Reunion (M)


"They still tailing you?" Veronica asks draping herself over the desk, her day glow pink cast,covered in doodles of ponies and sparkling princess stickers, strikes a nail into her personal guilt coffin every time she sees it.

Her eyes drift across the names scrawled across it to her face.

"Yeah..." She turns back to the monitor.

It's been weeks and she's still got a plain clothes tail, Sheriff Lamb is the only one that seems to think that they are coming for her. Although she sleeps every night with the windows wide open.

"You girls want any lunch?" Keith Mars peeks into his office to point at both girls in turn. A wave of relief rolls over her just like it does every time she sees him. He hadn't been on that plane. He had been pulled off the plane at the last second and had driven back to town to find the town in shambles.

Casablancas Chaos, she liked to call it. Well to herself. She didn't really say the name out loud to anyone anymore.

She used to have it scribbled on her notebook, and all over her heart, but now it burned with a strange betrayal.

She had entertained fantasies of being married to Cassidy, now the little, silver bracelet she had twisted around her ring finger like some lovesick idiot was collecting dust on her dresser.

"No thanks, Mr. Mars."

"Lasagna?" Veronica asks turning in her seat to look at her father as if she still can't believe that he's there.

Keith points at her and makes a click noise with his tongue before he disappears from the doorway, leaving them in the slightly awkward silence that has reigned over every interaction since Grad Night.

She had hoped that the week she had spent in New York with her father would have eased it, but it was still there, it made the air stiff and the conversation strained. She was sure that Veronica was trying to figure out when, exactly, they should talk about that night and how. Mac hoped that she never figured out a way to approach the Casablancas subject. She hadn't really wanted to come here to help with the computer either, but she couldn't say no.

Their welcome home present had been a blue screen of death and who did they know that had a talent for computers and the world's guiltiest conscience?

Bingo.

"So when do you think Lamb will stop stalking me?" Mac rolls her chair over to the venetian blinds and, pulling them up, displays the plain clothes officer standing across the street being very unconvincingly nonchalant.

"Once he's got a new, big case to sink his ego into. I mean not only did he lose Woody, he lost both brothers. One from his own holding cell. It's got to hurt."

She sighs and rolls back to the keyboard, "He's the only one that thinks they're coming for me."

Veronica changes the topic to school in the fall and she's mostly thankful, although she would have preferred any other topic. Veronica wants to know about her dorm. She's pretty sure she plans on crashing there when she has early classes, but Mac isn't even sure if she wants to go in the fall.

The money she used for college felt so tainted, the fact that it had come from Casablancas funds made her feel dirty, very Lady Macbeth, she couldn't get the spot out. She could remember, with a heartbreaking clarity, the heat in Cassidy when she had told him what she had done, can remember the feel of his hands against her skin, the way he tasted, the push and twist of his fingers.

"I'm thinking of going somewhere else..." She told Veronica without looking up from the screen; she half hoped that she wouldn't hear her at all. She knows it's too late, but maybe she can go to some college in Europe somewhere, wait out the media circus.

"What? Why?"

"I'm tired of being that girl who fucked those murderers."

"Mac-" Veronica's voice is soft and it hurts, "No one at Hearst is going to know."

"Really?! They don't read the newspaper on campus?"

She's referring to this morning's paper. Kendall had had a little talk with the newspaper and had provided more information about her relationship with both Casablancas brothers than she had been prepared to be bombarded with at the breakfast table.

Where, the fuck, she had gotten a picture of the three of them together, she wasn't even sure she wanted to know. How she knew that a picture of the three of them was a thing that would come in handy later, she didn't want to know either.

Well that was a lie. She did want to know. Had she been the only one oblivious to the darker workings of the boys she was in a relationship with?

She hated it even more because it was a good picture. She had ripped it out of a newspaper on her way over. It was folded in her pocket at this very moment.

Having such a private moment, nothing dirty or unsavory, just the three of them sitting close together and smiling at the poolside, felt so raw and horrible.

"It wasn't that bad, Mac." Veronica tries, the article talks about the hours spent in Cassidy's room with the both of them, the sounds, when she would go down to the kitchen for a drink, in just Cassidy's button up and some socks, her mouth swollen, skin flushed and marked.

