eleven letters, a fun way to pass the morning?

title: eleven letters, a fun way to pass the morning?
fandom: Stardew Valley
character(s)/pairing(s): Emily, Sandy; Sandy/Emily
summary: Sandy, Emily, and The Zuzu Herald's Sunday crossword.
crossposted: AO3 / Sunset / Tumblr

note: rated explicit on AO3!

"Seven letters, 'lady of'—hm—'the seas.'"

Emily hums. Pulls back. Drums a finger. "Siren?"

"No, too short," Sandy says.

"Oh. Mermaid," Emily says, then leans in again.

Sandy hisses. Emily just hums again, the low vibration of it pulling a long groan from Sandy. Somehow, she manages to scrawl it in.

"Nine letters, um…no, eight…'a wizard's newspaper of choice.' Solarion."

"Really?" Emily pulls back again. Sandy, face hidden from her by the newspaper, clenches her teeth; her hips twitch, though, and Emily's laugh sounds like she was expecting it. Tease.

"There are a few letters in the right place. And it fits."

Another hum. Emily traces something along the soft skin of Sandy's inner thigh, then something else, then something else that she finally recognizes as letters. It's her answer. Another, more pleased hum after the "n," then whatever finger was writing starts lazily trailing up, and up, and Sandy's teeth are clenched—"That's quite a pull. How'd you get it?"

"I had the 's' and an 'o,'" Sandy says. "And when I worked at that card shop in Grampleton, they called their newsletter The Chron—"

Emily, unbeknownst to Sandy, had been moving in while she was talking, and her tongue does something that cuts her sentence off with a yelp. The damn woman has the gall to chuckle at that, so Sandy huffs and whaps her on presumably her head with the newspaper section before returning to her task at hand. (Though the only effect it really has is drawing out another laugh.)

The next several clues are straightforward enough. Or they would be, if she were able to…focus. "Pearls before these"—soft kisses, but not where she wants them. "Between mountains"—Emily holds her exactly how she wants her, but pulls back in the process. "Metals that make you work for it"—that tongue again, but too light to do anything but make her go cross-eyed and fidgety. Her nerves are fraying in wonderful ways, but it's making the freebie clues hard and the cockeyed clues impossible. Worse, the grid spanner at the center of the puzzle, the only barrier between her and what her entire body is screaming for, is missing too many letters to even guess at.

Emily seems to want to remind her of that, too, when she replaces her tongue with a finger, just a touch higher than where Sandy needs it. (Given how she holds Sandy's hips down firm to the couch when she tries shifting for some release, she knows it, too. Tease.) "How's it coming?" she asks, slow as a bead of water trickling down the side of a cold glass, and when Sandy folds the paper back to glare at her she's…licking her lips with a soft smile that's almost at odds with just how intense her eyes are.

Sandy shivers and shifts a bit, her glare dropping as she licks her own lips at Emily's expression. It only makes the woman smile wider, eyes crinkling a bit at the corners as she lifts her eyebrows to repeat the question. "It's coming along," Sandy manages. She tilts her head and tries a smile of her own. "Maybe it's not the only thing that could be…?"

"You know what you need to do." Emily doesn't break eye contact, but that finger moves down to give her one firm, breathtaking circle before drifting back up.

"Worth a shot," Sandy says shakily, meeting Emily's crystal-sharp gaze for a second before chuckling a bit and returning to her puzzle. "Ten letters, 'an edible spiral'? Ends with 'd.'"

Emily shrugs, and Sandy rolls her eyes. She fills in a few words around it as Emily starts to work at her with her mouth again, drags teeth and wraps lips and fills Sandy's head with cotton, then miraculously it clicks: "Fiddlehead."

A firm lick, at that. Several. Sandy's eyes and thighs flutter, her toes clench, and she's, she's right, she's right—

And Emily pulls back. Just a hair from the edge. Sandy's body curls forward on instinct and she groans, long and pleading, right into Emily's grinning face.

"Please," Sandy rasps, breathing hard, the newspaper crushed between her torso and her bent-open thighs. She yanks Emily in by the chin and kisses her, open mouthed and more bite than anything. Her own taste on the woman's lips only winds her tighter.

