The Doctor dropped his head onto his wife's heaving chest, feeling her pulse like a panicked hummingbird against his sweat-slicked skin.

His arms shook with the effort of bracing himself above her, but he forced himself to bear the ache through the moment of silence pierced with ragged breaths, waiting for River to ride out her shuddering high. When her taut muscles melted limply into the mattress and her iron grip on the headboard loosened, he picked up his head and let his fingertips ghost over each of her ribs, buried beneath flushed skin. And when she made that noise he'd been waiting for, an abandoned groan of utterly spent rapture that sent his stomach muscles into spasms, the Doctor traced the cooling pathways of beaded sweat up her lean arms, closing his hands around her wrists to keep them pinned above her head. The languid kiss he caught River up in drew another guttural moan from her, her hands twisting uselessly in his grasp in a desperate attempt to clutch at him as he drew her swollen bottom lip between his teeth, flicking her tongue over the roof of his mouth in retaliation.

They pulled back panting for breath, eyes blown wide like startled creatures as they clung to each other out of necessity more than anything else. Only they knew how spin each other into this sort of state; what with the superior biology they could run across hostile alien lands for days on end, with neither food nor rest, and never run short of breath. But this, the silent promise to only stop when their flesh was raw and dizzying supernovas burst behind their eyelids – more often than not taking several hours that would likely kill a human couple - never failed to tire them out in the most spectacular fashion.

The Doctor wriggled down his wife's front to press delicate open-mouthed kisses to her breasts that made her writhe, chanting her name like a whispered prayer. "My respiratory bypass system is wasted with you, wife." He concealed his grin against her flesh, heaving given the needy gasps that made him genuinely believe he'd been left so breathless that it would ricochet through every one his regenerations.

He felt her throaty laugh before hearing it as it rattled through her chest, the warm vibrations tickling his cheek. Through the dizzying haze of the afterglow he was vaguely aware of the Gallifreyan rendition of a declaration of love being etched into his back by her fingernails.

The necklace that River had been wearing when he'd stopped by to visit – stolen from some poor soul, he assumed, judging by her sultry wink when he'd asked where it had come from - lay twisted to the side around her neck, both of them not having had the patience to remove it. The Doctor took the time to straighten it now, slipping his fingers under the diamonds to bring it to dangle perfectly between her breasts.

The hand that had straightened the necklace wrapped around her back, pressing her to him until there was a perfect raw imprint of the diamonds in his chest. River wriggled underneath him, cocking an eyebrow at his disapproving scowl. "Just trying to get my jodhpurs off, dear," she explained, grunting as she kicked her legs. The very image, though he was in no position to see it sprawled out above her as he was, made him smirk like a teenager; his wife, utterly naked except for a pair of jodhpurs – that he blamed completely for their current compromising position - and stupidly lacy, rather-pointless-in-his-opinion knickers caught around her ankles, paired with crimson high heels that would be the source of the bruises on his hips by morning.

He flicked at the shell of his ear with a wince, trying to dispel the ringing within it. "You're going to give me tinnitus one of these days."

River rolled her eyes playfully, peeling her husband's damp hair back from his forehead with a weary but fond smile. "You're so grumpy."

The Doctor made a valiant effort to climb off her, but River's legs were a vice around his hips in an instant. Her fingernails dug into the soft flesh between his shoulder blades for leverage as she arched her back, pressing every inch of herself against him with a positively obscene sound caught halfway between a purr and a moan that made blue lights rupture his vision.

Her name left his lips in a sigh, pulses pounding in his head. "And you're so bad."

"You love it."

He gave River a reprimanding eyebrow-raise, pushing at her thighs clumsily with his free hand until she conceded to release him. "I'm not as young as I once was, you know," he declared in a raspy huff, finding strength enough to roll off her and collapse to the side to sprawl out at a lazy angle across the bed.

