Mining Deep

Author’s Note:
The reaction to this story has been running about half and half between those who want the sort of details you’ll find in this chapter, and those who don’t. If you really don’t care about the specifics of what happened after the last line of Chapter 16, or if you are not yet 18, please skip this Chapter and go directly to Chapter 18.

(I’ll try to post it in the next week, but I won’t promise -- oddly enough, my RL friends and relatives expect Christmas cards and/or presents.)


Chapter 17: Mining Deep

Diamond tensed slightly again as, just as had the hobbit in the book, Pippin’s fingers hovered above the buttons on her bodice.

He saw, and brushed a soft kiss across her lips from where he still leaned above her. “Dinna be afraid,” he whispered, looking into her eyes with limpid pools of green. “Do--,” he swallowed, and she could see he was nervous as well, for his voice shook slightly as he continued in a whisper, “do you remember your saying tha’, as your husband, I might look upon you wherever I wished?”

Diamond nodded silently, her curls brushing against the bedding that lay behind her head, as she herself reclined in the circle of Pippin’s arms.

“I--,” he swallowed again, and his eyes strayed from her face to rest longingly upon her bodice. “I should dearly love to see your bosom,” he whispered, his fingers still hovering gently just above her bodice.

Diamond’s turn it was to swallow now, against the gasp that caught and died in her throat. For such a well-bred hobbitess as she had been, it was near unthinkable to expose herself in such a way. And yet, this was her husband who requested it of her. Not only must she be sworn to obey him, but -- Diamond hesitated a moment to look again upon his face -- she loved him enough to do near anything to satisfy the longing there.

Diamond slowly raised her own hand to grasp Pippin’s within it, and she it was who guided their joined fingers in unclasping her buttons.

Pippin watched intently as the fabric gapped apart and, as the last button came undone, he looked quickly up at Diamond’s face, where she continued to watch him with love, and trust, and only a hint of anxiety. He blinked quickly back down, and his breathing came quicker as he withdrew his fingers from hers and used them to reverently push her bodice completely off.

His stare was transfixed and he gave such a sigh that Diamond, in her concern, momentarily forgot her exposure and lifted her head to examine him.

As she did so, his hands reached out to caress the sides of her breasts and slide down to the bottoms of them, and his face followed to peer more intently at this long-awaited sight.

Diamond’s turn it was to gasp, now, with the shock of the touch. It made her feel more naked than before, and strangely on the verge of tears. If it had been any other hobbit but Pippin, Diamond knew, she would have been crying for her heart that had broken.

Yet now, it was more strengthened than shattered, and calling to her with a strength she had not known she possessed that she must, indeed must, touch him in return.

“Oh. Oh,” Diamond cried in the softest of whispers, and clutched at what she could reach of her husband at his back -- a very unsatisfying fistful of shirt, as it turned out.

“Oh,” she cried softly again, this time in frustration, but Pippin heard her and turned his head to look up at her, looking for all the world like he did when she held him close after a nightmare; except that this time, his curls were brushing directly against her bare skin. He snaked his tongue out and lapped it around her breast, causing Diamond to gasp again at the quiver that ran through her. Then, this accomplished, Pippin grinned cheekily with pride and pulled back to resituate himself so that he was sitting on the bed next to her.

He grabbed Diamond’s hands to pull her along with him and she, still full of sensations, went unresisting so that she, too, was sitting upon the bed, her torso half-twisted to face her husband.

“Diamond,” Pippin said, in a sigh that hovered between admiration and sadness. His eyes tried to focus on her face, but kept trailing downwards, and his fingers, too, fluttered repeatedly against her breasts before re-settling in his own lap as he worked up to what he wanted to say.

“I--,” he glanced quickly up at her eyes once, for reassurance, before his gaze was distracted. “I suppose you should like turnabout, then,” he said, and his fingers fluttered once in front of his own buttons before falling away again as he continued to look his fill.

Diamond nodded once, mutely, and then found her voice again to answer, “Yes, Pippin.”

She thought he would not answer for a moment, but then he gave a nervous giggle and ran one hand backwards through his curls while the other hovered over his shirt front.

He stood, then, kicking aside, among the pile of discarded clothes on the floor, the weskit he’d removed earlier when he lay upon the bed alone to read. He tried to keep his head down as he fumbled at his buttons, but kept having to sneak peeks at the sight of Diamond, half-unclothed, which he’d been anticipating so long.

His placket unbuttoned, he paused with a hand on either side of his unopened shirt to look again at Diamond. “’Twill nae be so beautiful as you,” he informed her sadly and with his own shame. “I am a scarred and ugly hobbit,” and one tear dripped from the corner of his eye, down along his nose, to drip onto the floor.

“Oh! Pippin!” Diamond exclaimed, brought back into the moment by this sight, and jumped to her feet to stand before him.

