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She’s going to do it.
Jester is going to sleep with Caleb, and they are both going to like it.
Her dress is shorter than usual, and her hair is down, and Caleb is watching her with dark eyes over the rim of his mug, and Jester is going to sleep with him.
She just needs to figure out… how.
He likes her, she thinks. She knows. She’s pretty good at picking out what people mean— whether they’re amused or angry at a prank she’s pulled, whether their tone shift is because they’re distracted or bored. She knows it when Caleb looks too long, a lot of the time. She knows when she makes him smile. She knows when she makes him laugh.
So, she knows.
Sort of.
It’s hard to deny when he’s only two drinks in and every time she glances over, his eyes are still on her and not looking away, even when he’s caught.
She should do this before he has many more drinks, or else she can’t do it tonight.
“You’re right, Jester, he does need to shave. Thank you for agreeing with me, Beau. No problem, Jester. What else do you want to talk about, other than Caleb?” Beau says, interrupting Jester’s thoughts with a bad impression of the both of them, and making her jump a little bit.
Caleb, across the room, chuckles into his drink, and Jester looks away when he doesn’t, looking back to Beau, who she’s pretty sure was kind of talking to her.
“Sorry, Beau,” she murmurs.
“It’s fine. It’s gross, but it’s fine. You wanna go talk to him?”
Jester nods. Beau doesn’t even make her feel guilty for it, motioning Fjord closer as Jester leaves her chair and her glass of milk to cross the room to Caleb’s eyes, still watching.
Her tail flicks. His eyes don’t waver, and Jester feels something warm and shivering in her chest.
She’s going to sleep with him.
“Cay-leb,” she says, sitting down across from him. “You keep staring. Is there something wrong with me?”
“Of course not, Jester,” he replies, pushing his drink away. He looks distinctly pleased that she’s taken the bait, and Jester mirrors his quiet smile with a grin.
“Then why were you staring?”
“I’m thinking— I’m thinking of blaming the alcohol.”
She does not end up sleeping with him that night. She stays until he’s had a few more drinks, because he lets them loosen his lips, and then he’s too drunk to do anything with.
Still, she presses a kiss to his cheek when she takes him to bed, and doesn’t miss his blush.
She doesn’t think he misses hers, either.
This time, she’s going to do it.
She’s going to sleep with Caleb.
Frumpkin is kneading at her left thigh, and technically Caleb could just snap him back, but she’d made sure that he saw her steal him, because then he’ll just come get Frumpkin.
And then he’ll be in her bedroom with her, and that was part of the problem last time. He’d started nudging her tail with his foot so it would flick and wrap around the table leg, and then he would drink again, and then he would do it again, and she’d been so distracted that suddenly he was drunk and she was laughing and there would have to be another try.
So, bedroom it is.
She hears the knock.
“Come in~!” she sing-songs, scratching Frumpkin underneath the chin so he’s purring when Caleb opens the door.
“You stole my cat,” he accuses.
Jester smiles.
“He loves me, Caleb.”
“That doesn’t mean you haven’t stolen him. I’d like him back, Jester.”
“Come get him, then.” She sticks her tongue out at him, and Caleb takes two steps forward, before stopping and snapping. Frumpkin disappears from her lap, and appears around Caleb’s shoulders, still purring.
“Hey! That’s not fair!”
“Neither was you stealing my cat. This feels like a trap.”
He’s not entirely wrong, but the surprise is more that Jester isn’t wearing any underwear, rather than some sort of nasty spell or levitating bucket of slime or something.
She makes a mental note of it, though.
“You have no faith in me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Jester. I have much faith in you, and in your Traveller. What have you been planning?”
She’s trying really hard to be subtle and sexy, but it doesn’t work really well. Instead, she giggles, pats the space on the bed next to her, and he takes it with some hesitation. Nothing happens immediately, and he relaxes, minutely. Jester reaches to pluck Frumpkin from his neck, and from there it’s kind of hard to climb into Caleb’s lap and make good on her plans because Frumpkin curls up in her lap, and makes good on his.
His plans seem to be purr and sleep through the rest of their conversation, even when Jester’s legs bounce with full-body laughter.
He only wakes when Caleb takes him from her lap to leave, and Jester is still trying to catch her breath from laughing and is a little too tired from the late hour to really want to make him stay.
It becomes sort of a habit. Jester doesn’t know what to do with it.
She promises herself, again and again. Okay, this will be the night. Yeah? This will be the night, it’ll happen just like the stories, she’ll sleep with him, he’ll love her, and then they’ll figure out the happily ever after.
Except, okay. So.
