Nielson's in the bathroom doing God only knows what, and Cammie's glad for it, because she's sitting on the edge of the bed with her cane in her hands and her heart in her throat, trying to tell herself that she's faced down Anubis and she's faced down her momma on a rampage, she can fucking well do this.

It isn't working.

She's wearing a black leather corset that plunges down to just above her nipples, zippers up the front and laces up the back, and a skirt made of nothing but artfully-arranged silk tatters in a thousand shades of red and gold. Nielson bought them both for her. They don't cover any of her scars, and they're not supposed to. ("You've still got a body to die for," he'd said. "Show it.") She's even ready to admit she likes the way she looks in them. It's been eighteen goddamn months since Jonathan Daniel Nielson stalked his way into her life, and looking back, she can barely remember the person she was when he knocked on her door. This is what recovery feels like. This is what it means to feel comfortable in your own skin again.

She's still one step away from needing to put her head between her knees.

Tonight's Nielson's plan, start to finish, top to bottom. She still doesn't know where he goes when he goes out -- she hasn't asked; he hasn't offered -- but three weeks ago he decided it was high time for her to get back on her game and a week after that he deigned to inform her, and whatever he's got planned for tonight, she knows he intends for it to end with her being the one to come home sated and slinky and all-fucked-out. Her libido woke up again months and months ago, and he knows damn well it did; there's no hiding anything in this crackerbox (and they really do have to get around to moving, one of these days, but neither one of them feels like the hassle). But he's apparently decided it's time she's cleared for partnered flight.

Part of her is furious at the presumption (how dare he believe he knows what's right for her better than she does?) Part of her is glad for it, because -- like it or not -- he does usually know what's right for her, is starting to be able to see through her with scary precision and incredible accuracy and an insight that would be fucking terrifying if it weren't for the unerring, stunning kindness he also bears with him (all the fucking time, and it don't make much difference that it's not what other people or he himself would necessarily deem 'kindness'; it is, and she sees it, and it makes a difference). If it weren't for him pushing at her -- pushing and prodding and nagging and manipulating and sometimes just plain fucking ordering -- she wouldn't have gotten this far. She knows it. He knows it too.

So she's wearing an invitation to riot (and she looks damn good in it, if she does say so herself, and she might not ever again be in the shape she was when she could run 5K before breakfast and lift one-twenty after lunch, but she likes the shape she's in now well enough, she supposes) and she's about to be taken out (somewhere) by her gay boytoy (the fucker) to show off what she's got in the hopes of getting laid. And it's a big fucking step, and one she'd say she isn't ready for no way no how, except that would be a lie and she knows it and so does he and there is no way on God's green earth he's going to let her slide on this one.

The water clicks off in the bathroom and a second later Nielson comes slinking on out (leather pants and the next in his seemingly-endless series of shirts that cling tighter than a frightened kitten and ever since she let him know she knows what he's up to he's been putting on his makeup at home; he doesn't look eighteen, he looks twenty-five trying to look eighteen, and he could probably set a room on fire just by walking into it if he wanted). She tries to bury her nerves when she looks up at him. The look on his face tells her she hasn't managed to pull it off.

He stops a few steps away from her, folds his arms across his chest and stares her down. She tips up her chin and stares straight back. Sometimes that works. This time it doesn't. His lips twist in that expression of his that in anybody else would turn into a full smile and in him is just a little amused quirk. "Yeah," he agrees, and damned if he doesn't know exactly what she's thinking, and that's what he's agreeing with; not that he's trying to legitimize her nerves and her fluster, just saying that he sees it and agreeing that it sucks and trying to tell her it's natural and normal to be all het up.

She sighs. The fact that he can read her fucking mind would be fucking obnoxious if it weren't so damn fucking useful sometimes. And if she couldn't do the same to him. Right now he's thinking that he's figured out at least three-quarters of her subconscious motivators, and he's trying to decide whether or not to hit her with them, because he thinks they're things she isn't going to want to hear. And she probably won't, but that's never stopped them before -- they've been calling each other on their shit since Moment Fucking One and they're both better people for it. The fact that he's willing to give her a pass on hearing it if she doesn't think she can handle it is a sign of just how on edge she is right now.

The other annoying part is how the fucker's usually right. Her fingers tighten on her cane. "Go ahead," she says, terse and irritable (love you too, you fucking fuck).

He nods. (Gracious in victory. The fucker.) "Three things," he says. "Worried about whether or not strangers are going to be able to look past the scuff marks and see that fabulous body that's wearing them, worried about how much it can hurt if you don't find a partner who's careful enough, and worried that whatever one-night stand you pick up is going to mean way too fucking much to you after so damn long."

Her breath catches in her throat, and all she's aware of -- in the middle of the deer-in-headlights shock -- is the sick grinding sense that he's right and that is what she's fretting about and she wouldn't have spotted it without him. And sweet Jesus suffering, she's glad she let him hit her with it, because if she'd had those realizations in the middle of getting naked and sweaty with some man she'll probably never see again, things could have gone sour right quick and at least this way she can consciously know what she's thinking.

