Bad Bad You, Bad Bad Me
NC-17. AU. Begins at the end of 5x08 (Joe's alleyway).
This is it, my baby: the piece I have been striving towards in almost 9 years of writing. It began last summer on my Blackberry on a very rickety Sri Lankan train and remains a (long) work in progress but one I really want to share. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I loved creating it, especially now when our beloved couple is in jeopardy. Many thanks to Leah for the beta.
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What you gave me was a reason. Not an excuse. Because there's sex, making love and fucking. And then there's you.
iwrotethisforyou[dot]me
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The first time it happened, it almost didn't and definitely shouldn't have. It was a fantastic mistake; a desperate connection. It was loneliness and alcohol, lust and anger and forgetting and remembering.
She would never know why she followed him out of Joe's, nor why she opened her mouth and kissed him back. She didn't know him or what he was thinking, or even what she was thinking, but the way his teeth felt on her tongue and the hum of his body as he flattened her to the wall were catalysts for something that had been set in motion long before either of them had realized it.
She walked away knowing he would follow, just a step behind, but of all the boundaries they had crossed together in the short time they had known each other the doorway of her apartment turned out to be one he couldn't confront alone.
"I don't need you," he said again from the hallway and in such a rough voice she was surprised it didn't hurt his throat.
He was trying to justify this to himself, which told her he didn't often follow women back to their apartments. Good, as she wasn't usually eager to be followed. So what was it about him that made everything moral and sensible about her go flying out into the night sky?
Maybe it was the fact that he was hot and she was lonely, or maybe it was just the alcohol they had both consumed – either way, she was in this now with no retreat, and when she stood before him and looked into his eyes she saw someone she barely recognized from their first meeting. It was foreign and scary and even more exhilarating than when Burke had first kissed her in that on call room. He had been practically a stranger then, just as Owen was now, but with Burke there hadn't been half as much anxious anticipation: of words which might trigger something feral in him; of his next, wild move; of when he would pounce on her and kiss her to the floor, and the speed at which she would dissolve when he did.
"You don't have to need me," she told him now, brushing her fingertips down his cheek, feeling him lean into her touch. She wondered when someone had last loved him, put their arms around him, called him their hero.
"You just have to want me."
There wasn't much he was giving away, with his dark unreadable eyes and rapid breathing, but his desire for her was screamingly obvious, buzzing through every atom of the air around them, and she was damn well going to play on that to get what she needed – and wanted – tonight.
She kissed him first, on tiptoes and in the doorframe, and from that moment onwards the lines between their bodies blurred, slipped and fell away until his hands in her hair were her hands; the teeth on her skin her teeth; his clothes ripped off and slipping down her body like she had been wearing them all her life. Hard and soft flesh was pushed together with increasing desperation and more than once the sharp corner of some piece of furniture bruised muscle as they created a trail of destruction around the apartment which was quickly filling up with moans and sweat and the unmistakable scent of lust.
He seemed to know exactly what she wanted with his roughness and his fingertips and the way his gaze just devoured her when she was finally naked and sprawled for him on her bed.
"You're sure this is a good idea?" he murmured, and the way his mouth moved against her ribcage was such a forgotten sensation it almost brought tears to her eyes.
"No," she gasped. And then she was kissing him again.
He was the antithesis of Burke: red, white and blue, and scarred right down to his bones. He was so different and yet exactly the same: he made her scream another name but she still came with such force she could barely breathe; still clung to him as if he was the only thing stopping the world from falling away beneath her. She quickly lost count of positions, surfaces, orgasms; of when his hands were on her boobs, her ass, in her hair or in her; of all the places she tasted and touched him, and the noises he made when she did; and of the nothings they whispered in the darkness like the ghosts of all their past lovers were right there with them, staring and shivering and longing to be part of it once again, not realizing that they always were and always would be.
She wondered if it was okay that sometimes, with her eyes closed, she was making love to Burke and he to her; that she was comparing him, mourning him, missing him and hating him in quick, intense bursts, interrupted only by the sting of tears or when the memories became so painful she wrenched her eyes open and blinded herself with Owen's pain instead. She eventually decided, after gazing at him moving above her, that it probably was okay to be elsewhere because, stranger as he was to her, somehow she just knew that she wasn't the woman he was making love to either. And that was fine, because the moments they were there together more than made up for their emotional absences, their distraction; their healing and their tearing apart.
She didn't know what exactly it was that they were doing but it certainly didn't need to be labelled because it was neither good nor bad - it just was: they just were. And whether or not it changed her, or him, and whether or not she would regret it tomorrow or feel like a whole new person, just didn't matter when he was holding her and she could lose herself in him and feel... Better. Empowered.
Herself.
From the moment she had kissed him in the doorway, he had taken charge and she had let him because it was easy and because, truthfully, she wasn't sure she knew how to handle him. Now, in the after, she still didn't – he was still a mystery and maybe that didn't matter because they probably wouldn't ever do this again. He had well and truly owned her and left purple fingerprints on her thighs to prove it, and she had liked it: to belong to someone again, just for a little while, just once. But mind-blowing as it had been, she wasn't about to get involved with someone so complicated, so lost, so completely broken.
As he was finally getting dressed, at some unearthly hour of the morning, he said seriously: "We shouldn't have done that."
She gazed at his broad back, at the way his muscles moved as he maneuvered his socks, thinking that of all the men she could have found with whom to share one night of truly mind-blowing sex, she had surely picked the best. "So? Maybe you didn't need me, but I needed that."
"You're not going to thank me, are you?"He looked around at her, something glinting in his blue eyes which she hadn't seen since their very first meeting.
"Fuck off," she said softly, and when the corners of his lips curved upwards he was suddenly a different man: a man she had once met, kissed and even – in that wishful place just before sleep – thought about loving.
So much for not getting involved.
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So come on over darlin'
and bring those magazines
and show me which one's your favorite flaw,
'Cause bad bad you and bad bad me
Is all we'll be left with, anyway.
Stephen Fretwell
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