Dance to Measure
This isn't how I thought the first time the Doctor and I had sex would look.
Oh… well, that's quite the statement, isn't it? Maybe 'how I dared to imagine,' or 'when I caught myself daydreaming,' or anything that sounds less sure of myself would sound a bit better.
Would something like that sound more proper? More appropriate?
Of course it would.
But – would it be more honest?
Absolutely not.
I have thought about it. And when I have, it's never been as some far-flung daydream or impossible fancy – our lives are full enough of impossibilities as they are. No…
I've seen the way he looks at me when he thinks I'm not paying attention. I've heard the way his voice drops at times, taking on a rumbling quality when he dares me to do something. And, of course, I've felt the way his touch will linger over me sometimes. Hands held a little too long to be friendly, a caress to the wrist as he let go…and that isn't to say I'm not just as guilty of the same things – not at all. That's why I decided a long time ago that this was pretty much inevitable – all just a question of when, instead of a question of if.
As much as some things with the Doctor are totally foreign – alien even – this game I understand. This dance is incredibly human, quite basic. Every step, every countermove, every darting away only to come back so much closer says one very simple thing…
Maybe it's because the dance is the distraction we've created for each other. He comes two steps forward, I go two steps back. I go right, and he goes left. If we keep that up neither of us has to admit the reason we tread so carefully around each other.
The grace to our steps disguises the intent behind them. They fall lightly, evenly – perfectly controlled. They lead the eye away from the surface of the imposing walls we are skirting knowingly around, those walls we have built to protect ourselves. Sometimes we slip, though. Sometimes we let a finger run along the smooth surface as we brush by, tracing a careful outline as a reminder – a reminder that those walls are still there.
But of course they are. Why would either of us doubt that?
Those barriers have been carefully constructed for a very specific purpose. They are meant to keep ourselves in, and others out. They are meant to protect us. And they have.
People have tested them before, and they've always held. Some try to slip past, to sneak in somehow. They failed. Others try to crash through the walls, or tear them down stone by stone and leave us exposed. They failed, too. We maintained the defences, guarding against the would-be assailants, or would-be rescuers depending on your point of view I suppose. Are they trying to get at us? Or are they trying to get us out? It doesn't really matter in the end I suppose. The results have been the same.
With how tried our fortifications are, I would never expect them to fail us. Anything we give, we give on our terms. And that's why, when I thought about how this would happen, it would be a slow thing – a careful thing. We would be somewhere quiet and safe, too. The TARDIS probably, where both space and time would be irrelevant concepts and no one could interrupt, or bear witness to our mutual, yet temporary, surrender.
It seemed impossible that someone could get at either of us any other way, without permission.
But maybe we were so focused on the structure itself, we forgot about something very important: the foundation. Unknown to both of us, the unseen force that draws us together, in unspoken yet perfectly timed steps, has managed to seep into the ground we built ourselves on. We never tried to break through to each other, or slink past each other – we never had to.
This all started so strangely.
"See you next Wednesday!" He'd said it as he always did, but I – thankfully – remembered to correct him.
"Actually… I'm going out with some friends from university. Its Easter break next week so I'm not working. I'm really sorry, Doctor, but it was the only time that worked for them. We can do any other day though?"
He looked at me, confused.
"Is it just you and your friends going?"
I shook my head. "Erin is bringing her boyfriend I think, and Mei might rope the girl at work she's trying to woo into coming, too."
"Can I go with you, then?" He asked me.
He went still after he did. The Doctor never stays that still unless he's worried about something.
"Of course. If you want to."
I said it without thinking.
The words fell from my lips automatically. It was only after that my mind caught up with my mouth. I managed to hide the surprise from my face as his whole frame visibly relaxed and he beamed at me. He was worried about my reaction, but, why? When he set a hand on my arm, and placed a quick kiss to my forehead in farewell, I realized that my shoulders had knotted tightly. He slipped back inside his big blue box, leaving me more than a little curious as to why he had such an interest in this, and also more than a little apprehensive, too.
The days and moments between then and now passed in a blur of normalcy. Occasionally a small collection of worries niggled at the back of my mind. Though there were times the Doctor could blend flawlessly into a crowd, other days it was as if he'd never been to Earth before. Which Doctor would be coming out to meet my friends on Wednesday night?
When today arrived and he knocked on my door – only a few minutes late – it turned out I needn't have worried. There was the Doctor, standing in my doorway without his bowtie and usual frock coat. If I hadn't known better I would call him nothing more than a well-dressed bloke – from this century, even.
He almost seemed timid with my friends, hardly his usual exuberant self as the obligatory introductions took place.
"Doctor John Smith, Clara's… boyfriend."
