Talking In Bed

Talking in Bed by Philip Larkin

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

And yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.


Talking in Bed

The warm body pressed closer to my side, shivering slightly in the cool air. I wrap the blankets tighter round us both. He fits so perfectly under my arms, his messy hair brushing the underside of my chin and his little hot breaths against my collarbone. Slowly, he stops trembling and I feel him relax. Never would I have dared to imagine this scene. The trust and need. And something else I recognise but don’t care to specify. I never considered, in all my years of berating him, that anything but hatred and arrogant defiance would meet me in those eyes.

“Weird, isn’t it?” the boy murmurs against my chest, as eloquent as ever.

“Please elaborate, Mr Potter,” I respond in the best attempt at sarcasm I can muster after an afternoon’s shagging. My fingers stroking his neck detract from the effect a little. He sighs and twists his head to offer me more of the soft skin to caress.

“This.” He smiles slightly and looks up at me. I frown. “I mean, well, it’s just, you’d never have thought, eh?”

“No, you uwould never have thought, Mr Potter –”
“Harry,” he interjects, placing a hand on my stomach to reinforce this. I shift very slightly. Well he may just be right – ‘weird’ certainly is an accurate word.

“Harry. I, however, consider everything.”

He snorts in response, but before I can pinch his behind in reprimand for laughing at me, he’s leant over my chest and is kissing me so deeply that my hand, half way to his arse, hovers uselessly in mid-air before grabbing the back of his head, my fingers weaving between knotty bunches of hair to pull his mouth firmly into mine. He catches my bottom lip between his teeth and sucks gently. My hand massages its way down his side, grabbing his waist and pulling his naked body completely on top of my own. And, despite the amount of energy (as well as other things) spent earlier that evening, I feel him hardening quickly against my thigh, alongside my own already aching erection. Despite myself, a small moan escapes into his mouth.

“Even this?” he asks me, his lips millimetres from mine, and he shifts so his cock slides hot and hard exactly over mine.

“Huh?” I moan, unable to respond properly as the blood has rushed from my brain to my groin.

“Did you consider this?” And he thrusts against me once. Now I’m the one biting my lip. However, I manage to answer him.

“Of course.” I try to smirk, but the muscles in my face have lost all control as he is still rocking against me gently.

He seems a little disappointed that he hasn’t been able to shock me, and his mouth thins as he seems to consider something. He rolls off me and I try not to look bothered by the sudden loss of friction. Taking this as the end of the game, I reach for the sheets to pull back over me. He’s going to have to learn to finish what he starts, no matter what I throw at him. Little do I know how true that will turn out to be.

His hand covers mine, pushing the duvet back off me. His eyes lock with mine yet again, and he looks far more calculating than a Gryffindor has any right to look. I narrow my eyes at him, but he’s fighting a wicked grin. He pushes my hand off the sheet and pins it to the bed at my side, then does the same with my other. No doubt I could throw the whelp off with ease, but I’m sufficiently intrigued as to where this is going to permit him this small amount of power, for now. He pushes his chest forwards, rubbing it against my stomach, his hip against my erection. I tighten my jaw. His eyes are still looking straight into mine, as if with some sort of challenge.

“Did you consider this?” And with one movement, he has dived downwards and swallowed me to the hilt. I cry out breathily as he sucks hard.

“Where in Merlin’s name did you learn to do that?” I demand, voice tight with pleasure. He simply hums happily around my throbbing cock. I can’t focus on anything, let alone what sort of game he’s playing with me, as his hot little tongue swirls patterns up the underside of my cock, up to rub against the folds of foreskin and across the slit in the top of the head. I am vaguely aware that I’m making little keening noises that are extremely out of character. I bite my cheek instead as he bobs up and down, sucking hard as he reaches the leaking tip, but then I can’t help but growl through my teeth. Forcing myself to open my eyes, I see he’s still watching me with those glowing emerald eyes as he feasts on me and the sight nearly sends me over the edge. In an attempt to gain control of myself, I grit my teeth and grab the bed sheets at my side fiercely. He notices this and smiles around his mouthful, before swallowing me whole once more. I cry out, no longer caring what I must look like, hot, rumbled and moaning under Harry Potter’s mouth. He likes this, and hums again, sending waves of pleasure down my length to pool in my balls, which tighten up to my body. I’m making little ‘uh, uh, uh’ noises. He reaches one hand, shorter than mine, but with more defined knuckles, round to cup and roll my balls. It occurs to me that I kissed and licked those hands earlier, and before the thought ‘what am I doing’ can find its way into my mind, I’m coming with such force that I buck off the bed, the head of my cock bumping the back of his throat as he works hard to pull as much pleasure out of me as possible. He chokes slightly, but keeps swallowing, his eyes watering slightly and his jaw obviously sore. God that boy is a glutton for punishment I think as I come down from my high. I flop backwards and pull him up next to me, holding him close in thanks. He tries to kiss me, but I pull back and perform a cleaning spell on his mouth. He grimaces.

