The Last Person She Kissed
Author's Note: Hey guys, here's my first one-shot for The Flash. After episode 1x19, I wanted to write my own version of the "fallout" from the Everyman's interaction with Caitlin. So I give you some Barry and Caitlin fun and I hope you enjoy! For the lovely people that read Heroes and Sidekicks, I am in the midst of writing the next chapter now, but I had to get this story out of my head before I could finish it.
Disclaimer: I do not own any part of The Flash.
The Last Person She Kissed
It had been four days since Barry first noticed that Caitlin was acting unusually jumpy around him. It was like every time Barry got within a foot of her she couldn't get away fast enough.
This time she practically yelped in his face after he tried to lean over her shoulder to read her computer screen.
"What is your deal?" he finally asked her. At first he had thought it was something to do with keeping secrets from Dr. Wells or that maybe she was mad at him for bringing her mentor's betrayal to her attention. He thought she would have started to move past it by now, but she hadn't and it was driving him crazy. He felt like he was losing her trust and it was killing him.
"What?" she feigned ignorance to his question, but quickly spun her chair away from him to put some space between them.
"That!" He flung his finger back and forth between the two of them. "Every time I get anywhere near you, you act like you're about to jump out of your skin."
"That's preposterous!"
"Really? Are you going to honestly tell me that you haven't been acting weird around me lately?"
She sighed. "No."
"Then what's going on? Is it about Dr. Wells? Are you doubting me?" he rattled off question after question at her.
Caitlin shook her head, but didn't offer up the real reason. She was too mortified.
"Then it's me," he inferred. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what I did wrong." Barry said. He was at such a loss for what he might have done that he looked like a puppy who had just been kicked.
Caitlin felt awful. She never meant to hurt his feelings. She was just having a harder time forgetting about her kiss with the Everyman's pretend Barry than she expected. "I swear, you did nothing wrong."
Barry sighed. "Then why do I feel like you don't trust me anymore?"
Her heart sunk. She couldn't let him believe that he lost her trust—now more than ever they needed to be able to trust one another. She rose from her chair and walked over to him. She placed a reassuring hand on his arm. "Barry, I trust you. I promise."
He nodded slowly, but she knew he wasn't satisfied.
She had to tell him.
She took a step back from him and turned to face the other direction. "Oh God." She swallowed hard. "I can't look at you when I say this."
"Okay…" He said, slowly drawing out the word. With the way she was acting, he was actually getting nervous for her.
Caitlin could feel her face getting flushed and she hadn't even told him yet. "I was never planning on admitting this to you, but here we are. So…when the Everyman was you…um, you kissed me—or I mean, he kissed me while pretending to be you." Even though he couldn't see her face, she felt the need to cover it with her hands.
She didn't dare glance back at Barry, but if she had she would have seen his blank-faced stare at the back of her head. At least that was before he busted out laughing. "What?" he said, through his laughs.
She turned towards him with her hands on her hips, embarrassment forgotten. "Are seriously you laughing at me?"
Barry tried to suppress the smile. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—you just surprised me." He cleared his throat and then asked her seriously, "Are you okay?"
She couldn't stay annoyed with him when he seemed genuinely worried about her well-being. "Yes, I'm not traumatized or anything. It's just thrown me off my game a little."
Barry was relieved to hear it, but he was also very curious about a few things. "So is that how you knew it wasn't me?"
"Huh?" She didn't expect a follow up question.
"The kiss—is that how you knew the Everyman wasn't me?" he asked again.
"Not exactly," she answered.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise.
She felt the need to explain. "I didn't really have time to process what happened before Dr. Wells figured him out."
Barry looked at her sideways. He was honestly interested in how the shapeshifter had been able to fool one of the smartest women he had ever known. He tried to picture the reverse situation—if the shapeshifter had pretended to be Caitlin, would Barry be able to tell? He needed more information to fully answer his own question. "How exactly did he do it?"
"What do you mean?" Caitlin asked cautiously. She seemed horrified at his question.
"Like how did he play it off?" Barry clarified. He sat back against Caitlin's desk and folded both of his arms across his chest. "He's pretending to be me, right? So in what situation did he think that you and I would kiss?" Barry didn't really think about what he was saying—his inner forensic scientist had taken over and he was too focused on piecing the puzzle together.
Caitlin, on the other hand, was offended. She narrowed her eyes at him. "Because I'm so disgusting that it's beyond the realm of possibility that you would ever want to kiss me upon normal circumstances." She shot at him sarcastically.
