Tessa and Will Wedding Story Read Online

hullo Cassie! idk if you've noticed, merely I think you've invoked a small (and quite entertaining) url revolution. — hornyjem

I did. I am very proud. :)

This is the full story of After the Span, a tale for those who might have wondered what Tessa and Jem did after they met on Blackfriars Span in the epilogue of Clockwork Princess. If you've been waiting to read information technology until it was done, information technology is now done.

Those who do not like Tessa&Jem together or Jessa sexytimes probably should skip this. (You will non miss annihilation that volition affect your agreement of later on books.) Those who similar that sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Subsequently the Bridge alternates POV between Jem and Tessa. This is Part Five, the total story. Equally this is one curt story and not chaptered, each post will contain the whole story from the showtime upward to the signal where that part ends so that new readers or readers who don't think what happened won't take to chase down the previous post(s.)

AFTER THE Bridge : At present with (sexy) fine art by Cassandra Jean!

Later THE BRIDGE

Now is the time of our comfort and enough

These are the days we've been working for

Zippo can touch u.s. and nada can impairment us

And goose egg goes incorrect anymore

 Keane - Love Is The Cease

As it turned out, Tessa had a flat she owned in London. It was the 2nd floor of a pale white townhouse in Kensington, and every bit she let them both inside — her paw only shaking very slightly every bit she turned the keys — she explained to Jem that Magnus had taught her how warlocks could finagle their mode into owning homes over many centuries by willing the properties to themselves.

"After a while I just started picking silly names for myself," she said, shutting the door behind them. "I think I own this place under the pseudonym Bedelia Codfish."

Jem laughed, though his heed was only partly on her words. He was gazing around the flat —  the walls were painted in bright colors: a lilac living room, scattered with white couches, an avocado-green kitchen. When had Tessa bought the apartment, he wondered, and why? She had traveled so much, why make a home base in London?

The question dried upwardly in his throat when he turned and realized that through a partly open up door, he could glimpse the blue walls of what was likely a chamber.

He swallowed at that, his oral cavity gone suddenly dry. Tessa's bed. That she slept in.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you all right?" She took him by the wrist; he felt his pulse leap under her touch. Until he had go a Silent Brother, it ever had. He'd wondered during his fourth dimension in Idris, after the heavenly burn down had cured him, if information technology would yet exist similar that with them: if his homo feelings would return to him. He had been able to bear on her and be near her as a Silent Brother without wanting her every bit he had when he was a mortal. He had however loved her, but it had been a love of the spirit, not the body. He had wondered — feared, even, that the physical feelings and responses would not come up back the mode they had. He had told himself that even if Silent Brotherhood had killed the ability of his feelings to manifest themselves physically, he would not be disappointed. He had told himself to expect it.

He shouldn't have worried.

The moment he had seen her on the bridge, coming toward him through the oversupply in her modernistic jeans and Liberty scarf, her hair flight out behind her, he had felt his breath take hold of in his throat.

And when she had fatigued the jade pendant he had given her out from effectually her neck and shyly proffered information technology to him, his blood had roared to life in his veins like a river undammed.

And when she had said, I dearest yous. I always take, and I e'er will, information technology had taken everything he had non to kiss her in that moment. To exercise more than kiss her.

But if the Brotherhood had taught him annihilation, it was command. He looked at her now and fought his voice to steadiness. "A little tired," he said. "And thirsty — I forget sometimes I demand to eat and drink at present."

She dropped her keys on a small rosewood side table and turned to smiling at him. "Tea," she said, moving toward the avocado-greenish kitchen. "I haven't got much food hither, I don't normally stay long, but I have got tea. And biscuits. Go into the drawing room; I'll be right there."

He had to smiling at that; even he knew no one said drawing room any more. Perhaps she was as nervous as he was, and so? He could only hope.

Tessa cursed silently for the fourth time as she bent to call up the box of sugar cubes from the floor. She had already put the kettle on without water in it, mixed up the tea numberless, knocked over the milk, and now this. She dropped a cube of sugar into both teacups and told herself to count to ten, watching the cubes dissolve.

She knew her hands were shaking. Her heart raced. James Carstairs was in her apartment. In her living room. Waiting for tea. Part of her listen screamed that it was but Jem, while the other function cried just equally loudly that just Jem was someone she hadn't seen in a hundred and 30 five years.

He had been Brother Zachariah for and then long. And of form he had e'er been Jem at the heart of information technology all, with Jem'south wit and unfailing kindness. He had never failed in his dear for her or his beloved for Will. But Silent Brothers — they did not feel things the fashion ordinary people did.

