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Sweeney can feel her staring from across the sofa. It is evident in the set of his jaw beneath his beard, the too-stiff angle at which he holds his arms, the way his eyes scan the book in front of him over and over again - seeing without reading, failing to turn the page.
He had spent quite some time selecting a book, inspecting her bookshelves bowed with tomes old and older, pages dogeared and in various states of yellow. She likes to think he is impressed with her selection, even if he will never permit her to know it.
Sweeney told her that he read in prison, squinting at words in the dark of his cell between violent beatings and sleepless nights and back-breaking manual labor. He would lay in the dark and close his eyes and will his mind out of his body and far, far away. Sometimes he came home (though not to her, never to her). Other times he trudged uphill to some wild, misty moor dotted with gnarled trees and well-kept secrets. He drifted to islands and stalked the halls of old castles.
The top of his slipper moves, and she knows he is curling his toes inside his worn sock, likely fighting the urge to push the curl from his forehead that sits just above his eyebrow, as if balanced atop its arch. He perches like a cat swishing its tail, irritated, preparing silently to be pounced upon at any moment.
Had Albert ever sat there, on that very cushion, with a book in his hand and the top button of his shirt unbuttoned? Had she ever thought to notice?
Albert hadn’t been much of a reader. No time, he’d said once - or, at least, she thought he did. Once.
Sweeney pushes the collar of his shirt to one side to scratch idly at his skin, feigning nonchalance, and Mrs. Lovett cannot help but think of the hair on his chest, his arms, his thighs. She feels suddenly like a young girl again - blushing, shy, preoccupied permanently with the nebulous nuances of romance, of love, of the things that almost certainly always followed.
How silly, she tells herself, to be discovering love at last at her age.
It is love, truly, in a manner far deeper and more profound than she ever thought possible. A nonchalant flick of his eyes in her direction is enough to make Nellie feel as though the very earth is falling away from her on all sides.
Even now, all this time since he had reappeared on her doorstep, she feels compelled to look at him. To see him. To drink him in as though the mere sight of him might fill the hollow circle of grief that remains in her heart - the reminder of all the time they might once have had and can never get back.
She recalls often the day she first glimpsed him, squeezing the memory for every last drop, wringing it like juice from a spent lemon: his eyes gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, the curls that had framed his face, the ever-so-slight slant to his amiable smile. Nellie knows that even on her deathbed, with her final breaths she will swear still that there has never been anything so beautiful in her life than that split second, frozen forever in the front of her mind.
In the quiet of the evening, Sweeney looks as though he has belonged here his whole life. When people talk of home, of knowing another person truly and wholly, they think of calm. Peace, even, whatever that looks like. Nellie has, instead, found it to be a constant quickening of her pulse, a breath held tightly in her lungs that she cannot ever quite catch.
The windowpanes rattle eerily in their wooden frames, and the wind gives a mournful wail as it whips around the corner of the house. Mrs. Lovett resists the urge to push her stockinged feet beneath his thigh, to guard herself against the chill of winter. Mr. Todd turns another page.
She thinks of Sweeney: his body tangled in her sheets, his greying head cushioned by her pillow and his fingers curled against his cheek; a flash of his lean, bare calf poking from under her secondhand quilt. A warm glow blooms at the base of her throat.
Even when he sets his book aside momentarily to stretch, raising his arms above his head and turning his neck to one side, she thinks of the way he arches his back when she squirms in his lap, how his belly tenses just before he cums.
Mrs. Lovett twists her hands in her skirt, balling up the fabric in her damp palms. She’d never once doubted the magnitude of her feelings for him; it was like the impact of being struck suddenly by a carriage, or the sudden plummet off the edge of a vast cliff. Had Albert been able to tell, all those years ago, just by the look in her eyes when she thought of Benjamin Barker?
Albert is only a name to her now - a character in a story, someone she met once in a dream. He’d likely be disappointed to know as much, not that she gave much consideration to his various affectations of disappointment when he’d been alive.
Sweeney blinks. She half expects him to remove his reading spectacles and rub at the bridge of his nose, the way he does when he is angry or frustrated or heading deeper into the darkest recesses of his mind - like there is a spot between his eyes that needs scrubbing out. Instead, he turns the page.
What must it feel like, she wonders, to rustle delicately between his fingers. To be leafed and turned and dogeared by those hands.
Warmth spreads through her, like a hot sip of tea on a frigid winter afternoon, down her throat and across her chest and into the pit of her stomach. All of the years she had spent dreaming of him, conjuring an approximate image of him in her mind to keep her company when she had none, and here he was. Different, yes, but here all the same - every imperfect, beloved inch of him, from the dark swirl of salt and pepper hair at the top of his weary head to the blunt nails of his toes.
It amazes her still that this has happened: that they have found each other again, that, through a cataclysmic event, terrible and earth-shattering though it may have been, their lives have once again entwined.
Would they have found each other eventually? In any scenario? Not even a continent could keep them apart in the end. Not prison, or the ocean. It’s all very romantic to Mrs. Lovett: the notion that even the darkest, most unthinkable turns of events shrink when stacked up against the inevitability of their togetherness.
It feels momentous, and she wishes, for the first time in a very long time, that she had any remaining friends with whom to discuss it.
