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Ilsa can’t see the canals from the safehouse balcony, but she can smell them. It’s more pleasant than she thought it would be; rocky and brackish, mostly, and the occasional grassy, slimy smell of the algae blooming along the banks. It adds to the soundscape of the city, a constant hum of people and birds. A church bell had rung earlier, announcing the arrival of the evening.
The metal railing under her elbows is warm from the summer sun, now setting to their right. Ethan is beside her, finally settling down from his earlier restlessness, joining her in watching the city below them. He’s close, very close. Close enough to establish a solid, unbroken line of contact from shoulder to elbow with her. She can feel the warmth of his body even through his jacket. She’s sure he can feel her warmth, too.
She doesn’t know when it started happening exactly, or if when is even an appropriate dimension for thinking about it. Soft, lingering brushes, small and unnecessary invasions of personal space, a charged meeting of the eyes. It’s a cliff face they’d managed to settle comfortably on, safe from the edge as long as they went no further. It’s also not particularly different from how most of their encounters go. She doesn’t think she’s ever met Ethan when he’s not vulnerable and exposed to the world in some way or another.
His arm pressed to hers feels just as vulnerable now. So maybe it’s not a when but a how. He had no choice in being tied up, or drowned, or pinned to a nightclub bathroom floor, or even handcuffed to a steering wheel. But he did have a choice now, and he’s choosing to press against her.
Her eyes draw down to Ethan’s hands, clasped loosely in front of him, his forearms braced against the balcony railing. The sparse, dark hair on his knuckles and the back of his hands alights in the yellowing sun, turning them briefly golden.
Ilsa unclasps her own. She offers Ethan her hand, palm up in invitation. It’s subtle enough that it can be easily mistaken for a shift of her weight on the railing, an advance to be rejected without justification or injury.
She can only see him in profile, but Ethan’s head cants downwards, almost imperceptibly. Her hand hangs between them, less subtle now that it’s been noticed. She watches him untangle his fingers from themselves, the movement unhurried, almost like he’s just shifting around, too. His arm readjusts on the railing, bumping her shoulder, and then he takes her hand. His smile is visible in her periphery.
His palm is warm against hers. The skin is broad and rough with work. Ilsa draws his hand closer, rotating it to watch the light catch on his skin. Her free hand brushes against his knuckles, studying his fingers. The cause of the calluses on his hands isn’t easily discernible from touch and sight alone, but judging by the smooth, worn feeling of them, she knows they’re longtime companions.
“I don’t think I’ve ever touched your hands before,” she muses. She keeps her voice low, although Benji and Luther certainly can’t hear them; the balcony doors are closed, and covered with heavy curtains to block any interior light from escaping. It was about as private a venue as either of them could hope for.
Ethan watches her inspect his hand. “Lots of the firsts today,” he says, the warmth in his voice just as quiet.
She glances up at him, smiling. “I count two. Are there any others?”
He repositions himself on the railing to face her, transferring his weight onto a single elbow. Ilsa mirrors him easily. Their hands stay clasped together between them.
She studies his face, savouring the rare indulgence of staring at him. The pinched, sorrowful look he’d given her earlier, when he realised the gravity of what her arrival in Venice meant, has been tucked away, a worry to be dealt with another time. The fear isn’t gone, but it is being ignored—rather well, in her opinion. A lot of things are easy to ignore right now.
Ethan stares right back at her, possibly making the same assessment. She sees his eyes move downwards a fraction of an inch; an unnoticeable shift to anyone who isn’t standing this close to him.
Ilsa smiles, knowing he’s watching her lips. “Going straight to the main event, are we?”
His eyes snap back to hers. There’s fresh colour on his face, a soft rosiness mostly swallowed by the warm hue of the sunset. His expression is relaxed, but his eyes are bright and daring. Playing chicken with Ethan has always been a wonderful way to pass the time, and it’s no different now. The cliff face is right up on them, already gone from under their toes.
“Are there any others?” he echoes, smiling back.
A quiet thrill goes through her. He’s bold today, although she supposes she started it. “I can think of a few,” she murmurs.
Ethan hangs in wait for her to elaborate, content to watch her. She’s content to let him watch her. Ilsa pulls their hands up, and both of their eyes draw down to see her thread their fingers together.
“We’ve never done this before, for example,” she says. His fingers, longer and more broad than hers, cup protectively over her knuckles. The touch is remarkably gentle, although that’s not surprising. She can feel her heartbeat in her ring finger, pressed tight to Ethan’s.
She tugs their hands up further, watching Ethan’s face as his eyes track the arc of their hands, and Ilsa presses her lips to his knuckles. She hears his answering exhale, sharper than usual. His eyes flick up to meet hers.
“I haven’t done that before, either,” she murmurs against his skin.