Barry's eyes widened and he bobbed his head forward in surprise. "No! Of course not! That's not what I meant at all!" He backtracked, honestly taken aback by how she had perceived his words.
She started to walk away from him toward her lab, fed up with the conversation.
He scrambled after her.
"C'mon, you know that I think you're awesome," he explained as he trailed after her. "I'm just curious about what he said for you to let him kiss you."
Caitlin threw her hands up in the air. "I didn't let him do anything! He grabbed and said 'I should have done this a long time ago'. Then he kissed me." She huffed out a frustrated breath and then turned back to see Barry's reaction.
He paused in the doorway of her lab and she could almost see the wheels of his brain spinning as he thought about it.
And they were spinning because the thing that struck Barry as odd was that the kiss she described didn't actually seem so far-fetched. He had never let himself give any real thought to kissing Caitlin before, but like he had said earlier she is awesome. So why wouldn't he want to kiss her?
He flicked his eyes up and down the full picture of the friend that stood across from him and he had to remind himself that that was what they were supposed to be—friends. Just friends.
"Interesting." Barry concluded. Caitlin wasn't sure why, but she was a bit disappointed that he didn't have a stronger reaction. "I'm surprised you didn't slap him," Barry added.
"Well, the first time I pushed him away," she replied without thinking.
Barry quirked his head and smiled. "Did you say the first time?"
"Oh God," Caitlin groaned.
"You kissed him twice?" Barry couldn't stop the wide grin that was taking over his face. It was a weird ego boost that she was willing to kiss even a pretend Barry more than once.
"He kissed me," she argued.
"So you didn't kiss him back?"
Caitlin hesitated and unfortunately it was long enough for Barry to understand that she had, in fact, kissed him back.
Barry practically cackled when he realized the truth—it was pretty fun to see her squirm.
"I hate you," she told him.
"Clearly not if you kissed him back!" he teased.
"I thought it was you!"
Barry raised his eyebrows as though she just proved his point.
"No," she said, holding up a finger to make him stop that thought process. She was not going to let him win this. "I didn't want to be rude to him because I thought that he was you."
Barry nodded like he believed her, but he wouldn't let it go. "So how was 'I'? he asked, throwing finger quotes over the "I".
"I'm not talking about this."
"Ooo, that bad, huh?"
Caitlin sighed. Maybe she would feel better if she got this off her chest. "Actually no. It was a nice kiss. One that I honestly liked, which is worse than if it was an awful kiss, because now…now I know that it wasn't you and I have to live with the knowledge that the last person that I kissed was a murdering metahuman. And that I enjoyed it."
That confession sobered up Barry's good mood very quickly. He closed his eyes and hung his head. "I'm sorry. I'm a jerk. I wasn't thinking about it like that."
He walked closer to her and opened his arms to offer a hug. She smiled and let him wrap her in his arms. "Are you okay?" he murmured.
She nodded into his shoulder. "Yea, I will be." She confirmed and rested her cheek on his shoulder. "Once I'm able to forget that before the Everyman, the last person I kissed was Ronnie and now it's a creepy criminal."
They pulled away from each other.
Barry hated the sad smile that ghosted her lips. She was still standing close to him and it unnerved him how quickly a "solution" to Caitlin's problem popped into his head. He didn't even want to think about the little thrill that ran through his whole body at the idea of it. He decided to view his reaction as that of a good friend, eager to help another in any way that he can.
"We can fix that," Barry suggested before he could chicken out.
"Excuse me?" She questioned him.
"You and I, right now. We can…you know. I can be the last person that you've kissed. Not a criminal." He tried to make the suggestion sound nonchalant, but he couldn't exactly pull it off. He stared down at his feet awkwardly, unexpectedly nervous about his proposition. It shouldn't have been so scary—it was just Caitlin.
"You want to kiss me?" Caitlin asked, wanting to be completely sure that she understood him correctly.
Barry shrugged. His last kiss had been Iris and at this point he wasn't even sure it counted, being that it happened in an alternate timeline. He thought it might be good for him to get beyond the memory of that kiss. Of course he couldn't tell that to Caitlin.
"Well yea," he admitted. "Right now, in a way you've kissed me, but I haven't kissed you. We do this now and we can be back on equal ground—we can go back to normal. Either that or we both become equally awkward around each other."
She laughed.
"Either way, we'll be on equal footing," he assessed.