Nellie’s leg has long fallen asleep where it is tucked beneath her, pins and needles prickling the length of her calf, but she can’t find it in herself to move. His finger taps the corner of the page, and Nellie thinks that if she so much as breathes too loudly, he might jump to his feet and flee into the back of the house – or worse, out the door and into the night, never to be seen again. Gone just as suddenly as he’d appeared, like the bang of a bird against glass.
But would he ever leave? Could he, even, given what secrets lay between them? A caged animal, she supposes, is quite capable of anything under enough duress. Though the way he looks at her in the dead of night when it is only the two of them, their shadows stretching too-large across the wallpaper, his eyes glinting like those of a wolf, his lip curled and gritted teeth bared -
Sweeney turns a page, and the rustle of the paper startles her back to the present.
Nellie wishes he was the kind of man that needed tending. Didn’t all men, though, to some extent? He is more handsome now than he has ever been, and Mrs. Lovett considers for a moment that she may only feel that way because he is hers now, truly , in a way he hadn’t ever been before. No longer transient, his home is their home, his bed their bed. She wonders if he remembers coming into the shop back then, exchanging little pleasantries, changing her life exponentially each time he smiled at her.
Mrs. Lovett wonders, too, what Sweeney had noticed about her all those years ago. If he had noticed anything at all. While Benjamin might have once been easily swayed by a bit of beauty, Nellie likes to think that Sweeney is a man who cares about other things: loyalty, dependability, practicality.
And what about Sweeney? He had certainly never envisioned this life for himself, in any capacity. Though neither of them dare to say as much, it hangs always in the air between them, unexpressed.
When he’d returned home, his pale face intense and ravaged, he’d looked like a man who had accepted a suicide mission, marching ever onward towards certain doom. She wonders often if he ever expected to return or if he had resigned himself to being just another of the countless men who got shipped off never to be seen again.
Maybe he had never really left at all, and his mind is shackled still. Damned to the darkness and damned to wander forever in memories that he cannot shake.
His features have settled since then, still haunted but resigned to it - to his life, to his circumstances.
She supposes it could be much worse.
“What.”
It is far from a question, the way it is always is with Sweeney, the single syllable falling from his lips like a challenge. Mr. Todd appraises her through the lenses of his reading glasses. Nellie lifts her shoulder to her ear in a half-shrug.
“Don’t play coy with me, Mrs. Lovett. You’ve been sitting like that for an hour.”
“Like what !” Nellie balks. Her hands fly to her chest in feigned offense, covering her flushing skin as though the blush has not already crept up her neck onto her cheeks and the tip of her ears. “It has not been an hour!”
Still, her heart stirs beneath her fingers: he noticed. In spite of himself, perhaps, but beggars cannot often be choosers,
“I’m no fool.”
“Now, when did I say that? Mr. T.-“
“Whatever it is you want to say, you’d better just say it so I can get on with my reading.”
“Who said I had something to say, eh?”
Sweeney rolls his eyes and turns back to the book in his hands. She should hardly be surprised; the barber had been in a prickly mood all morning and well into the afternoon, his sour attitude hanging over him like a fog.
He had swatted her away after she’d made a breakfast that he, of course, did not eat. When Nellie had practically bounced up the stairs and into his shop halfway through the day, he’d had to wrench her hand from the back of his trousers to get her to let go. Even before supper, Sweeney had sent her sulking back into the kitchen, her shoulders rounded with the slump of defeat.
The tighter-than-usual lacing of her corset that morning had done nothing to entice him, and neither had the plunging neckline of her blouse or the strategically loose curl left to tumble down the back of her neck. Other men might be grateful. Not that she wanted anything to do with other men.
Though a bit of brooding and grousing is certainly nothing new, this is different, harder to pin down. All day, he’d carried with him the air of someone busying himself with needless tasks for the sole purpose of having an excuse to brush her off - picking up a bowl of shaving lather just to put it back down elsewhere, aligning a stack of papers that needed no aligning. Still, Nellie thought he’d have shrugged it off by now, or at least pretended to.
“But- Well, since you brought it up,” she trails off, her hand creeping across the cushion towards his leg, fingertips walking little divots into the sofa. When her palm makes contact with his tense thigh, Sweeney snaps his book shut and jolts so violently that it startles her.
“I did nothing of the sort. How many times must I tell you to leave me be?” he barks, dropping the book onto the couch beside him and rising to his slippered feet, shaking Nellie’s hand off brusquely in the process. It is Mrs. Lovett’s turn to roll her eyes.
“I’ve wasted too much time already. All these months, and the Judge- the Judge still lives.” His voice cracks, just once, just briefly, but it is enough to catch Mrs. Lovett’s notice. In spite of herself, her posture stiffens. She rolls her shoulder. Is it a waste? Is that truly what he thinks? Part of her, she supposes, had expected as much, though it does nothing to dull the sting of his words, the venom seeping into her veins. Nellie exhales through her nose.
She reminds herself it is always this way: fine until it isn’t, placid until something inevitably shakes loose.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not now, not after all this time.
“Now, Mr. T., what did I say? About waiting?”
His fingers flex, the tendons in his hand popping beneath his skin. Sweeney curls his trembling digits into a white-knuckled fist. She’d been a fool to ever get so close, and yet she bobs toward him, rising without needing to think about the motion, a piece of driftwood caught in a rip current.