It was something she had idea of, sometimes, in later years, many decades afterward Volition'southward expiry. She had never wanted anyone else, never anyone but Will and Jem, and they were both gone from her, fifty-fifty though Jem still lived. She had wondered sometimes what they would have done if it had merely been forbidden for Silent Brothers to marry or beloved; just information technology was more than than that: he could not desire her. He didn't take those feelings. She'd felt like Pygmalion, yearning for the touch on of a marble statue. Silent Brothers didn't have physical desires for bear on, any more than they had a need for nutrient or water.

Only now …

I forget sometimes I need to swallow and drink at present.

She picked up the tea mugs with still-shaking easily and walked into the living room. She had furnished it herself over the years, from the sofa cushions to the unfolded Japanese screen painted with a blueprint of branches. The curtains framing the portrait window at the far end of the room were half-drawn, merely enough low-cal spilling into the room to touch the $.25 of gold in Jem's night pilus and she nearly dropped the teacups.

They had hardly touched on the taxi ride back to Queen'south Gate, simply belongings easily tightly in the back of the cab. He had run his fingers over the backs of her fingers over and over as he began to tell her the story of all that had happened since she had last visited Idris, when the Mortal War, which she had fought in, had ended. When Magnus had pointed out Jace Herondale to her, and she had looked at a boy who had Will'southward beautiful confront and eyes similar her son James.

But his hair had been his father's, that tangle of rich gold curls, and remembering what she had known of Stephen Herondale, she had turned away without speaking.

Herondales, someone had told her in one case. They were everything that Shadowhunters had to offer, all in 1 family: both the best, and the worst.

She set the teacups downwards on the coffee table — an old steamer trunk, covered in travel stamps from her many voyages — with an audible thump. Jem turned to face her and she saw what he held in his hands.

One of the bookcases held a display of weapons: things she had picked up around the earth. A sparse misericorde, a curved kris, a trench knife, a shortsword, and dozens of others. But the one Jem had picked up and was staring at wasa slim silver knife, its handle darkened by many years of burial in the clay. She had never had it cleaned, for the stain on the blade was Volition'due south claret. Jem's bract, Will'south blood, buried together at the roots of an oak tree, a sort of sympathetic magic Will had performed when he thought he had lost Jem forever. Tessa had retrieved it after Volition's death and offered it to Jem; he had refused to take it.

That had been in 1937.

"Keep it," he said now, his vocalization ragged. "There may nevertheless come a twenty-four hour period."

"That'south what y'all told me." She moved toward him, her shoes borer on the hardwood floor. "When I tried to requite information technology to you."

He swallowed, running his fingers up and down the bract. "He had merely just died," he said. She didn't demand to ask who he was. There was really only one He when it was the two of them speaking. "I was afraid. I saw what happened to the other Silent Brothers. I saw how they hardened over time, lost the people they had been. How every bit the people who loved them and who they loved died, they became less man. I was afraid that I would lose my power to care. To know what this knife meant to Will and what Will meant to me."

She placed her manus on his arm. "But you didn't forget."

"I didn't lose everyone I loved." He looked upwards at her, and she saw that his eyes had gilded in them too, precious bright flakes among the dark-brown. "I had you."

She exhaled; her middle was beating so hard that her chest hurt. Then she saw that he was clutching the bract of the knife, not just the hilt. Quickly she plucked information technology out of his hands. "Please don't," she said. "I tin't draw an iratze."

"And I oasis't got a stele," he said, watching equally she set the knife dorsum on its shelf. "I am not a Shadowhunter now." He looked downwardly at his hands; in that location were thin cerise lines beyond his palms, only he had not cut the pare.

Impulsively, Tessa bent and kissed his palms, and then folded his fingers closed, her ain hands over his. When she looked upward, his pupils had widened. She could hear his animate.

"Tessa," he said. "Don't."

"Don't what?" She drew away from him, though, instinctively. Mayhap he did not want to be touched, though on the bridge, it had not seemed that way …

"The Brothers taught me control," he said, his voice tight. "I have every kind of command, and I have learned them over decades and decades, and I am using them all not to push button you up against the bookcase and kiss yous until neither of us can breathe."

She lifted her mentum. "And what would be incorrect with that?"

"When I was a Silent Brother, I did non feel every bit an ordinary man does," he said. "Not the wind on my face up or the sun on my pare or the bear on of another'south hand. But at present I feel information technology all. I feel — too much. The wind is like thunder, the lord's day scorches, and your touch makes me forget my ain proper noun."

