A/N: Back again with a beefier chapter! I've really been enjoying this story so I'm going to try for weekly updates but no promises. Also, a shout out to those who left reviews, especially to those who came back for another read ~7 years later. This whole thing has made me super nostalgic. Enjoy!
In the superhero profession, bank robberies were about as easy as they came. Robin only had to assess the situation for a minute before he sent everyone rushing in. It was nothing but a couple of out-of-shape criminals with standard automatics and a beat up old truck as a getaway vehicle.
Raven floated down into the entryway of the bank, watching as Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy - she always thought of her companions by their hero names when they were in public - began their well-practiced routine of rounding up the criminals. The poor guys hadn't even gotten the bank vault open.
Starfire landed beside her, looking similarly bored.
"I believe there is not enough to go around." She remarked. Cyborg was blasting the guns out of their hands while Beast Boy, in gorilla form, was pouncing and flinging each man back at Robin.
"We can be backup. Again." Raven agreed, watching Robin clamp handcuffs on one of the men. A volley of bullets suddenly burst their direction, one robber's attempt at distracting Cyborg and Beast Boy from their gleeful rampage. But Raven flung up a portal as a shield, the bullets passing harmlessly into the black veil. Starfire only looked annoyed now.
"You're a bad man!" She shouted at the robber who was currently upside in Beast Boy's large paw. He gave the thief a good shake before tossing him across the room.
Not wanting to waste the opportunity, Raven opened another portal directly behind them, sending the bullets shooting forward into the getaway vehicle. A hiss of air and the pop of a small explosion told Raven the truck wasn't going anywhere.
With the excitement dying down, Raven could only think about getting back to the tower, taking a nice hot shower and maybe reading another chapter of her book before passing out. Her mind wandering, she was surprised to feel a soft touch on her shoulder.
"Raven what happened to your hip?" Starfire's concerned voice brought her back to the present.
"My hip?" Raven asked, swiveling her body and looking down to see what Star was talking about. Sure enough, a bruise was forming there, barely concealed by the black fabric of her leotard which rose high enough on her torso to make most men blush.
Worst of all was the unmistakable shape of four, light blue fingermarks blooming on her pale skin. Raven snapped her cloak shut around her and gave Star a look that begged secrecy.
"I'll tell you later." She muttered. "I promise." Starfire's eyes widened but she said nothing and before the matter could go any further they were interrupted by the rest of their team.
"I think this was a new record time." Said Cyborg, a grin splitting his face. He had two men slung over each shoulder like potato sacks and looked immensely pleased with himself. Robin was on his communicator with the police and Beast Boy had gone back to human form and was having fun drawing a mustache on one of the robbers at Robin's feet.
Somehow, he'd also had time to snag a lollipop from one of the candy jars scattered around the bank. Raven could do nothing but roll her eyes and wonder at her own taste in men.
They'd just gotten home and everyone had started to scatter off in their own directions when Star grabbed Raven by the wrist and hauled her off to her room. Raven didn't protest. Honestly, she needed somebody outside her own mind to talk to if just to know this was all real and she wasn't actually starting some spiraling descent in madness. Assuming madness meant hallucinating that you were sleeping with people.
Sitting down on the pink comforter, Raven shifted uneasily, preparing herself for Star's reaction. Starfire, meanwhile, had her hands on her hips and was staring down Raven like a suspicious mother.
"Gar and I had sex." Raven said simply. There was nothing else to say.
Starfire's expression went slack and Raven swore she could hear the gears in Star's mind processing this new, unexpected information. Then, her eyes lit up, her hands shot up into the air and suddenly Raven was bowled over by Starfire's momentum as she was pulled into a hug.
"Congratulations!" Star told her, voice full of unbridled joy. Raven thought it was the oddest response but she knew Starfire still struggled sometimes with social norms. However, her friend's cheerful expression was so genuine and heartfelt that even Raven herself started to think that maybe this was some kind of accomplishment. She'd never thought of sex as a reason for celebration.
Raven's lackluster reaction didn't sit well with Starfire though. She sat down next to Raven, taking a hand in hers.
"You… enjoyed it?" She asked, a bit wary now.