“Oi! Cheeky!” he splutters.

“You dare refer to me in the manner you would speak to a teenage boy and I will have to remove your tongue, the easier for you to scrub it yourself.” He raises his eyebrows at me. I smirk, and kiss him. His erection is still straining against my hip, I realise. So I take it firmly in my hands, turning us both on our sides. But his hand yet again resists mine.

“Brat, will l you ever permit me to do as I please with my hands?”

“In a minute I’d fucking love you to, but firstly, you haven’t answered my question”

Oh yes.

“Well you haven’t answered mine.” He looks confused. No, wait, he always looks like that. I kiss him and his mouth opens happily under mine. Our lips meet, press open and part repeatedly. “Where –” I say, between kisses “did –” kiss “you learn –” kiss “to do that –” kiss “with your tongue?” And I push against it with my own. He breaks away, giggling, giggling for Merlin’s sake! That is the last noise I want to hear in the bedroom, and yet, somehow, the sound pulls the corner of my lip up – the closest Harry Potter has ever brought me to a smile, unless you count grimaces of anger.

“You really don’t want to know,” he snorts from between his fingers, which have come up to hide his face as he jostles with some unknown and apparently amusing memory.

“Indulge me.” It is an instruction and he knows so. He pulls his face into a slightly more sombre expression, his eyes still gleam with mirth.

“Hermione taught me last Easter.” And he’s cracked up again. He was right. I did not want to know that. Fearing the answer, but knowing nothing can be worse than my imagination, I force myself to ask the next question.

“How, exactly, did she manage that? Some sort of manage á trois with you, Weasley and Granger? Did she demonstrate on you and you copy her actions on Weasley?” Severus, I tell myself, shut up now before you vomit.

“Ew, no, they’re my friends! That would be wrong!” I struggle not to point out that he is in bed with his greasy potions master – a man twice his age. “We were really drunk, and I’d just told them I was gay, though I think Hermione had guessed a while back.” Harry had propped himself on one elbow, facing Snape. His erection, forgotten for the moment, still pointed up at the both, looking eager and unsatisfied. Snape’s mouth watered, but he pulled himself back to what the boy was saying.

“So I told her I wanted to meet someone but I was scared because I’d never done anything with a man before, so she showed me. On my...” And he was laughing again.

“Oh merciful Gods save me. On your what, Mr Potter?”

“On my…my …broomstick!” He chuckles and rolls onto his back.

Wishing I had never asked, I hang my head in my hands, trying to force the image of Granger sucking the end of a Firebolt out of my head. I shudder. After a while his laughter dies down, and when I turn to look at him, he’s back to leaning on one elbow and looking at me, smiling. I lie back again, straightening the covers over me.

“My turn,” he says and he wriggles closer. Shamefully eager, I pull him close and reach down once more.

“Ah ah ah!” The boy reprimands, waving one finger in front of my nose. I bite it. “Ow!” He sucks the knuckle, looking at me moodily, before continuing. “I meant my turn to have a question answered.” I make a big show of sighing and throwing my hands in the air before tweaking his nipple and allowing.

“Very well, go on then.” I allow with, oh kill me now, something akin to a twinkle.

Who would have thought that Severus Snape, death-eater and all round nasty, stony git, could be playful? And with no less than Harry The-Boy-Who-Lived-to-Cause-High-Blood-Pressure Potter. He looks at me carefully. If I didn’t know better, I’d be sure he was thinking exactly the same thing. But the moment passes as he shakes his head slightly and continues, whilst trailing spirals on my chest with the hand that is not propping up his head.