A pang of heat speared through her, a heat that started depression in her tummy and spread through every part of her body. A sort of heat she hadn't felt in and then many decades.  Almost a century. Her skin prickled all over. "The wind and the sun you volition go used to," she said. "But your impact makes me forget my name likewise, and I have no excuses. But that I honey y'all, and I e'er have and always will. I will not touch you if you do not want it, Jem. But if we are waiting until the idea of beingness together does non frighten us, we may be waiting a long time."

Breath escaped him in a hiss. "Say that again."

Puzzled, she began: "If nosotros are waiting until —"

"No," he said. "The earlier office."

She tipped her face up to him. "I dear you," she said. "I always accept and I always will."

She did not know who moved toward who first, but he defenseless her around the waist and was kissing her before she could take another breath. This was not like the osculation on the bridge. That had been a silent communication of lips on lips, the substitution of a promise and a reassurance. It had been sugariness and shattering, a sort of gentle thunder.

This was a storm. Jem was kissing her, hard and bruising, and when she opened his lips with hers and tasted the inside of his mouth, he gasped and pulled her harder against him, his hands digging into her hips, pressing her closer to him every bit he explored her lips and tongue, caressing, bitter, and then kissing to soothe the sting. In the old days, when she had kissed him, he had tasted of biting sugar: at present he tasted like tea and —toothpaste?

Just why non toothpaste. Even century-one-time Shadowhunters had to brush their teeth. A small nervous giggle escaped her and Jem pulled dorsum, looking dazed and deliciously rumpled. His pilus was every which way from her running her hands through information technology.

"Please don't tell me yous're laughing because I kiss so desperately it'southward funny," he said, with a lopsided grin. She could sense his bodily worry. "I may be somewhat out of practice."

"Silent Brothers don't practise a lot of kissing?" she teased, smoothing down the front of his sweater.

"Not unless there were underground orgies I wasn't invited to," Jem said. "I did ever worry I might not have been popular."

She clasped her paw around his wrist. "Come here," she said. "Sit downward — take some tea. There'south something I desire to show you."

He went, every bit she had asked, and sat down on her velvet sofa, leaning back against the cushions she had stitched herself out of fabric she'd bought in India and Thailand. She couldn't hide a smile — he looked only a little older than he had when he'd get a Silent Brother, like an ordinary swain in jeans and a sweater,  merely he sat the way a Victorian man would have — back straight, anxiety flat on the floor. He caught her look and his own oral cavity tipped up at the corners. "All right," he said. "What do you have to testify me?"

In answer, she went to the Japanese screen that stretched across one corner of the room, and stepped behind it. "It's a surprise."

The dressmaker's dummy was there, concealed from the balance of the room. She couldn't encounter him through the screen, only a blurred outline of shapes. "Talk to me," she said, pulling her sweater off over her head. "You said it was a story of Lightwoods and Fairchilds and Morgensterns. I know a little of what transpired — I received your messages while I was in the Labyrinth — only I practise not know how the Nighttime War effected your cure." She tossed the sweater over the top of the screen. "Can you tell me?"

"Now?" he said. She heard him set his teacup downwardly.

Tessa kicked her shoes off and unzipped her jeans, the sound loud in the placidity room. "Exercise y'all desire me to come out from behind this screen, James Carstairs?"

"Definitely." His phonation sounded strangled.

"And so first talking."

* * *

Jem talked. He spoke of the dark days in Idris, of Sebastian Morgenstern's army of Endarkened, of Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild and the Lightwood children and their dangerous journeying to Edom.

"I have heard of Edom," she said, her vocalization muffled. "It is spoken of in the Screw Labyrinth, where they track the histories of all worlds. A place where the Nephilim were destroyed. A wasteland."

"Aye," Jem said, a niggling absently. He couldn't meet her through the screen, but he could see the outline of her body, and that was somewhat worse. "Burning wasteland. Very … hot."

He had been afraid that the Silent Brothers had taken desire from him: that he would expect at Tessa and experience ideal love but not exist able to want, but the opposite was truthful. He could not stop wanting. He wanted, he thought, more than he always had before in his life.

She was conspicuously changing her wearing apparel. He had looked downwards hastily when she'd begun to shimmy out of her jeans, only information technology wasn't as if he could forget the image, the silhouette of her, long pilus and long, lovely legs — he'd always loved her legs.

Surely he'd felt this before, when he'd been a boy? He remembered the dark in his room when she had stopped him destroying his violin, and he'd wanted and then, wanted and then badly he hadn't idea at all when they'd collapsed onto his bed: he would have taken her innocence then, and given upwards his own, without pausing, without a moment'due south thought of the future. If they hadn't knocked over his box of yin fen. If. That had brought him dorsum, and when she'd gone, he'd torn his sheets to strips with his fingers out of sheer frustration.

