A/N: It is XMAS TIME OVA HERE! Thank you for reading this far, please congratulate yourself with a pat on the back and chocolate if you have any haha.
Without further ado, I present to you...
Standing on the Threshold
Sloane hung out with Ferris several times a week over the next month. Sometimes Cameron hung out with them too.
There was one time when they turned on the sprinklers and messed around, jumping through them on the lawn. Ferris dove through the water like an acrobat, leaping and tumbling and commando rolling in mad glee. He dragged Sloane in with him and she fell to the grass laughing, belly aching as the cold water soothed her sunkissed limbs.
There was another time when they decided to teach BooBoo how to play dead. They bought a couple of pounds of pork for the job. It paid to be prepared.
BooBoo was a Rottweiler of unusual stubbornness. It took Sloane scratching him into oblivion to be more compliant and open to training. She sat on the steps of Ferris' side door, the dog puddling across her lap, muzzle against her chest. Hot dog breath breezed along her neck whenever she found a particularly good scratching spot.
There was a day when Jeanie took her to the mall to get the right colour lipstick and Ferris came home after to kiss it all off her.
There was a moment when Ferris was at her house for dinner and her father swapped sugar for salt (he would swear by accident later on) and the mustard for custard (that was the intended joke). Her mother's face, frozen as she tasted her oddly sweet mustard-sauced-steak, was immortalised in a Polaroid photo. It would hang in her parent's bedroom for years to come.
These were days that made her smile.
There were also days that drove her mad.
One time when Ferris decided they should go berry picking, so they took Cameron's old white crappy car, and bundled out to the closest strawberry farm in Illinois.
The smiling farmer gal had handed them their punnets, telling them to pick as much as they'd like- they'd be charged by weight whatever they brought in. They weren't meant to eat anything they picked until after they brought it in. Sloane cheered in excitement and immediately roamed across the lines of vines and strawberry patches. There were hedges breaking up the soil. It made for a good game of hide and seek, prowling around and simultaneously finding good ones.
The three friends drifted away from each other, picking and eating when they shouldn't and hollering when they found anything noteworthy.
Ferris had pulled a water bottle out of his bag and carefully dipped his fingers in it, before creeping up to Sloane. Her hair was up in a plait, practical for the heat and activity. His hands brushed the back of her neck, making her shriek and jump up as though electrocuted.
"Ferris!" she protested loudly, startling a couple of birds. He just laughed at her and tugged her down to fall against one of the hedges.
He rummaged in his punnet and pressed a strawberry to her mouth. She bit into the sweet fruit, savouring the juices. His gaze darkened a little and his hands encircled her waist, thumbs brushing under her white t-shirt, feeling the slope of her hips. It was a silent moment of tension where he waited, watching her watching him. Please?
She exhaled and shifted minutely. Yes.
His fingers slid up her ribs, t-shirt bunching a little to show a few more inches of flat stomach. But otherwise she remained decently covered. Ferris bit his lip, watching her as his hands cupped her breasts under her bra, before pushing it up out if the way, letting his touch have free access hidden under the shirt.
He drew delicate circles on her nipples. The touch was good, little sparks that she wanted more of, but she kept her eyes open to watch him. To take in the way he grew flushed, and his mouth parted slightly, and she could see him want her.
The sound of feet crunching in the dirt startled Ferris out of his little daze and he quickly removed his hands from under her shirt, springing away and forcing an innocent expression over his face.
"Found one thats all weird shaped like a butt!" Cameron's voice announced proudly. He held up a fairly odd looking strawberry and munched another one blithely.
Ferris grinned weakly at his best friend and made an excuse about looking for weird shaped butt ones in the next row over. Sloane was pretty sure he was just trying not to get caught with his one-eyed snake firmly up and about it.
She stayed however, shaded from the summer sun by a strip of hedge-shadow, one hand tossed over her face.
"This is the life," she sighed, and Cameron came over closer. His tennis shoes stopped by her knee and a hand descended to offer her get-up-help.
She took it, dusting off loose dirt on the back of her jeans as she stood. They shared a smile, and then Cameron's gaze shifted lower for a fraction of a second, clearly realising what he'd just interrupted.
Ah. Ferris hadn't put her bra back down. She had weird lumps above her boobs no doubt and everyone would think she was going to die of all weird known and unknown diseases.
His eyes returned to her face, as if checking her expression.
"Yeah, I could get used to this," he said, gesturing expansively.
