Some Sort of Neighborly
Chapter 8
The strings tug at his fingers as he brushes them, just light enough to feel the reassuring silent twang in response.
He should be used to this by now – and he is, for the most part. The soft lighting in his corner of The Jolly Roger. The old barstool Smee had dragged out of the back. It's all worn and familiar, like the touch of a longtime friend after coming home, just as it'd been the day after Liam's funeral – after Killian had taken all the papers, handed them to Smee, and taken his place on the tiny stage without looking back to where he used to stand behind the counter.
It'd just been too easy to keep glancing over at that empty space beside him.
It'd been easy to keep searching for that flash of long mahogany hair in the crowd, too. Until the day that it hadn't.
(You love playing for people. What Robin said hadn't been wrong, exactly, and yet – something in him hesitates, and it tastes bitter with the tang of his cowardice.)
The floor is reasonably packed today. Liam would have been proud for the turnout they're managing to scrape, but Killian won't take credit for all of it, even if live music had originally been his idea. Over by the control box, Tink gives him the thumbs up, and he taps the microphone to test the speakers before he clears his throat.
"Thanks for coming out tonight."
He'd once been wary of lifting his eyes beyond the edge of his guitar, but he's been making a conscious effort to really look at the members of his audience, even if they aren't particularly paying attention. Most of them aren't, in fact – he can't blame them; alcohol is an excellent companion for those who come alone – which makes him work even harder to appreciate the ones who do.
And that's probably the only reason he notices them.
An unmistakable pixie-cut hovering by the far end of the bar. The tall man beside her. Lipstick so red he'd have to be blind to miss it, and a long blond ponytail that nearly causes his fingers to slip off the strings altogether. They enter halfway through the fourth song, and even if Ruby hadn't wolf-whistled at the highest note in the bridge, he'd have had a difficult time making it through anyway.
Bloody Robin.
He isn't sure if Emma's wide smile is maddeningly smug or a legitimate beam of satisfaction, but whatever it is, it's blinding, and he can't look away. She isn't wearing that outrageous red dress from so long ago, the one of which she'd apparently been fond for snaring perps (his only context for her social attire, to be fair), though he doesn't think he should be thanking anyone when the alternative is a leather jacket and tight jeans that he can tell fit her far too well, even from this distance.
He wants to call her out – call all of them out, to be honest. But when the song ends, he knows he needs to take a generous swig of water and soldier on with his set. There's nothing to be gained from putting them in an awkward spotlight, even if he knows it'd coax the scowl out of Emma's lips, when they can just up and leave at any given moment.
They stay.
They manage to snipe one of the standing tables near the back, and he watches as Will brings them their drinks, a second round, a third. Every time he looks up, he feels his gaze being drawn towards their corner, like a moth to a flame – and every time, Emma's mouth seems to tilt upward the moment she snags his eye. He's not nervous, per se, but there's certainly something to be said about the rush that swells in his blood for playing here now, the one whose feeling he's almost forgotten. Like picking up the guitar for the first time. Like falling in love with the music.
(He shouldn't be even entertaining that thought about anything else.)
(But he swears she doesn't takes her eyes off of him, not once. So maybe he is.)
He'd once been proud of his ability to carry a crowd through a good couple of hours, except now his set list feels just a few songs too long. He knows he's in for a world of ribbing once he's finally free, but he also has his own teasing to do about her bringing all of her friends here, and the itch just under his skin to simply march right off the stage and make a beeline to their table is more than a little distracting, especially as he nears the end. The crowd grows larger and louder the later it gets. He's suddenly struck with the ridiculous notion that he might not even be able to find her once he's finished.
It turns out, though, that he doesn't have to worry about that even before he's made it halfway through the last song.
One moment, he feels distinctly as though he's exchanging a secret with her across the space of Liam's bar, one he tucks away in the spot under where the ring beneath his shirt touches his skin.
The next, he glances over, where all of her friends still stand – and she's gone.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
She almost wishes she really did have to use the restroom, like she'd muttered to Mary Margaret before she'd slipped away. But at least here, in the back hallway of The goddamn Jolly Roger – because of course Killian should play in the most notoriously niche bar in the city – she doesn't have to feel like she's hiding. Like she's a child, scared of the dark, of thunderstorms, of those shiny black social services cars all over again, instead of a perfectly functional adult with perfectly functional relationship problems.
Honestly, they aren't even supposed to be problems anymore. But she should have known Neal would fuck everything up, like he always used to do. If only he didn't have to do it in person, and now of all times.
She should be out there. She wants to be out there. Robin had told her Killian's show would end at midnight, and her phone had read five till the last time she checked it – right before she looked up, straight into the brown-eyed, laugh-lined face of the one person capable of breaking her resolve.
She hates it, hates him. And she hates herself even more for how she runs.
