Author's Note: I seem to really like writing scenes that don't get around to what they're supposed to be right away. This is one of those. :D
Jane came back into the bedroom wearing only a towel, and a smile that was still a little subdued, but genuine. Kurt put down the book he'd been reading and got up from the bed, stepping forward to meet her. "Feeling better?"
She nodded, wrapping her arms around his neck. "I'll probably be hurting tomorrow, but for now, it's not too bad."
The kiss she gave him was lingering and suggestive, and his pulse quickened. He'd brought up massaging her because he'd wanted to ease the worst of her muscle aches before they developed too far, but when her mind had leapt into the gutter, he'd been only too happy to let her drag him in after her. They hadn't shared anything more intimate than a kiss since Bulgaria, and he'd respected her need for time and space, but he'd missed losing himself in her.
Taking his cue from Jane, he tugged at the towel she wore. It didn't take much effort to make it fall to the floor, and she laughed quietly. "That didn't take long."
"I promise I'll take my time with other things." He kissed her again, unhurried and teasing, smiling against her lips when she began to unbutton his shirt.
Once she'd stripped him down to his underwear, he stepped back before she could distract him further. "Go sit in the middle of the bed. I'll be there in a second."
It wasn't anywhere near dark outside yet, but he'd already closed the drapes, and the room was dim enough to make candles worth lighting. He felt Jane's eyes on him as he set out a few small tea-lights on each nightstand and lit them one by one.
"Are you trying to seduce me, Kurt Weller?" she teased, her husky voice amused.
"Maybe." He finished up, then switched off the lamp that had been providing light before, leaving only the tiny, dancing candle flames to illuminate them. He took the massage oil from the nightstand and joined Jane on the bed, nuzzling her shoulder. "Is it working?"
"You should check for yourself." She took his hand and moved it towards her inner thighs, and he flattened his palm over her lower abdomen, giving her a brief, hungry kiss.
"I could…if you want to skip ahead a little." God, he was tempted, though he'd been looking forward to massaging her.
Jane made a small, uncertain noise, then leaned against him. "I guess I can wait a while. What do you need me to do?"
He kissed her again, stroking his hand just a little lower until her breath caught. Then he drew back and shifted around behind her, so that she was sitting between his thighs. "Just relax, and let me know if anything hurts too much. That's all I need."
As he squeezed a little of the sweet-tasting massage oil into his palm, then warmed it in his hands, he kissed the back of her neck. Jane let out a slow breath, her head falling forward slightly. "That smells so good. What is it?"
"Edible massage oil. Chocolate-covered strawberry flavour." He smoothed his oil-covered palms over her shoulders as he spoke, covering the area with firm strokes before beginning to work out the knots beneath the skin. Despite the work the hot water of her bath had done to relax her, there was still a lot of tension held in her shoulders, the result of too many nightmares, and more stressful days and nights than she deserved.
Jane sighed appreciatively at his touch. "You just happened to have that lying around your apartment?"
"I ordered it the day after you first spent the night. Just in case. I figured that in our line of work, one of us would need a massage sooner or later."
"Does it actually taste like chocolate-covered strawberries?" Her voice was a little lazier than usual, making him smile.
He took one hand off her shoulder and reached around to stroke oil across her lips, so she could taste.
Jane surprised him by intercepting his hand and slipping the tip of his finger into her mouth, flicking her tongue across it exactly the way she always did against his cock. Kurt gave a soft groan as she took his finger a little deeper before slowly releasing it, giving the tip a tiny nibble before she let go.
"Oh, you're bad, Jane Doe." And if she kept this up, the parts of her getting massaged wouldn't be any of the muscles she'd worked out today.
She kissed the sensitive pulse-point at his wrist before twisting her upper body enough to look back at him, her expression telling him she knew exactly what effect she was having on him.
He kissed her hard, communicating just how much she was testing his self-control without saying a word. She tried to follow when he pulled back, and he took hold of her shoulders with a grin, turning her to face away from him again. "If you want me to do this, you have to stay put."
Jane behaved after that, letting him regain his composure as he finished her shoulders and upper back. They were comfortably silent until Kurt pulled her to lean back against him while he massaged from her left hand all the way up her arm.
"So, did you learn how to do this to impress the ladies?" Jane teased, when he started on her right hand.