“ Waiting? And how much longer must I wait, then?” Something dangerous tinges the sharp edge of his tone, something brittle, ready to snap like the jaws of a trap. “I have waited: day after day, sitting here pretending - and all the while, he’s out there. And my daughter-“
Nellie suppresses a deep sigh. Sweeney had been stewing silently all night, simmering, pushing his food from one side of his plate to the other until she’d finally given him leave from the table. He’d woken up cross, too, all but stomping across the bedroom to the basin to wash his face that morning.
From the foggy kitchen window, she’d seen a fat crow on the roof of the house next door, preening his glossy black feathers. He’d turned his head, and the glint of his sharp eye meeting her own through the glass had chilled her to the bone. Mrs. Lovett wonders now if it had been an omen of some sort, a sign she missed, portending some future ill fate.
“How ‘bout I fix you something to eat, dear? Or a drink? ‘S not good for you to get all worked up-“ She slaps her palms against her thighs in a gesture of finality, a decision already decided, and begins to rise from the sofa.
“I don’t need you to tell me what’s ‘good’ for me.”
The lines in his forehead deepen. She would marry him right this instant if she could, whispering her vows to the bowed old walls of the house, letting the shapes in the wallpaper bear witness to their unholy union.
“Well, ‘course you don’t, but-“ Mrs. Lovett cannot stop herself, babbling in spite of her better judgment. “I can run you a bath, dear. A nice soak could-“
“ Leave me, ” he roars, straightening his spine, drawing himself to his full height. The flicker of the flames in the fireplace casts a long, distorted shadow across the rug, stretching his silhouette into something twisted and unrecognizable. Stunned, Nellie sinks back down onto the sofa. Her heart thuds in her ears, and her hairs stand on end.
Sweeney comes to a sudden halt in the worn center of her secondhand rug and crosses his arms, his face poised on the precarious edge of some emotion. Fixed on some indeterminate point on the carpet, his eyes betray a sense of spiral - a long descent into a dark, unknowable abyss. His rigid posture sags, suddenly, and for a moment, he looks lost. His gaze darts from Mrs. Lovett to the wall, then the fireplace.
The real damage had been done beneath his skin, wounds he picked at with his brain until they bled where no one else could see.
Benjamin had never been so intense, so tightly wound. He’d been demure, willowy, easygoing in a way that not a lot of men she knew seemed to be. Even now, she finds herself studying the downturned corners of his mouth and wondering if she’ll ever again catch a glimpse of his crooked smile. If there had been the faintest flash of darkness in Benjamin, she’d never seen it.
Sometimes she thinks she hadn’t known him at all, not really, not in the way that she’d wanted to - but they’d been friends, hadn’t they?
She knew he liked to take evening strolls after work, knew that he was amiable and cautious and graceless in a charming way - a fawn stumbling on gangly stilt legs, smiling genially to anyone he passed.
She knew, too, that Benjamin fancied himself a reader. She offered him a collection of stories once. He’d taken it upstairs with him, ducking his head shyly in a show of polite gratitude, though she had no way to know if he ever so much as cracked the spine.
He had entertained her on a few occasions: helping himself to a few tepid sips of ale poured too-eagerly into a dusty tankard, regaling her with a mundane anecdote about his day. He took his tea without sugar. He went to sleep early. He took some small pity on the widow who needed to rent out a room to pay her rent.
If she waved at him through the front window of her shop, he would pause long enough to flash her a bashful, crooked grin from the other side of the glass.
He was always there, even when he wasn’t: close enough to see, far enough to hurt.
Surely, it meant something, added up to something greater, even if she was uncertain of just exactly how the pieces fit together. Nellie’s heart stings fiercely with the recollection of losing him all those years ago - the sharp lash of a whip, the suddenness of his absence still hanging over her shoulders like a wet woolen blanket or the heavy hands of some old specter. They had been close, or close enough, at least, and they could be again if she only worked hard enough at it.
She used to envision him finding his way back to her, sailing steadily towards home, leaned over the bow of some great ship with wind-filled sails. It kept her alive for fifteen years, even when it seemed less and less likely by the day.
The fireplace crackles behind him, sputtering the last sad remnants of the fire she’d stoked hours ago and startling him back to himself.
Nellie studies him the way she has always studied him: unblinking, terrified that he will evaporate if she looks away for even a second. Like she has been missing him since the instant they met. He looks larger in the parlor, looming imposingly over the furniture, his rounded shoulders squared and his spine straightened against the imposing pattern on the wallpaper.
The way his shirt bunches up around his pectorals and twists at his waist is terribly distracting, the edge of the garment dangerously close to becoming untucked. If she did not know better, she’d almost think he was doing it with the intention to distract her, to disarm her. As if Sweeney feels her attention, he shudders.
Moments like these - brief flashes of time, inconsequential especially to Sweeney himself - make her wonder where they’d be now if she had made even one different choice. If she had moved away from London. If she had told him the truth.
She feels she will always be wordlessly apologizing, reflexively hiding I’m sorry in the corners of every mundane gesture even though he will never know it. Now more than ever, Nellie longs to go to him, to wrap her arms around him as tightly as she can and melt straight into the warm, fleshy space beneath his skin. As if Sweeney can sense it merely by the look in her eyes, he draws himself up to his full height. A warning. Stay away.
His fingers curl into a fist, and Mrs. Lovett thinks for a moment that he might truly be angry with her this time. It was bound to happen eventually, and she’d been a fool for thinking she might not poke and prod and needle him to his breaking point.