"Little of two," she says, when she can breathe again. When she can think. "Little of three. I think I'm good on one."

He cocks his head to the side, studies her face, eventually nods. Accepting that what she's said is the truth -- not that she ever lies to him, any more than he ever lies to her, and she tries not to lie to herself but sometimes she can't help it. But he's telling her that he thinks she's right, and she's pretty sure she is. She's swung and missed before -- she was always choosy about the men she'd decided to hit on (Before, and her life is divided into Befores and Afters, and some of them are good and some of them she doesn't want to think about too closely), and it was never anything more than a laugh and a return to whatever they'd been talking about, and she could do it again now. She thinks. She's come so fucking far. But the other two --

"Good," he says, and she's a little too busy having her own personal epiphanies to be shocked at how quickly he closes the space between them, reaches out a hand to cup her cheek. (Isn't that he doesn't touch her; he does, eighty thousand times a day, and every time it means something different. But this is care and comfort, and it always warms her straight through.) "Because I couldn't have done much about one."

She closes her eyes and turns her face into his hand. His skin is warm. It always is. "Like to see what kind of rabbit you're planning on pulling out of your pants," she mutters, against his palm. (Cranky. Irritable. Because yeah, good to know, and yeah, she's done all the reading on how she can have a sex life without hurting herself worse than she's hurt right now and she can recite back all the lectures her physical therapist has given her and she's still fucking worried about how she's ever going to manage to have sex in this body with anybody but herself and now that she's consciously thinking about it she's not going to stop.)

His fingers stroke her cheek. "Don't be an idiot, Mitchell," he says. Fond. Affectionate. "I told you. Queer. Not dead." He takes the last half-step that lies between them, and his other arm comes around her shoulders. Holding her. Warm and loving, and this is how they fall asleep every night, chaste and dispassionate, and her skin is used to listening for all the things his skin is telling her. It's listening now, and she can feel a thousand subtle changes, tiny shifts that turn his touch from chaste to carnal, the potential, the offer, an offer she never thought she'd hear or feel.

She doesn't push him away, but her fingers flex as thought they want to. "Ain't interested in a pity fuck," she snarls. "And you don't have to offer one just because you think I need it."

He laughs. (The fucker.) She can feel it vibrating through his chest, into her shoulders, everywhere he's cradling her. "Come on, Mitchell, when have you ever known me to do anything I didn't want to do?" he says. And yeah. Fucker's got a point. JD Nielson is as stubborn as a mule and as generous as a prince, and he loves her and she loves him and more than that, she trusts him. He's safe. He's safety.

He's never once shown, in word or in deed, that he has any physical interest in her whatsoever.

So she tries to pull away, because she's made love with friends and she's made friends of lovers but she's never had anyone in her life like this, never had a relationship so deep, so vast, and she has zero interest in fucking it up. "I'm all right," she says. (It's a lie. She knows it is. She knows he'll know, too.)

He doesn't let her go. "No," he counters. Easily. Lightly. "You will be. Soon. But you're not yet. And you know you aren't. Look at me, Mitchell."

It's an order as binding as any order she's ever received, calm and confident, and she's opening her eyes and looking up at him before her mind even really registers the words.

He doesn't quite look like himself. It takes her a second to realize why, and when she does, it makes her catch her breath. She's always known (never had to be told) that there's a huge part of him that views his life as undercover always and forever, and she knows he's glad of it -- no resentment there, not anymore, that he's been forced to make all these redefinitions, bear his losses with his head held high, because for everything he's given up he's gotten something in return. There's a part of her that takes pride in that, because he's happy, and she knows she's proximate cause and occasion. She can't replace the family he lost, but she's someone to care for and someone who cares for him, and she knows how much it means to him. Still. In some ways, the person he shows to the world is absolute and unalloyed truth. In other ways, he'll be play-acting a persona to his end of days.

He's not playing now. The person she's looking at is the same person she lives with, the same person she loves. But he's dropped all the roles it amuses them to banter at each other, and now she's looking at the core that lies underneath. Open. Honest. And her baby is a good man and a fine man and he's looking at her with a heart full of love, and she turns her head and buries her face against his chest and sighs.

Not pity. Not a burden. He's offering her a gift, no strings attached and no hidden motives, and he loves her without desiring her and God, she wants to be touched.

His hand strokes the back of her head, plays with her hair. (She doesn't think he knows he's doing it.) "One night," he says. "It'll all look better in the morning."

Knowing he's offering makes her feel better. Knowing he's offering, not out of a sense of obligation or pity, but because he wants to tend her. She wakes up every morning thanking her lucky stars (for him, for him-and-her, for their life and their livelihood and everything on down) and she goes to sleep every night giving thanks for her blessings, and he's not her only blessing, but he's one of the ones she cherishes most.