"I… did." Raven said slowly. Hands down, she had enjoyed it. It had been better than hot tea or good books or long meditation sessions. It had been better than any of those things combined actually. In fact, it had been too good.
Star smiled broadly, then tightened her grip on Raven's hand. "Marvelous. Then you must tell me everything."
Raven about fell over when she heard that. What was Star even asking for? Did she want a play-by-play of what had gone on between her and Gar? Raven only had to think about what Gar looked like naked to get herself to blush uncontrollably. Just the thought of trying to explain that little movement he did with his hips… Raven felt her face go up in flames and Starfire quickly tried to correct herself.
"Oh dear. Oh I'm sorry Raven. You know how excited I get." She stammered. "I just thought maybe you'd want to talk about it. I can tell you about Robin and I if that helps?"
"No, Star. That's alright." Raven sighed, suppressing her wave of horror at the thought of hearing the intimate details between Star and their fearless leader.
It wasn't that Raven wasn't willing to talk about it. Part of her mind had been running in circles since she left Gar's room, replaying the whole affair in a tiring loop, over-analyzing, slowly wearing her out with its obsessive fixation on every detail. Talking about it seemed like a good way to shut up her hamster brain but truthfully she wasn't sure how to do it. Some things didn't translate well to spoken words. She was partly afraid that telling Star would diminish the memory to something tasteless and cheesy, like a chapter from some pulp novel.
"I'll let you talk." Starfire told her gently. "I'm always running my mouth and this is your moment." Raven appreciated Star more than she could express with words. To show it, she decided to tell her a story instead. It was something that had always stuck with her and she hoped it would help explain to Star the knot of emotions in chest.
"I've never really told you about how I came to Earth did I?" Raven asked her shyly. Star only shook her head. Raven cleared her throat and began slowly, finding her voice.
"I left Azarath in a hurry." She explained.
"The priests thought keeping me there would prevent armageddon but I knew they weren't powerful enough considering the threat we were facing. I thought everyone was better off if I left and found the help we needed. So I escaped and ended up in the midwest of all places." Raven smiled a little at the memory.
"The portal from Azarath had spat me out in some field in the middle of nowhere. It was just me and corn and cows for miles. I flew for hours and when it started getting dark I finally decided to stop at a farmhouse to figure out where the hell I was."
"My mother was from Earth but told me very little about her home when I was growing up. She'd made a lot of bad choices and I think she was ashamed so I never knew much about her life before Azarath. But I thought people on Earth could not be so different from the ones on my world. I decided to knock on the door."
"A woman answered. I remember she was overweight and wore a stained apron and looked tired. I can't imagine what she thought when she saw me but she crossed herself and screamed for her husband. I was about to leave but a boy showed up behind her, probably no older than three or four, he peeked at me from behind her."
"'I tried explaining I was just looking for some help. I think I had given the women such a fright that she'd gone stupid. But a small voice asked me if I was lost and then the little boy started walking towards me. He had hair the color of the corn and blue eyes and a round face. The husband showed up then and he had a shotgun so I knew it was time to go."
"I started to leave but the boy grabbed my cape It didn't occur to me that maybe levitation wasn't a common ability on Earth but I saw their reactions and thought I'd made a mistake. I'm not sure if they wanted to pray to me or burn me at the stake to be honest."
"The little boy kept pointing at me saying 'Superman' and tugging on my cape. Eventually they invited me in. I think they were worried if they angered me I might tear their house down. The woman made dinner so I ate with them and found out I was in place called Kansas. I also learned that beings like Superman existed which was another important discovery but not the point."
Raven brought her legs up on the bed and crossed them.
"It was the first time I'd ever seen a family." She admitted.
"They fit together, all three of them in that little house, eating dinner. I was incredibly envious at the time. It was nothing like I'd grown up with, passed off from priest to priest, my mother's presence was just a shadow in my life. But they were three parts of a whole." Raven stared pensively at the floor. Star was silent next to her, perhaps just as pensive.
"I figured out that this was typical for people on Earth. It's possible this is how people on Azarath live too. I don't know. I never left the temples." Raven sighed and dropped her head into her hands.
"I was so alone that first year. People would ask me where my parents were and I'd lie and say they were dead." Starfire put a hand reassuringly on her head.
