ideal of a partnership was two bodies, one mind. Cooperation, understanding, another’s mind being as familiar as your own.
He had no doubt that Amanda had forgotten the moment - it was small to her. However, Sarek often thought of it whenever he found himself using the woman’s plates or blearily handing her her personal items in the morning. He knew where everything was and that he was allowed to use and handle them.
“My home is your home,” Amanda had said the first time he’d been over and asked if he could make a cup of tea. “Only your home’s probably tidier.”
“That is accurate,” Sarek had said, thinking of proposals and jewelry) bed.
The sun was shining, filtered through the pink curtains, and a fan was marginally cooling the air. Sarek didn’t understand her fascination with small vintage items. The only explanation she’d been able to give him was that they were ‘little bits of history’ and ‘cute’. When he’d told her vulkanshu had no word for ‘cute’ she’d spent twenty minutes showing him pictures and videos of different things she considered to fit under the aesthetic category and Sarek had quietly let her despite understanding the concept already - he had worked closely with humans for quite awhile after all.
“No,” Sarek said in response to his fiancée’s question.
“Oh? Never played doctor?” Amanda asked, shifting her legs slightly.
Sarek’s lok when sheathed wasn’t at all visible. In fact there was practically no indication he had anything down there at all - especially with his thick hair obscuring the view. Amanda’s own clit had always been large, something she’d been mildly self-conscious about until Sarek pressed his tongue to it one lazy evening and murmured to tell him if it was too sensitive.
Sarek raised an eyebrow at her. “Have you?”
“Mhm,” Amanda said, reaching her hand out and moving his hair with her thumb. “Nothing happened of course. Just kids being curious.”
“And you are…curious about me?” Sarek asked, letting his left leg fall to the side.
She looked at him then, grinning. Sweat or water ran down her brow and was beaded to her skin. Her long, typically unruly hair was flat against her head and made her look smaller than she typically was - lankier, especially with her oversized glasses perched unevenly on her nose.
“You’re fascinating,” she said earnestly. Her thumb was perched on his pubic bone, right above the slit that was his genital sheath, and through it he could feel her regard for him; love. Love that posed no danger unless he shared it. The one thing between them that must belong to Amanda alone.
“Do your human partners enjoy it when you call their intimate areas fascinating?”
“They love it.” Amanda said quickly, leaning closer, her grin growing even larger. “They say ‘Amanda you are a strange woman’ and we have sex for thirty hours.”
“That seems excessive.”
“That’s another one they love,” Amanda joked, snorting as she laughed. “Especially when it’s following up the first.”
Sarek’s expression didn’t move though he found her playfulness highly amusing. Amanda was an intriguing person to watch - so much so that her mere presence often distracted him from more important matters. Her every word and gesture was interesting to him and especially these moments where her alien nature was clear to him - jokes and grinning and strange rituals. There was no one else in the galaxy like her. He wanted to stay by her side for as long as she would allow him, watching.
“When you die I hope to be there,” he said softly without thinking.
He thought of Amanda, an old woman, lying still in her casket. He thought of watching her, waiting for something and never seeing it. It would be difficult - he would be waiting for the rest of his life to see whatever he’d been looking for again even if he leeched all the associated pain away. He could not grieve the rest of his life or he would be consumed by it - but he could wait. He could wait forever.
Instead of balking at Sarek’s words, Amanda stared at him carefully - as if weighing something important. Then she moved her hand up to his thigh and pressed herself closer so their noses touched, her smile softening as her eyes went half lidded.
“What a strange thought,” she said. Then she kissed him.