But he's made his choices and he's set his rules, for this new life he's been forced to build, and she's spent eighteen months living in six hundred square feet with him and there's never once been sex between them. His choice. His right, to make that choice, and she doesn't have the right to override those choices with her weaknesses. Just knowing that he would is enough. There isn't anything he wouldn't do for her, and that makes her shiver with the burden and stutter with the grace, and part of having someone who'd do anything for you is making sure you don't ask for anything you could get somewhere else, not if the giving would only be from a desire to give and not a desire to do.

So she breathes out and rests her cheek against his chest (and he smells like soap and leather and the faintest hint of oregano and basil left over from dinner) and soaks up the knowledge that with someone this magnificent shoring her up, it don't matter what happens out there, she'll make it on through. "Just gotta get through it," she says. "Come on. Back up on the horse, right? Where you haulin' me to?"

A polite fiction -- which isn't the same as a lie; polite fictions are social lubricant, signaling not what you believe but what you want to acknowledge at the moment, and their household lives on polite fiction nearly all the times they're not beating down each other's bullshit or arguing whatever triviality it amuses them to turn into life and death today -- but he'll know what she means by it (and oh God it's the first time in her entire life she hasn't had to spell things out from can to can't for somebody at least once in a while): she's saying thank you and love you and I appreciate you and I know you ain't offering because you think you have to and just the fact you love me enough to make the offer is good enough to get me going again so come on, let's go.

But he doesn't let her go. And that's different, it's new and strange, because he's supposed to accept it when she tells him the truth (through word or through deed), and she is telling him the truth. He's taking her out to whatever club, whatever bar, he thinks she's most likely to find someone to remind her of all the joys her body can carry to go along with all the pains it lives with daily, and she's nerves all over but it's about time for her to stand up and step back into the last bits of the life she used to lead that she can still have now, and it's going to be different (and different is scary, always has been) but not impossible. He said just enough to cut through all her cloud of self-ignorance and shown just enough to reassure her that he's standing at her side (looking out for her, always and forever, and she tries to do the same, and sometimes he needs more caretaking and sometimes she does and that's why they're partners); she's not going to ask him for more. He should know that.

He makes one of his little noises of frustration, same as he uses when he's just accidentally hosed the working branch of their Subversion repository and hasn't lost any work but is gonna have to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning up after himself. His arms tighten around her shoulders. "You stupid cow," he says, mild and half-amused, and she's always known she has to ignore what he's actually saying to her and look at what he's doing and being for her and it amuses the fuck out of her that other people can't. (Thank God he's got more sense than to pull that shit around Family.) "You keep ignoring the fact I'm making a pass at you, I'm gonna be hurt."

"Yeah," she shoots back, "well, I got a long an' cherished history of ignoring your total an' utter insanity."

Bantering with him will never fail to raise her spirits. But he doesn't rise to the bait. "Sweet puppies fucking, Mitchell," he says, and that amuses her even more, because she knows he doesn't even realize how much her little linguistic tics are rubbing off on him.

The amusement doesn't last, though, because he sounds pissed-off and annoyed and she realizes, suddenly, that he's serious and all of a sudden she can't breathe. "Nielson --" she says, quietly.

He lets her go, finally, and runs an irritated hand through his hair. It crackles behind him (static electricity's a bitch). The temper flare fades as fast as it came, and he's just looking at her, and it's him-not-him (but always him, always there, hidden beneath the smiles and the sighs, and she knows she's the only one who can ever see it and she knows precisely what that means to him calculated out to the very last measure) and then he cups her cheek with his hand again and brushes his thumb against her lips and there isn't anything lighthearted in his face or his voice in the least.

"Let me help," he says. And there's a part of her brain whispering reference at her, a hundred years or so from now, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme, and usually she could say it out loud and he'd catch it and tell her it was before her time and she'd tell him he was dating himself and he'd laugh and say that someone had to and it'd all be normal sailing from there, except his skin is burning against her lips and he's looking at her with calm certitude and she can't bring herself to joke about this. Not now.

She opens her mouth and draws a breath. Half of her wants to say oh God yes and half of her wants to say it would make things too fucking weird in the morning and half of her wants to say stop pretending you know what's best for everybody and which of the pieces overlap with the others to make a single whole depends on how she squints her eyes and turns her head. Before she can say anything, though, he puts two fingers over her lips where his thumb was a minute before. Not a suppression, just a quiet soft agreement that he already knows what she's going to say and it doesn't matter.

So she closes her mouth again. And he leaves his fingertips there, and she finds that she's kissing them, just a soft gentle flutter of her lips against his touch, and she knows and he knows that means she's arguing with herself about what her answer will be.

"Lie back," he says. Not an order, not quite, but calm and self-possessed and confident, the way Nielson's always calm and self-possessed and confident, and she feels like she's breathing underwater. Part of her feels like she's half a step away from panic, but Nielson's got her eyes held with his, like he can stare her into acquiescence, and she's moving before she's even decided that she will, sliding backwards along the bed. It's like her body bows to his hands as he lays her out beneath him, and her legs tangle in the tatters of her skirt, and if it were anyone else it'd cause a thread of oh-shit-what-if panic but this is Nielson, who knows what her body can and can't do before she does half the time, and yeah, he was right. Anybody else here with her right now and she'd be half an inch from flipping out from the quiet danger, what if what if, and she's spinning her wheels now but it isn't from fear. Confusion, maybe. Or fear, but fear of a different kind.