His free hand comes up to wrap around the back of hers, cradling it, and brings it to his own mouth. She feels the soft caress of his breath as his lips brush against her knuckles, in between the clasp of his fingers.
“Neither have I,” he whispers back.
Their hands are thoroughly tangled together now. She extracts one to circle around his wrist, twisting it to expose the soft inner skin. Her thumb brushes across his radial artery, blue and prominent. She’s never been good at finding a pulse point on the wrist, but she’s holding enough of him to feel his heartbeat anyway. It’s slightly elevated, and she feels her own heartbeat tick up in turn.
“I’ve never touched your wrist,” she says, and then ducks forwards to press her mouth to it. “Or kissed it.”
“I have,” Ethan whispers. She watches him hold her wrist up, the skin alabaster in the low sun. “Touched yours, I mean. I remember.”
Ilsa smiles up at him. “I don’t. When?”
“In Paris,” he says. “In the park.”
The memory of it is pleasant even if the circumstances attached to it are not. She sees Ethan so rarely it’s hard to think of a time where she didn’t enjoy his company, even when they were both staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Maybe I have touched your hand before,” Ilsa muses. “I almost forgot.”
“But not like this,” he says quietly. Instead of ducking down, he brings her wrist up to his lips, eyes locked on hers, and kisses the vein.
“Not like this,” she agrees, just as quietly. She frees her hand from his grip, the one he’d been kissing, and brushes her knuckles against his jaw. “I haven’t touched you here yet.” Her fingers find the tender underside of his jawbone, near the pulse at his throat. She’s beginning to hair-split a little; she’s touched his face, certainly, but not here, not in this exact spot.
Ethan, happy to follow her lead, does the same. “I’ve touched you here,” he says, and she shivers as his fingers trace the line of her jaw.
“But not in Venice.”
His laugh is soft, barely audible. It’s not meant for anyone else but her. “Not in Venice, no.”
They continue like that, noting all the places that have gone untouched until this moment: Ilsa’s temples, the skin beneath her right eye, the now-closed piercing indent on Ethan’s left ear, the bridge of his nose. It’s a tender manhandling, sure to look ridiculous to any passersby. The balcony is high up enough to give them cover from the streets, but a glance out of a stray window would reveal them to anyone looking on. It’s good, she thinks. They could be mistaken for just another pair of lovers.
She watches Ethan’s eyes flick down to her lips again, clearly preoccupied with them. She feels his breath hitch when she tugs them into a delicate smile, the plush line of her mouth pulling taut against her teeth. She bites her bottom lip, knowing how jealous he is in that moment of her incisors.
“You know,” she hums, fixated on his own mouth. “I have kissed you before, technically. You just weren’t alive when I did it.”
His teeth flash in a smile. “And it wasn’t in Venice.”
Ilsa laughs, feeling giddy. “No,” she agrees. “At least not yet, anyway.”
Ethan, finished waiting, ducks towards her. She’s already got her hands up by his jaw, and she forms her fingers around his face as he kisses her. She’s thought about it a lot, what kissing Ethan would feel like. It’s a shock to her how easy it is, how unremarkable the crossing of that threshold becomes. The cliff face isn’t just trivial to fall off of, it’s not a cliff face at all. Ethan is kissing her, and she is kissing him back, and nothing in the world has changed.
She shifts closer to him on the railing. His body is open, accommodating, turning towards her eagerly but not impatiently. She’s felt his body pressed up against hers before, more than once. It’s not the same as how she remembers it; he holds himself differently when he’s not working. It’s loose now, almost relaxed. It’s a body she could sink into as opposed to crash against.
Ilsa wraps her fingers around one of his shoulders. “I’ve touched your shoulders before,” she whispers into his mouth.
“Not in Venice.”
“Now, in Venice.”
He kisses her again. She feels lightheaded. Ethan’s arm snakes around her waist. “I’ve held you by the waist before,” he murmurs. “And now in Venice, too.”
Ilsa breathes him in, her eyes slipping closed as she leans against him. “Take your jacket off.”
It’s impressive how little Ethan pulls away from her as he sheds his jacket. It gets draped over the railing behind him, immediately forgotten about. But even that brief interlude is apparently too much distance; he missed her in the few moments it took to remove it, and he makes up for that lost time with a kiss, and then another, and then several more.
Ilsa’s hand goes to his forearm, now bare. She breaks away from his mouth, pressing their foreheads together—another first, though she doesn’t mark the occasion—and they both watch as her fingers trail up his arm. She stops at the inner crook of his elbow, pressing her thumb into the deep indent where the swell of his bicep begins. “I’ve never touched you here before.”
Ethan’s head shifts against hers. His lips press to her cheekbone. “And I’ve never kissed you there before.”