“Did you consider that?” he asks, nodding to my groin to indicate his meaning.

“Well I will most certainly consider it from now on.”

“You know what I mean!” he says, lightly slapping my thigh.

“Harry.” He looks surprised at my use of his first name. "You imbecile.” I quickly correct myself. “Only your own muddled brain ever knows your bizarre reasoning and or meanings. The rest of the living world assumes, as I do, that you are simply a fool and often an angst ridden nuisance with too much to say for himself and too little thought behind it.” He looks a little affronted at that. Good.

“I mean,” he glowers at me, “did you consider that? As in, did you really know I’d do that? Or that any of this would happen?” He waves his hand loosely to indicate the goings on in my chambers for the last few months. I take this to mean him, me, the fierce shouting match that suddenly turned into kissing, thrusting and moaning. My rejection of him, his return and my weakness.

“No.” I answer him honestly, though I would rather not. “I am your Professor. If I had considered doing this” I wave my hand in mimicry of him “before it happened, I would have had no right in allowing myself to continue as a professor at this school. Now it has happened, I have even less right to…” I pause for a second. But I’ll deal with that terrifyingly guilt inducing thought another time “Also,” I continue quickly “it is well known that I hate the sight of you.” He immediately looks sulky. “Come now,” I reprimand, “you cannot think that I held any sort of …affection for you, after the torment of potions lessons for the last seven years?” He shrugs and I mentally kick myself for allowing him back into my life every time he knocks on my bloody door. “Harry, I saw you as a brat. Your father in miniature. Part of me still does. But you are, I know now, a different person to either of your parents.” I steel myself, knowing that if I want this to continue, the boy is going to need some explanation. He always bloody does. “… You understand the pains of this world, and yet can still find joy in the bits that are pure. I cannot, and the fact that you can, fascinates me. You are not repulsed by me. This, I admit, took a while for me to believe. But now I see how you look at me and it makes me look at you the same. Potter…Harry, you must understand that no one has ever wanted to be in my presence for too long, let alone begged me to whisper to them as they come, or undressed me with such …reverence.” The boy is blushing and I’m already half hard again.
“I did hate you. I hated what I thought you were. Though I admit that some of my assumptions were true” He slaps me again and I raise an eyebrow “I accept you now as someone in your own right.” God that was painful. I must remind myself to nurse my pride with the half full whisky bottle in my cabinet when he leaves. I glance sideways .He is gazing at me with a look of awe and something else I recognise and which terrifies me. “Which is a pest with a very skilled tongue, an obnoxious brat with a surprisingly mature taste in wine, and men, and a relentless presence in my quarters that may, I begrudgingly admit, please me, also drives me to my wits end.” Damn post-coital honesty. Damn it to hell.
“Does that answer your question, Mr Potter?” I hurry the conversation on. “I do not foresee everything before it happens and prepare myself, but I do claim to understand the workings of life a little better than a seventeen year old boy.”

He is considering me, smiling and yet frowning at the same time. You do not see what you think you see in my eyes. Dear Merlin boy, please don’t take my words as anything but an attempt to stop you sulking.

He blinks, and then kisses me. “You seem to always be this kind of immovable force in lessons, and I’m guessing as a …death eater, too. And okay, you haven’t considered everything like you claimed to, but you’re never shocked, or embarrassed, and you always go out of your way to make sure people never see you without power or control. You don’t like other people to have the upper hand over you in anyway –”

“Is this relevant?” I bite out, interrupting his alarming accurate analysis of my psyche. He looks at me, frowning at my intermission.

“I’m getting there.” He sits up and faces me, wrapping his hands around his knees. I’m sad to see his erection has wilted slightly from being ignored. “Do you already know how this is going to go? Are you using me?”

“Oh do stop being such a teenager. I have no more idea what’s happening or will happen between us, or why, or how. I’m not using more than you are using me, idiot. For now, this is pleasant enough. I have no interest in having ‘the conversation’.” He blinks at me, obviously not understanding. I sigh. “The conversation when honeymoon couples discuss how ‘serious’ they’re planning on getting, ‘where the relationship is going’ or what they want from each other. I would prefer to let things happen until something crops up which stops us. The end. I do consider things before they happen, but not everything, no. Now this has happens, I’ve considered it fully, and, having done so, I know discussing it will do absolutely nothing, apart from ensuring I won’t be getting regular shag anymore.”