"We --" she says, half a step from saying we can't or we never have or even fuck it, I don't want to change things, I don't want to wake up in the morning and have to start wondering every time from here on out what every little gesture means, and she doesn't know which. She pushes herself up on her elbows. Half a step from bolting, and she knows he can tell, and the pit of her stomach is grinding with discomfort and a slippery, edged arousal that she has nothing to do with, like her body's trying to tell her something she doesn't want to hear.

He pauses. Kneeling up on the bed next to her, halfway on the way to straddling her hips the way he does when he's massaging her to sleep, but that's then and this is now. He doesn't look like himself. Or he does, but in a way she hasn't seen before; she's suddenly looking straight through him, past the makeup and the clubwear and all the trappings she's always wondered at. (How much of them are him, and how much the role he's decided to wear?) For a minute, it's like she's seeing double: the skin he wears, the person behind it.

She licks her lips. "You don't want me," she says, and it doesn't hurt her to say it, because she knows that want and love have nothing to do with each other. Not the way they do it, at least.

He knows it too. And he doesn't lie to her -- not here, not now, not ever, and that's a balm poured out over troubled waters, because they've spent eighteen months not lying to each other and that much truth means that if he lied to her now, she'd be able to talk herself into believing it. And from that point onward, they'd both know they could lie to each other, and their truth would suffer for it. "No," he says, cupping her cheek with one hand. His skin is like fire. "Not like that. But I want to do this for you. Let me help. Let me help you."

Her breath catches in her throat, and she can't look away. The pit of her belly flutters as he hooks a fingertip into the tab of her corset's zipper, draws it down slowly. Slowly enough that she could protest again if she wanted to, but her voice is frozen solid through. Slowly enough that it makes her want to squirm, and ain't that a shock, because she never -- never -- thought Nielson could touch her in a way that would make her envy all those boys and men he goes trolling after. He spreads the leather open, unpeeling her, unwrapping her, and the look on his face is a study in bemused-and-baffled, but his hands are reverent and generous.

"Won't change anything," he says, sliding his hands along her ribs, just underneath her breasts, just firmly enough so that it doesn't tickle around her sides. His hands spread out along her back, bearing her up, holding her weight. He lowers his head, brushing his lips along her collarbone, and her head falls back before she can stop herself. Her pulse is leaping underneath her skin, underneath his mouth. He turns his head to the side, pressing his cheek against her chest, listening for her heartbeat. "Don't say no," he murmurs. "Don't tell me to stop. I want this."

Sometime in the last half hour she must have fallen into an alternate dimension, because God help her, she actually believes him. She breathes out, one long ragged sigh, and he must be able to hear it for the capitulation it is, because he leans into her a little more, easing her back and downward, fitting himself over her. Just enough weight to keep her from expanding into vastness and floating away. He still has his hands underneath her shoulderblades, and even now, his fingertips are finding the nooks and crannies of knotted muscles, soothing the tension away. She can feel his heart beating too, sharp and fluttery, faster than she remembers it being.

He turns his head, letting his lips come to rest against the column of her throat, and she can hear a sound between them, and it's the sound of her whimpering. It shocks her, hearing it. The woman making that noise isn't the woman she tries to be. She feels shaken, unsettled, like she's ready to come apart at the edges. He kisses down the side of her neck, and when he reaches the curve of her shoulder, she can feel his teeth graze over the tendon there. It feels like he's just plugged her into an electrical wire, and her whole body ripples underneath him before she can stop herself.

If she even would. She doesn't know. Can't tell. He laughs. It's silent and sweet, an answering ripple through his shoulders and down his spine, and he takes the motion and turns it into a wiggle to tuck himself more firmly against her, and her whole body feels alive with the memory of how this works. Her hips are moving before she can even tell them to, pressing up into him, and he lets his teeth scrape her skin again and answers thrust for thrust.

He's hard against her, inside his leathers, and yeah, alternate dimension, it must be, that he can be aroused by her body against his.

"Come on, sweetheart," he says, and she can hear a breathless hitch in his voice, and it's something she knows but never thought she'd hear again. Never thought she'd hear from him at all. "You can touch." Encouragement and dare, all wrapped into one, and suddenly his hands, gentle against her skin, aren't enough at all. She can't name what she's feeling -- not anger, not anything like, really, but there's a depth of something stirring, some impulse to be something other than a china-glass doll to be passively tended.

She brings her hands up to his shoulders. The shirt, silken and tissue-thin, whispers underneath her fingers. This close, she can see the faint smudges of his ink, underneath its weave. She digs her fingertips into the muscles of his back, one cat-claw flex, and he picks up his head and looks down at her. His eyes are warm and dark, two shadowed smudges in the paleness of his skin. He draws a thumbnail up her side, rounding the outer swell of her breast, and she meets his eyes and lets herself admit how much she wants.