The first time he ended that sentence, his voice flexed experimentally over the last word, and his eyes locked onto me. His shoulders eased from their tensed squaring when I gave him an ambivalent nod, the corners of my mouth trying to work their way into a grin. Was that how we were playing this then?
After nursing a couple of drinks at a table, Erin dragged Mei out to the dance floor, motioning frantically for me to follow them. The gentlemen joined us a few minutes later, and that took the idea of us dancing around each other to an entirely new level.
A very… literal level.
As soon as our eyes met, I could see the same frantic thoughts were swirling around his head, too. His eyes acted as a window into my own thoughts, reflecting the same questions back at me.
Where did our hands go? And how much – or how little – personal space were we allowing each other? And once we were dancing, well… How did we move?
The answers slowly fell into place, with the two of us finding our footing and toeing the line. Placing my back to him freed me from the mirror of his eyes. I didn't have to see the uncertainty, or the questions anymore. Without that reminder, it was almost easy to relax – almost. The few inches hovering between us felt like a solid space – a real barrier between us instead of empty air.
At least for a while.
When I first felt his fingers graze a slow trail down my side, I thought I might have imagined the gentle pressure pulling me closer against him. I was tentative, taking a sharp breath as I eased into his chest. But when his palm fanned out to rest confidently across my hip, I let my head fall back, turning so my forehead brushed the bare skin of his neck.
I still think I might've been able to hear his pulse even over the drowning noise of the music and the people around us. At least, I remember what might have been nothing more than a phantom double-beat, but I've no idea what song was playing. In that moment all I was aware of was the heat rolling off of him, and the web of tension spun so tautly between us.
Just as he'd surprised me with the way he'd dressed, and the way he'd introduced himself, and the bold trajectory of his hands, suddenly his fingers were locking around my wrist, pulling me with an urgency that was usually reserved for running away from something dangerous, instead of running towards it.
Our carefully toed line was far behind us now, and I didn't know what lay beyond it.
Finding our way through the crowd should have been harder than it was. People seemed to ebb around him, flowing back together as I followed in his wake. The door at the top of the stairs to the loft fell open, and he tugged me through it. The trap door slammed shut behind us, with a deadbolt groaning in protest when I clumsily toed it into place.
His hand finally left my wrist, coming up to trace the soft angles of my face.
"Clara…"
But whatever he had to say – I'll never know.
He almost growled as I reached up around his neck to pull his mouth down to where I could reach it. Our feet shuffled, for once without any sense of rhythm, until my back hit the old brick wall. Every uncoordinated step of the way, our hands fumbled for clasps and buttons.
And here we are, crashing together only to discover that there are no barriers between us. We don't have to break through to each other. We've become a part of the groundwork beneath each other's feet, growing in to fill the space. Not undermining each other, sapping our strength unseen from below – but blossoming and taking root, acting as a natural support.
All we have to do is let go, and trust that the ground won't dissolve from under us.
The Doctor groans as I trace my way across his bare chest, trailing around his sides and sliding down the arc of his back. One of his hands cradles my neck while the other weaves its way into my hair. The pins prove no challenge to his fingers at all. He plucks each with ease, and they clatter to the floor as my hair cascades loosely around my shoulders. It doesn't rest there for long, though, as he sweeps it away and drops his mouth to the bare skin. The buckle of his belt comes undone easily. A quick tug at the loose ends pulls his hips to grind into me – not that that does me much good, even in heeled shoes. (Damn, he's tall.) His hand abandons its efforts to peel back my neckline to swoop lower, hiking up the hem of my dress before lifting me off of my feet. My legs shift out to the side to wrap around his hips, and it's my turn to groan when he presses me into the wall.
Like I said, this isn't how I thought the first time the Doctor and I had sex would look. But I never thought a time traveling alien would land on my doorstep, either. Or that I would agree to follow the mad man and his equally mad box in a freely measured dance across the ages. When he first beat at the Maitland's front door, I couldn't have imagined him like this – us like this. My hair pins littering our path, and my dress hiked to my waist. The Doctor's trousers in a pool around his feet, his shirt wide open across his chest…
No more dancing around each other now.
Every move we make is meant to pull the other closer: our lingering touches stretching out into tender caresses and heated grasps; our usually witty words of banter and teasing stilling to breathless exclamations, then to pleas, soft cries and finally to muffled moans.
I asked him once why the TARDIS never took us to where we wanted to go, and he surprised me with the soft reply that she always took us where we needed to be. My carefully thought-out future – our mapped-out mutual surrender was the intended destination…and yet all it took was a couple of unmeasured steps to send us spiraling off to where we needed to be, instead of where I planned to be.
And as he flashes me a knowing smile, I remember the first lesson of traveling with the Doctor…
The unexpected destinations are always the best ones.