you're too young & eager to love

Fanfiction for The Crucible? Yes, please!

I've been meaning to write something in this fandom for ages. It can't technically be called a fandom, because I may well be the only person writing fanfiction for it, but I will start the craze! Yes, I will.

-



He smells of the horses and sweat from the field. Guilt, Abigail finds, has no scent. It feels like nothing, unlike the scratch of his beard across her stomach or the worn fabric of his shirt that she pulls loose. John breathes heavy, and her wicked fingers pluck at his shoulders, following the sinewy path down his arms. He has untied the strings of her peasant dress and is on his knees before her, her skirts tangled in his fists.

Elizabeth is inside the house. (A house John built, sturdy and strong – a proper reflection of the man himself. A good house for a good wife.) The windows are open and the summer breeze carries Elizabeth’s voice into the stables; she is teaching letters to their sons. A for Adultery, John thinks and presses his mouth against the dip of Abigail’s hip. S for Shame.

Abigail threads her fingers into his hair and whispers something incoherent, something vicious.

--

Satisfaction has never come easy to him.

--

Elizabeth’s sickness still shows in her eyes, although the doctors suggest that she will be well in a fortnight. She has fragile bird bones despite her rigid stance and cold demeanor. Her lips are thin, John notices for the first time in some years. She had been more spirited as a girl, and he thinks something has withered in her, festered their marriage. The thought makes his insides curdle, fills his mouth with an ugly taste. If there marriage is wounded then it is he who has dealt the injury.

He can hear the boys in the yard, and somewhere nearby Abigail is waiting.

Elizabeth works her needle and thread near the fire while John finishes his supper, unhurried and silent. Abigail will wait till the wind chills, and he imagines her eggshell skin cool beneath her dress, her body shivering both with need and cold. She is not the only one who wants. John wants what he shouldn’t; he wants so hard it hurts.

But he would have Abigail be proper too. He would have Elizabeth full of warmth again.

(In the heated hell of his mind, he would have them together. He would have Abigail with the rest of the townspeople - her uncle, the reverend, even – and the thought makes him chuckle even as he aches.)

--

One day, Abigail dances for him in the woods. It is noontime, and the sun filters down through the leaves, blotching her skin in bewitching patterns. She lets her hair free from her bonnet, and it is so much longer and darker than Elizabeth’s. She has an untamable quality about her, a hungry free-spiritedness that John finds most often in young mares.

He breaks her in easily.

--

Mostly recovered, Elizabeth takes the boys into town for an errand. She kisses the corner of John’s mouth before leaving, touching his cheek with her boney fingertips, and smiling in a saddened way. She says nothing to Abigail, but she tells her husband that they will return in an hour.

Elizabeth has filled ginger jars with wildflowers, harkening the oncoming spring months, and they decorate the windowsills in the kitchen. John finds the color distracting rather than warming, so he washes his hands in the pewter basin with his eyes downcast. He can feel Abigail in the shadows, circling like a wry feline, licking for scraps, and it makes John laugh, but the noise turns bitter after touching his tongue.

Abigail sits on the kitchen table, improper, her skirts pulled to her knees. “What would you have me do, John?”

He shakes his head, his eyes more cobalt than marina blue and a sure sign of his conflictions. “I would have you leave here if I were a better man. I would have you whipped for your sins.”

“Aye, but they are your sins too, John.” Abigail smiles snake-like but laughs in a girlish, lovely way. When John stands between her legs, she strokes his cheek in the same spot Elizabeth touched before leaving. He turns his face into her small palm, kisses her fingers, and feels the old familiar hunger start low in his groin.

Not if you were my wife, he thinks, biting back any words, any sounds. Sounds give her strength.

Words to her are prayers. She can turn them quick to curses.