Ichabod fears her love, that she would reject him in spite of it.

With everything that he has been through for love, only to have it declared a shadow of what he would have with his fellow Witness by the very person he sought to cherish most, it is only natural that he would fear it, now.

Deep in his heart he knows the truth of it. He has been inexorably drawn to her from the first, but being destined for it does nothing to quell this fear.

She is fragile beyond measure, her heart locked tight against any small hurt, a result of the many knocks it has already taken.

Therein lies his fear.

Luke, a good man to be sure, would have had her hand, had she not so diligently kept it out of his reach. The sheriff’s turncoat obsessed over her, and her new beau, Sam? -clearly wants more from her.

Would she do the same to himself as she has done to every man who would have her? Experience has taught him that often the stronger the feelings, -the more a person has to lose, the faster they will run in the other direction.

Yes, his partner is damaged. She is a blade sharpened by stone, liable to slice clean to the bone before he even knows he’s been cut.

But he cannot keep to their mutual ruse any more. He cannot pretend that simple wordplay whilst drinking in her lovely visage is enough anymore.

If he is to have her, he will or fail in the attempt.


#######


Abbie has taken to spending her time “recharging” as she puts it, at her mentor’s cabin. He still does not think of the place as his own, despite his now steady tinder. Only a well-suited shelter his friend and benefactress has generously provided for him.

On this day, she lounges across from him on the sofa, her shapely limbs propped up as she stares at that infernal smartphone, with her brow furrowed.

He has decided that he will tell her today. Though, he still has no idea how. As it is, he sits stiffly, -ramrod straight, an old habit drilled into him by the countless hours of tutelage he has endured as a noble son of England.

His hair is loose and damp about his shoulders and he is reading one of Abbie’s recommended books, To Kill a Mockingbird.

That they sit together in such tranquil silence is encouraging, at least.

Abbie scrunches her face and grunts in apparent frustration.

“I’m sorry, I keep expecting to get a message about some new minion of Moloch’s… I don’t know what to do with myself, -it’s been so quiet, lately.”

“Savoring our repast seems appropriate.” Ichabod replies as he retrieves a potato chip from the open bag on the coffee table before him and crunches it loudly.

Abbie raises both eyebrows in agreeance and takes a few for herself.

After a few more moments staring at her smartphone screen she lets out a dry chuckle. “You must find modern man pitifully dependent upon machines.”

“On the contrary, I find myself at turns wishing that we’d had such fodder for tinkers available in my time…-and upon reflection, quite glad that we did not.”

Abbie smiles brightly at him and he takes a deep breath, his heart doing that awful flip it does whenever she looks happy.

“Miss Mills...I wish to speak with you on a matter of some great personal import.”

Abbie widens her eyes comically, “Sure.”

She leans forward with interest. Ichabod Crane is a man who takes everything he does quite seriously, but this seems different.

“I…”

Ichabod closes his eyes for moment to gather his courage.

“Miss Mills… When I awoke in this foreign time and place, all alone, --a sullied stranger, with an admittedly irritable disposition, I was imprisoned and thought to be mad… You appeared and confirmed that I was not. You, saved me. Mine own guardian angel.

--I would not have even seen you had our meeting been in my own time. Advocate for your people’s freedoms or no, you would have gone no further into my line of sight than the periphery...and I would have been all the poorer for it…-nay, an incomplete man.”

Abbie frowned in confusion. Just what was he trying to say? She resisted interrupting him.

“However, I am no longer. I have found you. Abbie,- I lov--”

Abbie was suddenly certain of what he would say, and her face crumpled as she shook her head back and forth in denial.

“--No. No, you don’t. And you won’t say it.” she stood to gain some distance between them and paced in front of him, her arms crossed protectively across her chest.

“We’re Witnesses. We were called by God to save the world. We can’t be the other thing-... It’ll only complicate things.”

Ichabod sighed and stood up, blocking her path.

“Abbie I understand that you’re afraid, I am too...but we cannot do this anymore. We cannot keep pretending that it isn’t there, -that it hasn’t been there, the link keeping you with me and I, with you. I know you feel it too. It’s not just that we’re Witnesses. This -deeper thing, is what we are supposed to be.”

“What Ichabod? Lovers?!” she practically screamed at him. “Witnesses we may be, but I’m seeing someone, remember?”

Yes, he’d rather forget the tall handsome FBI agent she’d been seeing for the past few months, ever since they’d saved him from one of Moloch’s minions. Like Katrina had been for him, he is her visual match. They make sense to the naked eye. A man of her race and similar employment. It hurt him to also know that she had likely lain with him. It had tormented him for quite some time, before he was able to admit to himself what the problem was… Katrina’s stark premonition confirmed.

