Author's Note: I wrote this story sometime last summer, during the whole Vendetta storyline, before Luis and Fancy finally got together. I have yet to write the second half of this story, but I really love this first half to much to let it collect dust on my hard drive. So, here it is.
Love is a verb. She uses it so many times, in so many contexts, throughout her day. "I love that purse." "She said she loves the city in autumn." "Father would love this pasta." "I love you."
But love is not only a verb, she knows. Love is also a noun, a force between two people so opaque that she's not sure she could ever fully hope to describe using only such limiting things as nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
Love is an agent, the darker woman once explained to her, chocolate eyes bright with belief; it is an agent of fate. Fate is a noun, too, she's been told, the noun which guides us all to our inevitable destinies with our respective soulmates. She'd thought it was all a crock, once. But her step-grandmother seems so sincere, so genuine in her belief, and wouldn't all just be nice? No more searching, no more longing to find a man who loves her for who she is, not how many figures her bank account balance contains. No more tears. She has a soulmate, a man to love her, and for her to love back.
Ethan and Theresa. Luis and Sheridan. Noah and Fancy. The way it's supposed to be.
He's standing in front of the television, his fingers pressed up against the screen, as if willing himself to defy reality, reach out and touch whatever it is that's etched this crestfallen, despairing expression in his handsome features. She comes around the corner and finds her aunt Sheridan's smile illuminating the TV screen; her hands rest on her stomach, swollen with maternity, and she laughs as she watches Chris swing James throughout the air, the boy's squeals of delight echoing throughout the room.
"I called her yesterday," Luis whispers, voice small, barely audible, as if someone has rammed his fist down his throat, and it still remains there. "I told her about how we figured out that Beth and Marty must have survived the fire, and how they're still here in Rome. I guess she decided to take Chris and James and go celebrate."
On screen, Sheridan and Chris are now each holding one of James's hands, letting the boy swing freely between them as they walk through the park, blissfully unaware of the papparazzi following them. Shaking her head, blonde hair swishing back and forth, Fancy turns her attention back to Luis. "You'll get Marty back, Luis, and then you can go to Sheridan and be a family," she reassures, resting her hand on his shoulder.
He shrugs, brushing her away. "Look at them, Fancy," he croaks. "Look how happy she is with him. With them. Look at them!" he roars. Face reddening, veins pulsing in his throat, he seizes the television and sends it crashing into the floor. Yellow and red sparks fly through the air, and she grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him back into her bedroom.
"Luis!" she cries. His chest heaves, nostrils flare, and he slowly sinks to her bed, devoid of all feeling, all energy. She climbs next to him, pulling him in closer to her, stroking his hair. "It's not over," she whispers, trying to convince more than one person in their chic Italian suite of this statement. "She still loves you, Luis. I know it."
His body is so stiff, spine nearly straight as he rests his head against her chest. "Yes it is," he moans. "I used to be the only person who could make her smile like that. I... I tried to tell myself that if only I could find Marty... but it was all just a pipe dream. She has Chris now, and James, and the baby she's carrying. She doesn't need me any more." He swallows hard, then adds, "She doesn't want me any more."
Everything that happens next she can only recall later in a haze, all jumbled and confused. She knows that, at some point, he looks up at her with those soulful brown eyes of his, and that, at some point, those soft pink lips of his are crushed up against her own, his tongue fighting for entrance into her mouth, but how they make it from point A to point B eludes her. All that she knows is his body covering her own, the hardness beneath his jeans, and this is wrong, so, so wrong, but why do they still have their clothes on? And they can't think, not now, because it all feels so good, and she's wanted this for a long time, hasn't she? She knows she shouldn't, because fate and destiny and love and soulmates, but they're all just words, nouns, far away concepts to her right now; this feels good, right, natural.
They've somehow made it further back onto her bed, and they've lost their clothes somewhere along the short trip; she thinks she can see her bra hanging from the ceiling fan with eyes only barely open, feeling forcing them closed. She feels his lips all over her neck, breasts, feels him inside of her, so hard and big and deep and oh God this is what she's needed, wanted for so long.
They're no longer in Rome, having a comfort fuck in some ritzy hotel, her ex-boyfriend and his whore somewhere downstairs; they're floating through oblivion, not a care in the world but making sure that this feeling doesn't end.
