Work Text:
It would be less than a lie to say Grace had never considered chairs very much. Although perhaps it was lending it too much glamor to call the stool she perched on while compounding scents a chair. Chairs had backs and cushions and sometimes carvings and ornamentation as though a knob on the top of a backrest would make the seat more comfortable for a person's butt. Or a whole civette, though Tab had ways of making his pleasures and displeasures alike known, and he had never commented on her single stool except to send an occasional smirk her way when he was using it.
Her little stool wasn't a chair, that was her point. Right. Not a chair. Certainly, even though she was hardly willowy, more of an oak than a birch, that stool could tolerate her weight without protest, but it could never be expected to regularly handle the bulk of an armored paladin. Not one who was tall and strong and muscled and capable, anyway, and she didn't think paladins came in petite and bendy varieties. Right again. Stephen wasn't made for her stool, or, rather, her little stool could hardly accommodate Stephen, nice as his backside was, inviting as he looked when he balanced on her stool, perfectly at ease, legs slightly spread, feet flat on the ground.
Stephen had made no drama at all of sitting on the floor, using the wall to keep him steady as he slid down, and he'd stayed still once he was there, no sighing or shifting his weight like she really should have been a gracious host and offered him the only seat. And there hadn't been even a ripple in his teacup to mark his movements. He'd taken a sip and set it aside and she had wanted to drop from the stool to crawl over and kiss his hips with her knees, straddle him gracelessly and explore his mouth with her tongue. That gingerbread scent of him would have mixed with the honeyed steam from the tea and he would have been a feast for the senses —
Wait. Chairs. What was she doing, fantasizing like a sheltered dimwit when she knew very well what a delight Stephen was underneath her? Right. Chairs.
She was going to get him a chair for her workshop.
Stephen was remarkably quick in understanding things with his body — she thought again of his fingers, that first time, how he'd used them and learned with them and set her blazing under their touch — and so his chair should be more than a perch like her stool; it should be a shelter that could cradle him when all he wanted was to knit and breathe in the scents she was compounding. If there was cloth on the chair, it would smell like gingerbread in no time, so that was out. So, a wood-carved chair, something of his own, looking nothing like her stool but pronouncing his welcome in her workshop.
She wondered where the furnishings in the Scarlet District came from — those would be hardy and up to bearing the weight of a paladin in chainmail and whatever else he routinely draped himself in, leather being the lightest of it. A Scarlet District chair probably could even accommodate two locking together as one, but . . . no. It would be a chair, no more, when she had perfumes to keep an eye on and a bed not very many steps away.
Stephen would like that, she thought, and she smiled at the image of him in her mind, knitting socks as he sat at his ease, obligingly sniffing strips of paper anointed with oils, letting her sniff him whenever she needed gingerbread to clear her head from the inevitable sandalwood. She resolved to go shopping for the chair that very day.