Perhaps it was just that remembered desire paled in comparison to the feeling itself. Or perhaps he had been sicker then, weaker. He had been dying, after all, and surely his body could not accept sustained this.

"A Fairchild and a Herondale," she said. "Now, I like that. The Fairchilds have always been applied and the Herondales — well, yous know." She sounded addicted, tickled. "Perhaps she'll settle him down. And don't tell me he doesn't need settling."

Jem thought of Jace Herondale. How he was similar Volition if someone had struck a match to Will and gilt him in living fire. "I'thou not sure y'all can settle a Herondale, and certainly not this one."

"Does he love her? The Fairchild girl?"

"I've never seen anyone so in love, except for …" His vocalization trailed off, for she had come out from behind the screen, and now he understood what had taken her so much time.

She was wearing a dress of orchid silk faille, the sort of clothes she might have worn to dinner when they had been engaged. It was trimmed in white velvet cords, the brim belling out over — was she wearing crinolines?

His oral cavity opened. He couldn't help himself. He had institute her beautiful through all the changing ages of the century: beautiful in the carefully cut clothes of the state of war years, when fabric was rationed. Beautiful in the elegant dresses of the fifties and sixties. Beautiful in short skirts and boots as the century drew to a close.

Only this was what girls looked like when he had first noticed them, first found them fascinating and not annoying, first noticed the graceful line of a cervix or the pale within of a feminine wrist. This was the Tessa who had first cutting him through and through with beloved and lust commingled: a carnal angel with a corset shaping her trunk to an hourglass, lifting her breasts, shaping the flare of her hips.

He forced his optics away from her body. She had spring up her pilus, minor curls escaping over her ears, and his jade pendant glimmered effectually her throat.

"Practise yous like it?" she said. "I had to do my own hair, without Sophie, and lace my own laces …" Her expression was shy and more a trivial nervous — it had always been a contradiction at the centre of her, that she was one of the bravest and yet the shyest people he knew. "I bought information technology from Sotheby'south — a real antique, now, it was far as well much money but I remembered when I was a girl you had said orchids were your favorite flower and I had set myself to find a dress the color of an orchid only I never found 1 before you lot were — gone. Simply this ane is. Anilyne dye, I expect, nothing natural, but I idea — I thought it would remind you lot." She raised her chin. "Of u.s.a.. Of what I wanted to exist for y'all, when I thought we would exist together."

"Tess," he said, hoarsely. He was on his anxiety, without knowing how he had gotten there. He took a step toward her, and then another."Forty-ix thousand, ii hundred and seventy-five."

She knew immediately what he meant. He knew she would. She knew him equally no one else living did. "Are you counting days?"

"Twoscore-nine 1000, two hundred and seventy-five days since I last kissed you," he said. "And I idea of you every single 1 of them. You do not have to remind me of the Tessa I loved. You were my get-go love and you will be my last one. I take never forgotten you. I have never not idea of you." He was shut enough now to run into the pulse pounding in her pharynx. To reach out and lift up a gyre of her hair. "Never."

Her eyes were half-shut. She reached out and took his hand, where it caressed her hair. His claret was thundering through his body, so hard that information technology injure. She lowered his hand, lowered it to the bodice of her dress. "The advertisement for the dress said information technology did not have buttons," she whispered. "Only hooks down the forepart. Easier for one person to do up." She lowered her correct hand, took his other wrist, raised information technology. Now both his hands were at her bodice. "Or to unfasten." Her fingers curved nearly his every bit, very deliberately, she undid the commencement hook on her clothes.

And so the next. She moved his easily downwardly, her fingers intertwined with his, unfastening as she went until the dress hung open over her corset. She was animate hard; he could non go along his eyes from where his pendant rose and fell with her gasps. He could not bring himself to move an inch more toward her: he wanted, wanted too much. He wanted to unplait her hair and wrap it around his wrists like silken ropes. He wanted her breasts under his hands and her legs effectually his waist. He wanted things he had no proper name for and no experience of. He just knew that that if he moved one inch closer to her the drinking glass barrier of control he had built upwardly effectually himself would shatter and he did not know what would happen next.

"Tessa," he said. "Are you sure —?"

Her eyelashes fluttered. Her optics were still half-closed, her teeth making pocket-size half-moons in her lower lip. "I was certain then," she said, "and I am sure now."

And she clasped his hands firmly to her sides, where her waist curved in, on either side of the flare of her hips.

