Author: lj user"linaerys"
Pairing: going toward Nigel/Woody, but not there yet
Rating: PG for now
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: On the Spot (Part 1/3)
Summary: Nigel and Woody get closer, somewhat against their own will. Set sometime after "Second Chances" and THAT scene.
"Oh, Woody, I'd so love to tell you."
Woody bolted as quickly as he could and shut the door hard behind him. He leaned back against the wall of the hallway for a moment. His face was flushed and he felt a nervous tightness in the pit of his stomach.
He wasn't sure how to feel--Nigel was putting him on the spot in a way that was only half joking. He wondered how far Nigel was willing to take it as he straightened the collar of his trench coat and walked outside.
Later, as he tried to fall asleep, the moment came back to him. I could have handled that better, he thought, but as he went over it in his mind he couldn't think of anything he could have said to take that salacious grin of Nigel's face. Wonder what would have happened if I'd taken the bait, he thought, just leaned in. That would have surprised him.
Trouble was, Woody couldn't imagine what would happen after that. Would Nigel pull back or would he go with the flow? Probably just go with it. Woody suppressed a shudder. Nigel wasn't one to back down from that kind of challenge--he was surprisingly macho about it, in his own twisted way. Woody grinned a little thinking about it. No, Nigel didn't back down from any kind of challenge to his weirdness.
Woody's mind turned next to Jordan, and then from Jordan so the woman Jordan reminded him of. Her. Linda Johnson was her name, a simple and prosaic name for someone who could make him feel just as uncomfortable as Nigel did. She shadowed all Woody's subsequent relationships with her presence. He'd been just twenty, a junior in college, majoring in criminology. She was a local detective who gave a semester-long lecture for honors students. She was probably fifteen years older than him, but that hadn't stopped either of them, nor had her being his teacher. She had dark, thick hair and serious eyes, so unlike all his other girlfriends' mid-western blonde good looks.
Woody disappeared from his own life during the six months of their affair and entered hers--a darker, adult place with many-layered pasts and long silences. And sex. Sex that lasted all night, days of smelling the scent of her skin lingering on his. He was no virgin when they met, but she was a level beyond his experience.
Linda was in complete control of their relationship, both in and out of bed. Some time near the end, long after he had given up hope of hearing "I love you, too" when he said "I love you," she said to him in her throaty voice "Do this again some day, Woody."
"Do what?" he asked with a grin. He started to kiss down her side, and lingered around her hip for a moment.
"Do that again soon," she said with half a grin. "What I meant was, make sure you act on some totally off-the-wall attraction. Like me. Something that doesn't seem right, but is. You won't regret it."
And so when he met Jordan, and felt that same attraction to her dark sad eyes, to her forcefulness, he thought this was finally it. The same things he loved in Linda, but with a vulnerability that would hold them together. Instead it just ended up pulling them apart. Woody drifted off into troubled dreams where it was Jordan who said "I'd so love to tell you," but she said it in Nigel's voice, and Woody woke up in the middle of the night, troubled without knowing why.
"Too easy," said Nigel to himself. Really, Nigel was amazed at all that Woody let him get away with--flirtation that would have a lot of red-blooded heterosexual men fleeing for the hills--but Woody kept coming back for more. Nigel was of two minds about it: either Woody was secure enough for the flirting not to undermine him . . . or that adage was true, that every joke has an element of truth.
"You can't always get what you wa-ant," Nigel sang to himself, slightly off key. "But you can try, try and try." He snapped his headphones back on (noise canceling, thank you very much, and worth every penny, even if they did put an unfortunate crease in his hair). He was just playing with Woody, really, he told himself, just having some fun. Not that he'd turn it down if Woody seemed interested, but pining after unavailable people kept a bloke from getting any action. Witness Woody and Jordan. Witness him and Jordan, for that matter. Nigel skipped songs on his iPod until something cheerful came on.
"Oh l'amour . . . broke my heart and now I'm aching for you. Oh l'amour, what's a boy in love supposed to do . . ." Well, the music was cheery even if the lyrics were not.
"They're sending you to the Forensics Conference?" Nigel asked incredulous. "Is this some kind of remedial thing? You always seemed to know what you were doing, at least in comparison to some of the cops we have nosing around here."
"Thank you, Nigel," said Woody as he straightened his tie.
"It's a bloody waste of resources," continued Nigel. "We've needed a memory upgrade on the lab's computers for month's and the city's throwing away money sending Woody to a conference."