He could overpower her easily. Would he drag her down to the bakehouse, she wonders, her heels thudding helplessly against the steps on the long way down; or would Sweeney take her roughly by the elbow and pull her stumbling up the stairs to see his barber’s chair one final time? It would take little effort to press her into the leather with one of his hands, and less effort still to drag the blade of his razor across her bare throat the way he had with countless others.
Would she fight him? Would he find it exciting?
Nellie imagines herself tumbling down to the bakehouse floor, her throat glistening with a ruby choker.
Mrs. Lovett has never seen him take a life. She thinks she’d like to watch one day, just to see the way his eyes flash and his muscles tense. Sweeney comes down into the parlor with blood splattered on his shirts sometimes, with a dark gleam in his eyes and an uncharacteristic spring to his step. Other women bearing witness to such a thing might have thought their husbands strangers, anyone at all other than the men they married (what kind of person is capable of murder, after all?); but Nellie knows Sweeney is never more himself than when he’s indulged in something dark and unspeakable.
Nellie stretches her arm out like a fishing rod, waggling her fingers and attempting to hook the waistband of his trousers when he brushes by: a desperate attempt to pull him into her, to remind him that she is there. To get him to understand, for just one small, finite moment. If she had her way, they’d always be touching - her hand on his shoulder, their knees pressed together on the sofa, his fingers ghosting along her lower back in the market.
He has already begun his retreat, tracing old paths back down into the depths of his troubled mind. Nellie will follow, comfort him, fight to pull him back from a place she cannot reach him. He must know it. Each time he slips from her, he must anticipate the chase - the wretched circle, the dance they rehearse.
Where do you go, Mr. T.?
She misses and lets her arm hang, sad and limp and suspended momentarily in the growing space between them. She will keep trying. She does not know how to give up.
Dreams never seem to last long past the point of waking - good or bad or something in between, they all pop just the same.
This latest nightmare, Nellie thinks perhaps she deserves, and she is more than glad that its ghost does not linger long. After all she had done to Lucy - every wad of spit hurled in her direction, each time she’d needlessly kicked up rainwater and mud from puddles on her way past. Just that morning, Mrs. Lovett had grabbed her by her bony elbow and yanked her out of the back doorway where the bedraggled woman had been rooting through the garbage in search of breakfast. Lucy had kicked up quite a fuss, screeching and gibbering all the while, though she remained in a heap on the ground where she landed like some gnarled ornament left to the wild, left to rot.
It felt good, gratifying, even, the rush of it filling her like something addicting; this was the worst part. The truly shameful thing. It was not enough to live her stolen life, to fuck her husband, to play pretend in domestic bliss —
Sweeney elicits a snore that makes her guilty heart jump. He had conceded to the bath in the end and remained there long after the water had grown cold, his hand dangling over the side, a long-empty glass of gin clutched tight in his fingers like a lifeline. That is where she’d left him, reluctantly: glazed eyes staring miserably into the water like it might provide him with some kind of answer.
Mrs. Lovett squints into the gloom, busying herself with making sense of the silhouettes dotted around the bedroom - vague approximations of the things that comprise her life. Her eyes trace the suggestion of the armchair, up along the arm, across where the cushion should be, down the other side to the carved foot. In the mirror across the room, she sees only the reflection of the headboard, its shadow slanted across the wallpaper behind it.
They’d had sex in that chair - Sweeney with his legs spread wide to accommodate her graceless, enthused bouncing; Mrs. Lovett had to grip the back of the chair for fear she might simply float, buoyed by joy, right off his lap and through the ceiling. It wasn’t sex, though. It had been something else, an act so sacred there did not exist a name for it. Yet.
Somehow even more intimate, he had permitted her to cling to him once, perhaps the night he’d first arrived back. Maybe another night entirely. She recalls only her arms around him, the press of his back against the front of her body, the feeling of being woven together. If he knew who she was, what she’d done, what she continued to do, he’d never have allowed it.
Nellie figures she must have fallen asleep at some point, her lashes fluttering closed as she watched Sweeney doze fitfully. That he had crawled eventually into bed was a small miracle in itself. The rise and fall of his chest beneath the bedclothes, the tousled curl resting on his creased forehead.
She had been listing even the things she could not see: the not-quite-closed little hole in his ear where she imagined he’d once worn some tiny, glinting ornament like a proper sailor, the light smattering of freckles across his cheeks, the enormity of his presence warming the space beside her where once there had been nothing.
She watches him now, too, desperate for a sign that he had been awake only moments ago.
Mrs. Lovett always feels wistful in the space between asleep and awake, reaching languidly for the sweet fog of dreaming to return as she rolls onto her side and away from him, from the center of the bed. She is nearly prepared to resign herself to the notion that Sweeney’s palm brushing her thigh had been merely a dream, too, when his finger taps her side.
Suddenly, she is too aware of her own body, hyper vigilant of the space she takes up. She fights to keep her breathing even and her posture relaxed.
If Sweeney knows she is awake, he won’t dare touch her again. Though she has always been a light sleeper, that first ghosting of his hand over her hip - hesitant, barely touching, hardly there - had woken her like a shot ringing out into the night. Her heart pounds eagerly. She wants more than anything to roll onto her side and tell him to do it again. And again.