Whore.

The newspaper called her a gold digging, thrill seeking whore and she couldn't wait for newsprint to just fucking die already.

"Why don't you tell my parents that? Like it wasn't bad enough that my patents found out that I was dating brothers, who also happened to be psychopaths, from the sheriff's department now the daily they read over coffee and toast is declaring their baby girl a gold digging whore."

"They love you Mac...and no one believes a proven gold digger like Kendall. Your parents love you, they'll get over it and in the fall no one will have any idea that you're Cindy." She sets her hand on hers and she rips it away quickly.

She wishes Veronica would stop being so nice to her. She doesn't deserve it. She was having amazing sex with one Casablancas boyfriend while the other shot her.

"Mac..." She must be able to tell exactly what is going through her mind and she hates that, too, that Mars interrogation magic, "What you did that night does not make you a bad person."

She knows it doesn't. What makes her a bad person is that she wants to be with Dick and Cassidy and she hates them for not rescuing her.

If she knew where they were, she would go to them in a heartbeat. She can never forgive the bus crash, she knows that, but it doesn't stop her wanting to be with them. The dreams, day or night, are vivid and wet and always about them.

She just wants to feel at home again.

"No, not a bad person, just a pervert." Veronica smiles brightly and nudges her in the shoulder, "So tell me, you did it right... With both or just one?" Veronica asks quietly and the gossiping, bright, curious girl, that had never been her friend, is peeking out around the detective made of marshmallows that she loves.

Keith comes back with lunch before Veronica has a chance to push her question.

She fixes the computer while the Mars family stuffs their faces with noodles and quickly takes her leave before Veronica has a chance to get her alone and get the same answers the reporters want from her.
-

She sits in her car, in the garage, and pulls the folded paper out of her pocket.

There they are and she wants so much to just disappear into the photo, to just live in those few wonderful weeks forever. She flops over in her seat onto the passenger seat and holds the picture tight to her chest, wanting nothing more than to feel their skin and have their voices wash over her.

The seatbelt is cutting into her hip, but she pulls an abandoned sweater from the backseat and buries herself in it, dragging the smell of Cassidy Casablancas, kicking and screaming, into her.

It smells like cinnamon and dirt and boy soap, and she's afraid that the dirt smell is gun powder, but she wants to devour it anyway.

She stays like that until she can't stand the cut of the nylon into her hip anymore and her ear is wet with her own rolling tears.

Tossing the sweater back into its hiding place behind her seat she leaves the garage, only pausing at the door into the house.

One of her parents might be there. The car is gone so at least one of them is gone, probably with Ryan, but one of them could be there. She just hoped she was wrong or, at the very least, it would be her mother. She hadn't been able to look her father in the eye since he slid the newspaper over and pointed at a line about how she spent every day after school locked up in a bedroom with the Casablancas boys.

Is this true?

She had hung her head and it had been answer enough.

At least her mother didn't look at her like she was disappointed. Like maybe they should have asked for their biological daughter back after all.

She was, however, being overly delicate and kept dropping little hints about a therapist.

Neither are home.

The whole place is on lock down. It's just her, the silence and a bored deputy tuning a radio across the street.

She goes to the kitchen for a drink; on the fridge is a note from her mother. They are both at Ryan's baseball practice. She figures that no kid will be left alone with any adult for a while. She doesn't blame them at all. Her dinner is in the blue container which meant they weren't going to be back until late and there are messages for her on the answering machine and mail on the counter.

She cracks her can of coke and grabs the envelopes off the counter. She presses play on the answering machine and waits to delete everything.

She's already gotten a new cell phone number so the calls keep coming on the answering machine instead.

This batch only has two threats, both from the same shrill female voice, an angry mother taking out Cassidy's sins on the only available person.

She deletes the message at the first bitch.

The messages go on into desperate reporters and talk show promoters. She deletes them all.

She had no desire to go on national television and talk about her relationship with Cassidy and Dick. How she had been kept in the dark, about how stupid she felt, how betrayed.

She didn't need the money.

She takes her mail and drink upstairs to her bedroom, flipping past the obvious attempts to get the exclusive on her story. Of the handful of mail there were only three things she cared about. The newest wired magazine, a letter from Hearst, most likely about her dorm assignment and a letter from her bank.