Fifteen minutes later and they're back in Rome, the guilt of what they've done eating holes in their stomaches. He fumbles for the words as he pulls his pants off the top of her armoire. "What... what just happened - what we just did... we can't. Ever again. It was wrong. I was wrong. We shouldn't have."
She nods, pulling her comforter around her bare body more tightly. "I know. I... I was wrong, too. You were hurt. I... I should have known better. I..."
"It doesn't matter," he interjects briskly, untangling his shirt from one of the suite's large, potted plants. "It's all in the past now. We just... we have to make sure that it doesn't happen again."
She looks down at the silky purple fabric, picking off a piece of lint and throwing onto the floor. "Right," she whispers.
He looks back at her, and then pulls his shirt over his head. "Right."
Their resolve lasts only eleven days.
She likes to eat dinner around nine when she's in Europe, likes to try to blend in with the locals; he's a stubborn American, through and through, and he likes to sit down at the dinner table no later than seven.
With Beth still loose, still crazy, still falsely believing that they're lovers (because they are not lovers, because one stupid night when he was hurting and she was weak does not make them lovers), they can't afford to eat outside of the hotel. They could have ordered room service, but she feels so trapped, the four walls caging her in, that he relents, agrees to accompany her downstairs to the hotel restaurant.
Things are normal between them, despite their night together. Things are normal even after, while eating her chicken piccata, she spots Noah pressing Maya up against a wall, kissing her as if there's no tomorrow. Things are still normal when she drops her fork onto her plate, after she flees into the elevator and back to her room.
Things are still normal when he finds her curled in a ball on her bed, eyes wet and red. Things are normal yet when he pulls her into his arms, when he rocks her back and forth, like he once had for Marty.
But then she kisses him. He pulls away, surprised, desperate to prevent himself from making this same terrible, horrible mistake a second time, but then something changes. Something in his eyes dies, or is born, maybe, and he moves his lips back to her own, his fingers to the hem of her short, short skirt, now seemingly so much longer. She pushes him back and straddles his groin, and he makes no move to regain his dominance.
Twenty minutes later and they're both sitting on the couch, watching the new, shatter-proof TV. Everything is still normal.
Two stupid nights, two lapses in judgment, do not lovers make. First, he had been hurting. And then she had been hurting. And it was just comfort, is all. There are so many people from Harmony running around Rome, but they are an island of themselves, cut off by their townspeople's own yearnings and goals to be accomplished here.
And they've both been betrayed so badly. It's only natural that, alone in this bright and shining city, would seek each other out. But they're not lovers. Never lovers.
Until one night she finds herself standing in the doorway between her bedroom and the living room, watching him stare up at the ceiling from his makeshift bed on the couch. He must sense her presence in his peripheral vision, because he turns his head towards her and squints. "Fancy?" he asks, more concern and caring in his voice than she could have expected for three-thirty in the morning. "What's wrong?"
She swallows, takes in a nervous gulp of stale hotel air. "I can't sleep."
He nods, turning his gaze back to the ceiling. "It is hot tonight."
Her heart is racing. This path can only lead to one place, she knows, but the words are out of her mouth before she can swallow them back into the place that things better left unsaid should go. "It's... I think it's a little cooler in my room. And - and my bed, it's more than large enough for us both. You'll be more comfortable there."
He stares at her for a few moments, as if wary of her offer, but then sits up. "Okay," he nods. "Why not?"
He follows her into the bedroom but, instead of going to his own side of the bed, he trails her to her own. He stops just inches from her, and she takes note, not for the first time, of how tall he is, of how strong his chest is. That strong, muscular chest of his heaves in time with her own, it seems, both nearly touching as they crest.
He places a hand on her bare shoulder and fingers the pathetic little strap there, all that is holding up this tiny scrap of fabric that she calls a nightgown. Gingerly, he pulls it down, down, and her breathing hitches, knowing what's going to come next.
"It's too hot," he says simply, and she nods in agreement. Too hot to think. Too hot to sleep. Too hot to do anything but this.
