"When do we leave?"
"5 am, Samantha. I suggest you get some sleep."
"It's Sam, Lara. Stop calling me 'Samantha'. It sounds like you're mad at me or something."
"Sam. Please get some rest."
"I'm too wound up. I can't."
The woman on the opposite side of the bed groans and turns onto her stomach, tucking her arms under her pillow. The three scratches on the planes of her shoulder blades show like trophies to the endeavor we'd faced. "Why did you insist on sharing a room, again? This manor has 52 bed chambers."
"Yeah, and 51 of them are creepy and dusty as hell. How come you don't have someone for that?"
"Hush, Sam."
I grumble to myself and toss over to face the window in the east corner. Moonlight is streaming in through the silken curtains and focusing beams of dim light onto the spruce green carpet. I could feel her breathing from the five feet of plush mattress and sheets between us; the bed's far big enough to give us both personal space. Not that it was exceptionally important to me. In fact, if she suddenly decided that the only way to keep us warm was naked body heat I'd be all over the idea.
But alas, I'm over here and she's over there and I can't get a wink of sleep to save my life.
I creep and little closer and turn to face her bare back. "So, who's this 'Vymes' guy anyways?"
She doesn't answer.
"Lara?" My fingers prod at her shoulder. One hazel eye snaps open in an irritated way.
"What."
"Who's this guy you keep talking about? The guy you think sent those decked-out men earlier?"
"Last time I met with him he was a power-hungry mogul with a Romanesque antiquity fascination. Now, who knows." She props her tired head up on her palm to address me. "I have my hunches on what I am to come face to face with tomorrow."
"We," I point out. "What WE are."
She mutters something under her breathe and turns away from me. The wounds are looking a little bit angry, I notice.
"Do they hurt?" I ask after some moments of silence. She pauses before replying.
"A bit." A simple answer, but the fact that she would admit it to me says a lot. I inch closer still, reach my arm to full length, and sweep my fingertips across the raised flesh delicately. Her muscles go tense under my touch, but she doesn't move away or tell me to stop. It's enough of an excuse for me to continue my striations. Beyond the red, recently stitched lines are labyrinths of old scars and new scars, long and thin and shiny against the matte of her unharmed skin; closer still I move, tracing them slowly.
"Sam," she says in a restrained way.
"I feel like I know you." The words confuse even me as they pass my lips. Her body goes rigid, but I dismiss it and keep talking; maybe if I keep talking it'll work itself out.
"Or, like, I feel like I'm supposed to know you. You know how, once you've seen someone once, you never really forget them? Even if you just walk by them on the street or pass them in a car, you can still have dreams about them and remember them at random times. That's how I think when I look at you. Like I saw you somewhere once, and now I can't forget it."
Her shoulders stiffen up to rocks and she breathes raspily into her pillow. Quickly I pull my hand away, sure that her pain was caused by my exploring fingers. She whispers something and I lean in to hear it.
"It has to be this way."
My eyes and nose scrunch with confusion. "What?" I question, sitting up quickly. She goes quiet again.
"Hey," I bark, straddling her waist between my outstretched arms and peering over her to see her face. She covers her eyes and mouth with a bent elbow and stays silent.
"What are you talking about? Lara?" Why did she say that? What had to be this way? She doesn't respond and it's frustrating enough to push the boundaries I knew she'd erected. Without a warning, I sweep my fingertips over her bare, rippled abdomen. Her breathing stops.
"You kissed me," I mutter, drawing tight circles just below her navel. "Tell me why."
I'm taking 'playing with fire' to a whole new level with this one, but I can't help myself. She confused me, she intrigued me, she was basically the most interesting and worldly and intimidating person on the planet, a walking monument to feminine pride and strength, and I needed to know what she was thinking.
Two of my digits hook into the waistband of the only item of clothing she'd climbed into bed with, a pair of navy blue low rise panties. She has enough right then, planting a hand on my shoulder with a commanding glare.
"Why did you kiss me, Lara?" I push farther. That hadn't been a pity kiss, or a 'fine if you want' kiss. That was…like, a scary passionate kiss that almost always led to something else. That kind of locked, hot dance. "You felt it, too, didn't you? That weird feeling I've had since I got here. Tell me!"
She shakes her head and clenches her eyes shut. I pull on her shoulder to tip her onto her back, seized with confidence-granting curiosity, and mount her hips between my thighs. She could have easily removed me, but she didn't; instead, she stays obediently, though still defiantly silent, under me.