He can see it, the change in her face. She can see him seeing it. His eyes flick down to her lips, back up to hers, and she takes a deep breath, lets go of the little voice saying don't shouldn't can't, and twines her arms around his neck to lean up and kiss him.

His mouth is soft and strong against hers. She can't feel any hesitation, not even a second's hitch; he opens his lips to hers, answering need for need, claiming her tongue with a heady assurance. He kisses like he codes, with competence and concentration, like he's the master of everything he touches, and right now what he's touching is her. She can feel his body pressing against hers, his weight bearing down on her hips, and it's beautiful and precious and delicious enough that she makes herself ignore the burn of her joints protesting the position.

Must not be able to ignore it completely, though, or perhaps he can read the discomfort from her mouth, from her breath, because he pushes himself up on both his hands, not breaking away from the kiss, shifting his weight so he's straddling one of her thighs. His knee comes to rest between her legs. It makes her whimper again, the noise swallowed between them, and dig her fingertips with their blunted nails into his shoulders. He shivers against the touch, and there's a part of her, the part that always used to pride itself on being able to make men come apart beneath her hands, that's taking notes on all the things his skin is shouting at her.

She flexes her fingers again, and the shirt slides with them, bunching up and shifting until it's half up around his throat. She can just feel bare skin beneath the edges of her reach. Fever-hot, the way he always is. He shivers again, and just as her attention is turning from the feel of his mouth on hers to the way his skin feels like sun-drenched rock beneath her hands, he breaks off the kiss and pushes himself up onto his hands, chest heaving against her. A heartbeat, two, while they stare at each other (and his eyes are wide, and she knows hers must be too), and then he comes up to his knees, ducking his head and reaching one hand behind him, up over his shoulder, clawing at the shirt to pull it over his head and clear.

She has just enough presence of mind to realize that he's thrown it across the room, just enough common sense to note its trajectory and file it away as a potential obstacle later, but of course he's got just enough presence of mind to remember that obstacles are dangers, because he's thrown it so that it skitters across the top of the dresser and comes to rest, knocking over the picture frame where she keeps the shot of Ash's family. Then he's looking down at her again, bare-chested, magnificent, and she's seen his ink a thousand times but she will never fail to marvel at the way it moves with him when he moves.

It's beautiful. He's beautiful, his eyes catching on her face, the quiet strength written in his every line, and he may look thin and frail to the untrained gaze, but anyone who thinks those adjectives apply to him lacks the eyes to see. She doesn't put her hands back on the bed to push herself upward. She winds her arms around his neck, pulling against him to pull herself up to sitting, and his hands curl around her sides and down to cup her ass as she fits her mouth over his collarbone to trace the sentences written there with her tongue.

The skin is faintly raised, microscopic scarring along the edges of line and shadow. She's never been able to feel it with her fingertips; to her hands, his skin is smooth and soft, but her tongue teases out the lines of ridge and valley, a world of nuance that's been hiding in plain sight all along. He breathes out a muffled curse. One of his hands slides up to cradle the back of her head, his fingers sliding through her hair, and her skull fits comfortably in the curve of his palm.

He leans back, counterbalancing her weight, and it makes his knee nestle more firmly between her thighs, and it makes her feel like she felt when she was sixteen years old and could get herself off just by straddling Joey Travitelli's lap and grinding against him.

"God, sweetheart," he finally says, sucking for air, and it's a comfort and a sweetness to know she could crack that perfect self-possession. She's touched him a thousand times, but never like this. Never thought she would; never thought she'd be invited to. She shifts her weight so she's sitting splay-legged, running her hands down his chest. He rises up further. The bed dips and sways beneath his weight. She rests her hands over the swell of his thighs, running her thumbs over soft and supple black leather shielding the crease atop his legs, and he groans again and takes her face between his palms.

There's a part of her that wants to close her eyes, enjoy the feel of the strong male body against her without having to think about the fact that it's Nielson, savor the dark warm scent of skin and soap and iron that threatens to drag her under. She shoves it aside and meets his eyes, stroking her thumbs inward, feeling the edges of where his thigh ends and his dick begins.

She doesn't know what she's expecting. Desire of the mind, desire of the body, desire of the spirit; separate, for them, for now and for always. He could be telling himself that she's any one of a dozen of his erstwhile lovers, that the hands half-touching him belong to anyone but her, but he isn't. The lights are on, and he's looking at her, stroking his thumbs over her cheekbones like she's stroking hers over his thighs, and he's never seemed more present than he is, now, in this moment. Here. Like this. She presses the palm of her hand against the length of him, trapped and straining, and he grabs her wrist and holds it in one quick flash.

For a second she thinks she's crossed a line, until she can see his lips quirking, mostly at himself. He draws her hand up to his mouth, tonguing the base of her thumb, following it with one tiny nip of his teeth. "I am looking forward," he says, against her palm, "to the days when this damn body can be safely trusted not to come in my pants. Leather's a bitch to get clean."