He just stares at me. I expected a tantrum, but it hasn’t come. Now he sighs, places his hands on my cheeks and kisses me slowly, running his hands through my long hair, which slips through his fingers and back onto my chest. I kiss him back, confused, but not wanting to admit so.

He pulls back and looks into my eyes again. “Okay. You think over things. You prepare yourself for however you think things are going to go. Don’t tell me, because what ever you think I’m going to do to make it end, you’re wrong.”

I let it slide. I have nothing to say. Instead, I roll on top of him and rub my hardening cock against his fiercely until his eyes roll back into his head and his nails are digging into my back. He comes with something between a whine and growl, splattering our stomachs. The boy is lithe and surprisingly animalistic in bed and Voldemort himself save me, I seem to be partial to it. I follow with a few quick tugs of my own hand.

Under the covers, he pulls himself backwards to fit against me and wraps my arms over his chest. I kiss and nibble his neck, enjoying how very soft the hair is at the base of his skull and how firm and warm the flesh is against my lips. The smell off him – like sun-soaked grass fields, sweet and slightly musky with sweat, with the lightly tangy and obvious smell of sex. It’s addictive and I snuffle round the back of his hair, diving my nose into his hair and massaging his chest with one long fingered hand. He lets out a gentle moan.

“I love you,” he murmurs, bringing my fingers up to his mouth to kiss them.

“I know.” I answer without thinking and my hands and lips still in shock at myself.

“Sev?” His head turns to try and look at me.

“Go to sleep, Harry. …And don’t call me that.”

He hesitates, and then turns his head back, snuggling down to sleep.

“Nox” I mutter and the torches go out. I rest against him, my eyes open. What just happened? After a while, I continue stroking his chest.


When his breathing steadies and I’m sure he’s asleep, I say what’s been trying to burst out of me.

“The gods must hate me. I …I love you too. You blasted, soul destroying little brat.”



I can see Hogsmeade on the other side of the grounds as I sit by the one fucking window in his rooms. The Christmas lights from the little village are mockingly bright. No one there has a clue I’m here. One year. One whole year today since I killed the bastard. Three years since I told Severus I loved him. What the Fuck did I know. What the fuck do I know now? Ron and Hermione are there, drinking and laughing in the pub. And here I am, cold and angry and broken, with a man I can’t even look at, but can’t bring myself to leave. I sip my scotch and gaze back out. It’s pissing it down and the dark shadows of the forbidden forest whip around and buck with the fierce wind.

I hear him enter the room behind me, the stink of whatever and wherever he’s been on his robes.

“Still here?”

“Obviously.” I take another swig. I realize it’s his whisky, and slam the tumbler down on the table, pushing it away from me. I can imagine the sneer on his face as he undresses. I don’t turn around to watch. I don’t want to. Well, part of me does. The little part of me that’s still the stupid seventeen year old boy who got excited about the idea of someone getting naked for him, who believed that there could be something – someone- good in the world for him. Someone who would be honest with him, someone who would support him, not coddle him and keep the hero blind to the world like everybody fucking else. No, Severus is just like everyone else, and I don’t want to look at his body, despite its assets that still stir a reaction in me, because the body belongs to him.

“Are you coming to bed?”

“Where have you been?” I don’t turn around.

“That, Potter, is none of your business.”

Okay, I can’t stop myself from swinging round in my chair. “It is my bloody business, you bastard! I’m still fucking here, aren’t I? I’m still part of your piss awful life! And while I am, where you go to destroy what’s left of your shrivelled soul is my business! And don’t you dare call me ‘Potter’ again! Don’t try and convince yourself that I’m my father. You know better than that, or at least you pretended you did.” I finish my diatribe with a sneer that I learnt from him.


Snape snorts, but says nothing more. Climbing into bed, he spells the lights off. I dig my nails into my palms.

In the end I throw my clothes off and climb into bed – as far away from the dark lump in the bed with me. I face away from him and tug the covers over me. He grunts with irritation. I used to find that endearing. Now it makes me want to throttle him.

An undeterminable amount of time passes.

“Why don’t you just leave?” The voice sneers from the unmoving lump of the man I loved.