Her secret bank. The one her parents don't know about, the offshore that she hides all of her ill gotten gains in.

She rips into it first.

It's a statement. Nothing new, she knows how much is left in it. Enough for one more year at Hearst and nothing more since Big Dick had gone and got his assets frozen, putting an early end to her education plan.

It's more than that.

It's an odd number more than that. Seventeen thousand extra dollars. She rifles through the papers until she finds the deposit.

It had a memo like her Grammy liked to make except it didn't say anything about being from Santa or to have a happy birthday.

You promised.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Fuck." She stands up so quickly she loses half her can across her bedspread and all over her hand. She barely notices until she powers up her desktop and finds a finger sticking to the shift key.

It's surreal pulling some of her patented Mac Magic on her own financials, surreal and easy.

Following the money, tracing it back to Cassidy and Dick and her home...

"Greece..." She pinpoints it to a branch in Athens.

When she tells them about this story later she's sure that her reaction time is going to be sped up, but right now she just sits there looking at all the little numbers that mean so much.

"That bastard really bought me that island..." She stares at the screen and drops the near empty can to the floor.

The file for the island is under her mattress. He had given her the file and the bracelet for Christmas, saying something about actually wrapping the present this time.

It had been a pretty, dark blue ribbon.

She dives for her mattress, pushes the thing off kilter, digs her arm in between the mattress and box spring, and pulls out the paperwork.

She thought it had just been a cute joke. She wonders if it had always been the contingency plan or if he had bought it for her because he was super rich and shit at presents.

The Ionian Sea.

They are on her island in the Ionian Sea, without her.

She looks between the statement, the you promised deposit, and the island paperwork, the photographs of the pretty sizable island off the coast of Greece. White beaches, blue water, lush green plants warm weather, white buildings and her boys.

She doesn't need to check to know that the extra money is enough for a one way ticket.

She sits there, in the destroyed room, for a while trying to pull herself together, the paperwork clutched close to her chest.

They were calling for her and she was going to answer.

She had to.

She had promised.

Veronica and her parents may not think she was a bad person and she didn't think she was a bad person for the same reasons that the media wanted to devour. She wasn't a whore, she wasn't a gold digger, she just loved them both and she is too smart to let anyone tell her she has to choose, and too stubborn to cut ties with them.

She would leave tonight.
-

She doesn't remember what she packed, but she's wearing her white church dress and the silver bracelet. She shoved her favorite shirts, jeans, and underwear in the bag she's sure, but other than her hard drive she doesn't remember much. She thinks there might be a toothbrush.

It had been a blur, a bright happy moment that she had let herself get caught up in.

It wasn't until she looked out the window and saw the 'not cop' cop car that she came crashing back down to her horrible reality.

She needed to deal with her tail because if they figured out she was on her way to the airport to catch the first flight to Greece she was going to have a problem.

She grabbed her bag, scribbled a note for Veronica that she wouldn't find until she was long gone and a subsequent note for her parents.

Sitting in her car again, she stares at the contact, she knows she has to call for this to go anywhere at all.

Veronica

She took a deep, hopefully calming, breath and hit send.

"Well if it isn't my favorite hacker, my gal Friday, Quartermaster,"

She's sure that Veronica will keep going until she hits the bottom of the pop culture reference barrel.

"I had sex with both of them." She blurts out and the line goes silent.

"Okay..." Veronica starts slowly, the frivolous tone gone in an instant, "and they were good to you, went the way you wanted, were nice."

"Yes."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I need your help. I... I can't stand being here anymore. I need to get out of town, my head just won't wrap around it. I need to be alone and sort this out."

"And you need me to get rid of your tail."

She nods and then realizes that she can't see her, "Yeah."

"Okay."

"Thank you." She's trying to keep this shit on lock down, but she can feel her throat get thick with threatening tears.

The line is quiet for a long time until she chokes out the words stuck in her chest for so long, "I love you and I'm sorry."

"I love you, too, Mac-attack. It'll be done in an hour."

They say their goodbyes and hang up. She's impressed that she manages to do so before she starts crying.