Then his eyes went back to her chest. The sunlight made him glow from the side. It also made her nipples, still standing bold from the earlier attention, visible through the white t shirt. She smiled up at him, blushing a little, and didn't bother to fix her bra until he'd turned away.
He hummed, and dropped a strawberry on her head playfully. The moment was over.
Whore, her mind sung, you want him to keep looking. How can you be so fickle!
it was an accident!
Sure... but she immersed herself back in the present, adding a cheerful descant into whatever his song was.
Ferris crouched, arms full of strawberries, trying to decide which ones were the nicest to feature in his punnet. He waved at her as they drew nearer, knocking over a couple of prospectives in the process. She grinned, his joy spilling over to her.
The three of them fell into step naturally, feet synchronising together as they came close and walked shoulder to shoulder back to the weigh in station. Sloane looked over at Ferris, at how he lengthened his stride a little and how Cameron shortened his, how smoothly this assimilation happened without words or conscious thought.
They worked well together.
She pondered that for a moment. Let the idea sit in her head as she proffered her punit, thanked the lovely plump lady as it was weighed and paid for, and leaned back against the wooden stall.
Ferris was chewing on a strawberry loudly, puffed cheeks like a chipmunk. Cameron was imitating him. Both of them made her smile, affection siffusing through her gaze.
A good day, together. Even as guilt at what had just happened poured down her spine.
There was another time, after she'd just come back from Cheer Camp for a week, when she was nothing but a bundle of sore and knotted tissue, her flexibility pushed and her muscles strained.
Ferris had run over and they sat on the lawn of her house, her fingers brushing through the overgrown lawn, lazing. He tossed a frisbee around, amusing himself and Malcolm while she groaned every time she had to move.
"Maybe I can make you stop whining," he murmured, and she kissed him enthusiastically, the heat pooling in her- but the soreness returned, and her abs protested, and she fell back to the grass with a pathetic thud.
Cameron came round to pick Ferris up for a boy's night out, and examined the scene with the air of Puck delivering just desserts.
"All that pom-pom shaking tucker you out?" he grinned, and Sloane rolled her head slowly to give him a glare. He just laughed, and as Ferris teased Malcolm ("Which hand is the ham in? C'mon, c'mon! Which one? Use your nose boy, I swear Booboo could eat you for breakfast!") companionably plonked down next to her. It was another moment of strange and new.
"I'm going inside to find my shoes," Ferris hollered, and she huffed a small "OKAY!" back.
Cameron rested his forearms on his knees, casually relaxed in shorts and an old t-shirt. She was still in her training shorts and top, with sweatpants thrown on top for decency. She wanted to move but she was so tired and sore there was a dissociation between her body and her mind, small but present. She could just picture propping herself up and going inside, could wish and will for it as hard as she liked, but her body stayed prone in the grass. Closed eyes, smell the air, drifting down into nothing and nothing and heavy weight sinking down and down...
"You're really hurting, huh?"
She nodded slightly, a sigh escaping her.
"My mother used to play tennis, before they had me," he said after a pause. "Apparently she was as good as the state."
Her eyes fluttered open a little, to look at him as best she could.
"I never knew that," she slurred.
"She'd come home after a match and be dead tired, like I suspect you are. My old man would take a bunch of lavender and rosemary and throw her in the bath and leave her there for a couple hours. Said it helped her be less annoying afterwards."
"That's real sweet of him...are you gonna suggest Ferris throws me in a tub too?"
"No," he looked away, grinning to himself, plucking a grass stem idly.
They watched the world go by for a minute or two. Sloane pondered exactly how much energy it'd take to get her to her bed. Her mom had told her to go easy on the weights but she hadn't listened and now her quads and her triceps were pushed to failure.
"Ughhhh," she moaned, "I hurt."
"Where?"
"Huh?"
"I said, where? Are you injured?"
"Nah, just... sore."
Cameron looked her up and down assessingly. This would have sparked heat in her, an uncomfortably shameless pride, but now she just rolled tentatively onto one side to see him. Her training top was likely grass stained to heck on the back anyway.
"What were you working on? Splits?"
"I can do those already," she huffed. "Try doing those perfectly timed 50 thousand times over while you're being thrown in midair."
He raised an eyebrow, impressed but not willing to admit it.
"Glutes, hip flexors and calf stretches," he said. "It's the hockey team's bread and butter. They've gotta have really strong hip and knee mobility because of all that torque and rotation on the ice. If you dont mix up your stretches, you fossilize into one kind of movement."