Emily moans into it before drawing back. Somehow, her eyes are burning even brighter as she asks, "What about that spanner?"

"It's getting there," Sandy croaks. Technically true, but given how far her mind is from this puzzle, she might as well be lying straight to her face.

Emily's eyes drift down to her lips. "How many words do you have?"

Sandy leans away just enough to count her crossed-out numbers. She counts for a living, but has to restart twice when Emily's hand wanders a little too high. "Twenty seven."

Emily nods. Pushes Sandy's legs apart harder than she would normally and drags that blue-hot gaze down. If Sandy were in her right mind she'd make a quip at the expression on her face, maybe wrestle with her a bit. In this state, though, just sprawls back and opens up, lets one leg hang off the couch. Shifts her hips forward. Bites her own lip, too, because if there was ever a time to go for broke….

The hand holding her knee open tightens, Emily's nails digging in hard enough to send lightning lancing across her nerves. Sandy inhales sharply, and—

"One more," Emily says.

Sandy manages, barely, to choke off a whine at that. "Em," she starts, but then Emily's eyes flick up and she smiles…not her grin, not her smirk, but that smile. The you-can-do-it one, the one that's bright and clear and that she's shot Sandy's way a thousand times. The one that's always her first, best memory of her girl. Sandy's chest aches.

"C'mon, lovely," Emily says, lowering back down. "Just one more."

All Sandy can manage to do is jerk her head up and down in a nod. She digs the newspaper out of where it's gotten crumpled between her side and the couch, gropes around on the floor until she finds where her pencil rolled off to. She starts poring over the paper in her hands, looking for something short, easy, mostly done, whatever is going to get filled in the fastest. "Horizontal mine accesses"—Emily shifts, those careful, steady fingers to part her—"frozen from fear"—so she can press a gentle kiss right above her clit, something soft that makes Sandy fight off a shudder—"fortunate"—and, and just the tip of her tongue—

"Lucky," Sandy gasps. And keeps gasping, because as soon as she gets it out Emily dives in, licking and sucking and laving and moaning and the vibrations of that, oh—

Sandy sails off the cliff with a long, glorious shout. Every muscle in her clenches and then her clit throbs, waves of pleasure rolling through her body strong enough to make her writhe and nearly sob. It's all she can do to wind her fingers through Emily's blue locks and claw at her bare shoulders. Whether to pull her closer or push her away, who knows, but something in her needs the anchor of the woman's body as Emily presses her down and works her through it, hard at first before tapering off as her limbs loosen and go slack.

When Sandy is fully slumped back against the arm of the couch, Emily presses a gentle kiss to her clit one last time before straightening. Sandy pants up at her for a moment, watching Emily look her over head-to-toe with a growing grin before she throws the newspaper and pencil onto the coffee table and gestures for her smug little smile to come here. She pulls Emily in and kisses her until she's panting too.

Eventually, Emily pulls back a bit and glances over at the heap of newsprint off to the side. "I told you we could do more of it."

Sandy looks over too and huffs a quiet laugh. "Were you really going to make me solve that long one first, before you let me come?"

"I wanted you to get farther than last week. And you did!" Emily picks up the newspaper and maneuvers around so that she's sitting between Sandy's legs and spreading the crossword out across Sandy's chest. A small smile is all the reaction Sandy gets from squawking about the position, but damn if she isn't too boneless to do much about it. "Yeah, this is much more filled in," she says as she scans it. "Even without the spanner."

"A snowball has a better chance of surviving outside than I had at figuring it out while you were down there."

Emily hums. Smiles. "Well. Maybe I'll draw things out a little longer next week. Give you some motivation to try to finish it.

"I don't know," Sandy says, reaching over to grab the pencil and offering it to Emily with a grin. "Then we wouldn't get to tag team it. You sure you want that?"

Emily chuckles before leaning in to take the pencil and kiss Sandy, long and languid and lazy as the rest of the morning looks stretching out before them.

"I'm so glad I convinced you to start taking Sundays off," Emily murmurs against her lips.

"Me too," Sandy says. "Now lay down and start writing."