Takes another second for the meaning of his words to sink in, and then she's torn between laughing and not-laughing all at once. Laughing because the chagrin in his voice is pure Nielson, straight down to the little pissy snip. Not laughing, because it's just another one of the small and subtle indignities he has to bear, day in, day out, his body an endless stranger. The two impulses cancel each other out, as he opens his lips and draws her thumb inside his mouth. (Hot, wet suction, curling around her like he's trying to read the Braille of her fingerprints with his tongue, and if this is how he sucks cock, God, no wonder he never has trouble finding someone to go home with.)

"So take them off," she says, daring, and they're the first words she's spoken in what feels like too damn long, and he freezes for a second and then his eyes say I was beginning to get worried that you weren't in there anymore.

And he releases her thumb just before he laughs around it, and he falls backwards on the bed with a casual disregard for the fact that his spine shouldn't do that (careful of where she is, though, careful to avoid clocking her with a stray knee or foot) and shimmies himself straight out of the pants, tossing them at the laundry hamper one-handed and without looking, and rolls himself on around to bear her back down against the mattress.

"Yeah, okay," he says, settling down not over her but plastered up against her side, and it's like getting naked has frayed a hint of that self-control, like all of a sudden his simmering energy is all unleashed, because she finds herself at the center of a whirlwind. His mouth closes over her breast, the flat of his tongue pressing against her nipple, and she shivers, because his hand is seeking through the tatters of her skirt until he finds the plain bikini cotton panties (cherry red) she's wearing beneath.

She rolls towards him, her body saying yes, please, more, and he hooks his fingertips into the waistband of her panties and pulls. Careful without being too damn gentle, and she draws up her knees so he can slide her panties down them, and once he's casting her panties away, her knees fall, not back down to where they were, but to either side. His teeth close on her nipple, just enough to send shockwaves through her but not enough to hurt, and she shudders and pulls her arm out from where he's lying on it so she can dig her nails into his shoulder again.

She's on her back; he's lying on his side, pressed up against her, his dick full and heavy against her hip. Just as she's considering turning in his arms, rolling to bring them chest to chest and mouth to mouth again, he lifts his mouth, sweeps his hand up her calf, and pulls, arranging her like a rag doll, draping her knee over his hip and turning her the opposite direction, her back to him, one-quarter on her side and the rest of her weight borne on his chest. His other arm snakes underneath her, palm rubbing the breast he hadn't had his mouth on, and the contrast between the heat of his touch and the cool shivery dance of air on her spit-damp skin makes her writhe. It's the way they fall asleep every night, except it isn't at all, and he rests his forehead against her shoulder and nestles his dick up against the curve of her ass and she can feel the trembling in his hips as he tries to keep them still.

"Come here," he says, and that's weird, because he's just finished moving her to where he wants her and she feels like she doesn't have to move a muscle on her own (and oh, the strength there, and it is so fucking nice to be touched like she isn't gonna break), but then she realizes what he meant when his fingers plunge between her thighs and skim over the wetness there before settling against her clit.

"Fuck," she says, prayer and imprecation, and her body tries to make her jack-knife against the pleasure his touch brings, but he's holding her pulled taut against him and all she can do is moan. The strips of her skirt brush against her inner thighs (and sweet Buddha suffering but she is still half dressed and as soon as she realizes that she knows that's why Nielson put her in this skirt, so that someone could do this, fuck her senseless without even stripping her down first and that should not be this fucking hot but it is) and fuck, but he knows just what to do with those hands. His fingertips circle her clit, not quite touching, hard and steady just above so the pressure builds and builds without being too much.

It's just the way she does herself, and he's walked in on her and she's walked in on him and they've both pretended they don't have eyes (or noses) when it happens, the polite fictions of two people living in nowhere near enough space, but this is like he was sitting on the edge of the bed watching, because it's perfect. First times are never perfect, always some missed cue or misread signal, some ghost of a former lover's preferences surfacing in the bed between, but this is perfect and she's coming before she can even get a second to think.

"Yeah," she can hear, tucked in between the rush of her blood in her ears, "like that, with me, come on, sweetheart, come on, come on," and his fingers slide downward, slick and slippery, skimming around the edges of her cunt and into her. She whimpers again, bearing down against him, and he laughs, sharp and ragged. He holds deep, his hips pressed against her like it's his dick inside her instead of two fingers, rocking against her body, the body he's braced against him. She can feel her fingers clutching the sheets, and she casts one arm behind her, hand landing on his hip. It's the only part of him she can touch, pinned so effortlessly even if her leg is the one draped over his, and she puts as much of her strength as she possibly can into pulling him forward.

And she'd have to be blind to miss the way he likes that, the way he likes having fingers digging into his muscles, because his whole body stiffens for a second and she can feel the tremors running through his thighs. He slides his fingers free and back over her clit again, and there is someone in this bed whimpering please, please, please with every breath and she's only half sure it's her, because he's saying something too and it might just be please as well.