He knew in his gut that she did not feel for Sam, what she felt for him. Abbie would of course, attempt to live normally as a much as a woman of her time would, regardless of the greater mission. As she put it, ‘What was the point in saving the world if I can’t even live in it, if I survive?’ and so she allowed herself to be courted, in the thoroughly sexually-liberated way of her time, but he could tell that her heart wasn’t in it.

“ --Developing an attraction is natural between heterosexual men and women when they work as closely as we do, but look at us, Crane! I’m a black woman and a modern one at that…”

“...yes, I’ve noticed.” he murmured, with an arched brow that said a great many things.

She ignored him and continued… “You’re a white man from the 18th century. We don’t make sense. I mean for fucks sake! Your best friends owned slaves!!”

Her laugh was overloud and full of desperate derision.

“I am a man of my era. I make no apologies for that. There are things that are just as abhorrent in your modern world, normalized by a false sense of distance. You watch it remotely on your television screens and laptop computers and go about your days as if rape, slavery, and genocide is just one more news-item of barely passing interest, because it is not happening in your own personal world. Humanity has not changed as much as you think with regards to passivity to cruelty. --That said, we all have room to evolve. Furthermore, you know me. You are simply using the clear differences between us to talk yourself out of facing the truth.”

“And what’s that?” she replied, glaring up into his eyes.

He returned the glare, his ice blue irises glinting as he heaved in heavy breaths.

Before she could react, both his hands threaded around her skull and neck as he yanked her into a desperate kiss.

She tensed for a moment, shocked at his nerve and then allowed it, her mouth relaxing into his surprisingly capable explorations. He then released her, after far too short a time, half-heartedly chasing her swollen lips for a beat before holding her amber eyes the barest few inches from his hooded blue ones.

“--Simply this.”

He gripped her tiny hand and placed it upon his chest.

“Our hearts are tethered, Abbie. No matter how much you deny it, you know this to be true. Nothing. Not our races, not time, Moloch, --your beau, my deceased wife, - not even the devil himself can stop it.

I am yours completely and you are mine.”

His voice was a harsh whisper, his lanky body a drawn bowstring. Abbie stood trembling, with unshed tears brimming her eyes.

“Please…don’t. Everyone I love leaves me. My parents, Corbin, --Jenny...”

“No, Abbie. I won’t. I never will.”

He gathered her into a hug and she sobbed against his chest, her arms loosely wrapped around his long torso.

“...promise?”

“Yes. Never.”

He pulled her face away from his chest and directed his gaze into her starkly naked eyes.

“I promise.”

She kissed him then, putting every ounce of the feelings she’d held in check for so long into it.

Her hand curved along his sharp bearded jaw line and then trailed down his chest, blindly fumbling at the ties there.

He captured it and pushed it away, undoing the ties himself.

She took the space he gave her while in this task and backed toward the bedroom door, unsnapping her jeans as she went.

Just inside the threshold, she untucked her top and pulled it over her head, leaving her usual no-nonsense sturdy black workbra.

That done, she slid her jeans down her legs, and kicked them away, leaving a scrap of pink-striped bikini underwear. She paused for a moment before turning to face the bed and strolling languidly towards it.

Ichabod took in the sight before him, -her rearview is truly the eighth wonder- his eyes shining with want, before divesting himself of his own shirt and working the ties on his breeches.

Abbie lay on the bed and began to shimmy out of her panties, before Ichabod reached a hand to stop her…

“No, please, allow me.”

He hooked his fingers into the elastic waistband and tugged gently, pausing only to place a light peck on her exposed hip.

Once to her knees, he gazed up and what he had exposed and quirked a devilish eyebrow…

“ ...bare as an Egyptian.” he observed softly.

He slide her panties the rest of the way off, and then, traced a few fingers over the sensitive skin of her mound, while nudging her legs apart… She was already slick and trembling.

He lay on the bed between her legs and cocked his head to the side, a slow smile appearing on his lips.

“...a flower covered in dew.”

He traced her lips slowly while she diligently tried to remain still, jerking only a little when his thumb paused at the apex of her cleft and made torturous circles in her flesh.

He leaned forward and rubbed his nose along the crease between her thigh and groin, inhaling as he went.

Abbie bit her lip and gasped, her face flushing at the knowledge that he was purposely inhaling her scent.

“You are heaven, Abbie.” he whispered absently, before dipping his head and placing a sucking kiss directly on her clitoris.

Abbie squealed and grabbed handfuls of his hair. Actually, trying to ease him up some; -the intensity was a bit much. -And then she collapsed back against the bed, her face contorted in ecstasy when he penetrated her with one long finger, pulsing it within her body just so…

Ichabod hummed his approval at her surrender and curved a hand around the cheek of her ass, lifting and exposing her to his liking.

“Ichabod! ---Ah! shit!!!”