It could have been a mere accident, an unconscious brushing of his limb against her, but it could have been purposeful, too. Deliberate.
Nellie envisions snatching his hand the next time he reaches for her and pulling it over her hip, across her stomach, clamping it securely between her thighs.
The mere implication that he is comfortable enough to touch her - to want to touch her badly enough to try in spite of whatever it is that keeps him from opening up to her - makes her knees weak and her blood rush.
Behind her, Sweeney moves, and the sheets tighten across her shoulders. He sighs. Nellie finds herself longing to be closer, to be settled in the trajectory of his warm exhale. The mattress dips, and she listens to the rustle of the bedclothes against his beloved skin. He’s been restless, agitated, unsettled, and more so than usual. She has come to expect a certain bit of static, something always crackling along his sharpest edges. This is something else.
Something has taken hold of him, shut him off and holed him up in the darkest recesses of his mind like a prisoner. Nellie counts the days in her head, laying them out one by one and assigning them a number. It could be a birthday, an anniversary, something worse. She’s unsure. There is so much about him that she does not, cannot, know.
“Mrs. Lovett?”
The sound of his hoarse whisper sends her heart leaping into her throat, and Nellie rolls onto her side to face him so quickly that she swears she sees his shadow flinch. “Hm?”
Even in the darkness, she can make out the shape of his hand on the blanket, stopped in its tracks just beside her hip, fingers splayed like something caught.
“Ah- Nevermind.”
“No, love, what is it?”
“Forget it. Go back to sleep.” There is a tightness to his voice that does not come from drowsiness. His too-big nightshirt hangs pitifully from his shoulder, and the swatch of his exposed skin glows in the darkness. Like this, he looks almost frightened - startled and wary of even the brush of her shadow falling across him in a long, stretched-out slat. She cannot reconcile the man sprawled beside her with the man who tears through the parlor in a blind rage or sulks at the dining table in the evenings.
“Have you been up all night?” Nellie asks, though she knows already that the answer is yes .
“No,” he says, too quickly, then, defeated, “Yes.”
She bites her tongue and allows a beat of silence to pass.
“Sleep has been… difficult,” Sweeney speaks like he needs to wrench the words from between his teeth.
Mrs. Lovett watches his legs shift beneath the covers, rippling the silhouette of the bed. Even now, heavy with sleep that will never arrive, exhausted from tossing beneath the bedclothes, he smells like soap and lather, like a brand-new shirt or a blanket - something to run her hands over and press her face to and breathe in until she can breathe no longer. A small, barely-there sound passes from between his dry lips.
“Well, I know just the thing,” she murmurs. Sweeney grabs her by the wrist before she can throw back the covers in desperate search of his cock, and her heart sinks just as quickly as it had sprung into her throat. “Oh, Mr. T., just let me-”
“No, let me ,” he says, pushing himself upright and detangling himself from the sheets. Adrenaline surges through her limbs, all at once energizing her and rendering her motionless. Surely, she must be dreaming. She has had this dream so many times before, peppered in among countless others like it. Sweeney swings his leg over her and settles one knee on either side of her body.
The bed frame wails beneath their combined weight, and Nellie wishes for the thousandth time that she had a four-poster bed, something grand and befitting the magnitude of their love. She had never really envisioned taking him in this bed. It was always a different, more impressive structure with silken sheets and embroidered pillow covers.
“What’s come over you all of a sudden, eh? You feelin’ bad about brushin’ me off earlier?” she giggles, squirming beneath his stare, though his face remains mostly in shadow. So this is her reward, then, for tolerating his sour mood. There is always a reward in some way or another. The bit of his cheek caught in the slant of moonlight is pink, and his beloved lips pull down into a frown. “‘S alright,” she says, “You know I forgive you.”
Nellie leans up and folds her hands behind his neck, attempting to pull Sweeney in for a dry, clumsy kiss. When he does not yield, she leans up instead, desperate to taste him, stale breath and all.
This could be forever, she thinks: the future, a watery, moon-washed vision of every night stretched out in front of her. She permits herself, as she often does, to entertain the fantasy for just a moment. A little cobbled cottage, their bodies curled together in slats of yellow sunlight, the waves lapping at the shore and lulling them to sleep in each other’s arms. Nellie lingers just long enough on the thought and imagines that she can pass it to Sweeney, a tangible manifestation of what could be, look what I have for you.
She squeezes her hands together, and the soft hair that curls at the vulnerable nape of Sweeney’s neck tickles her wrists - hundreds of downy soft eyelashes, the countless feet of some tiny gathering of insects.
“It takes too long,” he says against her mouth, too preoccupied with hiking her threadbare nightgown up around her waist to bother with feigning interest in kissing her back. His beard scratches the soft skin of her cheek, and his words are a hot burst of air across her face. A shiver shoots up her spine and into the base of her neck, making her skin prickle and her hair stand on end.
The first time she had managed to talk him into slipping between her legs, she’d felt as if it were the first time all over again; and afterwards, something new - the feeling that she’d been changed forever, that everyone in London would see the difference written plainly on her face though the change had truly been inside.
Now, she feels almost like a wife, awakened in the dead of night by a husband made sleepless with longing for her. Nellie imagines him lying awake for hours, wrestling with thoughts of her spread lewdly beneath him and growing harder by the moment until he could stand it no longer.
She throbs so violently that it hurts, radiating in waves from her cunt to her hips and her thighs.