Sensing no insecurity about his past relationships in her voice, he laughed. "Might have helped. I did start learning with pure intentions, though. When Sarah was training to be a physical therapist and learning sports massage, sometimes I'd be her practice patient. Needless to say, it was nothing like this. She used to explain what she was doing while she was doing it, to fix it in her head, so I picked up a few bits and pieces. Sometimes she screwed up, and I'd be in pain for a week or two. Then, just after she qualified, I really did wrench my arm. I was one of her first real patients."
"What were you doing?" If Jane thought having a perfectly casual conversation and mentioning his sister was strange, it didn't show. He was giving each part of her arm thorough attention, which made it obvious that foreplay was on the back burner for now, anyway.
"I was still pretty much a rookie agent back then. Two years on the job, maybe. A suspect was evading arrest, he went up onto the rooftop, and he leapt over the alley to the next building. It was maybe a twenty-five, thirty foot drop, and this guy was probably six foot five, maybe even taller. His legs were longer than mine." He finished Jane's right arm and reached for the massage oil again.
"Why do I get the feeling you jumped?"
Kurt kissed the oil derricks tattooed at the top of her back, amused by the trepidation in her voice. "I knew I could make the jump, so I started sprinting. My partner of the time yelled at me that I couldn't make it across, but I ignored him, leapt over the gap, just about managed it, but my landing was a little off. Meanwhile, the guy had run across to the opposite side of the building, realised there was no fire escape or anywhere to run on that side, and doubled back around to try the fire escape above where I was jumping. My partner shot him, but not before the suspect kicked me in the chest, and I went flying off the roof."
Under his hands, Jane had tensed up again, and he told her, "Maybe this isn't the best story to get you to relax."
"You can't just stop it now," Jane protested.
Kurt relented. "On my way down, I got lucky and managed to catch one of the fire escape railings, about halfway to the ground. That's how I wrenched my arm—right out of its socket, actually— but it slowed my fall enough that I didn't break every bone in my body when I landed in a dumpster."
Jane gave a pained hiss in sympathy. "If that's the kind of thing that happened to you as a rookie, I'm glad you survived long enough for me to meet you."
He smiled. "Yeah. Me, too. My partner never let me live the dumpster part down, though. My ego was bruised for about five years."
"Whatever works," Jane said. "If I could remember the things I did on my first few military missions, I bet I'd have something to rival that one."
"And that's the last death-defying story I'm gonna tell you today," Kurt finished.
"Remind me to ask you for more stories from your rookie days later, then." Jane hugged her knees while Kurt began to massage farther down her back, where the tattoo of his surname began. "You don't want me to lie down?"
"Can if you want, now your arms are finished." He moved aside while she stretched out on her stomach, and he wondered for the millionth time how he'd managed to get a girl as beautiful, resilient, talented and determined as Jane to fall in love with him.
She glanced over her shoulder as he gazed down at her tattooed body, and smiled. "You're staring."
He leaned over to kiss her. "If you were me, you'd stare at you, too. You're stunning, Jane."
"Thank you," she whispered, looking touched and self-conscious all at once. Before he could ask her about her uncertainty, she looked away again, and the moment was lost.
Not wanting to rest too much of his weight on her when she'd already stressed her body so much today, Kurt sat to one side of her hips instead of straddling them. As he warmed more oil between his palms, Jane adjusted a pillow beneath her head and got more comfortable.
"I used to hate the tattoos. Those first few days, after I came out of the bag, I just used to stare at them and…"
He was quiet, sensing she had more to say. While he stroked slowly and firmly up and down her back, she sighed, her lips curving a little. He thought he'd derailed her train of thought, but after a while she continued where she'd left off.
"At first I used to panic, cry. Look at myself in the mirror and wonder, 'Why me? What is all this for?' But then we started solving more and more cases. I could see each tattoo and think 'this one helped us take Trakzer offline' or 'this one pointed us to the CDC so we could stop a biological attack'. Things that I could be proud of having helped with, even if I didn't understand where the tattoos came from, or why I'd been chosen."
Kurt made a non-verbal noise to show he was listening, not wanting to interrupt her, or accidentally steer the conversation anywhere she didn't want to go—towards Sandstorm or Keaton. As he began to slide his thumbs up and down either side of her spine, applying more pressure than before, Jane gave a tiny groan of encouragement.
"How are you an FBI agent and not a massage therapist?"
"Have you ever been to a real massage therapist?" he asked, amused.
"Not that I can remember. But I doubt it feels much better than this." When he leaned down to trail soft kisses down the lower portion of her spine, Jane laughed. "And something tells me massage therapists don't use that particular technique."