"I'm sorry Star." Raven muttered. "I know you're happy for me but honestly I feel so screwed up sometimes. Sex is probably normal for most people but I don't even know what normal means."
Starfire only tutted and ran her fingers through Raven's hair. "Everyone feels like this at times in their life. No one is really normal. We're all just doing our best." Having opened her mouth, Raven found she had a hard time stopping it now. It was like everything was just gushing out all at once.
"But I've always been screwed up, Star. Even when I act like I know what I'm doing, it's just that, it's an act. There's so much more to life and Azarath never prepared me for any of it. They taught me how to survive but never taught me how to live."
Raven felt a tug on her hair.
"Ow.. Star that hurts." She looked up at her friend.
"Are you acting now?" Starfire demanded. Embarrassment was creeping up her neck under Starfire's piercing gaze.
"No." Raven admitted.
"Let it be known from this time forward that this room is a no-acting zone." Starfire told her sternly. Raven nodded dumbly which seemed to appease Star because suddenly her expression lit up.
"Keep talking, but in exchange, let me braid your hair." Raven groaned into her hands but acquiesced and turned herself sideways on the bed so Starfire could reach properly.
Chastened a bit, and strangely soothed by the rhythmic motion of her friend's fingers sliding through her hair, Raven continued.
"I guess my point is that Earth made me want things. I never even knew there were so many things in the world to want." She bit her lip, thinking how to explain herself better.
"On Azarath, the priests taught that attachment and desire were the path to evil. Wanting led to other emotions like loss or fear or anger and that was a recipe for destruction. Especially because of the way I am. Or was."
"We approach things differently on Tamaran." Starfire told her. "Our emotions are our greatest power in a way. We feel deeply, and respect our feelings for what they are." The idea sounded ludicrous to Raven. What a world it would be if everyone was at the mercy of their emotions all the time.
"Let me use an analogy." Star continued. "To my people, every emotion is like a song. There are long songs and short songs and songs that have beautiful melodies. But there are also the songs that make you want to cover your ears. For some people, their lives are filled with such songs. But each of them must be played from beginning to end. It is the way of emotions. They demand to be heard and it is up to us to listen."
Raven said nothing for a moment and just let Starfire's words wash over her.
"In a way," Raven began, "it's why I decided to sleep with Gar in the first place." Starfire's fingers paused in her hair.
"I thought maybe if we just got it over with, then I could shut up all the noise in my head." It took a second but gradually Stafire's fingers resumed their work. Raven could sense an odd mood in her friend and she was suspicious it had something to do with her reasons behind sleeping with Gar. They sat in silence for a minute while Raven tried in vain to measure Starfire's thoughts by her braiding technique.
"Perhaps it's not the best way to start a relationship, but I have to hope this is the beginning of something good for the both of you." Starfire said softly. Raven's brain felt utterly incapable of digesting what Star was implying. The words hit some wall deep inside of her and bounced right back.
"This was just a one time thing." Raven corrected her, very matter-of-fact.
Suddenly, Starfire burst out laughing behind her. Raven jumped, alarmed and certainly not amused by her friend's reaction. Her face darkened and so did the lights in the room. Star swallowed the remainder of her laughter with a hiccup.
"Oh Raven, I'm sorry it's just…" and she seemed to be fighting the urge to laugh again, "it's just when Robin and I started having sex, we were at it all the time. We couldn't keep our hands off each other. We were doing it every day, sometimes three times a day and I mean eventually we were just so exhausted between the training and the missions and all the…"
"Star, please." Raven said, her face in her hands again. Starfire's words were in no shape or form what Raven wanted to hear right now. Sex had been a solution, not a promise for more. At least, she was fairly confident about that being her original intention. Hadn't she said so much when she barged into Gar's room?
"I only mean to say that unless it was terrible, it will likely happen again. And from what you've told me, it wasn't terrible."
Raven began to shake her head but remembered the braids.
"It accomplished what it needed to. This doesn't mean we're in a relationship and it certainly doesn't mean we're going to be… doing it three times a day."
Starfire's reply only filled her chest with dread.
"Does Gar know that?"
