Disclaimer: Y'all know the drill…
A/N: Late nights, messed up heads and lack of sleep brought this on. Inspired by the quote below and also by All We Are by Andy Kong. Not beta'd so any mistakes are mine.
Let's Play A Game
I heard you're a player. So, let's play a game. Let's sweet talk. Let's play fight. Let's talk 24/7. Tell each other good morning and good night every day. Let's take walks together. Let's give each other nicknames. Let's go on dates. Let's talk on the phone all night long. Let's hold each other. Let's kiss and hug. And whoever falls in love first? Loses.
She doesn't know when her walls began to crumble. All she knows is they're barely holding, barely keeping back the torrent of emotion that threatens overflow. Her carefully compartmentalized compartments are stuffed to the brim.
It's a dangerous game they play. One full of indescribable looks and not-so-innocent touches. It's a game they started way back when and are now in too deep to stop. It's a game they crave, like the precious air they breathe. There's a line in the sand, a barely visible one the game seems to skirt the edge of.
She doesn't know when the innocent looks across the room became something more. Doesn't know when she first realized it was no longer a game. She's pretty sure she's crossed that line, fallen off the edge of the cliff, head-first into the abyss.
They remain professional at work. They have to. Especially in a room full of profilers whose job it is to decode the world. But after hours? A look turns into an unspoken conversation. A touch becomes a caress, fingers tracing patterns on thighs, leaving warmth in their tracks. Their game holds no bars.
The first time they cross the line, she blames on alcohol. One too many after a night with the team. They'd been on gruelling case, one both physically and emotionally draining, and the alcohol helps numb the horrors left behind.
A soft knock at the door, and hot lips crashing against her own starts it all. She responds out of habit, as if they've done this before. Answering all of the unspoken questions with moves perfectly tailored for their situation.
Soft cries and hushed moans fill the air. She breathes in the intoxicating scent of the blonde before her, swallowing down the taste of the forbidden fruit dangling within her reach. Her hands grip too tight, leaving bruises on the porcelain skin, proof this is all real.
They fall to the bed, a tangle of limbs and nakedness, clothes roughly discard in the darkness of the hotel room. They move in sync, touching and teasing, bringing each other to the edge of pleasure, over and over again.
When she wakes in the morning, she's alone in the bed, the faint smell of intimacy lingering in the air, the fading warmth of the sheets giving the only evidence of what happened.
Weeks pass and the game resumes, the line in the sand as prominent as ever. She chalks it up to a drunken one-night stand and hides it in one of her compartments.
Until it happens again. And again. A late-night visitor on her doorstep. A kiss that leads to something more. Another morning woken up alone.
She wants to feel used, but she knows it's a two-way street, this game. It takes two to play, to give as good as you get, to tease the hell out of the other person, until they're begging for mercy.
Phone calls turn into breathy words of seduction, careful words whispered not to alert those around them. Team nights become a promise of something more and girls' nights become date nights, laced with a hidden thrill of danger.
They sneak around, always ending up at hers, in her bed, because the blonde has a partner; has a family she can go home to and pretend none of this even exists.
She wants to feel hurt. She wants to make liaison hurt like she hurts, but she can't bring herself crush the woman she loves. Can't bring herself to lose the woman she yearns for. But she knows they can't do this forever. She can't do this forever.
So, it has to be now. She has to be the one to give it all up. Because she was the one to fall in love first.
She is the one to lose.
"It's a dangerous game, my dear, falling in love with a phantom."
Sorry it's so short.
Lemme know what y'all think.
Monkeywand