When she comes this time, she knows she's yelling, like the orgasm is spun out of her instead of hitting her like a brick, teetering on the precipice of too fucking much and sweeping her up half a second before it crosses that line. He gives her just a second to catch her breath, circling his fingers around the edge of her cunt again, spreading her wetness everywhere he touches her, and this time his thigh comes up between her legs to trap his hand between it and her.

He's just flicking his nails over her clit, fast and light, an edged teasing while he gives her a second to catch her breath, when she catches herself saying "please, God, please" again, and she knows what she means by it but she doesn't want to leave anything to chance. "Please," she says, one last entreaty while her brain catches up with her mouth, and this is an alternate universe and they've suspended all their rules, so it's all right for her to say "fuck me".

It comes out as an order, not a request, and for a second she thinks she's gone too far, that he'll touch her but he won't make love to her, because his hand falls away from her chest and his fingers come away from her clit and trail over her upper thigh and hip, shoving her away from him to sprawl, face-down, against the sheets. But it's only a second, because when he rolls backwards away from her to free himself, it's to open the bedside table and shove its contents aside until he finds the condoms that he's looking for, and he's moving so fast it maks her wonder if he was just waiting for her to ask it.

"You," he growls, not as the start of a sentence but as a sentence all by itself, and she pushes herself up on her elbows and turns her head and watches his hands shaking as he tears open the package. He falls onto his back, planting his heels against the bed and letting his hips rise, once, to fuck his own grip as he rolls the rubber onto his dick, and then he collapses back against the bed and just breathes for a second. Then he's moving again, rolling over and plunging his hand back into the drawer, flipping open the cap of the bottle of lube one-handed and gathering some up in the palm of his hand, and he's looking at her when he anoints himself with it and the look in his eye makes her feel like she could come again just by the weight of his gaze.

She's just working up the drive to move herself, roll herself over and spread her legs to welcome him in, when he rises up over her and shoves her legs apart with a knee between her thighs. The noise she makes must be a question, because he says "up on your knees" with a voice that doesn't sound like his, rough and harsh and commanding. His hand, the one that's wet and slippery and cool from the lube, finds her again, two fingers sliding back inside of her. She breathes out like a punch to the stomach and obeys before she can think about it too closely, leaving her face against the pillow, getting her knees up underneath her, and he fits herself between her legs and forces her knees to open wider.

"Hips, up," he says, snaking his other arm underneath them, and her heart bursts apart and flutters free as she realizes his choice of position has nothing at all to do with not wanting to look at her face or her body or her scars or her breasts. He just doesn't want her taking both of their weights on her spine.

"Pillow," he grates, between gritted teeth, frustrated and snappish like she's failed to grasp some essential element, and her brain might be short-circuiting as he slides his fingers in and out of her, more urgent with every stroke, but she finally catches what he's saying. It only takes her a second to reach out a hand and grab the other pillow, and she thinks he barely realizes what he's doing as he heaves her up so roughly that her knees nearly leave the bed while she shoves the pillow underneath her hips as a bolster.

Then his fingers are leaving her, and she buries her face in the pillow and hollers as he wraps one hand around her hip with the gentlest of guiding touches, constrasting sharply with the thick heat of his dick as he sinks deep inside her with one smooth thrust and holds there.

It feels good; it feels more than good, it feels fucking incredible, the perfect mix of rough and tender, stretch and pressure and burn, and she rocks back against him in time with her heartbeat. He makes a little noise, muffled and choked, like he's trying to remember not to grab her. "Don't fucking move," he says, edged, desperate, half an inch from snapping. He brings his other hand around her hip and rests his fingertips on her clit, then drops his forehead so it's resting against her spine. She can feel his breath, spreading out over the small of her back, fast and tight like his chest is heaving. "You start moving and we've got about half a fucking minute --"

She likes the sound of him, halfway to feral, the closest to losing control she's ever heard him be, because she's a little shaky on control herself at the moment and it's fucking nice to know she isn't the only one. Her heart is slamming against the cage of her ribs, like it's trying to break free, re-splinter bones that have finally mended. Her hips and her spine are aching; her thighs are straining and sore.

She feels alive. She feels real. She feels like Cameron fucking Mitchell again, in her own skin, in her own body, and it's been three years, five months, and thirteen days since she kept an appointment she hadn't known she'd had with a field full of Antarctic ice and she has re-learned how to walk and she has re-learned how to live and now she's remembering how to dance.

So she pushes back against his hips, and he swears and shudders and snaps forward to meet her, and she buries her forehead against her arms and tries to dare him to do his worst. His fingers beat a tattoo over her clit. He fucks like he knows what he's doing, like he wants her to come fast and furious, and the force of his hips drives her forward as the pleasure builds in her thighs, in her belly, in the depths of her cunt where he's filling her. His skin is so hot it feels like scalding, and she wants -- reaching, straining -- there --

When she's thinking again, she realizes she's slid down boneless, facedown against the bed, and he's slipped out of her and slumped sideways so none of his weight is bearing down on her anymore. She feels worn-out, well-used. Well-fucked. Been a long damn time. Tiny little quakes are running down her spine, aftershock and aftermath, and his hand is resting on the small of her back, right over the scar tissue, warm and reassuring.