Over the course of their years together as a team, certain traditions in Titan Tower had developed a life of their own. Such traditions had transcended their humble origins, becoming so ingrained in the fabric of their existence that no one dared question or evade them. It was just the way of things. However, these ineffable truths of being a Teen Titan all boiled down to one very sacred observation: Friday night was pizza night.
"Be there or be square." Robin liked to joke during their Friday morning huddle. What Raven heard was "be there or be ready to handle my unfathomable disappointment." The reality was that most folks don't need persuasion when there's pizza involved.
Raven always liked to time it perfectly such that she walked into the common room ten minutes before the pizza arrived. It avoided the impression that she was just there for the food but it minimized the amount of pre-pizza chit chat. And once everyone was happily munching away, she could sit in peace on the couch and enjoy herself.
A lot had happened recently, but that was no reason to mess with a perfectly good strategy. If anything, current events should have deflated a lot of the tension between her and Gar. Additionally, she secretly relished the idea of proving Starfire wrong.
So Raven did her calculations and walked into the common room at exactly 18:11.
The first of three highly irregular events happened as Raven stepped through the sliding doors. Accustomed to gliding in and out of rooms as she pleased without attracting much notice, Raven was shocked to discover the particular sensation of not one, not two, but three pairs of eyes on her.
She caught Starfire's gaze first but her teammate-turned-confidant simply smiled and nodded before glancing over at the source of another pair of interested eyes. Gar, who had been in the middle of setting up the GameStation was still enough to make Raven wonder if time had suddenly stopped.
"Yo, did your brain restart?" Victor asked from the couch. "Push the game disk in." His intense focus interrupted, Gar's expression suddenly came to life. He smiled. But this wasn't any kind of smile Raven had catalogued before.
She knew his shit-eating grin from all the moments he'd made her blush or lose her cool. She knew the 'please don't kill me' smile from the times he'd stapled her cloak to a chair or put pepper in her tea. She knew the happy smiles and sad smiles and the many shapes in between which she'd observed over the years but somehow she found herself looking at a new one.
It was a small twitch of his lips, a reflex, as if some pleasant thought was bubbling up just beneath the surface. Gar had always been the type to be loud about his emotions, but this smile was soft and secretive. It felt reserved just for her.
Before she could stop herself, Raven found herself remembering other things about those lips.
"Hey." Raven had been so lost in thought that she'd failed to remember the third set of eyes that had found her when she'd walked in. It was Robin's voice who brought her back to the present. Raven blinked.
"Hey." She echoed.
"I know the pizza is going to be here soon but can we talk for a minute?" It took all of Raven's will not to allow the avalanche of conversation possibilities to overwhelm her.
He couldn't know. Her brain reeled with panic as she did some mental gymnastics to check herself. There was no good reason to assume Robin's words had anything to do with yesterday. She'd been careful about leaving Gar's room. Nothing suspicious had gone on during the bank robbery to imply anything. Maybe this was about training or PR or Azar knows what else.
"Uh, sure. Where…" Raven said, her words trailing off.
"The hallway is fine."
Raven felt a sinking feeling in her gut the second the doors slid shut behind them
"I wanted to talk to you about Gar." He said, clearing his throat. Raven closed her eyes, praying that whatever evidence he had wasn't so incriminating that she couldn't lie her way out of it.
"The truth is, I felt bad about what I said the other day." Raven's eyes popped open.
"I was being too judgmental. Gar is a good guy and whatever I said or implied about his character was unwarranted. I just wanted you to know I didn't mean anything by it."
Raven was almost too shocked at her good fortune to respond. Here was Robin, looking very sheepish indeed, apologizing to her for something that suddenly felt like ancient history. She'd been angry at the time but now could barely recall what he'd said. In fact, she was fairly certain she'd gone and completely ignored every piece of advice he'd given her. Something about being careful about Gar and his emotions… or maybe about her own clarity in the matter. It seemed hardly relevant now.
"I never meant to make you mad. I don't always know the best way to say things without it coming off badly." He admitted. "But just know that I trust you."
Ouch. His genuine words suddenly made her lie feel so much worse.
"It's fine Robin. Don't worry yourself." She told him, trying to exude some aura of genuine gratitude. It seemed to work. Robin smiled at her and Raven, feeling that a crisis had been averted, was mostly at peace again.
