Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12834762.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Taboo_(TV_2017)
  Relationship:
      James_Delaney/Zilpha_Geary, Thorne_Geary/Zilpha_Geary
  Additional Tags:
      Sibling_Incest, Sibling_Bonding, Sibling_Love, Infidelity
  Series:
      Part 7 of Infidelity_Kink, Part 1 of Taboo
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-11-27 Words: 2397
****** This Close ******
by Dirtykinkylove
Summary
     His breath ghosted past her lips and she felt faint.
Notes
     This is how their scene together in Episode 2 should've ended. Also,
     their dialogue on the stairs is lifted from the show. Warning on
     behavior that verges on dub-con.
See the end of the work for more notes
Her breath trembled in her throat as she felt the presence of him behind her,
some surly beast prowling through the underbrush. She could excuse
their...youthful indiscretions...as the product of too much neglect and lack of
care, but twelve years since the last press of his flesh against hers couldn't
account for her knowledge of his whispers at the edge of hearing.
"Little bird," he soothed, his lips against the fragile shell of her ear. "Come
fly to me."
Only with her did the growl in his voice quieten into a seductive drawl, a lure
her fifteen year self never resisted, but her twenty-seven year old self bucked
against. 
"Never," she responded fiercely, knowing she didn't have the strength to leave
him as he once left her. She'd taken his desertion to heart and had deafened
herself to him, though their connection flourished in her dreams, ones she
could safely ignore in the light of day and the cold chill of her husband's
regard.
Rough fingertips stole across her bared collarbone and dipped into the
decolletage of her (suddenly) favorite evening dress. She stifled the moan that
threatened her lips and ignored the light pebbling of her breasts as he
casually stroked across them, sure of his ownership. Her body was never her
own, always subject to the whims of the men in her life, James no excepting.
Sharp pleasure peaked through her when he cruelly tightened his fingers,
forcing her back into the present and from her own thoughts; he'd always known
when she'd wandered from him into the black he couldn't share. James was a
possessive and greedy boy at twenty-one and the intervening years seemingly
hadn't dulled that instinct. 
"This is mine as is this," he responded, his other hand dropping to her...cunt.
The thrill of the word once moaned against her lips scored lines of fire
between her breasts and her lower body, and she instinctively writhed against
the brutally strong body pressing into her back. She could feel him hardened
against her, an instrument of both terror (her husband) and pleasure (James)
she never forgot.
"Zilpha?" Sarah, her companion in lieu of Thorne for the evening, stepped into
the glass frame, disrupting her line of sight with James and ending
their...interlude. She felt feverish and overwrought, and nearly cursed her
friend from allowing her completion. "Are you alright? You are flushed."
"I, I, am not feeling well; maybe a brief sojourn outside will refresh me," she
intoned primly, knowing without needing to look that he'd already left the
room.
"Do you need me to attend you?"
There was an edge to Sarah's words as if she suspected something awry, but
Zilpha was practiced at deflecting unwanted attention and persuaded her friend
to return to the musical. This feeling of impending doom was as familiar as the
feeling of James' heartbeat beneath her hand, and Zilpha couldn't help her
quickened steps until she nearly flew like the bird James often compared her to
when they were younger.
James caught her midway down the stairs as she knew he would, and the brush of
brand-soaked breath across her sensitive lips made her feel faint. She ached at
the feeling of him surrounding her after so long apart, but she couldn't allow
it. She pushed him a step back, though they were both aware only because he
allowed it.
"James, please don't."
The first sally in their battle.
"What? I missed you and couldn't bear to see you alone."
Indignation welled. If he hated to see her alone, why had he left her in the
first place? "Do you know this is so old, I could even laugh at you."
Bitterness welled as fresh as the spring water he once fed her mouth to mouth. 
"And yet you came outside to see me," he pointed out smugly, his emotions
beating against her as intensely as her own tormented desire to lessen the
space between their physical bodies.
"Because otherwise you would've come to me and make very loud declarations." It
wouldn't be the first time he had staked his claim on her in public except now
it wouldn't be indulged as a young brother's desire to protect his sister. No,
she greatly feared it would be seen as exactly what it was: a man coming for
his woman. 