“I daresay that is not true,” she said gently, while pushing open the shirt and, as he let his hands fall, removing it from his shoulders and then his arms.

The shirt dropped to the floor to lay among the other discarded things they’d clothed themselves in, and Diamond embraced Pippin from the front, trailing her soft fingers delicately along the scars upon his back as he ran his own hands across her back and then her front, worming his head down to catch his lips and his tongue again upon her bosom.

Into the ear that was tilted up toward her, Diamond stated, her fingers splayed across one of the worst knots on his back, “You are the bravest, most beautiful hobbit I know.”

Pippin glanced up from his suckling and, without letting go, shifted their position slightly nearer to the bed.

He held tight to Diamond, squeezing her about the waist, and crooked one ankle around hers -- then twitched it to throw her off-balance and guided them both into landing sideways upon the bed.

Diamond could not help but laugh even as Pippin glanced up at her, puzzled, from where he continued to intently pursue the ministrations his mouth made to her bosom.

Diamond had grown used enough to the sensations by now that she was able to merely shake her head fondly and utter, “Never mind, dear,” at this latest surprise while one hand twisted through Pippin’s curls and the other followed the lead he had shown in caressing first his back, and then his front.

He gasped again in a few moments’ time as he withdrew himself from her bosom, and sat up upon the bed. Diamond made as if to follow him, but he stilled her with one hand upon her shoulder and reached down with the other one to draw her foot up onto his lap. Removing the hand from her shoulder, he then used both to cradle this appendage before his face, staring at it with nearly the same rapt attention he had been showing her bosom.

“Oh, Diamond,” Pippin sighed as he stroked the dark curls along the top of her foot, “your foot-fur is beautiful. ‘Tis glistening, almost,” he said.

“Oh, but Pippin,” she cried out softly, and started to withdraw her foot from his grasp, but Pippin held on tightly as she continued, “I have not yet washed from them the dust of the day!”

“I dinna care,” Pippin said, and leaned over to place a kiss between her toes. He was grinning as he came up from the kiss, and informed her saucily, “’Course, most hobbits do this afore they’re wed, but I should think this way is better, as there ‘tisn’t any reason for us to stop.”

“Oh. Aye, Pippin,” Diamond said, slowly smiling herself as she turned her head to look at what lay upon the sheets next to it. Pippin wriggled his toes as her gaze fell upon his foot, and she smiled fondly, but did not laugh.

Instead, she reached out with a tentative two fingers of her own and stroked the curls upon Pippin’s foot.

“Aye,” he breathed, and turned the attentions of his own hands back to the foot of Diamond’s which he held.

She reached out to firmly grasp his before it wriggled away from her in the initial startlement at the sensations she was producing, and then she used her other hand to tangle her fingers through the lush curls that grew atop Pippin’s foot.

He had dropped Diamond’s foot back to rest in his lap now, and leaned back to support himself on his elbows, his eyes nearly closing except that he forced them aware, his breath coming in hitches, and his foot still giving shudders in Diamond’s hand as she touched him.

“Do you know,” she muttered dreamily as she played with the abundant curls, “that your feet were the first I really saw of you, Pippin?

“For, here she swallowed and closed her eyes, stilling her movements for a moment, before opening them and going on with both her hands and her voice, “for that day when we were betrothed in the office of the Thain, I did not dare to look further upon you, so I kept my eyes cast down.

“And now,” she glanced up at him, and her smile reflected some of the cheeky grin that was more often seen upon the other face, “I think I like the rest of what I see, as well.”

Pippin made a sound that was somewhere between a giggle and a hiccup, and Diamond looked back to the foot she caressed in order to say, “although I did think that such feet must be part of a very handsome hobbit indeed.”

She bent her head over his foot but, instead of kissing it as he had done to her, she stroked with her hand along the top of his foot and up his calf, and followed this path with her head, until she reached the hem of his trousers and, her eyes looking up at his face, she serenely kissed the scar that snaked out of the trousers along Pippin’s leg.

Pippin made another inarticulate sound, and he was moving faster than Diamond could understand, and suddenly he was lying atop her, kissing her deeply while he hugged her, and hugged hard.

They were both breathing heavily as he broke away, and Diamond thought she saw a tear standing in Pippin’s eyes, but he smiled gleefully when he looked down at where both their pairs of feet now intertwined, the soft curls brushing against each other.

“Well,” Pippin said in a laughing voice, “at least any child we have should be well-furred.”

Diamond smiled as well, but she never took her eyes off his face, so that when he returned his gaze away from their feet, he was met with the sight of the dark-haired, gray-eyed lass smiling beatifically at him, her bare bosom lingering less than a hand’s-breadth away from his touch, and her delectably furred foot rubbing against his own.