All too soon, the moment passed and Robin's expression shifted to one that Raven knew much too well. It was the same one he got when investigating a crime where the pieces didn't quite add up and Raven could tell she wasn't going to like this line of thinking.
"I really didn't expect you to be so understanding." Robin admitted, his brow furrowed. Mentally slapping herself, Raven quickly tried to backtrack.
"I mean, I think you were a little unreasonable but I don't-"
At 16:17, the common room doors swished open, startling them both and marking the beginning of highly irregular event number two.
It was Starfire. But from her expression it was obvious something had happened.
"It's terrible." She whispered. Her eyes, wide with shock, conveyed something her voice could not.
"Star? What on earth…" Robin sounded as worried as Raven felt. He reached for her hand to comfort her but Star only shook her head.
"Come quick."
Back in the common room, Gar was seated at the breakfast table, his head in his hands. Victor was on the phone, an incredulous look on his face and Raven could barely make out the sounds of an apologetic male voice on the other end of the line.
"What's happened?" Asked Robin.
"It's lost." Said Victor mournfully. Gar moaned in response, sliding deeper into his seat.
"Lost?" Neither Raven nor Robin could make heads or tails of the statement.
"The pizza!" Victor exclaimed impatiently. "Oh. Sorry, I'm listening." He said hurriedly into the phone.
Relieved that no one had died, Raven still felt there was something ominous about such an event. It didn't bode well at all, she thought nervously. The pizza had never gone missing in all their years of ordering.
The process of getting pizza to an island was more complicated than the average delivery she admitted. The solution they had worked out with the restaurant was the use of a small drone Victor had designed. It had originally been conceived for helping him move boxes around in their underground warehouse but when complications arose with all the pizza joints declaring their location undeliverable, he'd put it to much better use. Nowadays, it had the sole purpose of carrying freshly baked pizza to their tower every Friday. That is, until it had mysteriously gone missing about 20 minutes ago.
Silence settled over the team, a palpable sense of dread filling the air. Meanwhile, the voice on the other end of the receiver chattered on.
"They'll redo the order if one of us.. picks it up." Victor told them. Robin shrugged, looking at everyone as if this were a remotely agreeable solution.
"Raven and Garfield will go get it." Starfire blurted much too loudly. As far as suggestions went, it wasn't a suggestion at all. Raven could have strangled her.
Another rule of Titan Tower was no one except Robin volunteered Raven for anything. Sure, Gar enjoyed whining about things incessantly hoping she'd cave in but that was much different than calling her out to do an errand like pizza pickup. It didn't even begin to cover how many other lines had been crossed by suggesting Gar accompany her.
In the awkward silence that followed, Raven observed the expressions of her teammates. Victor had the phone dangling from his hand, looking expectant for an answer. Robin's furrowed brow was at work again, not quite sure what to make of the situation. Gar was wearing his best poker face which wasn't saying much. And Starfire was smiling and blinking at her.
Anyone who knew Star understood that this was how she winked.
Groaning internally, Raven considered her options and nodded in agreement. If Starfire wanted to play dirty, she'd show her the true depth of her resolve.
"Fine. The faster we leave the faster we'll be back eating pizza." Raven told the group, hardly believing the words coming out of her own mouth. "Gar, go get the keys."
"Hold on just a minute." Victor said, standing up. Raven froze as she watched Victor's eyes bounce between her and Gar, clearly evaluating something. Then he popped open a small compartment in his arm and startled Raven by tossing her a set of keys.
"YOU'RE driving." He told her firmly.
Raven's initial bravado faded as her and Gar set out on their mission in the T-Car. She was too acutely aware of being trapped alone with him in a small space. Out of the corner of her eye, Raven could see his hands resting on his knees, close enough for her to touch. She could remember all too well what those hands had felt like. She could but she wouldn't, Raven decided. It was better to just focus on driving.
"I can't believe Patrick is lost." Gar said, breaking the silence.
"Patrick?"
"Our pizza drone." He explained, a note of impatience in his voice.
"You named it?" Raven asked, giving a flock of seagulls a wide berth as they jetted out across the water.
"First of all, he's not an it." Gar stated. "Secondly, Patrick is a valuable member of this team who deserves our respect." Raven rolled her eyes.