"Not the reputable ones, anyway."
As he focused on her lower back, which necessitated a little gratuitous groping of the upper part of her ass, Kurt wondered if she'd forgotten where she was going with her monologue about the tattoos. But as the fruit-scented oil was absorbed into her skin and he reached for the bottle again, Jane picked up her train of thought.
"So after a while, I stopped hating the tattoos. I didn't choose them, so I didn't really have any strong feelings of liking them, but they stopped being something that ruined my mood. And then I saw the way you look at them. Not the pictures, on the screen, when we're trying to solve them…but on me."
He smiled, unable to resist moving down to massage where her ass met the tops of her thighs, then moving in just a fraction, teasing her with future possibilities. "We're back to the part about staring now, huh?"
"Full circle," Jane agreed, a slightly breathless note to her voice as he dipped his thumbs between her thighs, just brushing her labia for a moment before turning his attention outward again. "Kurt…"
He grinned as she tilted her hips against the bed. "I'll admit it—it was hard not to stare at you at first. You were like a living puzzle, and you had my name on your back. But it wasn't the tattoos that drew me to you." One more 'accidental' pass between her legs, still not seeking her clit, just tantalising her with the idea…then he shifted backwards, down to take one of her feet in his hand.
Jane mumbled something frustrated against her arm, and he swallowed the urge to laugh. Holding her ankle tightly enough to dissuade an involuntary kick if she was ticklish, he ran his fingers down the inner arch of the bottom of her foot. She curled her toes a little, but didn't giggle or squirm, so he began to apply pressure, smiling when she gave another appreciative sigh.
Instead of focusing on one leg at a time, he did both of her feet first, trying to remember what he'd been talking about before he'd gotten side-tracked. "I didn't look at the tattoos and think, 'Those are hot.' They intrigued me, but they weren't…" He stopped, trying to find the right words.
"A fetish?" Jane suggested.
"Yeah. If you'd just showed up with my name written on your back with a Sharpie, or if my name had been on the tag of the bag you'd been in… I would still have found you just as beautiful as with the full-body tattoos. I guess I even assumed that I found you attractive in spite of them, at first. But then you covered them up when we went undercover together, in the Hamptons."
He noticed a tiny shiver pass through her body, and looked up from massaging her left calf muscle, concerned. "You cold?"
"No." She lifted her head off the pillow and looked over her shoulder at him, her expression holding more than just a hint of lust. "Just remembering that day. The dancing. The combat. You looking at me like you wanted to rip that dress off me…"
Unable to stop himself, he moved up her body on his hands and knees to kiss her, hard and deep. Jane rolled onto her side, reaching for him, but he drew away before she could pull him down to the bed. "I'm not done with your legs yet."
Jane groaned and lay down, and he sat back within reach of her calves before continuing, "Yeah, you looked amazing in that dress. And I did have a lot of improper thoughts about what I wanted to do to you that day. But it wasn't until we got back to the NYO and changed out of the formalwear that I realised how much I'd missed the tattoos. Not because of how they look, but because they're unique to you. They're a part of you, and I guess they're a part of us."
"That's what it is," she said, almost to herself.
A little unsure what she meant, he waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't. "What what is?" he asked, smoothing more warm oil over her inked skin.
"The way you look at the tattoos. When they're on the screen, you're analytical. You're looking for clues, trying to figure things out. But when you look at them on my body, you don't see the puzzles or the connotations or the deception that put them there. You look at my skin the way you would any other part of my body, just as a part of me."
He looked down at the tattooed skin between his fingers and smiled. "And because it's a part of you, I find it very, very attractive. Which brings us back, yet again, to staring at you."
"The reason I started talking about the tattoos is because when I look at them from your perspective, I feel good about them. I never thought I'd have that, but it really helped me to accept them. I guess I just…wanted to thank you for that."
Kurt paused the massage for a few seconds to rest his palm on the small of her back. Since the very first few days of knowing her, he'd wanted her to be at ease with who she was, unassailed by the demons in her mind. To learn that he'd managed to slay one of those demons without even knowing it—that affected him more than he could express. A little overwhelmed, he had to take a breath before he spoke.
"You're welcome, Jane."
Author's Note: Oh, yes. Yes, I did stop it there. But only because it was getting really long and I'm point-of-view shifting from Kurt to Jane. And I'll probably update it tomorrow, assuming I get the scene finished. :p