Pippin swallowed, and his eyes turned a harder green. He kept his intent stare focused upon Diamond’s face as he removed one hand from her back and brought it to the bottom of her skirts, only to inch it up, bit by bit,among her petticoats and underdrawers, until he was touching her upon her most private fur of all.

Time held still for a moment, and they stared into each other’s eyes, and then, “P--” she began, while “Dia--” he whispered, and then they broke apart, each standing silently by the bed as Diamond, with trembling fingers, removed her skirts and her petticoats until nothing was left and Pippin shucked his trousers to achieve the same.

They stood there before each other awkwardly for a moment until Diamond, once again feeling shame, began to lift her hands in front of her to cover her face.

Pippin stepped forward then and grasped her wrists gently to bring her arms down to their sides. “Nay,” he whispered to her. “Dinna hide yourself from me, my beautiful wife.”

Diamond thrilled again to hear him give such praise, and to call her “wife”, and she remembered, as Pippin laid them gently across the bed once more, that her mother had said she should let him do whatever he wished -- no matter what -- on their wedding night.

More than happy she was, now, to follow such instructions as she allowed Pippin to roll her awkwardly about the bed. She’d thought she had been happy to do so the previous year, too, of course, but oh! then she did not truly know what it was to love her hobbit. She would give him anything, no matter into what strange positions he shifted her.

“Diamond?” Pippin said, sitting up so abruptly that she was startled and wondered what had gone wrong. His cheeks were blushing bright red, and he ran one hand backward through his hair as he asked awkwardly, “Er -- um -- do you s’pose that your books have any instructions for this next part?”

Diamond stared gap-mouthed for only a second before jumping up with alacrity to work the catch upon her underbed storage drawer. She spilled out on an armful of books, tumbling them upon the floor, all the while becoming more agitated.

“I--I have not learned enough, husband,” she said with the beginning of a broken sob as she picked up one book and began to thumb through it desperately, though her eyes barely saw the words upon the pages. “I -- I do not read quickly, and after I learned that you were courting me, I wished to savor the pages--”

Pippin had grinned widely again at Diamond’s admission that she knew of his attempts to court her, and he gently pulled the book from her grasp with one hand, the other around her shoulders.

“Diamond,” he said and pulled her down to sit upon his lap on the floor, the both of them surrounded by the piles of books. “Dinna worry about it. Do you know what I have often heard lasses say who have read such books?” he asked as she marveled at the feel of sitting naked, herself, upon the lap of an unclothed hobbit. She shook her head.

“Skip to the good parts,” Pippin intoned seriously, though his eyes twinkled a sprightly dance. He grabbed a book from the floor and ran his fingers along the pages’ edge to open it up at the most worn spot -- and then discarded it after half a moment, before Diamond barely had time to read the words over his arm.

He reached nearly desperately, then, for what looked the most worn book in the pile and let it fall open naturally where it would.

Pippin’s eyes had skimmed the page, Diamond’s following more slowly behind, and they both were breathing heavily again as he turned his head to look not upon words on a page, but on Diamond, and tossed the book carelessly over his shoulder with one hand.

With the other, he lifted Diamond in the crook of his arm as he stood and again placed her on the bed, then climbed atop her and positioned himself between her legs.

They stared again into each other’s eyes, and Pippin reached out with one hand to grasp Diamond’s tightly within it. He squeezed strongly back and, with his other hand, he guided himself forward at an angle according to the “instructions.”

Diamond gasped wordlessly with a sharp intake of breath as a wall was breached, and a sudden pain went with it as she felt a tiny trickle down her leg. And then -- and then her husband, her Pippin, was mining deep; mining deep within her as his face bent over hers and it was the face of a warrior with clenched teeth and persistent grunts as he thrust himself forward again and again, and it was the face of a handsome hobbit who would be the Thain of the Shire, his rich chestnut curls shining in the evening light as they fanned out about his head, and it was the face of her husband, her beloved, her Pippin, his green eyes wide and frightened and yet ecstatic at the same time, brimming now with tears that did spill over onto his cheeks, and she knew it was because he was overwhelmed so with sensation and emotion, as was she, and she could deny him nothing ever and oh! oh! darling--

“--aah,” Pippin groaned out slowly, letting his body sink and his head fall forward as he bent his arms at the shivering elbows until he lay prone against the sheets, his feet still tangled up with Diamond’s.

He was weeping now, softly, overcome himself with strong emotions, and he rolled his head to one side and held out a hand for Diamond to come to him, a request she hastened to obey.

“Oh, Diamond,” he said wetly from where he was snuggled once again in the circle of her arms, “I love you so much. Please dinna ever leave me.”

His voice trailed off, and it was a moment before Diamond had breath enough to respond to such an absurd statement. As if she could, whether she loved him or no! “Of course--” she began, but then realized he had fallen asleep in her arms, and she finished in a whisper, “--not, love,” and gently kissed where Pippin’s curls met his brow.