"The way I see it, Patrick had one job and he screwed it up." Raven muttered. Gar only chuckled.
The sun was setting low over the horizon beyond the city, casting long shadows over the calm water. It was strangely peaceful. Raven could feel night closing in around them as they sped towards the mainland.
"You told Starfire didn't you?" Gar asked her. Raven debated on lying but there was nothing to gain by hiding it from him. Starfire's strange suggestion had been too obvious to cover up anyway.
"I did." She said. He didn't seem angry but Gar had also been unusually quiet for the past few minutes.
"I won't say anything unless you want me to." He told her. She felt a swell of appreciation at his words. Raven knew he wasn't much of a gossip but it was still kind of him to say so.
"I'm going to apologize in advance for Starfire's behavior." Raven said, biting her lip. "I may have made a mistake." Gar chuckled again.
"She loves matchmaking. Don't you remember all the ladies Victor had to turn down last summer? She even tried setting him up with some jewelry thief. I guess she was out on parole for good behavior." Gar wasn't wrong. Starfire had a zeal for romance that sometimes bordered on inappropriate.
"Did she ever try to set you up?" Raven asked him. Not that she cared, she told herself.
"Well, she tried. I'm not so good at the dating scene…" He admitted. Raven, despite herself, snuck at glance at him. Gar was staring straight ahead, a thoughtful expression on his face.
"Being a superhero makes things hard enough." He explained. "You wouldn't believe how many girls start off by asking me if everything is green. If you know what I mean." Raven could only cringe.
"It's that bad, huh?" Raven never gave the idea much thought but she couldn't imagine herself sitting down at a restaurant with a complete stranger. Especially a stranger who didn't know what it meant to be… a little different. What would there even be to talk about? If Gar's dating experiences were the norm for superheros, she hated the idea of being on display for some man, a curiosity to be poked and prodded. She was already a bit of a freak by her own standards; she definitely didn't need anyone around to make her feel more unlovable and weird.
"I mean there are some success stories but they're pretty rare. Most heroes date within their own crowd. Look at Robin and Starfire." Gar told her.
"Not that anyone really understands how that relationship works." Raven muttered.
Entering the city now, Raven got them on the highway heading towards downtown. Taillights in front of her were lighting up red with the usual Friday evening traffic. This was partly why pizza pickup was such a problem.
They progressed in silence for a while. The last bit of sunlight died away and the city began to light up around them like some nocturnal beast slowly rousing from slumber. A thousand little bright windows winked down on them as they drove. The atmosphere in the car had turned oddly intimate with nightfall, Raven noticed with some trepidation.
"Hey." Gar interrupted eventually. "Do you think you'd want to do something sometime?" Raven could see his hands fisting nervously on his knees.
"Something together I mean. Just the two of us?" He continued. Raven swallowed thickly. She knew that Gar might eventually start on this line of thinking. She couldn't blame him. Her behavior had been erratic and misleading. Eventually she was going to have to face the music. Her hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.
"I'm not sure that's a good idea." Raven told him softly.
"Oh." The word hung in the air awkwardly. His disappointment felt like a punch to her gut despite her mind's reassurance that this was the right thing to do.
"You don't want to date me Garfield." She felt she owed him this amount of honesty at least.
"So is this… just about sex?" He asked slowly. They had gotten off the highway and Raven paused to check the upcoming street name before cutting a right.
"It's not about anything."
"It has to be about something. You don't just normally go into guys' rooms and demand hanky panky do you?"
"Of course not." She said blushing furiously. "I had a very good reason for what I did."
"Which is?"
"I thought it would help me sleep at night." Gar's booming laugh startled her. She glanced over at the passenger seat to see Gar with his hands over his face, caught somewhere between disbelief and hilarity.
"I thought you had your tea and all your old boring books for that." He told her once he'd composed himself a little. He was still wiping tears out of his eyes.
"That's not what I mean." Raven said through clenched teeth. Only a moment ago she'd felt genuinely bad for what she was putting him through but now she was definitely annoyed.
Raven suddenly swerved the car over to the side of the road and hit the brakes a little harder than she'd intended. Both of them jolted forward.
"We're here." She told him. Her hands were glued to the steering wheel and her gaze was focused somewhere out the front windshield. Outside the car, happy pedestrians strolled by, probably on their way to dinner or other fun Friday evening activities. She cursed Starfire's good intentions.