"I would, yes. Is it my loudness that troubles you?" Had it been anyone else,
Zilpha would've dismissed the sly innuendo, but memory impinged on the moment,
recalling them both to times when his loudness was very welcomed.
She pressed her attack. "in the forest, no." The shielded glen that beheld the
birth and death of their mutual innocence. "In the jungle, no." That steamy
half-remembered place between waking and sleep where they did things their
physical bodies weren't capable of.
He parried. "You used to straighten your skirts, and march away like nothing
every happened." 
Zilpha felt the scarlet brand of passion fill her cheeks and brighten her eyes
- so like his, so like their father's - as her body remembered what her mind
strove to forget. Those fingers, so broad and capable even then, pushing past
her maidenly modesty and enticing her into licentious behavior, sprawling like
the tartiest of maids as he paid homage to her on his knees like a penitent
before a religious icon. He'd played patient and worshipful until she fell into
his arms with quivering thighs and heaving bosoms, the wet suction of those sly
digits giving way to the press of a man's private flesh.
Passion twisted into shame when she remembered watching his broad back leave
her behind with nary a glance over his shoulder. "Who marched away?" His
beloved face, once so dear and known, knitted with a grimace of pain and their
breaths mingled for a brief shining second before anger saved her from
indiscretion. "And thank God you did," she commended, stepping back that
crucial inch.
"Gone." The word was wondering.
"This is very simple, James," she began with a slight roll of her shoulder.
"Take away a little ancient history. You live in the east. I live in the west."
Pain surged beneath her breastbone as impassioned promises to take her with him
echoed down the long corridor of time between then and now. "There are no
practical difficulties." Her last decisive blow. The fever surging beneath her
skin couldn't break through the layer of ice she'd spent a decade building as
the realities of womanhood asserted itself with tenacious and exacting
standards. 
He never could give up a fight. "Apart from that great big river that connects
us."
Gods damn him! She wanted to hurt him as she hurt, a gaping wound in her soul
that never ceased whispering his name even as she lay beneath the heaving bulk
of another man. She recalled Thorne's words from earlier and whirled around,
her skirts flaring gently against her legs. Zilpha stepped as close as she
dared and asked, "Did you really eat flesh?" She waited for his expression to
morph into cold derision, something her husband never could do quite as well,
but instead he took the step so it put them on level again, and she tasted his
breath as he said, "Why don't you tell your friends that you're sick, and you
can come and hear everything."
The silence that fell between them was leavened only by the sounds of applause
and the tuning strings of the next quartet to play. She so badly wanted to pat
his face and flounce away, could even see herself do it, but walking away
was his strength and not hers. She just wanted one more second of closeness
before she locked this in the past as was right, but James was never one to
hesitate when he sensed an opening, and he grasped her wrist and whirled her
down the steps towards the beckoning blackness besides it, a hidden alcove only
he would find. The sounds of the crowd faded even as the city around them
expanded. 
She scratched at him when he used his larger body to force her against the cold
stones, hitching his thighs between hers until he grunted and shifted it so her
legs wrapped around his lean waist. The sliver of excitement wended its way
through her when he pressed his hard...cock...to the apex of her thighs and
whispered, "The only flesh I ever ate was yours, your warm cunny dripping with
honey."
"Damn you, I'm a married woman," she cursed at him. James laughed quietly
against her throat as he dragged her fur from her shoulders so it trapped her
elbows tight against her. "That was a false wedding, promises to obey and bed a
man when you already promised yourself body and soul to me long before Thorne
came."
The rage rippled through his words and she instinctively stilled with feminine
fear at having a raving male so close to her vulnerable parts. The tanned and
nearly feral man between her legs wasn't the same devil-may-care boy who'd
mocked her until she cried and then tasted each tear as if was manna straight
from the heavens. She didn't really know this man, despite what her foolish
heart decided.