They discover together that not all of these are firsts. She rapidly recalls that Ethan has touched a lot of her as his hands dance across her body; searching her in his car, holding her while they jumped from the opera house roof, tucking himself in front of her to shield her from gunfire, when she’d pulled him into a hug in London. Even in Paris, when he’d reached for her hand and found her wrist instead. And again in the desert, holding her close. She doesn’t have nearly the same resume with his body, but she has touched his ribs before, in Kashmir.
“I’ve touched your hair,” she whispers between the movements of their mouths. They interrupt each other too much for this to be a proper making-out, but her heart’s quietly thundering now, and her breath doesn’t come as easily. “I’m sad I didn’t get to touch more of it before you cut it. I liked it longer.”
Ethan kisses her. “You still can,” he murmurs back. “It’s not that short.”
She laughs and takes him up on his offer. Her hand cups the nape of his neck—a thrill goes through her as she realises she’s done that before, too. Her fingers travel upwards, threading through his hair. He shivers at the touch.
“Have you ever buzzed it before?” she asks.
He nods against her fingers. “Once, a long time ago.” He’s kissing her jaw now. Ilsa plants a stray kiss on his temple, another first, and feels his hand mimicking her own as he cradles the back of her head. “It didn’t look very good.”
She pulls herself even closer to him. Flush now, she feels the firm warmth of him like nothing else. Ilsa captures his earlobe in her mouth, and it’s what finally draws a soft moan out of him. It’s more of a strained hum than anything, too quiet to be given proper voice, but it’s a victory all the same.
“That’s the first time I’ve made you moan,” she whispers into his ear.
Ethan gives a full body shudder in response. His mouth continues along her jaw. “No it’s not.”
Ilsa pulls back to look at him, frowning. “It must be,” she protests. “I would’ve remembered that.”
The line of Ethan’s mouth dances, trying to hold back a smile and failing. “You weren’t there when it happened,” he confesses.
Her brows shoot up, a soft thrill going through her belly. He was being very bold today. “Oh really?”
The flush across his cheeks deepens. “This is the first time in Venice, though.”
Her thumb caresses his chin. That is a first, too. “I’d be impressed if it wasn’t. I’m not sure where you’d find the time.”
Ethan laughs. She hasn’t heard him laugh very often, and certainly not this many times in a single evening. The sound of it is intoxicating.
“I’ll have to put some work in, then,” he whispers, fingers brushing her throat. The last time he’d done that, there had been angry red restraint marks there. The touch is just as tender now. “Even the score.”
“Oh, it’s already even, don't worry,” she assures him, her turn to confess.
Ethan’s eyes alight. She ducks towards him again, pressing their foreheads together, drinking in the giddy pleasure that came with this private little transgression of theirs. Ilsa can feel it on him too, the way his exhales almost come out like soft laughter. There’s no gravity to any of it, none of the heaviness she had convinced herself would be there. It had been a convenient reason among many to delay all of this, a boundary they’d both silently agreed would be too much of a liability to cross. She can’t attach a when to that decision either; it certainly hadn’t always been there, but the cementing of it can’t be tethered to any single point in time.
And it turns out that kissing Ethan is incredibly easy. It didn’t have to be a big event; it didn’t have to be an event at all. It could just be an evening on a balcony. If anything had ruptured, she couldn't feel it.
His mouth is back on her skin again, unable to help himself. She lets herself be kissed, tipping her head up to give him access to her throat. Ilsa occupies herself with exploring the contours of his back, slowly tracing the hard lines of muscle along his shoulder blades, up and down his spine, across the broad span of his trapezius. His lips are electric against her neck, but not in the way she’d thought they would be. It’s not overwhelming, it’s not world-ending. It’s nice.
It’s also very distracting. She leans into his mouth, her eyes closed and head tipped back. Ilsa breathes in the warm summer air, the smell of the sea filling her nose. It’s a position that prevents her from returning the favour, but she promises herself that she will, eventually, once he’s done.
Ethan’s hand is still in her hair, cupped around the back of her head. The touch isn’t merely for the sake of it; he guides her movements, tilting her head as his mouth trails all along her throat. This, too, is slow. She gives him the responsibility of holding her head upright, and shivers at how easily he takes it on.
She’s properly dazed now. Her fingers tangle up in the fabric of his shirt, holding herself steady. A line of sweat prickles along her spine, caught between the humid summer air and Ethan’s body. She could take her jacket off too, if she wanted. If Ethan asked her.
“You ever been breathless in Venice?” Ethan asks, sounding breathless himself. His mouth is up by her ear, just beneath it, lips tickling her hairline.
“Not for fun,” she breathes back. He slowly trails back down, leaving wet marks on her throat. She sighs as he stops to suck on the delicate skin beneath her jaw.
“So it’s still a first.” Ethan tips her head back even further, moving along the underside of her jaw until he can kiss her directly beneath her chin. He definitely hasn’t done that before.
“Yes,” she says, her laughter vibrating against his mouth. “Still a first.”