She rolled her eyes at him, "Since when did you become an expert, oh great athlete? You skip gym whenever you can get away with it. Also, for the record, we already do stretch those. I'm not tight, I'm flexible and achey." Cameron must have found something amusing in those words because a little muscle in his jaw twitched but he kept his composure.
"Pidgeon pose?"
"Yup."
"Glute squat?"
"Yup."
"Heel drops?"
"Every goddamn morning, Mr Frye."
"Ok, cool, you've got all the basics."
Anger fuelled her enough to sit up and give him a birdie. He just laughed.
"For the record, no I don't have a six pack and no I don't do school gym because running is, uh, not fun. But I get on the ice more than you realise. Kneel up for me?"
She did, begrudgingly, quads shrieking.
"One knee on the floor, other one up, press your heel to the floor, lean forward to add more weight. Hold it for like, a minute. 30 seconds is for pushovers." He demonstrated and she mimicked. He was only a little less flexible than her, and it hurt to stretch but in a bizarrely necessary kind of way. They swapped sides.
"Good," he murmured, and ran a hand over her sweatpants to check the muscle. She froze, wondering if this was some kind of move-pulling, but his touch remained focused and completely diagnostic, prodding just above her achilles and at the side of her calf.
"Ok, come out of that. Next one, I want you to brace your arms and your top half like you're going to go into a bridge. But we'll focus on the hip flexor, so you'll be like trying to do a bridge but kneeling. This is my weak point one, so I just look ridiculous, but see if you can do it?"
This stretch would be fun. Sloane had always loved doing bridges, even as a seven year old, before she'd ever seen Cheerleaders. It was the antithesis of her normal body position.
His hands this time very carefully placed fingers under the small of her back, thumbs just under her hip bones, and lifted her up, furthering the stretch. It was burning- hot pain ouch too far too far, and she hissed "Too much!" and Cameron's touch vanished. She collapsed back onto the ground, back of her head probably gaining some dirt.
He shifted to form a shadow over her and his thumbs returned to carefully press below her hipbones at the top of her legs, silently making tiny circles as he dug into the muscle.
"Ferris has probably found his shoes by now," Cameron commented, "but just to say, your hip flexors are really strong. Like, freakishly strong. They're engaged when they should be relaxed right now."
It hurt, but good hurt. She sighed in relief, but the touch went away too soon. Sloane instantly craved more, anything just to push the aches and pains out of her body, but the sound of Cameron's car horn proved his point. Time to go.
"Can you show me more stretches sometime? You guys use different ones, it'd be really helpful to give to the girls."
He shrugged, getting to his feet in a fluid motion. "If you really get that beat up after a training camp, you need sports massage, stretches help but they don't work with damaged tissue. I'm willing to bet your hip flexors are overtight from pulling your leg up fifty thousand times."
"Do you know someone who can do that?"
Cameron laughed to himself, looking up to the heavens as though someone had just told a great joke.
"I can do enough," he announced at last, "but if I had Ferris there I could teach him as well. I'm actually going for a game of roller hockey tomorrow but what are you doing the day after that?"
"Probably shoving as many calories into my mouth as I can without disgusting my mother, and sitting trying not to die," she said dryly.
"I'll take Chocolate poptarts as payment."
"Deal."
Cameron had gone round the side of her house, and she'd dragged herself up to her bed. And although she was tired, bone dead tired, the thought of a massage from both boys together kept her mind exhausted and awake.
It turned out that sports massages were not anything like a spa massage. There was no fluffy white towel, no steaming concoctions, no head wrap or special cucumbers for her eyes.
Sports massages were a thousand times over that needling pummelling aching soreness somehow good and needed dragged and over and over and over her muscle.
Sloane had opened the door to Cameron with his professional, composed and mature face on (she'd privately named it the Hire Me TM look in her head) and Ferris, bouncing full of energy and cheeky sparkling eyes. Ferris seemed to find this all funny, insisting that she stopped exercising two days ago so there was no way she was still hurting.
If only that were the case. Her pectorals were on fire and her core just... ugh. Owh.
As Cameron held up the lavender oil that he'd nicked from his mom's bathroom back cabinet, explaining it needed to be heated a little bit so it could absorb better into the skin, and where were her Poptarts he'd been promised, and if they were going to do hipflexors and calves and ankles she didn't need a special table with a hole in for the face, it was entirely business, with Cameron's eyes staying dutifully on his own hands and the couch and Ferris as he explained what he was searching for and doing.