“What d’you mean, ‘too long’? You’re the one that can’t last a minute!” Mrs. Lovett bumps her leg against Sweeney’s in a bid to get more comfortable beneath him. The hair coating his calf makes her skin erupt into gooseflesh. From this angle, his nightshirt looks impossibly white, the fabric distorting around his stiff cock.
Nellie curses the dark for keeping the full sight of it from her. She envisions it throbbing, flushed, leaking a desperate little bead of precum that glistens like a sticky pearl. She bites back a moan, and her core aches.
“You never want it to end,” he clarifies, slipping his hand between her legs. Not sure I’ve ever heard a man want it to end, she thinks, not without a twinge of annoyance despite Sweeney’s palm against her skin. He has always been deft, his endearing awkwardness masking some long-unused skill that only ever served to make her crave him more. Nellie groans, savoring the feeling of his wide, flat palm against her fevered flesh. She wants to clamp her thighs shut, to keep him there forever. Sweeney slides his finger along her folds - hesitant, shy, almost, so unexpectedly human. Mrs. Lovett wishes, not for the first time, that he’d have been her first: sweet, accommodating Benjamin Barker.
It is mere utility, she knows: a means to an end rather than care for her pleasure. Still, her hips buck into his touch all the same.
Her hands drop to his broad shoulders, twisting the fabric of his nightshirt in her fingers. They could have been each other’s firsts, fumbling through the ordeal of learning another person’s body, sharing the sort of vulnerability that was both terrifying and thrilling. Even through the filter of nighttime, kneeling in front of her with his hand nestled between her thighs, there is a harshness to him that she suspects will never leave. Not all the way. Mrs. Lovett is certain that she can fix him still, that her love for him can seal the cracked and fractured bits.
If only he would let her.
Sweeney’s fingers move against her, brushing places she’d long forgotten. Nellie thinks of his hand: long fingers, short nails, bitten cuticles. He is nothing if not efficient - every movement purposeful though unpracticed, calculated but erring on clumsy. She doesn’t care that his motivation is purely selfish. Her breath escapes her in a shaky sigh.
Mrs. Lovett had been fishing for this all day, trying to bait him into bending her over the arm of the sofa or taking her against the closed door of the barbershop. It is infinitely more satisfying this way, when his body is her reward for a hard-won victory.
For a moment, his sharp eyes linger on her, searching under the cover of night. For- what, exactly? She’s not certain that it really matters, in the end, so long as she manages to hold his gaze. Her heart swells in her chest, ballooning with love that she will never properly be able to express. Mrs. Lovett paws at his other hand and places it over her breast, above her frantically pounding, lovesick heart.
Sweeney is too quick to remove it, flinching as though her nipple poking through the fabric has burned his skin. He steadies his newly unoccupied palm against the headboard instead, rejecting her attempt at gentle authority. He shakes his head, his features twisting into something almost like displeasure. Nellie just wishes that he would touch her, feel her, want her beyond just the necessary motions of sex. She has him at last, but not all the way. She is too needy, yes, and altogether much too desperate, but Mrs. Lovett finds she cannot stop herself. It is love that makes her this way - horrible, terrible love that sits in her bones like an incurable malady. It is the sort of thing she suspects would be enough to declare her mad.
“Do you see what I mean?”
Nellie frowns in spite of herself. “All business, this one,” she mumbles, though she can’t keep from eliciting a delighted shriek when Sweeney curls his fingers - wet and slick and almost slimy - around the bend of her knee to pull her legs open. He pauses, picking her apart, maybe, or trying to talk himself into following through.
She imagines his heart in his chest, thudding like the beating of a bird’s wings against his ribs, and she feels a stab of pain as clearly as if it were her own. Is there any joy in it, she wonders, or does he only scratch a primal itch when he slides into her? Isn’t it all the same in the end?
It’s not like that, he’d muttered once at the mere hint of love and all its weight and implications, and though the inciting incident is long forgotten, Nellie thinks of it often. Like what, then? she wanted to ask. Should have asked.
Mrs. Lovett shifts her hips in a pitiful bid to be enticing, to coax him back into the present, and his throat bobs lewdly when he swallows. If his confidence has wavered at all, Sweeney’s body certainly makes no indication of it.
She plucks coyly at the hem of his nightshirt, nudging it up his hairy thigh. “Let’s get you out of this, then, eh, love?”
He swats her intrusive limb away like a buzzing, bothersome fly and pushes her leg further to the side. She rolls her eyes for the thousandth time that day and settles instead for rubbing idly at her throbbing clit. The accompanying sensation feels wholly unsatisfactory, muted in comparison to his hands on her. Nothing will ever again measure up; everything else is ruined for her completely and entirely.
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m not!”
“I’ll stop,” Sweeney threatens. His earlier hesitation almost makes Nellie think he might mean it this time, that he is fighting with some burgeoning regret at having woken her at all. Still, he reaches beneath his nightshirt to take his cock into his hand. He inhales sharply at the contact, and his eyes flutter closed for the briefest of moments. Is he steeling himself, she wonders? Trying at the very last moment to talk himself out of showing her a scrap of affection?
She supposes it would be so terribly like him. Not that it matters. Nellie could lay just like this and be perfectly content to watch him, to touch herself and allow him to spill onto her legs or her stomach or the sheets. She swipes her index finger over her clit and moans unabashedly. Her body is on fire already, desire scorching her from the inside out.