There's a throbbing at the base of her left shoulder; if she thinks about it hard enough, she thinks she might remember him biting down just as he started to come.

"Oops," he says, his voice transmitted through his chest to buzz against her skin. His fingers slip under the waistband of her skirt, pluck at it once as an illustration. "Won't be wearing that again."

"Your fault," she manages, her throat dry, her voice scratchy. She turns her head to look at him, before she can think of all the reasons why she shouldn't. He's lying on his side, his other arm up to serve as a pillow, and he's watching her from behind lowered lashes like she holds the secrets of the universe. He isn't smiling at all.

"Yup," he says, quiet, unrepentant, and rolls over to grab a tissue from the bedside table and swipe it over himself. He balls the condom up in it and shoots it at the garbage can. It's a mark of how wrecked he is that it misses, rebounding off the edge to land on the floor. He makes a face, but doesn't get up to deal with it.

Her skin is damp and the window is open (the window is always open, no matter how often she closes it) and without him there to warm her, it's amazing how fast she starts to shiver. Or maybe it's the aftermath, emotion distilled into the realm of the physical, spreading through her. He rolls back just as she shivers again, plastering himself along her side, his mouth coming to rest against her shoulderblade like he could kiss away the toothmarks. He yawns against her skin, and an answering yawn tries to fight its way through her chest, but she breathes deeply and keeps her mouth closed against it, so it turns more into a tensing and a release.

They stay there for a few minutes, motionless, tangled together; she can feel his heartbeat against her side, slowing like hers is slowing. "That was ... new," she finally says, because he won't take compliments and he won't take thanks, but if she leaves it too long without saying anything, without marking the event somehow, it'll all build up until the weird she was worried about overrides the glorious lassitude sweeping through her bones. "We gotta redefine 'queer'?"

What she's asking is we gotta redefine us? and he knows damn well it is. He chuckles, softly, and the sound of it is almost an answer. "Wasn't always," he says, like it's the most self-evident thing in the world, like it explains everything completely. And yeah. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe she's thinking too hard.

"Here, lift up," he says, his hand at her hip again, and she obeys. (And ow; she can already feel that her hip and thigh muscles are going to be aching in a few hours and wretched by tomorrow, but it's not damage, just strain, and it eases a fear she'd been carrying for a damn long time, because he wasn't gentle with her and she didn't want him to be and that means she can do this again and be all right afterwards.) He slides his hand under the waistband of her skirt again, pushes it down her legs. She rolls to her side, squirms a little, gets it down the rest of the way and kicks it halfheartedly to the edge of the bed. He wraps his arm around her waist and holds her there, the way he'd held her earlier, the way he holds her every night as they're falling to sleep, pulling up the covers with his toes and draping them over her and her alone.

"Loved my wife," he says, against her hair, soft and calm. His hand splays out across her belly. Her breath catches in her throat, because he'll talk to her at night and he'll talk to her in the dark and he'll talk to her when he has to, telling her the stories of his Life Before, but it always feels like he's forcing out the answers. Some things he tells her because she needs to know, and some things he tells her because she makes him confront them, and some things he tells her because he has to tell someone; they have things they talk about because they have to, and things they make each other talk about because to hold back would be to withhold truth, and they leave the remaining pieces unexcavated and unexamined until they fall into one category or the other. This doesn't feel like either. He's just ready to talk. "I never ... it was always good with her. Couldn't make me stop wanting more. But it was still good."

She spreads her palm out over the top of his hand, holding it against her body, twining his fingers with hers. She's trying to think of something to say, when he adds, "Good with you, too. Different kind of good. Isn't better, isn't worse. Just different."

"I love you, you know," she says. They don't say it often. Not in words.

"I know," he says, and he works his other arm underneath her until he's cradling her from behind, one palm between her breasts, one palm where she's holding it against her belly. "Love you too. Now shut up. You're wrecking my afterglow."

She snorts. Starts thinking about getting up, going to pee and drink a glass of water and take her pills, but it's too much effort. Her gluteus medius and piriformis are moving from ache to throb, and she untangles her hand from his and presses her palm against the worst of the trouble spots. He's sitting up before she can protest, moving her hand aside and working his thumbs into the muscle, gently. "Thought you were enjoying the afterglow," she mumbles, even though the last thing she wants in the world right now is for him to stop.

"Shh," he says, sweeping his palm over her ass, warm and comforting. "I'll get your drugs in a minute. You okay?"

She closes her eyes and lets her hand fall back to the bed. She doesn't even have to think about the answer. "Yeah," she says, and it's truth, and it's triumph, and it's glorious. "Yeah. I'm fine."

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