She could sort of understand his logic. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"Not at all," he answered honestly, but he started to lean toward her anyway.
Barry took his time, giving Caitlin every opportunity to stop him if she wanted to. He wanted this kiss to be completely different from the one she shared with the Everyman. He wanted her to know that this kiss was Barry and only Barry. And he wanted it to be a lot better than her last kiss.
With their faces only inches apart, Barry let out a nervous laugh that made Caitlin smile too. He placed a hand on either side of her face, allowing a thumb to rest on each cheekbone. He lightly dragged his thumbs back and forth over the soft skin of her cheeks and gently pulled her head toward him. He stopped right before their lips touched to memorize every detail of her face and make sure she didn't seem uncomfortable.
"For someone called the Flash, you're not moving very fast," she whispered. She was worried that if she spoke too loudly that she would ruin the moment.
Barry smiled and took her words as a sign of encouragement.
He closed the space between them and suddenly his lips captured hers. She felt soft and warm and perfect up against him. He quickly lost focus on the reason he was kissing her in the first place and found himself completely absorbed in Caitlin. She tasted like cherries or strawberries or something delicious that he couldn't quite place, but he knew he wanted more. He tried to remember why they were doing this and like the good friend that he was, he started to pull back until he felt her push up on her tiptoes to lean closer into him and deepen the kiss.
A spike of adrenaline or excitement coursed through him and triggered something. He could feel his lips buzzing against hers. Literally. His superspeed had accidentally kicked in and he was having trouble focusing enough to get it to stop. He actually kind of liked it and it seemed like Caitlin did too. He felt her suck in a sharp breath in surprise, but she didn't break away.
She had never felt that before—that pulsing sensation as Barry's lips hummed against her own, but she didn't want it to stop. She pulled him in even closer, if possible, balling her hands in the back of his shirt and using it to keep him close.
It was unlike any kiss she'd ever had—unlike any kiss anyone had ever had, she assumed. The rapid vibration of his lips on her own combined with the long, slow pace of each kiss was incredible.
Iris was an idiot for turning him down.
And then his tongue touched hers and Caitlin nearly imploded. Barry Allen's tongue was in her mouth. She was full on making out with her friend, The Flash. And she was loving it. While her body was screaming at her to keep this going as long as she could, her rational mind told her to put an end to it before they crossed a line.
She hated her rational mind sometimes.
Caitlin pulled away from the kiss and stared down at his chest as she caught her breath and worked up the courage to look Barry in the eye. She still had her hands tangled in the back of his shirt and his hands were still on either cheek. She could feel his eyes on her. She didn't want to break up the moment until she knew what to say.
Barry found his voice before she did. "Umm…I hope that helps," he offered awkwardly.
"Huh?" she responded and looked back up at him. She wanted to kick herself for sounding so stunned.
"I mean, I hope it helps you feel a little better. The last person you kissed isn't a criminal anymore. Just me." He said and removed his hands from her face.
She released him as well and took a step back. "Yes, I'd definitely say that a superhero is better than a criminal." Unfortunately she knew it was more than that. That kiss wasn't just amazing because it was with The Flash, but because it was with her friend Barry. Her lips were still buzzing and she didn't think it was all because of his powers. That made her concerned for their friendship.
She was trying to sort out what she was feeling and how to ask Barry what he was thinking when his phone rang.
He gave her a sheepish smile and turned to answer it. After a few quick words, he hung up. "Joe caught a case," he explained. "I'm supposed to go," he added, but then he hesitated. It didn't seem right to leave after what just happened. He thought something big may have just passed between them and didn't want to leave that hanging in the air. He didn't really have a choice though. "Is it okay if I go?"
Caitlin laughed. "What? Of course it is!" When he still didn't leave, she flicked her hand toward the door. "Get out of here!"
Barry started to leave, but turned back to look at her one last time. He saw her absently touching her lips and he suddenly felt the urge to do the same. That wasn't good. Barry could feel his heart speed up as he thought about the effect that she had had on him during the kiss. A sudden urge to run came over him, so he did. He couldn't prevent the kiss from filling his thoughts as he moved. Maybe it hadn't been a good idea after all. Yes, his way of helping Caitlin move past the Everyman's kiss and get himself past Iris's kiss had worked all too well. But now, he found a new problem had emerged because no matter how fast he ran he couldn't shake the urge to kiss Caitlin again.
Hope you liked it! :)