“Mr. T.! You won’t,” she retorts, her voice breathy. “I know you won’t. Mm- ‘m not ready yet, though.”
“Yes, you are. You’re always ready.” Mrs. Lovett can’t help but laugh. The sound devolves quickly into a low, carnal groan when he pushes his finger into her with no resistance, as if to prove his point. Even his fingers are thick, girthy and knobby-knuckled and callused, and her body eagerly welcomes the addition of a second one. She lifts her hips in a wanton attempt to take his digits deeper. What she wants more than anything is his cock.
Who’s drawing it out now? Mrs. Lovett wants to tease. She won’t, though; she does not dare risk turning him off or breaking the spell. That is the balance, the game they play. Nellie swallows a disappointed whine when he pulls his fingers from her. What comes next - the very best part - is worth the momentary ache of emptiness. It is, in fact, worth everything. She anchors her fingernails in the softness of her pillow and watches Sweeney reach sheepishly beneath his nightshirt once more as though he has anything to be ashamed of. As if there is any modesty left to be preserved between them.
His arm pumps, lean muscle rippling beneath his skin as he strokes himself - once, twice, three times, before he positions the tip of his cock at her entrance. He bites his lip, a flash of yellowed teeth too bright in the sparseness of night. Sweeney’s hips shift forward, but the angle is wrong and he misses, sliding instead against her slick lips. Mrs. Lovett releases something akin to a squeal when his tip nudges up against her throbbing clit. Even in the darkness, she can swear he rolls his eyes.
“Stay still,” he says. She shivers.
“I am!”
Sweeney had shoved his thumb into her mouth once, when her whining and moaning pitched too loudly for him, and his cock had twitched inside her when she bit down on it. Another time, bored with her steady stream of mundanity while they readied for bed, he’d simply stuffed himself past her lips, and Mrs. Lovett had taken him until she gagged. A great glob of spit had fallen from the corner of her mouth onto the floor, narrowly missing his bare foot.
The sheets rustle beneath her body, and Sweeney’s nightshirt shifts against his skin like a sigh. Anticipation slips beneath her nightgown like a chill, hardening her nipples and blanketing her skin in gooseflesh; Nellie had forgotten to be cold. The dreary winter slush outside might as well be on some distant planet, the windows chattering in their panes belonging to someone else’s house.
This time, when he presses forward, he does not miss. Mrs. Lovett’s mouth sticks open in a wordless “O” shape, the breath leaving her lungs as she stretches around him. His size surprises her, always, even when her body pleads for it and her legs are splayed as far apart as she can manage. She needs this, him , more than anything. Nellie resists the pull to screw her eyes shut in favor of squinting through the darkness at Sweeney’s face. She cannot, will not, miss this.
Even in the scant light, she can make out the crease between his eyebrows and the way his jaw moves wordlessly beneath the cover of his beard. He breathes out, once, his lips barely parted. He always looks pained, she thinks, as though pleasure cannot exist without it. Perhaps that’s true. She reaches up to cup his cheek, to cradle his pinched face in her palm and stroke at the screwed-shut corner of his eye. It only lasts long enough for him to exhale the shaky beginnings of a moan, a sound held in his lungs for so long it manifests as a rattle. He turns his face from her hand.
He fills her until Mrs. Lovett feels she might tear at the seams, and their hips press together at long last, slotted like pieces of a puzzle. Sweeney nudges himself impossibly further, their sweaty skin flush, nowhere left to go. It is difficult to breathe. To focus. Nellie twists her arm around the back of his neck in an attempt to pull him towards her open mouth, only to drop it, limp, onto the pillow. His nightshirt brushes her thighs and her stomach, twisting around him like the sheets beneath her prone form.
Sweeney feels it, she’s certain: the involuntary jump of her muscles, the traitorous way her body responds to him. She longs to bite him, to be bitten herself, to sink her teeth into the vulnerable stretch of skin where his throat and shoulder meet. Instead, she squirms uselessly, shifting her hips just to feel his hardness rooted deep inside her.
“You can move now,” she says, the words hitting the air more harsh than seductive, commanding where she had hoped to be playful. Could’ve just shoved it in there, too. Fed up with being forced to endure the special sort of torment that prolonging pleasure brings, Mrs. Lovett reaches forward and grabs weakly for his hip.
Sweeney pulls himself from her abruptly, grunting in displeasure of his own making, but her resulting disappointed whine cuts short when he shoves her back into the mattress. His eyes flash, and his nostrils flare. Nellie swallows hard, and her heart thunders in her ears. Before she can gather herself enough to say a single word, he grabs her by the wrists and pins her hands above her head. Blood races through her veins, excitement and adrenaline shocking her like a thousand tiny bolts of jagged lightning.
“Why can’t you listen?” he snarls, thrusting himself into her before she can react. It hurts , and yet, she can’t seem to get enough of it. Of him. Ordinarily, she’d have to pick quite a fight to get him so worked up; this is better. Mrs. Lovett’s back arches up off the mattress, every inch of her body yearning again to be pressed into him. Sweeney pauses only long enough to allow Mrs. Lovett to catch her ragged breaths, his hips stilled against her own and his sturdy body rigid between her splayed legs.