James ended their stalemate by taking her mouth with his, his teeth scoring her
lips until she parted them and his tongue stroked across the barrier of her
teeth. Muscle memory guided her as she opened even further beneath his
ministrations and their tongues dueled with silken strokes reminiscent of even
further intimacy he clearly wanted. A small moan shattered the fevered silence
and sharply reminded Zilpha of her own anger. She tore her mouth from his, her
teeth cutting at his lips and leaving a bloody trail.
"You left me! You promised to take me with you and then you left!"
Each cry was ripped from the depths of her wounded being and she slapped his
face once, twice, three times before he grabbed both delicate wrists in one
large hand and tightened briefly until he let her go. Unbidden her hands came
to rest on the greatcoat stretched across his broad shoulders. "I couldn't take
you with me, Father would've destroyed me had I tried. I left to make my
fortune to take care of you!"
Tears poured unchecked down her cheeks as the ice finally started to melt
beneath the onslaught of heat he brought to bear. "I waited for you for a year,
waiting for word of your arrival or departure, for one bl-bloody word of your
presence in the world. I had no choice to wed Thorne, James, and you know it!"
Horace Delaney was a hard man who forced others to do his bidding with or
without their wishes. Zilpha was only glad her knowledge of the marriage bed
came before her wedding night, otherwise she would've curled up with horror and
died then. Thorne Geary wasn't chosen for Zilpha's pleasure, but for the coin
he supposedly would bring to the Delaney coffers. She nearly coughed for the
mad laughter welling her at the thought of how a nearly penniless man wed his
daughter to another nearly penniless man, both men assuming they were getting
the better end of the bargain. 
Her mind was abruptly brought back to the present moment when she felt the cold
evening air against her bared thighs, James having shoved her skirts to her
waist as she drifted in contemplation. The feeling of the backs of his hand
against her was obviously him unbuttoning his breeches.
"Do not do this, James," she warned. "Do not make me."
"Make?" he barked against her lips, though his hand never stilled. "I can feel
how wet and desperate you are for cock instead of the little prick you've had
for a decade." The smooth insertion of one finger is surprising and she cannot
bite back this moan when he smoothly crooks it at the right angle. Jealousy
gnawed at her as she imagined all the dark and light skinned women who'd
writhed on his fingers in the time since he last touched her. Spittle collected
in her mouth and she hurled it at him like it was a spear. It landed on his
right cheekbone and slid down, a slimy trail glistening in the faint lamplight
at the edge of their alcove.
His only response was to thrust into her, his intrusion a shock as she took him
to the hilt with an ease she hadn't experienced once in the tenure of her
marriage. The oiled slickness of his entrance and exit could only come from her
and she fought to keep herself from experiencing anything except James refused
to grant her any quarter, swiveling his hips and allowing his fingers to
explore the creases and canyons between his thrusts. Zilpa bit into his
shoulder, wishing for flesh to rend and tear, but needing to content herself
with the griminess of his greatcoat. His grunts and slurred vowels of voiced
pleasure were softening her as once wispy memories formed full and perfect in
her - their - mind's eye, of the first, second, hundredth time they'd done this
in the time of endless summer. Her legs wrapped him tighter and she began to
answer his mating dance, her inner muscles tightening and caressing him in ways
she'd forgotten she could do. 

"My love!" he cried out against her neck, his lips brushing against her
collarbones, a gush of warmth her only warning. Loss hit her then as she
realized he'd gotten what he wanted and left her adrift again...he pulled out
with a rush of seed before dropping heedlessly to his knees in the muck of
London's street, and brought his mouth to her, greedily cleaning her of his
release, before sucking and licking and biting, fingers plucking at her like
the expert violinist a level and a world above them, until that half-forgotten
stirring in her belly urged her to ride his tongue until she too found elusive
pleasure.
James looked anything but subservient at her feet, face slick with her, and she
hated him most in that moment, a twin to the unbearable and unholy love she
bore him as well. Bringing the fur back around her shoulders and shaking her
skirts into place, Zilpha stepped around him and walked away like nothing had
happened. Victorious.
End Notes
     I made a six year gap in their age due to the actors on the show
     (though they are actually nine years apart) and figured it made sense
     because a) women were married young and b) there hasn't been a clear
     indication of their ages in the episodes I've seen so far.
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