I can't resist drinking in the view I get from my motions, her topless form and splaying tresses calling for my attention greedily. My fingers begin wandering again; her eyes remain firmly away from mine, but her hands twitch against my hips in a horridly conflicted way.
"Sam," she whispers raspily. The conflict in her cracked voice sends tickles of unexpected pleasure rattling over my spine. I settle against her waist and the light nightshirt she'd lent me rides over my thighs; the only thing separating her immaculately sculpted abs from my bare skin are my rather flirtatious choice of underwear, lacy and black. The pressure gives me an immediate head rush.
"Stop," she mutters, as if helpless. "We can't do this."
"Why?" I grind against her lightly to illustrate my point. "You can't tell me you don't want this. Not after that kiss." She bites into another halting gasp when my hands creep up to squeezes her breasts tightly.
She mutters that word again, a few times, stop, stop, but her body reacts to me like a recognized lover. I rock against her mercilessly, knowing I'm breaking down her resolve, however I couldn't understand it. Was it her life of solitude that kept her from making a move? She's responding as if she was controlled by a resistance and a hunger at the same time.
I'm caught off-guard when she sits up under me, hooks her nails into the small of my back, and sinks her tongue between my lips with a fervor that would rival anything I'd experienced before. I grapple at her bare skin desperately as she grabs my ass hard and flips us without effort.
"Sam," she mutters, licking a wet line over my throat. Her hands move over me like they'd done it before, like they knew me, and her motions are halting and conflicted and repressed.
Her thigh slots forcefully between my legs and my eyes roll back. Shit, she was good at this. Really, really good.
Lara. God, I think I love you. Can that happen so fast? Why should I love her? It was instinctual, it was impossible to hide or to debate. I've never loved, or wanted, another woman before and yet, I needed her, here, now, forever. I needed to be able to touch her and to see her and to know that she's there.
"I'm sorry," she snarls through her own euphoria, blinking down at me with half-lidded eyes. She thinks she's cursed. She thinks that if we do this, I'll be dead before this mission is over. Carefully, I lay my palms over her jawline and pull her down, and this kiss is slow, long, warm. I tease her lips apart and linger there, stealing her breath away, convincing her that everything would be alright.
Lara Croft. Her grip tightens around me. Her mouth travels and leaves a trail of restrained, pink bites over my throat and her hands finally restart their traveling. They work up into the nightshirt, pinching and caressing and just everything I could beg her to do, everything I'd been craving; she's practiced, precise. She knows trigger areas, sensitive spots, she knows how to gut reactions out of me. And here, in this tangle of silk sheets and fine cotton and her, just her, I'm happy for the first time in a long time.
My body is singing with butterflies and white hot sensation when a high pitch shriek breaks me from my focus. It chirps loudly once, then twice, then three times, and just as her head is crawling between my legs and her tongue brushes against me, a low voice soaks into my brain.
Sam.
I snap my eyes open, and look down between my breasts at the woman spreading my knees farther apart. How did she-?
More angry chirps. I cover my ears with the flats of my palms and groan. "Lara, what the hell is that?"
She doesn't move. It doesn't even feel like she's breathing down there. "Uhm, hello?" I sit up , lifting her head to get a look at her. Except she's not Lara anymore.
She's a giant, beeping alarm clock.
I start awake like I'd just been electrocuted and my forehead makes contact with a brick wall.
"Fuck!" I shout, recoiling back into the sheets with my hands over my face. When I've cleared the pain tears out of my eyes and peer between my fingers to investigate what I'd hit, Lara's there, bent over in a similar position.
"Damn it, Sam," she hisses, dabbing a cut on her eyebrow with hesitant digits. My skull must have reopened one of her facial cuts from yesterday.
"Sorry," I resign, massaging my new sore spot with a tinge of disappointment. "Weird dream."
Weird. That was a flat out lie. Of course she had to wake me up right when it was getting to the good part.
Was that really imaginary? My dreams are never that vivid…
I rub my head and look around the bedroom, dark and cool. The sun still hadn't risen. I pout, and sniff the night air.
"What's that smell?"
She quirk her brow at me and throws over my clothes. "5 am."
The plane isn't so much a plane as it is a flying deathtrap. Apparently, even with her 'vast network of connections', as she called it, she still couldn't hail a proper flight on a whim, and so she had to resort to calling in a long overdue favor.