I can’t answer. I wish I could just get up and leave. Fuck the lying bastard. He killed them, near as damn it, and I’m ruining their memory by being so weak. But I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to leave. Every day when he pisses off, I pack my bags and re-write the letter I’ve been planning since I found out. But in the end, I reach the door and convince myself that I’ve forgotten something. I drag my trunk back into the bedroom and open it to pack the mysterious forgotten item, and in the end, I simply unpack and then get royally drunk on his scotch. He has no idea that this happens.

So I don’t answer him.

Its only when I start to choke that I realize I’m crying and have been since he walked in. I’m numb somehow. My emotions are detached from me so I can’t feel them.

I wipe my tired eyes and try to control my breathing, scratching my own arm with my nails in complete desperation where they’re wrapped around me. When I open my eyes, he’s sitting up and looking at me, his sunken eyes cold and empty.

“I will not let this continue. Leave.”

Now I’m sitting up too and I’m inches from punching him. He has no little understanding of how hard it is for me not to leave. How hard it is for me not to stay.
But then the punch half way to his face doesn’t strike but pushes him back and him kissing him, biting his lip and claiming his mouth as mine all over again. He’s a liar, but he’s lies are mine. He’s a cruel, sadistic, heartless murderer, but he’s mine and he can’t fucking dismiss me like that. I grab his face and stare into his eyes that are somehow grounding in their familiarity, and yet destroying in their emptiness. I know my face is twisted in anger and disgust and pain. But only emptiness, tinged with a distant consideration looks back at me from eyes as black as purgatory. I got lost in those eyes. Now I’m losing myself.
.

I don’t know how long I’ve been gripping his face, but my hands are shaking. He lifts one hand to touch mine. He’s so cold. He was never cold before.

“Harry, I’m sorry. I had no idea it was your parents the dark lord would choose to chase.”

“Liar.” My hoarse voice whispers through bared teeth. But I sit back up. Something brushes over my arse. He’s hard.

“YOU SICK FUCK!” I leap off him, disgusted that he could possibly get turned on by my pain.

He struggles to cover himself. I’m standing by the side of the bed, leaning on the wall and pulling at my hair.

“Harry, I still find you attracti-“

“FUCK OFF!” I throw a book at his head

“Idiot boy, for once in your pointless life, listen to me!”

“I can’t! Not any more.” I slump to the floor by the wall and bury my head in my knees.

He rips the covers off the bed and storms into the living room with them, slamming the door behind him. After a while of staring blankly at it, I clamber back onto the bed and lie on my front, pushing my face into the sheets and remembering. I can smell him and for a moment I can believe this bed is still the one place he’s honest with me, where he lets me inside that ice stone heart, where he tells me he loves me when he thinks I’m sleeping. But it’s not. It’s an empty pit – a shell of something that was once the most perfect thing in my life. A hollow reminder of how different things are now – now I can’t even see him on this bed without my heart tearing in my chest. Where before he could tell me he liked my company, that he thought I was hot, where he believed he loved me, he can’t say a word to me that isn’t worse than when he hated me.

I’m standing in the door way, watching him in his armchair, tracing the fading dark mark on his arm with a long, potion stained finger and I don’t know how I got here. But still, I watch. He looks so old. And …sad. He’s empty, just like our bed. Who did that, I wonder? Me. I did. I should never have come here, so many years ago. And when we lie in bed, how can I not hate myself for that? For the fact that I expected him to hold everything together and to accept me, my love and my trust, without ever thinking that his secrets and his burdens were already too heavy? Burdens and secrets he knew he couldn’t share with me.

I walk over to him, naked, more vulnerable than I’ve let myself be in front of him for at least eight months. I kiss him. I Look into those eyes and wish for him to forgive me, to forgive himself. I get my cloak and my wand and stand next to him again. He looks at me and his face crumples, but he doesn’t cry, simply reaches out and grabs my hand tightly.

“Don’t say anything”

He doesn’t.

“Goodbye”. My voice cracks in the middle of the word, but I bite my cheek.

He closes his eyes tightly and his teeth clench.

I lift his hands to kiss them and I scrunch my eyes shut too, holding his fingers to my lips for as long as I can bear without my resolve breaking again.

“I love you.” I whisper, dropping his hand, turning away.

And, finally, I leave.

…

“I know”.