"Oh, but you get better with age, my love." He watched her watching him with a hazy-eyed reverence; a gaze she'd often fix him with when he was being clever or stupid or sweet that would send his mind hurtling frantically to memories like this one and prove to be an frustrating, though not unwelcome, distraction.

The Doctor propped his chin on River's chest, relishing the breathless giggle that he felt fizz through her before it left her lips, and cupped her hips with hot palms. "So, Prof Song… do you offer all of your students this sort of treatment?"

She ran a light finger down his nose, biting her lip to contain a giggle. "My students don't need to use psychic paper and a sonic screwdriver to get into the lecture hall, sweetie. Though I admire your enthusiasm for archaeology, I do wish you'd stop dragging me up here in my lunch break; it's very distracting."

"Then stop dropping pens in your lectures, Missus. You're damaging the poor youngsters in those jodhpurs. Having an adverse effect on their education…"

"Doesn't a wise and mysterious old time traveller like yourself have nothing better to do than sit in on your wife's sermons?"

"It's one of my favourite pastimes."

"What, ogling my arse?"

"Complaining?"

She grinned up at him. "Would I ever?"

Her eyes sparkled with mirth in the semi-darkness; the Doctor let the urge to worship her carry him away, running his hands up her sides until they came to cup her flushed cheeks and peppering feathery kisses along her upturned lips.

Rough material grazing against the side of his calf that he'd been too preoccupied to notice until now made him release her lips with a soft pop, realising that she still hadn't managed to rid herself of her clothes. "Come on." He shuffled down the bed to cradle River's ankles, slipping off the jodhpurs caught around them along with her heels to discard them carelessly onto the rug where the rest of their clothes lay, before retrieving the duvet from the end of the bed.

River lifted her head off the pillows, shaking that gloriously tousled mane of curls about her shoulders and cocking an eyebrow at her husband with a smirk. "Oh, we're doing the cuddling thing tonight too? Is it my birthday?"

"Shut up." The Doctor tickled the arches of her feet by way of punishment, smirking when she kicked his hands and squealed. He clambered into the perfect space next to his wife, bringing the plush navy duvet with him and wrapping it around them like a cocoon.

Drawing it over their shoulders caused a couple of stray buttons that had once belonged to River's shirt to fall loose from the folds and rain down on them. River picked one out of her hair, holding it between her finger and thumb and glaring at her husband pointedly. "Again?" she asked incredulously, propping herself up on one elbow to hover above him. "Are you capable of undressing me without completely destroying my clothes?"

"I'm not the one to blame here. You're too slow at getting them off; I intervene out of necessity."

"So impatient," she scolded, flicking the button away to likely join the haphazard trail of clothes and dancing her fingers along the slope of his shoulder. "I'll have to borrow something of yours…"

"That's fine by me, darling." He pulled her down to pillow her head on his chest, burying his nose in her soft curls, frizzy at the ends from the damp heat beaded on her neck.

"Are you tired?"

He hummed, winding a ringlet loosely around his little finger. "Shattered; I blame you entirely."

She chuckled tiredly, wrapping an arm around his slim hips and pressing a kiss to his chest for each heart seated in his ribs. "When was the last time you slept?"

"The last time you were here, a few weeks ago. I save up my sleeps for you."

River lifted her head, resting her chin just below his jutting collarbone and tracing the crinkles at the corners of his mouth that had manifested with his smile. "You sentimental idiot," she murmured lovingly, breath invitingly warm against his cooling skin.

"You bring it out in me." Hands splayed out across her lower back, he pulled her impossibly closer to him with a soft sigh against the top of her head. "Oh, what are you doing here, River? What are you doing with me?"

He felt sharp fingernails digging between his ribs in a warning. "Don't you go all insecure on me, husband."

The Doctor conceded weakly, eyes roaming over the ceiling. "You could do better, you know."

"Nah. I've checked."

His laughter joined hers, husky and mingling in the darkness. "I always knew I'd like you."

"Most people do, honey."

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it! LP&B x