She does want to sleep with Caleb. She knows that. She feels a swoop of arousal in her stomach every time his laugh rumbles to a halt and his hands stop to linger on her hips or her sides, when he’s comfortable with touching her. She wants to lean up and kiss him to breathlessness when his eyes flick down to her smiling mouth, but she never does, because she can’t get herself to stop smiling for long enough that she can be sure that it won’t be a bad kiss.
But! Okay. So.
He makes her laugh!
She says, right, okay, she can do without the flowers and the candles and the near death experiences, and they’ll fuck, because she’s pretty sure he likes her—loves her—and that kind of only really gets clearer as it keeps happening, and it’ll be really good and stuff, and nothing like the stories and everything like the stories, and she’ll figure it out because he makes her smile.
She’ll sleep with him, she swears it, and then he makes her smile, and then he makes her laugh, and then she does the same for him, and nothing matters except for that, and then it’s hours later, or minutes, or whatever, and he’s excusing himself quietly back to his own room.
Jester knows what hookups are. How sometimes you have someone that you spend the night with a lot because you know they’re good in bed and stuff, and you like them. It’s kind of like that, she tells herself, staring very intently at one of her smut books.
The woodcut print of Valeria the human paladin locked in passionate embrace with Chevel the human bard stares back, and tells her it’s kind of not like that at all.
But Jester doesn’t really know what it is. It’s every few nights, where she just knocks on his door or steals his cat or sits herself down on the comfy library chair next to him and he makes her laugh until she forgets that she had an agenda. The agenda hasn’t changed, day to day, he just keeps… avoiding it.
Avoiding it felt like the wrong words. He’s not avoiding sleeping with her. That was saying he wouldn’t be happy to.
He would be. She thinks.
He just— she thinks, she thinks he just likes making her laugh more than he thinks he’d like making her moan.
And that’s fine, but Chevel and Valeria look like they’re having a whole lot of fun and Jester thinks she could still laugh even if, in between, she was moaning.
She just thinks he can do both, is the thing.
Still, it’s a little hard to be upset, because there’s nothing really upsetting about it.
She just, she still wants to sleep with him.
Next time.
The next time, Caleb makes her laugh while he’s bent over the rim of a bathtub, washing slime out of his hair. She’s sitting next to him, also on the rim, asking him for his dirtiest Zemnian words.
She uses the words, dancing with him the next time it happens.
They echo around the high ceiling of the ballroom when they make a game out of it, and he laughs right along with her as the guards escort them out of the party. His hand clutches at hers longer than it needs to, when they leave the grounds, and Jester’s breath halts when they finally get back to the inn, up to her room, and even though he leaves her to her own bed, alone, she mouths “die Möpse” to herself and giggles looking in the mirror, thinking about how every time she did that while they were dancing, Caleb would look at her mouth.
Next time.
Next time, she ends up singing for him, and he teaches her more dirty words in Zemnian.
Next time, he pretends like he doesn’t notice when she scribbles the dirty words on the margins of his spellbook, the pages on pages of notes he takes on dunamancy. He complains that he’ll have to translate them for Essek, and she says Essek probably already knows them, and he flushes until he leaves.
Next time, she struggles through teaching him the same dirty words in Infernal, not sure how “pussy” or “tits” translates in a very legalistic language. She laughs at him trying to pronounce some of the words without a forked tongue or fangs, and enjoys the way he shivers when she whispers Infernal to him.
She also enjoys his smile when she smiles, seeing the shiver.
They don’t do it every night.
Until they do.
“You have to be quieter, Lavorre. We wouldn’t want to wake the others.”
“Then you should stop doing that— oh! Caleb!”
His name comes out as a squeak and Jester twists away from his fingers, gasping and casting a worried look to the paper-thin wall that separates them from their sleeping companions. He draws her attention back to his face with his other hand— shoving it under her arm and wiggling, and Jester curses in a giggle and retaliates by pushing her hand further up his shirt.
She’d volunteered to share a room with him, because of course she did, and then there was only one bed, because of course there was (Jester had requested it), and she’d stared when he’d taken off his coat and book holsters and he’d blushed, and blushed, and when she’d drawn her nails up his sides under his shirt, he’d squirmed, and now.
Well.
Her hands are up his shirt, one of his has hiked her nightgown up to her waist, she’s on his lap, and she’s done nothing but giggle about it.
Because he’s tickling her.
She’s tickling him, too, she started it, but still.
It was supposed to have different consequences than this. The tickling should have morphed into touching and then moaning. It shouldn’t be giggling that Jester’s trying to muffle from all their friends. Her gasping shouldn’t be from laughing too hard, she shouldn’t be on top of him because she was trying to get the upper hand.