And now they lay side-by-side, dripping with sweat, and everything has changed. Maybe after one night of comfort, two nights of comfort, they weren't lovers, but there was no comfort in tonight's liasion; it wasn't some misguided way to put the hurt, the pain at bay until they had recuperated enough to bare the burden once more. It was her, and him, and together in the same bed, like they have both done so many times before with so many other people.
And it's wrong, she knows, because Sheridan and Luis and Fancy and Noah and fate. Destiny. Soulmates. These words do not apply to them. They were never meant to apply to them.
The first week, he only joins her at night but once. The second week, it's three times. The third week it's every night, and the fourth it's every night and often times in the day, stolen kisses in a cab, out of view in some empty hallway.
And they can't stop now, even though they swear never again every single time, because it's become a pattern, a habit, and patterns and habits, especially the bad ones, aren't so easily extinguished.
They're funny things, these dirty little habits. They always come to light, somehow, no matter how careful, how cautious their bearers might be. The need to fulfill the burning, aching desire outweighs the need for secrecy, and a slip-up occurs. It is inevitable.
It's only eleven in the morning, but already the emptiness she feels when he's not inside of her has reached unbearable proportions, and his longing to hear her sweet voice cry out his name as she comes is flooding his brain, preventing him from thinking rationally. They're all kisses and caresses in the elevator, a mad frenzy as they fight the conflicting urges for instant gratification and a more clandestine union. "I could stop the elevator," he gasps out between kisses, and she laughs and breaks away as the door finally dings open. There's nothing that she'd like more than for him to fuck her senseless in an elevator, but there are too many people they know wandering around the hotel. It's too risky.
But their desire is starting to shadow the risks involved. Even as they rush down the hallway, as she unlocks their door, his hands are roaming, exploring the soft skin beneath her shirt, his lips tasting her throat, tangy with perfume.
They fall into the room together, gasping and grasping, and neither notices that the door does not shut completely, remains cracked open. Instead, unable to make it any further, he bends her over the table and sheathes himself within her, mouth seeking out her breasts; she screams, intoxicating waves of ecstasy washing over her.
It's so wrong, she knows, for reasons that seem so far away, reasons that she can't seem to pluck out of her mind as freely as she once had, but it all feels so good, so right, and how could something that feels so right be so wrong?
He thrusts deeper inside of her, and another scream, this time louder, more shrill, escapes from somewhere deep in her throat. And then the door flies open.
Ethan is standing in the doorway, the look of worry on his face quickly being replaced with shock and disgust. "Oh my God. Luis?" he asks, disbelief prevalent in the short question. "Fancy?"
Luis is off top of her within a second, pulling his pants back up; she rolls off the table, hastily buttoning her blouse and smoothing her skirt. "Ethan..." they both begin at the same time, but her brother's raised hand causes them both to trail off.
"How... how could you do this? How could you two do this to Sheridan? And to Noah?" Ethan pauses and laughs, harsh and bitter. "My God, I told him - I told him that there was nothing going on between you two! That it was all a big misunderstanding!" A stormy look passes over his face, darkening his features. "How could you lie to me like that, Luis. My own sister!"
"He wasn't!" she cries out, turning her older brother's wrathful gaze onto her. "We... we didn't... we hadn't, not then."
"Oh!" he cries, throwing his hands into the air. "Oh, and that just makes everything fine, huh?" Resting his hands on his hips, he closes his eyes and exhales loudly, then looks back up at the two. "Look," he says, voice softer, more even now. "I think that I should stay with Fancy now. You can stay with Theresa, Luis." Ethan is still breathing heavily, trying, Fancy knows, to keep from flying off the handle and punching Luis in the face. "But I think you should go now. We can get our luggage later."
Luis looks as if he might say something, might challenge his niece's father, but ultimately deflates, nods. He looks back at her, as if in apology (which is utterly ridiculous, because she started this whole thing, she started their cycle as lovers), and finally walks to the door, defeated.
"Luis?" Ethan turns to face his friend. "I won't say anything, to anyone. This ends here."
Fancy laughs inwardly at his words, as if he's implying that there's something dirty, something disgusting and revolting and low about what they've done. But, she realizes, there is, because Sheridan and Luis, and Fancy and Noah, and destiny, soulmates, fate, and oh God, what has she done?
She sinks to the couch, still sticky with not only her sweat, but his, too, and feels the guilt wash the ecstasy away.