Beta reader: The amazing Zan
Genre/Rating: Angst? / R (for safety)
Summary: Dominic Cobb wasn't the type of man Mal expected to get settled down one day.

NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN

Dominic Cobb wasn't the type of man Mal expected to get settled down one day, which was why when she spotted him for the first time, sitting bent on the chair in her father's work room, all she could think of was how much time she'd take to get him into bed.

Weeks were spent on what she later named The Waltz and what Cobb renamed to The Hungry Waltz, once he connected her difficult-to-get-apart-from behavior with that of a female praying mantis. Every step she made towards him, Dom acted as if it was an insult to his nonexistent innocence. Some days, she struggled not to just tie him to the first available chair or table and show him how a man should react when a woman was willing to spread her legs for him. Some days, she went with the flow and caught herself enjoying all that nonsense.

Until he finally got trapped by her feigned lack of knowledge about dreamsharing. Of course she had read all she could from her father's notes as she perceived her small advances were related to it and, since she had never really paid much attention to any of that when her father was talking about it, she only needed to echo all the doubts she had during her research to Dom and complete some of his explanations, when he was in the middle of them, as if she had concluded that by herself in that very instant.

There was a somewhat clichéd dinner on the day she perceived he was ready for her, where she skipped the dessert just to get faster to Cobb's apartament. Dom didn't notice she was faking calm as she undressed him and he led her to his bed never stopping the kisses. Mal always thought of Dom as a man who liked rough sex (and that wasn't far from the truth), but she didn't expect him to be almost a mummy during the act. She'd point that if she hadn't felt his hot breath against her skin and seen that glare that said everything his mouth wasn't. That glare which gave her the certainty that he wouldn't let her go easily.

Mal tried to get out of there as soon as they finished, but Dom was a gentleman and would never permit her to go home alone at that hour of night. It was sweet the way he thought of her as some kind of damsel who didn't know all the shady types that might cross her path in those streets. So as he put his arm around her waist, Mal fought the urge she always felt during the moments where men treated her with a sort of reverence and refrained from her account of the first obscene case she could remember of before it could slip out.

She never wrote a note or left any sign that her absence in Dom's bed wasn't a refusal to what they could have become. Even so, Dom looked for her every time he found himself in the university's grounds, but Mal seemed to have vanished into thin air just like she had appeared for the first time as she entered her father's room on his second meeting with the professor.

Miles observed them both and their recently odd behavior to figure out what had happened to bring them apart. So, the day he found Dom staring at something on the other side of the campus, he followed his gaze and saw his daughter in the arms of an unknown man. Her hand in the stranger's back pocket compounded what they had already concluded. Miles put a hand on the Cobb's shoulder.

"I think you are a noble man, Mr. Cobb, but I'm afraid that means nothing to my foolish daughter."

Dom didn't answer a thing. Just nodded and walked out.

He spent the following months trying to avoid Mal, while she tried to ease things for the sake of both their relationships with her father, who didn't like to hear about the story and told her to fix it as fast as possible. But all that effort only led to strained encounters which often ended with rude comments from Mal regarding Cobb's masculinity. Then, when the opportunity to work at home for a week came, Dom took it without thinking twice about it.

A knock on the apartment's door made him huff. Dom hated to be interrupted when he was in the midst of analyzing a new idea, so without another thought, he ignored it, hoping that whoever was on the other side give up and go away. The next knock could have been mistaken for a SWAT team trying to break in with a battering ram and was followed by two more. As Dom feared losing track of where exactly he was on his analysis due to some useless ranting coming from his cranky landlord, living near the end of the corridor, he rushed to answer the door. His hand was halfway to the doorknob when he spotted an envelope next to his feet and took it hesitantly. Dom looked through the peephole and, seeing nobody, opened it and read its content.

She was waiting for the elevator she hadn't yet called, when Cobb unlocked the door to run after the person who had put the envelope under his door. She didn't look over her shoulders, and her count was at eleven the moment an hoarse voice asked Cobb what the hell was happening to make such ungodly sound disrupt the floor's peace. Dom never gave an answer to the question which led his landlord to complain about the lack of respect the Americans had nowadays and something about letting no more foreigners into the building after the end of that contract.

When she turned to look at him, Mal saw the landlord's door closing and muffling the man's peevishness and Dom with a paper in hand at face level. Squinting. That was the first time she saw the man doing such a thing and, somehow, she thought he was adorable doing that, because he seemed not to know that look didn't scare her at all. She smiled as if she were mocking him and he squinted even more - what she thought it was impossible until then.

"It seems that lack of respect isn't the only thing Americans have, but lack of good quality protection too."

"It was French to start with." Mal chose that moment to hit the elevator button. "How are you sure it is mine?"

His tone was tending towards rude and Mal almost could picture half of the floor eavesdropping on them behind the doors; the landlord with a glass for a better acoustics. She ignored the fact she was unable to tell whether Dom was seething or not as she freed her tongue for her usual sharp retorts.

"I know mathematics and biology as much as I know my sexual life. You can do the maths if you are inclined to."

She entered the elevator and Dom passed a hand through his hair before asking what she had expected from him with that scene. Mal flashed a crooked smile again and hit the button for the ground floor. As she disappeared behind the closing doors, all that was left to him was the implied question in her words.

"This isn't about me. You tell me."

Cobb didn't know what he wanted beside finishing the dream project he was in and go back to the States. Raising a child hadn't been on his plans for the next couple of years and now this had happened. He looked at the exam again and then at the sky through the floor's open window.

He squinted.

Note: A fill for Harlequincepted's Theme 2: First Times.
Disclaimer: Inception belongs to a guy called Christopher Marvelous Nolan.