She is leaving everything behind to chase after bad guys, but not to bring them to justice. She is, instead, running across the planet to bury herself in their arms, to drown in their adorably similar smell and their vastly different tastes and touch.

True to her word, when Mac presses the garage door opener an hour later her tail is gone.

She's never driven so cautiously in her life, not even for her test, she is so afraid she'll get caught on her way to the airport that she almost makes herself sick.

After she pays for her ticket and is ushered into the first class lounge to await boarding, she does actually get sick.

She passes it off as being nervous for her first flight and the man smiles softly and hands her a glass of champagne.

Twenty some hours later, wasted and practically knocked out, with a special thanks to Amy the attendant with the champagne refill, she's having her ratty, ancient duffle bag tossed into the back of a car.

She moves to pull her phone out before she realizes that it's laying wiped in a garbage can in LAX. She'll have to buy a burner phone later.

The driver opens the door for her and requests the destination.

She gives him the small coastal town she needs to go to get to the island and when he asks why a pretty young thing like her is going to some small fishing village she just tells him she's meeting her boyfriend.

She falls asleep in the car which is too bad because she's sure the scenery would have been gorgeous.

It's her first time off the continent and she's slept through most of it. Some tourist she makes.
-

She's standing on the dock of a town she can't pronounce, in a slept in dress, carrying everything she cares about in a rattle duffle bag she stole from her father. She's looking out across the blue water dotted with little white fishing boats. Lush green islands with white cliffs and sand push out of the water, marring the horizon.

One of those islands is hers, she should really look into property tax later.

She looks around, she needs passage.

There is a grizzly-looking old man sitting in a folding chair in front of a boat. She approaches him carefully, suddenly nervous that she doesn't want to do this, that she doesn't want to see them.

She could go back now. She could go lose some days in Athens before going back and starting up her life again.

Without them.

"Excuse me, sir?" She starts, "I need to get to-"

"You looking for passage to the private island?" A girl, maybe twelve, pops out from below deck smeared in grease.

"Uh... yes."

She speaks in Greek to the old man, probably her grandfather, and watches with wide eyes as the man places a bill in the girl's hand before helping Mac onto the boat.

"Its lucky that I found you. It looks like all the other boats are too busy with fishing." She smiles nervously, "Thank you."

She reaches into her purse, but the girl shakes her head.

"I have to pay you for this."

"We've already been paid. One of the men on the island pays us to wait. Grandpa was sure we'd be waiting until I was a grandmother."

"And you?"

"Well I've seen the man that pays grandpa." She waggles her eyebrows at her suggestively and she somehow knows that the person that pays is Dick.

The rest of the short journey is quiet, just the sound of a motor, somewhere below deck, and the water against the hull. It's a calming thing, the bob of the vessel keeping her mind from wandering too far into itself.

This is it.

She is the anti-hero of her own story now. Tossing away justice and truth, and all things that she had been taught to uphold, in order to be with the people she loves. She crinkles her nose at that thought, it was very romance novel. Like that trash her mother poured over when on camping trips.

Except the men she was torn between she wasn't actually torn. She had chosen Cassidy and Dick had been a part of the deal, now she couldn't think of one without the other.

They were right there on that island waiting for her. Really, desperately waiting, throwing out life lines for her, breadcrumbs to follow.

She twisted the little loop of silver around her wrist nervously.

She wondered if they would be making out again, they had this habit of being midsession whenever she found them.

Here they could be doing so much more than kissing, she could walk in on them in flagrante, the sounds of their moans echoed around in her chest and she bit her lip to bring herself back to the blue water and the looming cliff that belonged to her.

Everything and everyone on this island belonged to her.

They were docking and the old man helped her off the boat again. With a tip of his hat, he started up in a grumbling, thick Greek with his granddaughter.

She watched them head back out to the mainland before she turned back to the island.

There was a roof peaking out of the trees and she figured that was as good a place as any to start.
-

The door is locked and she can't help the laugh that bubbles up out of her because the only house on the whole island is locked.

There is a worn trail away from the house and she's sure it leads to a beach; everything here must eventually lead to a beach.

She shifts the strap of the bag and starts out, trying to plan out what she'll say, what she'll do when she sees them.

Honestly she hadn't thought much past ditching her phone at the airport.