“Truce, truce,” Caleb finally says, and Jester acquiesces, pulling her hands away. He does the same, though he presses his thumb into the skin of her upper thigh as he goes, leaving her reeling and wondering.
“Caleb,” she says, after a second.
“Jester,” he replies.
She smiles.
He smiles back, and she decides that that’s enough for tonight. They don’t have to rush. Besides, the walls are super thin. They shouldn’t risk waking everyone up any more than they already have.
And they did, from the smirk Beau throws her over breakfast. Jester just smiles.
She already did that a lot, but she does it a lot.
Next time.
“Caleb?”
“Mm?”
“I drew you a picture.”
“I— Jester— I am not this big.”
“Oh? You’ll just have to show me.”
He reads her smut books out loud with her, trying to improve his accents and failing, failing, failing. Jester laughs with each failure, and tries herself, and neither are very good. Chevel ends up with a drawl so unlike Fjord’s that the next time Fjord says “eldritch blast,” Jester leans forward to muffle her giggles in the pink hair of Caduceus’ that she only has half-braided.
Caleb uses the terrible drawl the entire next evening, and Jester’s stomach hurts into the next morning from laughing.
She falls asleep on his lap, and feels very smug that it means he can’t leave for his own room, tonight. She still wakes up alone, Caleb probably having moved when she did, in her sleep, but Frumpkin is curled up with her, and when she opens up her sketchbook to tell the Traveller about yesterday, she finds doodles of cats in the margins next to all her dicks.
Next time.
She’s being obvious, she tells Valeria, who is distracted because Chevel is sucking at her tits in this picture. She doesn’t know what she wants except for it to continue, and for it to stop.
Valeria offers no advice.
Jester’s happy. She just wants to do something about the impulse to kiss him without risking that he stops joking. She wants to sleep with him without it meaning they stop smiling together. She likes both. She wants both at once.
Chevel laughs loud in the next chapter, Valeria’s fingers buried up to the knuckles inside of her. They are joking about how zombies might fuck, if they have nothing else to do in their crypts, and Chevel laughs until Valeria makes her moan, again.
Jester reads the chapter twice.
Next time.
Caleb knocks on her door like he always does, definitely with an excuse to be there.
Jester, who’d waved Beau out an hour ago, calls out, “Caleb?”
“Ja,” he says, and pushes the door open.
Jester is lying completely naked on the bed.
She thinks this might be the most direct way to get both sides of what she wants. Caleb freezes, and Jester does, too, not sure, suddenly, if this was the best idea.
Her tail swishes, agitated and anxious.
Caleb closes the door behind him, slowly, as if one of them is going to be startled into running.
“This… isn’t your usual attire,” he observes.
“Do you mind it?” Jester asks.
“No.”
A wave of relief crashes through Jester so heavily that she forgets that she’s meant to be stretched out over her bed in an alluring way, and instead she scrambles to sit on her heels, tail swishing behind her in excitement she doesn’t bother to hide. “Good! I thought— I really like laughing with you, Caleb.”
“So you undressed?”
“So, I don’t know why— I’ve kind of been obvious, you know? Really obvious. And I don’t want to stop laughing with you and everything. I just thought we could do both.”
“You want to be naked, and laugh together?”
Jester nods.
“You might distract me.” It sounds like a warning.
“I’m okay with that,” Jester replies. “Um. Why haven’t you wanted to? I’ve been obvious.”
“I’ve wanted to. I’ve wanted to, Jester. I,” Caleb looks away from her, moving his hands to rub them together. “I didn’t want to stop laughing, either. This is nice. I like— I like making you smile. I want to see you smile. I’d do— I’d do anything to make you smile, and it felt like doing— that it might pause that. If it didn’t ruin it.”
“I can still smile while we sleep together, Caleb.”
“I believe that.”
“Are you okay with both?”
Caleb nods.
“Are you gonna come over here, or are you just gonna stand there and make me smile all night?”
“Making you smile— That sounds rather like heaven, yes,” Caleb replies.
Jester smiles.
Oh, damn it. She wasn’t supposed to do that. Now he’s gonna—
“There’s the pretty girl.”
They both flush, and Jester reaches out. “Come here, Caleb. I wanna have words with the buttons on your shirt, okay?”
“I’m not sure what they’ll have to say,” Caleb replies, but comes anyway.
“That’s why I have to press them, to find out,” she says, reaching up and pressing to undo a button.
He chuckles, shakes his head. “That was a bad joke.”
“You laughed.”
“I did.”
“Then keep doing it.”