"I think it's a good idea," said Jordan from down the hallway. "If nothing else, the New York MEs you meet will help you appreciate what you've got here. And anyway, Nigel, don't complain." She started to push by them and hit Nigel on the back. "You're going, too."
"I'm what?" screeched Nigel. "I certainly don't have anything to learn there. At least Woody might finally get some rudimentary anatomy drilled into his thick head--"
"I heard that," called Woody from near the elevators, but Nigel continued.
"--but I've got no reason to be there."
"Relax, Nige," said Jordan with a half-smile. "You're presenting."
Nigel followed her into Macy's office where she had been typing up reports. "What exactly am I presenting?" he asked. "Our new computer systems that are hooked directly into the mass spectrometer so we have near instantaneous look-up of every man made substance? The larvae database--no you'd send Bug for that . . ." he trailed off as he noticed Jordan looking at him impatiently.
"These are cops," she said. "No, you'll be going over basic and slightly less basic procedures for preserving and cataloging physical evidence at crime scenes. Some of these cops come from police departments that don't have quite the resources we do in Boston."
"But . . . but . . . it's in less than a week. What if I had plans?" Nigel protested. "I did have plans." Jordan ignored him and soldiered on.
"Garrett has a pretty standard presentation he likes to give. The slides and notes are on the file-server. If you want to do a practice run, I'm sure Lily would be willing to be an audience."
"How come you don't have to do this?" Nigel asked as she shooed him out the door.
"Seniority, baby."
"Bugger," Nigel said under his breath as he closed the door behind him.
"I am not sharing a room with you," said Woody as he barged into the lab a few days later.
"Knock, knock," said Nigel without looking up from his cadaver. "I can't get any peace around here."
"They wouldn't," said Bug. "We're on separate budgets." Woody and Nigel both turned to him in surprise. "What?" he said at their expressions, "Macy made me run the quarterly numbers last week because you had Nigel out on some wild goose chase." Bug turned back to the microscope. "Someone's been spending a large portion of the office supply budget on ergonomically correct mouses for the lab computers." He gave Nigel a look.
Nigel put on his best expression of offended innocence. "I'm sure I had nothing to do with it. Anyway, someone is having you on, Woody." He raised his eyebrow at Bug. "We're on separate budgets."
"You think you sound like me," said Bug, still without looking up, "but you don't." Woody shrugged and nodded at Bug as if to indicate that he had a point, and Nigel sighed deeply.
"Why do I even bother?"
Nigel decided to make the best of a bad deal and went down to New York a day early to check out what was new in the SoHo shops and galleries. He'd been neglecting his designs lately, with Jordan and Woody keeping him so busy, but it never hurt to look for new inspiration.
He left his luggage at the hotel on the West Side but didn't bother to check in until after dinner. He wanted to go dancing--New York clubs might not be better than Boston's, he thought loyally, but there were so many more of them. But his first presentation was at 8:00am, so he decided to go to bed early.
Nigel didn't pay too much attention to what the hotel clerk was saying when he checked it; he was too busy noticing the lovely, long-legged redhead giving him the once, twice and three times over from where she sat at the hotel bar. I love New York women, he thought to himself but unfortunately, the man she was waiting for showed up, and her attention was turned to him by the time the clerk was finished coding Nigel's keycard.
The light was already on when Nigel entered the room and he heard water running. He called out and heard a muffled voice . . . singing? A moment later, Woody came out of the bathroom, dripping wet, and naked except for the towel around his neck.
Nigel just blinked for a moment, as his mind struggled to take in the, well, the vision of beauty in from of him. Perfect stomach, perfect arms, long and well-muscled legs. Pale, but still . . . "Perfect," he breathed, before he recovered enough to flash his usual grin.
"What are you doing here?" Woody asked, hastily wrapping his towel around his waist.
"This is the room they gave me," said Nigel, forcing his eyes up to Woody's face. He twirled the keycard between his fingers for a moment then sighed. "I'll call the front desk and find out what happened."
"I'm calling the office," said Woody.
But the front desk was no help, and although Nigel was somewhat distracted sneaking glances at the well-toned muscles in Woody's back, Nigel was able to determine that yes, they had been booked into the same room, and no, there weren't any other rooms available.
"They did this on purpose," said Woody after he closed his cell phone. "Separate budgets, my ass."
And a lovely ass it is, Nigel just managed not to say.
"Fine, there's two beds. I get this one," said Woody. He glanced at Nigel whose gaze had wandered down Woody's torso again. "And I'm putting on a shirt."
"If you must," said Nigel, half a beat too late.
Next: Drinks and drunks