When she gets close to the beach, she knows she's picked the right path because noise is drifting through the leaves, the sound of voices, water and... Roxy music?

"He's singing about a blow up doll." Dick's voice cuts across the space as she breaches the foliage, cuts right into her, and she has to grab onto a tree to keep on her feet.

They are sitting right there, looking out at the slow surf, talking about the meaning behind In Every Dream Home a Heartache.

She can't stand it. Shouldn't they be talking about something important, her, what they had done? Anything?

"It's not about a blow up doll, it's about the materialistic emptiness of his life." Cassidy counters and his voice brings an ache out in her heart, in her brain, legs, everything.

"Blow up doll." Dick pushes Cassidy playfully and she's amazed at them. They know they are the bad guys, right? That they are the villains, in the wrong, that they are drenched in blood.

"I love this song." She tells their backs, her voice thick, her legs shaking, and, God, she wishes she had changed earlier because standing there in her slept in dress and exposed soul she feels like a wreck.

They turn around to look at her, and Cassidy is on his feet and in front of her before Dick can manage to get her name out.

"I knew you'd-"

He eats the rest of his sentence and is on the ground holding his face. She hadn't even known she was serious about punching the first Casablancas she saw, but there he was on the ground, her fist burning.

"Mac!" Dick yelps and stops dead in his tracks. He's searching the tree line behind her. No doubt for some flash of blonde hair, for the cavalry.

"I can't believe you didn't tell me!" The words seem to throw themselves out of her mouth, "I thought you loved me! How could you not tell me about something as big and as important as that?!" She throws her bag down into the sand, towering over Cassidy, "Did you think I wouldn't love you anymore? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one."

"Hey-" Dick starts, but doesn't continue when she drops to the ground into Cassidy's lap. Her hands grab a hold of his collar and shake him.

Dick recognizes this as something between the two of them. She'll get to him in a minute because she is so not okay with him femme fatale-ing her on Grad Night.

"Why wouldn't you tell me?" She asks again and his hand comes away from his face to grab a hold of her hands. His skin is hot and has been horribly missed.

"It's not exactly an easy topic to broach, Cindy. 'Hey, I know we've only been dating a couple months, but I was molested during Little League and killed a bus full of kids to cover it up'."

His eyes seem to dig straight into her with every word, every raw burning slow syllable.

"You could have told me, " she tells him quietly, getting lost for a moment in the feel of his body under her own and his hands wrapped around hers, "I'm really rather smart. It would have been easy to get Woody to take the fall for the bus."

"Mac..."

"Or we could have just left together that night. The three of us."

"Mac...I don't want a hostage, I want a partner." His fingers leave her hand, trailing softly along the silver line across her pale skin, "The choice had to be made by you after you knew all the facts."

"I could have made the choice months ago if you had kept me in the loop. Seriously, Dick and not me!?" She point at Dick who is waiting on the edge of the confrontation for his queue.

"You think I'm not still pissed? He kept it from me a lot longer than he kept it from you." Dick tells her, his voice doing that strange, serious thing that churns her insides.

"Did you come alone?" Cassidy asks, pulling their attention back to him.

"Of course, I did. What do you take me for?" She looks down at him with narrowed eyes just fucking daring him to say something.

"So you still want to be with us..." Cassidy's hands have slid down to her legs, slipping under the fabric and, running hot and familiar, up her thighs.

"I love you both, I wouldn't be here otherwise." She leans down to kiss Cassidy when she's suddenly being pulled away from him. She's pulled up into Dick's arms and is over one shoulder before she has a chance to do anything other than make a startled noise.

Dick starts back towards the house and she watches Cassidy follow happily behind.

She points back at him, "Don't for one second think that I'm not mad at you two just because I'm letting you carry me back to the house."

"Sure thing." Dick pats her on the bottom and she squirms in his grip.

"I'm serious. We need to have a real talk about this shit in the morning."

She has to look away from Cassidy's smile because it is so bright and happy that it hurts.

Dick unlocks the door and stops before he sets her down at the threshold.

"Thank-" she starts prematurely because Dick gathers her up in his arms again, like a princess, and carries her across the threshold. Like they were married and it silences anything she had to say about how she is perfectly capable of walking.