Definitely a badly healed muscle tear. We're searching for a knot. She's flexible on her calves, more than most people. Watch her face for pain, it'll tell you faster than she can speak.
He was trying to keep the sparks from happening inside her, but he couldn't quite stop them when he turned and asked if she had anything like a spare cheerleading skirt or towel or something. She limped up to her room and breathlessly looked through her sports gear. Her parents were off at the mall somewhere picking something up for her cousins back in Tennessee. She was wondering if this was going to be a breakthrough moment where she did something horribly horribly wrong.
She picked up the short green skirt that she hadn't worn since Senior of middle school. It had been giving and comfortable around the waist, the elastic freedom to move and breathe and stay secure. That was then.
This was now. She looked in her mirror and slipped it on, twisting from one side to the other. God, she looked like someone trying to get into Playboy. She should take it off right now it was absolutely tiny and barely covered her rear!
Or, that small breath of wickedness in her whispered, you should wear it because its absolutely tiny. It's only your boyfriend and his friend downstairs.
Sloane remembered her Nice Girl friends and pictured how horrified they would be if they saw her practice in that skirt. She thought of Ferris' face, eyes dark and cheeks pink, mouth open and panting. She thought of Cameron and how she had stood shamelessly before him.
"Green for school spirit," was all Cameron said when she came down, "Nice." Ferris looked at her like she was every male high-school fantasy come true, and she lapped it up with an affectionate wink. His jaw dropped a little, and then looked over at Cameron as though to say, you know he is still here right?
I know, she smiled, hopping up on the kitchen counter padded down with towels. Her hair was up and she wore no make-up as if to emphasize the wardrobe choice was careless rather than one puff of teenage daring.
He rubbed some oil into his hands and Ferris did the same and the scent of lavender wafted over to her. Nice, but not erotic or anything. More like a mom's soothing herbal treatment.
Cameron's fingers were suddenly sweeping up a thigh and then round and down along her skin and trailing up a hipbone, trying to get some heat from friction. It hurt. Every press and pressure hurt, exquisitely. She closed her eyes and scrunched up her face and tried not to wiggle. There were patterns and methods to his madness- some longer presses, some small pulses, a deep harder movement.
It was gloriously aching. She loved and hated it, wanted it to end and wanted it to never stop, wanted to move away from it and get more at the same time, not quite there not quite at the right spot higher higher higher-
He pressed down on a nerve and she whimpered.
He began to work down her calf and it was like parts of her she didn't even know were sore started to hurt too. How could someone make your kneecap groan? Make your instep weak? Tension in her achilles, so many leap ups and jumps unproperly released.
"Ferris can try the other one," he said, "You hanging in there okay?" and his voice sounded amused and she wanted to curse him because she was being remade and reshaped by his hands in muffled agony and he thought it was funny.
"Just fine, pal." She bit out, and sighed when his hands left her. Ferris' touched her other leg, tentative, more gentle. Him she felt the callouses of, could sense his fingers tremble as he tried to feel the muscles under her skin. His knuckles made her spine shiver when he pressed them into the arch of her foot, her ankle being circled and circled and loosened with each touch. He wasn't unpainful, just- uncertain. Or maybe she was more compassionate with him. She could dimly hear Cameron give direction to Ferris in a calm voice, while she grimly endured him working through a knot on her right hip flexor. She tried so hard to relax it made her just as tense.
They finished up working together, both shifting to light strokes, encouraging blood supply to the area, flushing out toxins, lavender permeating the air, until it was just Cameron, hands circling in cloudlike motions from her toes all the way up her calf past her quad and feather light up to her hipbone. She could have sworn his thumb, hidden under her short green skirt, gave one tender circle over her hipbone and a barely there skim along her pantyline. But his face remained impassive and he withdrew his hand and turned to Ferris with a shrug, and she propped herself up on her elbows, startled to find there were tears in her eyes. Tears of relief, of catharsis perhaps.
All she knew was sports massages were not like spa massages, and Cameron was much better than "I can do enough."
A/N: Thank you for reading, a happy holidays to you, and hope this was tension enough. Sloane is starting to come to terms with the fact she Likes Cameron, Cameron is... trying to keep his cards close, and Ferris is not as clueless as you think. Having had several sports massages, I tried to bring into it the aspect of dealing with the muscle pain being good but um, it actually does really bloody hurt. Rereading this it almost comes across as masochistic though, (Sloane isn't and I don't want to bring that into this experience) any ideas on how to improve the description would be greatly appreciated!
Over n out
~featheredblades