His control bankrupt, a silent explosion. He pulled her toward him, bent to buss her savagely difficult. He heard her weep out in surprise and so his lips silenced hers, and her oral cavity opened eagerly under his. Her hands were in his hair, gripping difficult; she was reaching upwardly on her toes to osculation him. She bit at his lower lip, nipped at his jaw, and he groaned, sliding his hands within her dress, his fingers tracing the back of her corset, her skin burning through the bits of her chemise he could feel between the laces. He was kicking off his shoes, toeing off his socks, the flooring cold confronting his bare feet.

She gave a trivial gasp and wriggled closer, into his artillery. He slipped his easily out of her clothes and took hold of her skirts. She made a noise of surprise and then he was drawing the dress upwardly over her head. She exclaimed, giggling, as the clothes came off most of the way simply remained fastened at the wrists, where tiny buttons clasped the cuffs tightly. "Careful," she teased, equally his frantic fingers flicked the buttons open up. He heaved the apparel up and tossed it into the corner. "It's an antique."

"So am I, technically," he said, and she giggled again, looking up at him, her face warm and open.

He had thought about making dear to her before; of class he had. He had thought about sex when he was a teenaged boy because that was what teenaged boys idea about, and when he had fallen in beloved with Tessa, he had idea about it with her. Vague inchoate thoughts of doing things, though he wasn't certain what — images of pale arms and legs, the imaginary experience of soft skin under his hands.

Merely he had not imagined this: that there might be laughter, that it might be affectionate and warm as well as passionate. The reality of it, of her, stunned him breathless.

She drew abroad from him and for a moment he panicked. What had he washed wrong? Had he injure her, displeased her?  Merely no, her fingers had gone to the muzzle of crinoline at her waist, twisting and flicking. Then she raised her arms and twined them about his cervix. "Lift me up," she said. "Lift me up, Jem."

Her vocalisation was a warm purr. He took hold of her waist and lifted her upwards and out of her petticoats, every bit if he were lifting an expensive orchid free of its pot. When he put her back downwards, she was wearing only her corset, drawers and stockings. Her legs were just equally long and lovely as he had remembered and dreamed virtually.

He reached for her, but she caught at his hands. She was still smiling, but now in that location was an impish quality to it. "Oh, no," she said, gesturing to him, his jeans and sweater. "Your turn."

* * *

He froze, and for a moment, panicked, Tessa wondered if she had asked him for too much. He had been so long disconnected from his body — a mind in a shell of mankind that went largely ignored unless it needed to be runed for some new ability. Perhaps this was as well much for him.

Merely he took a deep breath, and his hands went to the hem of his sweater. He pulled it off over his head and emerged with his pilus adorably ruffled. He wore no shirt under the jumper. He looked at her and bit his lip.

She moved toward him, wondering eyes and fingers. She glanced at him before she put her hands on him and saw him nod, Yes.

She swallowed hard. She had been carried this far frontward like a leaf on the tide of her memories. Memories of James Carstairs, the boy she'd been engaged to, had planned to marry. Had nearly made love to on the floor of the music room in the London Constitute. She had seen his body and then, stripped to the waist, his skin pale every bit paper and stretched thin over prominent ribs. The trunk of a dying male child, though he had e'er been beautiful to her.

Now his pare was laid over his ribs and chest in a layer of polish muscle; his chest was broad, tapering downwardly to a slim waist. She put her hands on him tentatively; he was warm and hard under her touch. She could feel the faint scars of ancient runes, pale confronting his gilded skin.

His breath hissed out between his teeth as she ran her hands upward his chest and down his arms, the curve of his biceps shaping themselves under her fingers. She remembered him fighting with the other Brothers at Cader Idris — and of course he'd fought at the Citadel Battle, the Silent Brothers kept themselves ready to exercise battle, though they rarely did. Somehow she had never quite thought almost what that might mean for Jem once he was no longer dying.

Her teeth chattered a fiddling; she bit her lip to go along them silent. Desire was washing through her, and a little fear as well: How could this be happening? Actually happening?

"Jem," she whispered. "You're and then …"

"Scarred?" He put his paw to his cheek, where the black mark of the Brotherhood notwithstanding remained at the curvation of his cheekbone. "Hideous?"

She shook her caput. "How many times do I have to tell you that you lot're beautiful?" She ran her paw upward the bare curve of his shoulder to his neck; he trembled. You are beautiful, James Carstairs. "Didn't y'all see everyone staring at you on the span? You're and so much more beautiful than me," she murmured, sliding her hands around him to touch the muscles of his back; they tightened under the glancing pressure level of her fingers. "Just if you lot're foolish enough to desire me and then I will not question my expert fortune."

He turned his head to the side and she saw him swallow. "For all my life," he said, "when someone has said the word 'beautiful', it is your face I have seen. You are my own very definition of beautiful, Tessa Greyness."

