Spoiler Alert (Spoiler Alert #1)(26)
“Your fanfiction, whatever you’ve written—” His fingers stilled. “It may make things a bit awkward, a bit more complicated, but it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t stop me from hoping to see you again. If that was your main reason for turning me down, I wanted you to know.”
If that was your main reason.
He knew she’d been fibbing to save his feelings, and no wonder. She wasn’t much of a liar. Never had been. And unlike him, she had no natural talent for acting.
As he straightened in his chair, his fingertips slid away from her wrist, and she almost snatched them back.
“If you had other reasons, though, that’s fine too.” His voice became oddly formal then. Solemn, as if their dinner together held more meaning for him than she’d realized. “And if this is the last time we meet, please know it was an honor to spend the evening with you, April Whittier. AKA Unapologetic Lavinia Stan.”
She’d given him a final chance, and he’d taken it.
Now she had hers.
She wasn’t hesitating another moment.
“Let’s do a second date,” she told him. “Are you free the day after tomorrow?”
That smile. Fuck, that smile.
It banished the shadows in the dim restaurant. Lit his eyes. Turned her buoyant and giddy, light as helium, as his hand reached for hers again and tethered her safely to the earth.
“Yes,” he said, his fingers interlacing with her own. “Yes. For you, I’m free.”
Rating: Explicit Fandoms: Gods of the Gates – E. Wade, Gods of the Gates (TV) Relationships: Aeneas/Lavinia, Lavinia & Turnus, Aeneas & Venus, Aeneas & Jupiter Additional Tags: Alternate Universe – Modern, Sex Work, Explicit Sexual Content, Dirty Talk, Porn with Feelings, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Hurt/Comfort, The Author Regrets Nothing, Except Maybe All Her Previous Life Choices That Led to This Fic, Hard to Say Really, But Seriously Prepare for the Smutathon
Stats: Words: 12815 Chapters: 4/4 Comments: 102 Kudos: 227 Bookmarks: 34
Pretty Man
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan
Summary:
When Aeneas arrives in Latium upon the orders of his mother and grandfather, he finds himself disoriented, guilt-stricken, and without enough resources to survive. Unless, of course, he uses the one resource he values least: his astounding handsomeness.
Luckily, his first sex work client is Lavinia. He won’t need another.
Notes:
This is not at all accurate when it comes to sex work, I’m certain, as I wanted to keep things fluffy. But I did intend to explore how two people defined by their appearances in totally opposite ways could find comfort and love and a sense of self-worth through the medium of sex.
* * *
Aeneas sees the woman before she spots him. And she is definitely looking for him, or someone like him; there’s no doubt about that. No woman comes to this street at this time of night for anything other than what he can offer: sex. For a price.
He hasn’t decided on that price yet. This first night, he intends to play it by ear.
Once he sees her face under a streetlight, pale and crooked and homely, he knows: she’ll pay plenty. This one act should make him enough for a night at a hotel, at least. And in return for shelter, he’ll give her the best fuck of her life.
“No need to keep looking, sweetheart,” he calls out from the shadows. “Here I am.”
Only, once she sees him too, she laughs and keeps walking.
“Too pretty for me,” she calls over her shoulder, and he finds himself somehow startlingly indignant.
“Excuse me,” he huffs.
“Consider yourself excused,” she says, not looking back, and without quite understanding why, he discovers he wants to change her mind.
8
THAT NIGHT, AFTER SHE’D SHOWERED AND CHANGED INTO her pajamas, April opened her laptop and went online. Most likely, she’d received several new DMs from BAWN, but she wasn’t ready to face those quite yet, much less the Twitter reaction to whatever dinner pics had been posted already.
AO3, then, to check the reaction to her most recent story.
She’d posted her one-shot fic late last night, in response to the Lavineas server’s self-declared fanfic initiative, Aeneas’s Angry Boner Week.
Her contribution had received a gratifying number of kudos and comments so far. All necessary and welcome encouragement after one of her rare forays into book-canon-compliant storytelling, rather than a self-created modern AU.
In the story, Lavinia confronted one of her ex’s soldiers outside the home she shared with Aeneas—a soldier who spat upon her for breaking her betrothal to Turnus, his dead leader, and threatened to do worse. Instead of calling for help from her husband, she drove away the intruder with her own sword, and when Aeneas heard about the incident, he marched toward his homely, resentful wife, inexplicably enraged by her carelessness when it came to her own safety, and—
Yeah. Their platonic marriage of convenience became decidedly less platonic, but somewhat more convenient in terms of, say, mutual sexual gratification.
April had originally intended to write a fluffy modern AU, as normal. But somehow, even before their date, picturing a hero with Marcus Caster-Rupp’s face meeting, falling for, and fucking a woman—albeit a woman who looked like Lavinia, not April—in the modern world had suddenly seemed . . . odd. Exploitative in a way it never had before.