The sounds emanating from between her legs were obscenely divine, his talented tongue flickering right there, while he sucked and stroked and plundered her.

He brought her to the edge quickly, shoving her face-forward into the blinding white of the sun. The intensity was shocking, her whole body alit with it.

After, Ichabod lay his head on her belly, still delicately dancing his fingers along her entrance while sucking kisses along her belly.

“oh my god, -oh my god, -oh my god…” she chanted, a complete mess of girl. He could do whatever he wanted to her from here and she would have no objections.

She tugged at him dragging him up until they were face-to-face and kissed him again, blindly undoing her bra and tugging the rest of his clothing down his hips, without breaking their kiss.

He sprang free, long, thick, and heavy between them and Abbie broke the kiss to glance down at him and then back up to his eyes, unable to hide her shock and the slightest bit of trepidation.

She had slept with Sam, mostly to prove that she could, despite everything she’d felt for Ichabod.  But that had been months ago and she hadn’t since, declaring that she wanted to slow things down… It had been a while.

As she had suspected, much as she had guessed from accidental glances in that direction, her fellow Witness is quite sizable.

“If you’re afraid I’ll hurt you, I’ll finish myself.”

“No--, I'm just a little surprised. I’m not that delicate Ichabod.” she said with a smirk and gripped his length, pumping slowly. When he arched in pleasure she kissed the exposed length of his neck.

“Oh, of that, I am quite aware.” he rasped.

“You will not finish me with your hands, Abbie…” he said and gently removed them with his own, trembling though they were.

He pushed her legs apart while nuzzling her neck and ear...

“-I should very much rather sheath myself inside you, Abbie. Feel your cunt rent my pleasure from me.” he whispered, his lips brushing the shell of her ear.

He pushed himself in, achingly slow, while Abbie threw her head back and gasped, -at his words as much as what his body was now doing.

He grunted and squeezed her hip; angling her body just so, as he parted her willing flesh around him.

“...god’s wounds, I should die like this.”

Abbie let out an explosive gasp.

“Are you okay, my love?”

She nodded vigorously and gripped his ass with both hands. She then rolled her hips up at the same time as she pulled him in the rest of the way.

“-shit!!” he exclaimed.

He could feel her, warm, wet, and flexing around him, perfect… He leaned his forehead against her own and closed his eyes. Who knew it would be like this? She had almost finished him before he could properly begin.

He swallowed and calmed himself before fixing himself to move.

He sat up a little so her pelvis and hips sat upon his lap, and her legs instinctively crossing at his waist. He sat there for a moment, running his hands along her body and gazing lovingly at her exposed form.

“You’re perfection.” he said, as he placed a thumb at the apex of her opening and pressed just as he began to roll his hips.

“Ah-hh...” Abbie bit her lip and threaded her fingers through his chest hair, tracing the line of his scar as he took her at his leisure.

He was neither gentle nor rough. He was as deliberate and mindful in this as every other task she has observed him doing. He was beautiful...

Caught midway between being lost himself and determinedly bringing her the most pleasure he could.

His eyes danced along her body, --now sleek with sweat, and there was a covetous gleam in them, that wasn’t miles away from the look she’d often caught him give her on the most benign of occasions.

She smiled at that, inwardly confirming what she had guessed he was thinking then.

He picked up speed and frowned down at her, grinding himself into her as he grunted and gasped in pleasure…

He was surprisingly vocal, more-so even than herself.

“--Ahh!”

His entire body flushed a rosy hue, his muscles visibly flexing and straining on his lean physique…

She could tell he was close. His thumb slipped against her and she felt her body short-circuit again, --gripping him as he desperately took her.

“Look at me Abbie.”

Though still coming down she obeyed.

He gripped her hips firmly in both hands and rolled his hips hard, -once, twice,.. before spilling into her.

“-oh gawd, yes! --yes,yes!! oh yes, abbie…finally.”


########


Later, they lay in a dazed heap of sticky tangled limbs. Abbie idly toyed with his stringy hair, while he traced a brown nipple with his finger.

“I had no idea that guys in your day did that.”

“Did what?” he replied with a yawn.

“Kiss women, uhm...below the waist.”

“For a gentlemen, a woman’s pleasure is always paramount.” he drawled, and drew his finger lightly, just below her belly-button, making the skin there jump.

“I too am pleasantly surprised by the ways of your sex. A lady would not dare seize a man with her mouth as you have done. Though, I daresay, I am quite pleased that a certain modern lady does.”

He shifted a little, and Abbie could feel him hard and twitching against her thigh.

“Ichabod…”

He gazed up at her innocently and dipped his hand between her legs…

“My god! Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Abbie, my love, I’ve been asleep for a good long while. I think it’s about time that I enjoyed being awake.”