Her heart turned over. She raised herself upward on her toes — she had always been a tall girl but Jem was still taller — and put her oral cavity to the side of his throat, kissing gently. His arms came up around her, pressing her against him, is body hard and hot, and she felt some other pang of want. This time she nipped at him, biting at the skin where his shoulder curved into his neck.

Everything went topsy-turvy. Jem made a sound low in his throat and of a sudden they were on the floor and she was on acme of him, his torso cushioning her fall. She stared down at him in astonishment. "What happened?"

He looked bewildered likewise. "I couldn't stand up whatever more."

Her chest filled with warmth. Information technology had been then long that she had nearly forgotten the feeling of kissing someone so hard that your knees went weak herself. He pushed himself up on his elbows. "Tessa —"

"Nothing's wrong," she said firmly, cupping his face in her easily. "Cipher. Understand?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Did you trip me?"

She laughed; her center was still pounding away, giddy with joy and relief and terror all at the same time. Simply she had looked at him before, had seen the style he glanced at her hair when information technology was down, had felt his fingers in it, tentatively stroking, when he had kissed her on the bridge. She reached upward and pulled the pins out of it, throwing them across the room.

Her hair fountained down, spilling over her shoulders, down to her waist. She leaned forward so that it brushed across his face, his blank chest.

"Do you intendance?" she whispered.

"Equally it develops," he said, against her oral cavity, "I don't care. I observe I adopt to be reclining."

She laughed and ran her manus down and down his body. He twisted, arching up into her bear on. "For an antique," she murmured, "you lot would fetch quite a price at Sotheby's. All your parts are quite in working order."

His pupils dilated so he laughed, his warm breath gusting across her cheek. "I have forgotten what it is like to be teased, I think," he said. "No one teases Silent Brothers."

She had taken advantage of his distraction to rid him of his jeans. In that location was distractingly little clothing between them now. "You're not in the Brotherhood any longer," she said, stroking her fingers beyond his stomach, the fine hair there just below his navel, his shine bare breast. "And I would be very disappointed if you remained silent."

He reached for her blindly and drew her downwardly. His hands buried themselves in her hair. And they were kissing once more, her knees on either side of his hips, her palms braced against his chest. His hands ran through her hair again and again, and each fourth dimension she could experience his trunk strain up toward hers, his lips pressing against her own harder. They weren't vicious kisses, not now: they were decadent, growing in intensity and fervor each time they drew apart and came together over again.

He put his easily to the laces of her corset and tugged at them. She moved to show him that information technology also attached down her chest, but he had already reached around to grip the textile. "My apologies," he said, "to antiquity," and then, in a most un-Jem-similar fashion, ripped the corset open down the front end and cast it bated. Underneath was her chemise, which she pulled up and over her head and dropped to the side.

Then she took a deep breath. She was naked in front of him now, as she never had been before.

* * *

Jem had the feeling that after his hands would sting, but at the moment, he could feel nothing but Tessa. She was sitting astride his hips, her optics broad, her hair pouring downwardly over her bare shoulders and breasts. She looked like Venus rising out of the waves, with only the jade pendant to comprehend her, shining against her skin.

"I call up," she said, her vocalisation gone loftier and breathy, "that I need you to kiss me at present."

He reached up to draw her downward, catching hold of her slender shoulders. He rolled them over and then that he was on top of her, counterbalanced on his elbows, careful of his weight. But she didn't seem to mind. She adjusted herself under him, curving her body to fit his ain. The softness of her breasts pressed against his breast and the hollow of her hips was a loving cup to concord him and her bare toes ran down his jean-clad calves.

He made a dark, needy sound low in his pharynx, a sound he barely recognized every bit coming from himself. A sound that made Tessa's pupils aggrandize, her breath come quickly. "Jem," she said, "delight, Jem," and she turned her head to the side, pillowing her cheek on her unbound hair.

He aptitude over her. This much they had washed together, before. This much he remembered. That she liked to be kissed in a line down her pharynx, and that if he followed the shape of her collarbone with his mouth she would cry out and dig her hands into his back. And if he had been terrified of what came next — not knowing what to do, or how to please her — information technology was washed away in the rush of her responsiveness: her soft cries as he ran his hands downward her legs and kissed her chest and breadbasket.

"My Jem," she whispered as he kissed her. "James Carstairs. Ke Jian Ming."

No one had chosen him by his birth name in over half a century. Information technology was equally intimate as a bear on.