"Rae." She ignored Gar's teasing tone.
"Raven." He persisted, drawing out the syllables of her name. Hell would freeze over before she acknowledged him.
"Do you remember what happened the last time you didn't want to look at me?" His voice was cajoling and full of mischief. She made an unhappy noise deep in her throat and turned to face him.
"What." She demanded. He was smiling at her and looking like trouble.
"You know where to find me anytime you can't sleep. I'm always happy to help." He winked. Raven's brain short circuited a little at his sudden audacity.
"Garfield Logan." She stammered. Her entire body was red hot with bottled fury.
"Oh no, my full name. Someone's mad." He laughed, trying to feign terror. Raven couldn't tell if this was his idea of revenge or if he just had a death wish. She wanted to punch him right in that handsome face of his.
"That was the first and last time we have sex." She said shrilly, taking a hand off the steering wheel to jab a finger at him. Gar smirked and Raven caught the glint of a fang in the streetlight.
"We'll see, darling." He leaned in a little. "I think you're not very good about being honest with yourself."
"I think you're full of shit."
"Kiss me and then tell me that." He suggested. The cocky grin on his face had her boiling over.
At 19:02, highly irregular event number three happened.
Raven fisted the front of Gar's t-shirt in her hand and pulled him towards her, their lips colliding violently. Whatever was left of her rational thought was silenced immediately once she felt his warm mouth against hers. This had been a huge mistake, she realized weakly. She wanted him more, not less. Just kissing him had her body humming with anticipation. But why wasn't he kissing her back?
As Raven started to pull away, Gar suddenly snapped out of his shock and leaned in. She shivered as she felt his lips curve in a smile.
Hands came up, fingers winding into her hair, gently tilting her head to give him a better angle as his mouth opened to kiss her fully.
Raven felt like her heart was going to burst inside her chest. It was just like yesterday, she thought dimly. Gar kissed her like a drowning man finding air, like this was absolutely the only thing on earth that mattered. Her fury dissolved in the heat between them as Gar's passion crashed down on her.
It could have been seconds or minutes, she wasn't sure about anything at this point. Her tongue found the edge of that sharp tooth as she explored the shape of his mouth, fascinated by the way her own movements only seemed to intensify Gar's response. He was gradually pulling her closer, coaxing her gently with soft nibbles to her bottom lip that had her breathless and dizzy.
Whatever remaining resolve she had was fading away, her senses enthralled by his proximity and the taste and smell of him. She wanted nothing more than climb over into his lap, press herself up against his firm, warm body and let Gar's hands and lips carry her back into that exquisite world of pleasure. Raven sighed gently as fingers started to trace their way over her right breast.
Then Gar's stomach growled.
Something in Raven snapped back into place and she jumped away from Gar like she'd been burned. He blinked slowly as if coming out of a dream, his hands still frozen in the place she'd been moments before. Raven blushed, noticing his obvious arousal.
For a moment, the only sound in the car was their labored breathing. Then Gar exhaled deeply and looked out the window.
"No more sex huh?" He seemed to be talking to himself more than her.
Raven sat frozen in her seat, horrified at how close to she'd come to caving in. Maybe it was time to reevaluate all these brash decisions she'd been making lately. It was completely possible they'd ruined her by giving her a taste of the things she'd always denied herself. Knowing was worse than anything, she realized. All of her textbook knowledge and nighttime fantasies paled in comparison to the sensuous torture that was real flesh and blood passion. She was going to live to regret this.
"I can hear you thinking." Gar told her suddenly. He turned to look at her again, his dark eyes almost predatory in the shadowy lighting. Then he smiled at her, sending waves of nervous electricity up her spine.
"Don't worry, I'll play your game." He said. More composed now, Gar turned to open the door and step out of the car.
"This isn't a game, Garfield." Raven called to him, her eyes narrowing. He poked his head back in for a moment, that cocky look still on his face.
"Sure it is." He said with a toothy grin and a wink. "And I'll have you know I don't plan on losing."
A/N: I have devious plans for future chapters, so stick around :) Besides, I think we can all use some happy distractions these days. Cheers!