The drive to the runway is quiet, and I manage to get a couple more minutes of shut-eye while trying to force a continuous line of dream. Unfortunately, all I could get was that last frame of imagery, pulling Lara's face up and seeing a goofy looking alarm clock with big, glowing numbers and a series of protruding buttons on top. Jesus.
She taps me awake with a little more care when we arrive, keeping her own head out of impact range. "We're here, Sam. Come on."
I shake the sleep out of my eyes and take the hand she offers me, lifting myself out of the Jeep and stretching. The sky was alight with a pretty brilliant sunrise, decorating the grassy landscape with reflective oranges and yellows.
I look around, blinking my brain awake. I see only one machine, at the start of the concrete drag. It's looks like one of those planes that dumps chemicals on crops, whatever those are called. My stomach ties itself in a knot just by the sight of the rickety looking thing. Right by its tail, a tall looking man is waving us over.
"Shelia!" he calls to us. Lara smiles broadly and straps her bags to her shoulders, making her way to him with open arms.
"Hello, Wally," she says happily. They lock into a tight embrace and he gives her a strong pat on the back.
"Crikey, girl!" Australian, really Australian. He's got a blonde mustache and a red baseball cap hiding what looked like it could be a military cut and he is touching Lara and I already don't like him too much. He hooks a finger under her chin to get a good look at her banged up complexion. "You been wrestling bears again?"
"Vymes' men," she smirks in a pleased way. "They thought they could get a run at me, but I got lucky." She turns to me then and we lock eyes; her gaze is softer than I think I've ever seen it. "Thanks to this one."
"This one," I point confidently at myself, "saved that one," I point to her, who snorts, "from imminent doom, if you could believe it."
"Ah, it's about time she's gotten herself a proper guardian," he retorts with a grin. "Can't leave 'er alone two seconds without some catastrophe strikin'. I'm Wally, one of Lara's old mates."
"Sam. One of Lara's not-so-old mates." His handshake is firm and tight.
"Alright, alright," she waves dismissively at us. "Let's get this show on the road."
"As ye wish!" He climbs into the cockpit and opens a sliding compartment on the side of the craft, presumably where one would shove toxic barrels of Agent Orange.
"Have you ever flown before?" The question seems pretty redundant, since equating flying on a jumbo jet in first class couldn't really be a comparison to this. She props her hands against the rim of the compartment and lifts herself up into it.
"W-Wait!" I call at her, flabbergasted. "We're riding in there?" It was an opening maybe 3 feet by 2 feet and I had no idea what the space on the inside was like.
"You're more than welcome to take the Jeep back to the manor if you'd prefer." She gives me a cheeky smirk and I perch my hands against my hips in response. "Yeah, right. Nice try."
"Suit yourself," she shrugs. "Put this on and strap it on tight." She tosses me one of her bags; I just narrowly manage to catch it.
"What's in here?" Supplies? Maps? Other archeology-related stuff?
"A parachute."
"Oh." It takes three whole seconds of silence between us for my brain to click into place. "Wait, what?! We're jumping out of this thing?!"
"No doubt Vymes has his own security and has taken my advance into account. He'll be on the lookout for activity." She buckles the straps between her thighs tightly, her choice outfit is a tight bodysuit, stark black with red accents, that hugged every curve and muscles she had like a second skin. It made my heart race irresponsibly every time I looked at her. "The area he's settled in is regularly treated with chemicals to control the locust population, so a craft like this could get close without arising suspicion."
"And we're…just gonna…" Just thinking about falling out of the bottom of this thing is giving me some serious anxiety nausea.
"It would be strange for the plane to drop us off on land, and would defeat the purpose of flying in this way."
"Right." I shake my head and gather up all of the nervous energy shaking around in my gut. "Alright, alright." I hold the pack in front of me. "Show me how to use this thing so I don't die?"
She climbs down from the dormouse and approaches me. I really can't believe how tight that catsuit is. Like, how did she even fit her tits in that thing? I don't think that dream had done them justice. She straps the parachute onto my back and shows me how to secure all of the body straps. "Pull this cord for the main chute. Count, alright? Count to six and pull, no sooner, no later. If the red cord doesn't work for some reason, pull the yellow one; that's your emergency chute. Don't pull them both at the same time."
I nod at her and swallow my overwhelming nervousness. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all.