He wasn't entirely sure how the balance of their dress were discarded, only that somehow they were lying on the wrecked remnants of her silk dress and petticoats. Tessa was non soft and pliant under him equally he had long ago imagined but responsive and demanding, lifting her face to exist kissed over and over, running her hands over him, each brush of her fingers igniting sparks in nerve endings he had feared long dead.

It was and so much better than he had imagined. He was surrounded by her, her olfactory property of rosewater lather and her soft skin and her implicit trust. Information technology was not only that she trusted him not to injure her; information technology was more than than that. She trusted that his inexperience would not matter, that nothing mattered except that information technology was the two of them and they had always sought to make the other ane happy. When he faltered and said, "Tessa, I don't know how to —" she whispered against his mouth and placed his hands where they should go.

A sort of lessoning, but the gentlest he had ever received, and the best. He had non quite always imagined this, that their responses would be mirrored, that her pleasure would magnify his own. That when he slid his easily up her legs she would wrap them around his waist of her own accord. That every thought would flee from his head except for the feel of her under him and so around him as she guided him to where he needed to be.

He heard himself cry out as if from a distance every bit he cached himself in her. "Tessa." He clutched at her shoulders equally if he could grasp the last shreds of his control. "Tessa, oh God, Tessa, Tessa." Coherency had left him completely. He said something else besides, not in English whatsoever more than, he didn't know what, and he felt her tighten her arms around him.

He was breathing in gasps. His optics were closed; calorie-free blazing behind his lids. And then much low-cal. He struggled for the shreds of his command, not wanting it to be over, not notwithstanding. He heard Tessa'south vox, whispering his name; they were so close, closer than he had ever believed possible. Her hands slid down his body to grasp at his waist. There was a thin line of concentration betwixt her eyebrows; her cheeks were bright crimson, and when she tried to say his name over again, a ragged gasp swallowed it up. 1 of her hands flew to her mouth and she bit down hard on her fingers as her body tightened around him.

 It was like a friction match to tinder. The last shred of his control evaporated. He buried his face against her cervix as the light behind his eyes fractured into kaleidoscopic colors. He had carried the darkness of the Silent City with him fifty-fifty when he had left the Brotherhood. And at present she had opened his soul and let in the light, and it was brilliant.

He had never imagined this. He had never even imagined imagining this.

When he came dorsum to himself, he institute he was still gripping her tightly, his head bowed down on her shoulder. She was breathing softly and regularly, her manus in his hair, stroking, murmuring his name.

He drew away from her reluctantly, rolling to adapt them so that they were lying face to face. Nearly of the daylight was gone; they looked at each other in a dim twilight that softened all harsh edges. His heart was beating hard as he reached out to swipe his thumb across her lower lip.

"Are you all right?" he said, hoarsely. "Was that —" He broke off, realizing to his horror that the brilliance in her optics was tears. I rolled down her cheek, unchecked.

"Tessa?" He could hear the panic in his ain voice. She gave him a quick, trembling grinning, but then that was Tessa. She would never bear witness disappointment. What if it had been awful for her? He had thought information technology was amazing, perfect; he had thought his body would break in pieces from feeling so much bliss at once. And he had thought she had responded, but what did he know? He cursed his own inexperience, his hubris, and his pride. What had fabricated him think he could —

She sat up, leaning over the java tabular array, her hands doing something he couldn't encounter. Her unclothed body was outlined in the twilight, unbearably beautiful. He watched her with his heart stuttering. Any moment now she would stand upwards and pull on her apparel, would tell him that she loved him, loved him always merely non that way. That theirs was non a passion, merely a friendship.

And he had told himself that he could behave that, before he had come to the bridge to confess himself. He had told himself that he could have her friendship and nix else, that it was improve than not beingness well-nigh her at all.

But now that he knew, now that they had shared their breath and bodies and souls, he could no longer stride back. To be but her friend, never to touch her once again, would tear him into a million pieces. It would exist more agony than the heavenly fire had ever been.

"Jem?" she said. "Jem, you lot are a m miles abroad!" She had wrapped a folded greyness throw from the burrow around herself; she sat downwardly abreast him; the tears were gone and she was warm and smiling. "Honestly, if what we but did didn't go your attention, I don't know what would."

 He stared at her. "But you were crying," he said, finally.

She looked at him quizzically. "Considering I am happy. Because that was wonderful."

He expelled his breath in a rush of relief. "Then it was — that was all right? I could get better, we could practise —"

He realized what he'd merely said, and clamped his oral fissure shut.

A wicked grin spread over her face. "Oh, we volition exercise," she said. "As soon as you're prepare."

"I have no other appointments this evening," he said gravely.

She blushed. "Your body may need time to — to recover."

"No," he said, and this time he allowed himself a small tinge of smugness. "No, I don't think and so."