“I- I can’t listen,” she repeats mindlessly, the words tumbling from her mouth before her pleasure-fogged brain can think of anything more intelligent to say. She would say anything to keep him there. Sweeney tightens his grip on her wrists, and his blunt nails dig into her thin skin. His forehead creases, brows pinching upward, though whether it is with concentration or something else, she is unsure.
He moves again, grunting, and Nellie wears it like a badge of honor: only she can make him feel this way, so primal that any facsimile of shame falls away when it comes down to it. “Useless,” he spits. “You’re only good for one thing-“
”Tell me. Tell me, Mr. T.-“. She all but squeals, her voice pitching and her body squeezing around him. It is too much and not enough, pleasure and pain and longing that nothing can quell. Desire swells within her, a twisting, writhing thing beyond any hope of control. Nellie feigns a struggle, wrestling weakly against the circle of his hands to make him grip her more harshly. “Tell me I’m nothing.”
”Y-you’re nothing,” he says feebly, a moan sliding from between his lips. Sweeney’s hips stutter, throwing off any remaining semblance of established rhythm. He only thrusts harder, as if to prove to himself that he can regain the momentum. Nellie will be sore in the morning, and her fingers curl into fists above her head. She longs to graze his stomach with her nails, to wrap her fingers around the base of his cock and shove him deeper.
“ Yes . Say it again- Mr. T., please. ”
“You’re nothing. I don’t- I don’t need you," he grinds out between gritted teeth.
Yes, you do.
Sweeney’s voice is tight, strained, stretched like a string about to snap; he shoves himself into her with as much force as she can manage, and Mrs. Lovett moans loud enough to rouse the entirety of their street from their peaceful slumbers. For once, Mr. Todd does not beg for her silence. A shriveled, sick piece of her wonders if anyone really can hear them, if a certain skulking figure might be listening in from the alley alongside her house, weeping bitterly for a life she cannot remember.
A shiver rolls through her, arching her spine and curling her toes.
He releases Mrs. Lovett’s wrists abruptly and drags his cock from deep within her, taking himself in his palm. The sneer of disgust that flickers across his face at the wet slickness that coats him fills her core with a rush of longing, boiling hot and heavy in the pit of her stomach. She considers hoisting herself onto her trembling knees and sucking him clean.
Instead, Nellie yanks her nightgown up to her ribs, baring her stomach, granting silent permission for him to spill onto her skin. He appears to consider this for a moment, his chest heaving. In the sparse light, a single bead of sweat trickles down the side of his face and disappears into his beard.
Sweeney decides instead to push himself into her again, meeting no resistance from her all-too-eager body. He fumbles in the dark for her pulsing clit, and one half-hearted swipe of his thumb is enough to send her careening wildly over the edge, bursting from the inside out. Her head swims, and Nellie closes her eyes against the barrage of sensations that overwhelm her.
Seemingly oblivious, or perhaps simply uncaring, the barber thrusts into her, reaching places she did not know existed until that moment. Mrs. Lovett feels as though her body goes on forever - that he could fill her and fill her and never quite be close enough.
You’ve been practicing, she wants to tease, praise for his improved stamina. The words won’t come; Nellie supposes that he would be grateful if he knew she kept from saying anything at all.
She is still quivering, her mouth stuck open with animalistic sounds that will not budge from the base of her throat, when he finishes inside her. Heat rises beneath her skin, flushing her face and neck and chest red in the dark of the night. Even as he softens, her muscles spasm around him, her body desperate to keep him in - a wordless thank you , silent appreciation for the monumental, lust-driven step forward that he had just chosen to take.
He withdraws from her for the final time that evening, panting, refusing to meet her lovesick eyes. A wave of elation spreads through her, and Mrs. Lovett barely registers Sweeney’s exhausted collapse onto the empty space at her side. Never in her life had she felt so much. Nothing will come of it. It cannot, and she knows this, but it does little to dull the warm glow that settles into her chest, her limbs, her head as her shaking subsides. To allow himself to be given over to pleasure so completely -
How can she ever live her life again, pretending that anything will matter as much as this?
Beside her, Sweeney pushes his hair from his forehead and sinks into the mattress, worn from the consistency of his shape, night after night. Most nights, anyway. The sheets are damp beneath her, and Nellie is distantly aware of the mess that coats her groin and sticks to her thighs. It can wait until daylight.
She wonders if he understands just what he’s done. Does it mean anything to him at all? His ragged breathing fills the silence between them. Nellie watches his fingers curl into a loose fist, then relax again, and Mrs. Lovett knows he is wishing he’d left Albert’s old pipe on the nightstand within reach. He likes to smoke once he’s fucked her, propped up against the headboard, his unoccupied hand draped languidly over his bare stomach, silently aiming wobbly rings of smoke at the rafters. She searches her hazy, feverish brain for words she knows she will not find; it is for the best. Anything she might think to say would only spoil things and, for once, Nellie cannot bring herself to speak.
Perhaps it can be like this again. Perhaps he might find it in himself to stroke her hip, idly possessive, intimately comfortable. Or maybe he will pull her into him, their bodies pressed together from shoulder to hip to foot. She imagines lying near his heart: her head nestled between his neck and shoulder and her fingers tangled in the thicket of hair that blankets his sturdy chest.
He turns his broad back to her, spent and stricken. Sweeney pulls the bedclothes around himself like a cocoon, leaving Nellie alone with nothing but the waning hours.