Dick drops her onto the bed and she watches as Cassidy closes the door behind him.

It seems so unnecessary, they have the whole island to themselves, they could have had the sex, that was promised a month ago, on the beach, but she's not going to say no to a soft bed.

Dick tosses his shirt across the room, to the decidedly messier section of the room he seems to have claimed for his own. Cassidy's shirt is draped over a chair, his section just as tidy as his bedroom used to be.

Dick gets onto the bed next to her. His large warm hands slide across her, up her leg across the hitched up white fabric, up her stomach, skim across a breast and settle on the side of her neck before he pulls her to him.

His mouth is soft and wet, warm against her own. His tongue sliding, welcome, through her lips, slow and burning, pulling her into that weird, wonderful fog.

Another set of hands is on her, but her body doesn't stiffen with surprise, it presses into the hands because this is what she's been dreaming of since Grad Night was interrupted by villainy.

The two of them, and she can feel how badly they've missed her in the rough grabs and slow, soft touches.

Dick barely pulls away from her mouth to breath. He smiles softly against her and kisses her lightly; the action would almost be chaste if his other hand wasn't climbing up the inside of her leg.

Her hair is pulled aside and Cassidy's tongue and teeth graze her skin sending shockwaves through her body, pulling a soft moan from her lips.

One of them is unzipping her dress, but she's losing track of whose hands are whose.

The hand pushing her legs open is Dick, the hand in her hair is Cassidy, but the other two are a tossup and she doesn't mind.

The zipper of her dress is undone and Cassidy's mouth moves to the newly exposed skin while Dick pulls the dress down to expose her breasts and stomach.

Dick's hands are on her, soft, gentle touches that bring out a soft, little whine. She wants it harder. Her hands grab Dick's and push them into her, kneading herself with his hands. She can hear Cassidy's breathing pick up in her ear, she drops one of Dick's hands and reaches behind her for Cassidy.

His body is almost exactly the way she remembers, it's lost that nervous tension and he's all the better for it. The coiled power under his skin is still there, but it doesn't feel as dangerous as it once had. It didn't feel like he might snap if she touched him wrong. His body pushed against her fingers and she turns away from Dick to push Cassidy down into the bed.

When she bends over him Dick pulls her dress the rest of the way off. She wishes she was wearing a better set of underwear than whatever underwear she had put on when she got up, what felt like a million years ago, but neither seem to care much about the small piece of fabric. Only about what's hiding behind it.

Mac kisses her boyfriend and he returns it, hot and biting and urgent like always. Like he always thought it might be their last. One hand slides down into his shorts, he's hard for her and when Dick leans over her, pressing a kiss against her back, she can feel that he is as well.

Someone slides her underwear out of the way and another hand rubs against her, she's sure she's already damningly wet and they prove it by sliding a pair of fingers into her easily. Her mouth breaks from Cassidy's. A moan, low, deep and satisfied falls from her mouth.

She can remember the exact location Dick had been in before those sirens had broken up the party and she wants him back there.

She pulls the hand out of her with a whine and rolls away from them.

She lays there for a moment, in silence, looking at them. Dick's breathing is only slightly ragged, his hands now on either side of his brother whose chest is heaving, lips swollen, eyes dark.

She wonders if she left now, if they would just keep going without her.

"What's the matter?" Dick asks, his voice this penetrating sound and when he shifts it rubs his own hardness against Cassidy who arches into the movement, his fingers now looped around Dick's wrist.

"Too many clothes." She tells them and they both seem so relieved that she has to stifle her laugh.

She came all this way for them, but they still seemed so afraid that she didn't really mean it.

She pulls her underwear off, a blush bursting to life as she notices that they are watching her movements like hawks.

"Now you." She smiles and pulls at the fabric of Dick's shorts because they seem too interested in devouring her visually to move forward.

"Right." Dick and Cassidy untangle and lose the extra clothing. She notices that this time that Cassidy tosses his shorts somewhere without even looking to see where they land this time.

Cassidy grabs a hold of her and pulls her on top of him.

"I missed you so much." He tells her, voice this half moan and breathy thing as she slides down onto him. His words are almost lost in her own low moan.