She blushed even harder. He loved making her chroma; he ever had. "Well, I need five minutes, at least!" she said. "And I demand you to see this. Please?"

She held out a slice of paper to him. Her expression was surprisingly grave; it wiped his smugness away, and his desire to tease her, too. Not daring to speak, he took the paper from her and unfolded it.

She cleared her throat. "I may have been joking, earlier," she said, "when I said I owned this flat under the name of Bedelia Codfish."

He stared down at the deed to the flat on Queen'southward Gate. Information technology was fabricated out in Tessa's name, or something like information technology. Not Tessa Gray, even so, or even Tessa Herondale. It was made out in the name of Tessa Herondale Carstairs.

"When I spoke to Magnus in Idris, later the Mortal War," she said, "he told me that he'd dreamed that you lot were cured. You know how Magnus is. Sometimes his dreams are true. So I allowed myself to hope for the first time in a long time. I knew information technology was unlikely, if non impossible. I knew information technology might be many years. But y'all asked me to marry you, one time, a long time ago. And in a way, this is our nuptials nighttime. A long-delayed consummation." She smiled at him, biting her lip, clearly nervous. He fingers worked at the blanket she held around herself. "I shouldn't accept borrowed your name, perchance, but I have ever felt in my blood that we were family."

"Tessa Herondale Carstairs," he whispered. "You should never worry most borrowing my name when you know that you tin can take information technology to keep."

He let the paper slip out of his hand and reached for her. She tipped into his lap and he held her hard, confronting the choking sensation in his ain throat.

She had never given upwardly on him. He remembered proverb to Will once that he had given him faith, when Volition had none in himself. He had always hoped for ameliorate for Will, even when Will did not promise for himself. And Tessa had done that for him. He had long ago despaired of a cure, but she — she had e'er hoped.

"Mizpah, Tessa," he whispered. "In truth, for surely God was looking out for us while nosotros were parted from i another. And he has looked out for us while we both accept been parted from Will and brought us back to each other."

* * *

They slept, curled together, on the ruin of Tessa'southward dress, and later on moved to the couch. It was quite nighttime, and they drank cold tea and made honey once again, this time more than gently and slowly until Tessa was clutching at Jem's shoulders and begging him to get faster. "Dolcissimo, not appasionato," he said with a smiling of pure tormenting amusement.

"Oh?" She reached downwards and did something with her mitt that he was clearly not prepared for. His whole trunk tensed. She giggled as his hands clawed suddenly at her waist, fingers digging in. His dark hair hung in his eyes; his skin shone with sweat. Earlier, she had airtight her own eyes: this time she watched him, the change in his expression equally his control broke, the shape of his oral fissure as he gasped her name.

"Tessa —"

And this time, she forgot to bite on her hand to conceal the sounds she made. Oh, well. Damn the neighbors. She had been serenity for nearly a century.

 "Maybe that was more than presto than I had intended," he said with a express joy, when they were lying together afterward, wedged among the cushions. "But then, you cheated. You are more experienced than I am."

"I like it." Tessa kissed his fingers. "I am going to take a great deal of fun introducing you to everything. I tin can't wait for you lot to hear rock and roll music, Jem Carstairs. And I want to meet y'all use an iPhone. And a reckoner. And ride the Tube. Have you lot been in an plane? I want to be in an airplane with you."

Jem was however laughing. His hair was a terrific mess, and his eyes were nighttime and shining in the lamplight. He looked like the boy he had been, so many years agone, simply different, also: this was a Jem Tessa had merely just begun to know. A young, healthy Jem, not a dying boy or a Silent Blood brother. A Jem who could love her with all his strength as she would love him back.

"We'll take an airplane," he said. "Maybe to Los Angeles."

She smiled. She knew why they had to be at that place.

"We have time to do everything," he said, tracing one of his fingers down the side of her face. "We have forever."

Non forever, Tessa thought. They had a long, long time. A lifetime. His lifetime. And she would lose him one day, as she had lost Will, and her eye would break, as it had broken before. And she would put herself back together and go on, because the retentivity of having had Jem would be better than never having had him at all.

She was wise enough to know that, now.

"What you lot said before," she asked. "That Jace Herondale loves Clarissa Fairchild more anyone you've ever known except someone — you never finished the sentence. Who was it?"

"I was going to say you lot and me and Will," he said. "But — that's rather a strange thing to say, isn't it?"

"Not strange at all."  She cuddled in shut against his side. "Exactly right. Always and e'er, exactly right."

***

The end and the beginning.

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Source: https://cassandraclare.tumblr.com/post/96388203069/after-the-bridge-the-full-story-jemtessa

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