A/N: There is some mature content in this chapter. You can certainly skip it, but there is some important information toward the end. However, you won't be too lost if you do skip it, I don't think. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you're enjoying it! I would dearly love a comment or two, so please don't be shy!
Haymitch gets back to the apartment in just a short while. The 4/12 alliance has split up into watches and are as safe as they'll get for a while yet.
He's tired, but he wants to hold Effie, kiss her, and just see what happens after that. He walks into the living room and doesn't see her. He pokes his head into the dining area – empty. Even Darius and the first redheaded Avox are gone now. He walks to his room and opens the door.
Haymitch almost thinks he has the wrong room, and even goes so far as to back out and start closing the door, when his brain catches up to his eyes. He steps back in, and shuts the door quickly behind him. Then he just stares like the yokel he is.
Effie is lying on his bed in considerably less than she was wearing earlier, but it's not her shift dress, or her underwear. He thinks it's going to take further inspection to understand, and walks forward to get a better look.
She's smiling as he approaches the bed. She's wearing very sheer, very light pink stockings. He's never seen such sheer socks. They must be a Capitol invention. At the top of the stockings are deeply pink straps, connected to a lacy belt the same color. This dark lace rests on top of silky underwear, the same color as the stockings. Effie's legs, which look good no matter what she's wearing, suddenly seem a mile long.
She's wearing a corset that matches her stockings. It's light pink laciness, and same light pink silk are just slightly darker than the pink of her skin. Her breasts are pushed up, molded very nicely out of the top. He's only seen this kind of apparel in shop windows. He had no idea it could make a woman's body look like this.
Feeling suddenly foolish, he looks into her eyes.
She smiles warmly, and says, sounding slightly nervous herself, "I thought you should have at least one proper Capitol dalliance."
He smiles, then laughs, before lowering himself onto the bed, so he's hovering over her before he kisses her.
"Thank you, Effie. I'll never forget it."
She grabs his face in between both her hands and trains his eyes on hers.
"Do you mean that?"
He nods. "I swear, Effie. This will be the first thing I think of every day I wake up."
She kisses him, slides her hands into his hair, almost crushing his face to hers. Then she releases him and lowers her hands to take off his shirt. Whatever self-consciousness he had when he first arrived at the Capitol has been obliterated after years of being naked in front of prep teams and stylists. And he's always figured if someone wants to see him naked, they're not attracted to lithe, well-built bodies anyway. But it strikes him that Capitol men might have some similarly useless "dalliance" wear.
She senses his hesitation and stops kissing him.
"What is it?"
"Hm?" He's brought a hand up to her breast, feeling the nipple stiffen beneath his fingers. He looks at it, and can't say why it should be so exciting to see one perfect breast free from the corset, and one still perfectly shrouded beneath. He lowers his head and kisses the soft, cool skin above the top of the corset.
"You seemed like you were elsewhere in your mind."
He laughs against her skin.
"Sorry. I was wondering what Capitol men must wear to bed."
This makes her laugh, really laugh, not her silly, affected giggle, but a real guffaw. It's a bawdy, barmaid's laugh, and it makes his cock stiffen even more.
Then she kisses him again, pushes him until they've switched places and he's under her. He frees her other breast and leans forward to take the nipple in his mouth.
"Mm. Haymitch, take your trousers off, I want you inside me. I've been thinking about you, about this, all day, and I want you, uh, so bad."
With the most perverse timing of anyone in the known world, someone knocks at the door.
Effie shrieks.
"Everything okay in there?" comes a strange voice.
"Just fine!" says Effie cheerily, looking slightly manic as she tries to sound like her normal, chipper self, and tries to get up and get dressed quickly. Haymitch would be laughing if he wasn't feeling so sorry for himself.
She opens his wardrobe, where she had neatly hung her day things, and pulls a dark blue dress with very puffy sleeves over head. She starts struggling with the zipper, so Haymitch gets up, a little awkwardly, and helps her.
"We're to take the escorts and stylists home. As a group. For your safety." She says these last three words as though Effie is an idiot, and she's trying to make herself as plain as possible.
Effie rolls her eyes. She throws her arms around him. "See you tomorrow," she whispers, and tries to leave the room.
He grabs her shoulders, and gentles his touch before whispering, "Where's Cinna?"
She looks around at him, eyes wide.
The person outside the door says, "Don't make me come in there!"
Effie shakes her head to indicate she doesn't know, and leaves the room.
"Well, I must say -" is all he hears Effie say to the waiting Peacekeeper before the door swings shut. He waits a few minutes, not really keen on laying eyes on a Peacekeeper again for a while, and makes his way to the living room.
He is all alone. Effie usually stays. It had been to babysit him in the past, but over the last few years, they had been building a kind of rapport, which had accelerated rapidly after their weekly phone calls this year. It's the closest he's ever come to living with someone, in his adult years.
He pulls a chair over to the window again, and sees Effie and several escorts and stylists walking amongst a group of Peacekeepers.
Haymitch wishes he weren't alone. Usually, alone is what he likes best, which was good, considering what his life was.
But right now, alone doesn't feel like safety, or freedom. It feels like a yawning emptiness he's smack in the middle of.
He's very worried that Effie doesn't know where Cinna is. He had been counting on her knowledge of everyone's itineraries to set him at ease. He'll ask Plutarch tomorrow.
Things he doesn't want to think about, doesn't want to remember right now, not tonight, when he's so far from anything good, start playing in his mind clear as a television screen anyway.