"I missed you, too." She barely gets out because fuck he seems bigger than before, bigger and harder, but maybe she's tighter because Cassidy's fingers dig painfully into her hips. She turns to find Dick kneeling on the bed a little ways away a hand slowly pumping himself, " You too, come here." She reaches out for him as Cassidy starts to move and, Christ, her nails scratch along Dick's arm, but he gets the point and moves to them.

Cassidy's fingers grip her hard and start that burning, fantastic build up.

She's lost in the feeling for several, beautifully long moments until Dick's hand pushes her down onto his brother. Cassidy wraps his arms around her, whispering soft, reassuring words into her hair, pressing soft kisses against her skin and in her hair.

This is exactly the image she had been imagining in the hotel room and out of the corner of her eye she can see Cassidy smiling at Dick. It makes her feel warm all over, or maybe it's the fact that Cassidy's hips are still moving.

With very little preamble, Dick pushes into her and she tumbles closer to the edge, both, both of them are inside her and it burns and blinds, it's too much. Dick is pressing kisses against her bare back and Cassidy is rubbing slow circles against her side.

She can't take much more of this full rubbing, building thing. Her hands full of bedding, her teeth graze along Cassidy's collar and pull a long moan out of him that is cut off by Dick's mouth.

He starts up slow, but she shakes her head. Scared that he's hurting her, Dick makes for a quick retreat until he notices that she's leaning back into him.

"Harder?" He asks between moans and all she can do is nod and thank God that she remembered to take her birth control because there's are no way in hell, they're stopping until she passes out.

He slams into her and it moves the bed, slamming the headboard into the wall, Cassidy's fingers are threaded through one of her hands as he adds his own movement to Dick's violent thrusts. Dick's fingers are soon threaded between the fingers of her free hand, as well. They seem to alternate and she can't even think about anything anymore. Everything just falls away in that way she had always read that great sex does, but she was sure was mostly just crap.

She comes violently between them, her fingers squeezing theirs until she lies limp between them, barely conscious. They finish quickly after that and she's sure she can feel them touching each other around her until Dick loses himself, and Cassidy quickly removes himself from inside her to spray across Dick.

She thinks she should have told them it would have been safe, but Dick looks so good smeared that she'll wait a couple days.

She falls asleep between them, a hand thrown across Cassidy and her head buried in Dick's chest, and knows that she doesn't want to sleep any other way.

She let's the jetlag take her.
-

Wide awake.

She is wide awake and it's only, she pushes herself up to see passed Cassidy to the alarm clock she's sure doesn't actually get used, four o'clock.

Okay, maybe she should have tried to stay up a little longer to kill the jetlag, but she had just been drained, emotionally and physically.

She pushes herself up out of bed and looks back at them. Dick reaches out across the empty space and whimpers a little before Cassidy falls into the space and Dick drags him until he's right up against him.

This was the bed she made and she had every intention of laying in it.

Tossing on a shirt, she makes her way to the kitchen. Maybe if she has some water she'll be able to go back to sleep for a couple more hours and get up at a reasonable time.

The kitchen is small, but totally doable. She opens a cabinet and there is a single mug in it, she makes a mental note of all the things they'll have to pick up if they actually plan on living here.

She takes the mug and fills it up with the filtered water in the fridge. It's not until then that she actually notices that there is something written on the mug.

She lifts it to her eyes.

"Muff dive?" She mumbles and makes a note to bring this up during tomorrow, today's serious talk.

"Dick had it made special." Cassidy's voice cuts through her thoughts and she turns to find him leaning against the opposite wall in just a pair of underwear.

"Of course he did." She rolls her eyes and takes a deep drink, she's parched from all the airplane drinking she had done.

"You're sure, right?" He asks and his body seems to shift into this small, nervous, scared thing that breaks her, but she needs to answer him honestly, he seemed to have a built in lie detector when it came to her and Dick.

"I'm not. I wish I was, I want to be sure, but the only thing I'm really sure of is that I love you, both of you, and that if I didn't come I'd regret it for the rest of my life."

"You might regret this."

"I might, but I doubt it."


the end

A/N: thank you to everyone for reading and reviewing and going on this crazy season two rewrite with me. A special thanks to my beta for fixing the same mistakes over and over again.