linger
Mercedes freezes while she goes about rolling back her shoulders like she does every morning, shards of reality progressively puncturing past her early haze. Sam provides heat as efficiently as a furnace does (which she knew, before, just not as clearly as right now). She fell asleep on the couch watching The Dark Knight with Sam after an evening of dancing her feet and booty off with their closest friends. His arms feel fire delicious wrapped around her as they are. It's some sacrilegious, ungodly time on Friday. And… - Mercedes can feel Sam lower down her body, the length of him a hard weight against her.
Long seconds pass without the slightest movement, and, telling herself to breathe in slow and steady, Mercedes starts on trying to come up with ways to get out of her current predicament as smoothly as possible. What she'll need to do is find her footing below before sliding off the couch's thick cushions without changing her torso's position too much, which doesn't seem like the easiest feat when Mercedes considers her petite height and curvy physique.
But she doesn't get to it even after going through what would be the necessary motions inside her head. She wonders what's keeping her, and part of her tries to make the case that she's yet to take action because she doesn't want to either move in some way that disturbs Sam's sleep or get her clumsy on and end up with her ass firmly planted on the floor, but, the truth is… - the truth is she's actually contemplating moving her hips back against him once before turning around and waking him up by finding his mouth with hers. Sam has not disposed of the condoms stashed in his room, and just the idea of seeing him racing up the stairs to get to them at some speed only those about to have sex can manage makes Mercedes want to giggle in deep humor and love.
Because the heart of the matter is that Mercedes really does love Sam. She loves Sam. Uncontestable piece of evidence: she kinda even likes how he's sort of a morning person, which should be annoying but is not entirely so because his laidback silliness as they go about preparing breakfast has gotten her out of her typical morning funks plenty. Or: how she can't help but notice that, even when he's lost in Portal 2, he asks about her day, a practice that has resulted in him knowing the title to each song she's been working on as well as most of their hooks. Or: how he only forgets to take out the trash three out of seven times. And: how Mercedes can sit through incredibly suspect tv shows just because of Sam's outrageous take on them. Also: Mercedes loves him. What lies underneath all the colorful details that make up Sam's surface, the fact that he's an unlikely mix of a personality full of flair with the biggest heart pumping sturdy and warm as the motor keeping it all functioning. She likes the evident steel in him, the historical truth that this is a person who shouldered a man's weight when he was just a kid so that his family could stay afloat.
That's one of the things with Sam, he keeps weathering storms you might never expect he'd weather.
Which goes a long way toward explaining why Mercedes has yet to start getting off the damned couch. He's weathered her, living together and going on four months of their relationship, good moments and not so good ones, her lack of laughter when he goes hyper on the impressions when she's already bone tired following a challenging day of recording, and her strong blast those three out of seven times he forgets about taking the trash out, and, four days ago, Sam baiting her into a heated argument because of a bartender who showed some maximum interest in her admittedly hypnotizing cleavage. With no sex to blunt all of these edges off.
Which reminds Mercedes of another thing that goes a long way toward explaining why she has yet to start getting off the damned couch. Sam has managed to make sex concrete for her. Before,… she used to think about the general notion of sex, things like gravity-shifting, passion-fueled kisses and lots of caressing, and then (what she once focused on) that afterglow of talking and laughing and just… - that palpable consciousness that you love, enjoy, and trust each other. But lately she's gotten into the habit of adding more color and texture to her thoughts, of filling these up with details. And so now Mercedes thinks about Sam above her, likes to imagine how his biceps would look if he were reigning himself in as he loved her thorough and deep, finds herself trying to conjure what would play in his eyes if it were her above him, driving him closer with each movement. Right now, she's wondering how he would feel inside her, her body already responding to the reality of him pressed against her combined with the very vivid reel playing inside her head.
Somehow she knows sex with Sam would be a hot expedition into complete oblivion. Even if Brittany hadn't dropped several comments followed by the requisite significantly charged looks about how Mercedes should be having a blast back home, Mercedes knows Sam enough to guess he must be a relentless hard worker when it comes to the physical. The responses he draws with just his hands on her breasts when she allows for it are a mix of almost embarrassing and definitely thought provoking enough that she finds herself still here. Still not moving. Still thinking about it, uncertain whether it's her feet or her hips she'll go with.
Maybe she's being too cautious with herself with her decision.
(Maybe she just is pretty cautious with herself).
Mercedes finds herself taking another calming breath before she's closing her eyes tightly, then she's whispering the shortest prayer because her feet have landed on the carpet and she's able to wiggle out of Sam's embrace without waking him up. She pauses as she's leaving, watches Sam for some long beats as she draws level with the arm of the couch. Her fuzzy peach blanket - (which should only look ridiculous around him but also looks too cute) - covers the majority of his frame but nothing of his face. Her throat gets tight for some unfathomable reason as her gaze lingers over his closed eyes, so she instructs herself to continue with the task of walking as soundlessly as possible.
She stops as she's about to vacate the room, goes back around and drops the softest kiss against Sam's forehead, convincing herself she's glad when he's sound asleep enough that it gets no reaction.
Later, even as she's going over the notes for a new song, Mercedes keeps getting caught in musings of maybe soon and forever and meaning and foundation and love and lust and the degrees that separate some of these. Sam remained deep under as she went up and got ready for the day ahead and then as she went about preparing breakfast. Had he been there to cook his chocolate chip pancakes for her, her resolve might have shifted from pretty thin to completely nonexistent, which would have led to them ending up a sated tangle draped over either one of their beds. And maybe that would only have been good for them, and so she… - Mercedes really hopes she's doing right by herself and by Sam when she sticks to what her conscience seems to be telling her, that she's actually building up to something significant instead of just standing motionless when moving in a desired direction would maybe prove a wiser path to follow.
~#~