Well, she doesn't technically run, though for her skittering heart and how tight her lungs feel, she may as well have sprinted. No, she'd locked eyes with him across the room, registered his shock even through her own numb realization, and waited until he'd started moving. It was only when she'd lost sight of him trying to nudge his way through the crowd that she'd excused herself and started shoving past in the opposite direction, which means she's now trapped between the freedom of the back exit and the sound of applause that ripples around the corner, from the main room.
Her back pressed against the cool wall, she breathes into the enclosure of her hands, tilts her head down to rub her eyes.
This is absurd. Humiliating. Downright maddening.
He doesn't deserve a place in her life, not anymore – so why is it always so difficult to cut him away?
"Emma?"
She jumps.
It isn't him.
"Killian?"
Silhouetted in the dim bar light, it's difficult to make him out until he steps into the hallway. She isn't sure whether it's more embarrassing to attribute the leaden feel of her tongue to her current state of mind, or to the fact that he's dressed to the nines (maybe she's a little biased; their leather jackets do match) and doesn't even have the courtesy of looking worse up close.
"What are you doing back here?" He's slung his guitar around to his back so that it hangs upside-down, but it feels ridiculous that she should want it between them instead, like some sort of shield.
His unwelcome question slices an even worse realization into the fog of her thoughts. She grimaces. "I missed the end of your show."
"For all the trouble you went through to find me," he says, a hint of a sympathetic smile on his lips, "I can't imagine it wasn't for good reason." He glances somewhere behind her as he nears. "Unless the call of nature was just too compelling?"
"What?" She follows his gaze to the set of worn wooden doors set into the back of the hallway, but then only rolls her eyes, even though she'd used that same excuse. "No. What are you doing here?"
He taps the guitar behind him. "This one needs safekeeping before I can start to brave the pandemonium out there."
It's only barely an exaggeration, and if just to mask the misplaced pride that flickers through her, she makes a point of reminding him: "No screaming fangirls."
"Not yet."
"You were really good." It's an admission she would have otherwise made, but it feels cheap with her attempt at diversion when she says it now. "I think David has a new crush."
His handsome grin turns crookedly contagious. "Is that right?"
"When your posse gets here, he'll probably join them."
"And what about you?" he asks.
She snorts even as she feels her mouth twitch. "In your dreams."
"Perhaps," he says lightly, "of a very specific sort." He's stepped close enough that she can see the rouge that colors his the pale skin of his cheekbones, undoubtedly the mark of performance adrenaline. It makes him look almost boyish in his vibrancy, his eyes bright, so blue she knows she'll have trouble looking away.
"I don't want to know about you and your harem fantasies," she tells him with a sternness that's probably completely transparent.
"There's no harem," he assures her. "It's only—"
"Oh—shit!"
She grasps his shoulders, hauls him to the side between where she sinks into the wall, as if she might disappear into it, and the length of the hallway leading back into the bar.
Her mind shutters, and her thoughts skid to a painful halt but for the awareness of her heart, vaulted into a violent, uneven overdrive, the breath of her abandoned words snagged halfway up her throat like it's suddenly burst into shards.
Had he seen her?
"Swan?" Killian asks, bewildered. "What—"
She shushes him sharply, instinctively. He's tall enough that he might block her from view, and that guitar on his back is certainly helping, but—
"What are you—?" He makes to twist a glimpse over his shoulder, so, before she can think twice, she grabs him.
By the face.
His skin is smooth, warm beneath her touch.
"Don't move," she hisses under her breath.
He blinks at her for a good moment before he seems to get a handle on himself. "Swan," he whispers fiercely. "What in blazes is going on?"
The words burn as they leave her mouth: "Neal's here."
God, of all the fucking bullshit timing. She knows she's put Killian in an awkward position, but she's frozen, still afraid he'll turn around if she lets go.
Worse, she might risk a peek, too.
She sucks in a steadying breath, but it shudders in her lungs and tastes distinctly like clean sweat and salt and a spice she can't name. She can't think. She had her chance to escape, but now she's resorting to using a human shield and hoping Neal hadn't turned in time to spot her wrestle Killian in place. Hoping he won't walk down the hallway.
Hoping Killian can't hear the way the blood is pounding beneath her skin like a frantic, pitiful wreck.
She wouldn't doubt it if he could feel it, honestly. There's a scar on his cheek she never noticed before, just above the tip of her thumb, and the pads of her palms prickle with the scratch of his beard. She should let go.
She needs to let go.
It's only because he's so close, because she's watching him so closely that she can tell when something shifts behind his eyes. The change is nearly imperceptible, but even as his lips press together into a thin line, as if he's hiking up his chin, his gaze turns into something more subdued, a more fervent blue.
She doesn't have to ask to know that he understands.
"Do you trust me?" he asks, his voice low, reassuring.
She needs to let go.
She nods.
He takes that last step forward, backing her against the wall – it's nowhere near forceful, but she feels the breath drawn out of her lungs anyway, as if tugged by a string – and reaches into the space behind her head. The hair from her ponytail falls in waves around her shoulders as he pulls the elastic away.
Gathering her curls between his fingers, he presses his hands to her cheeks, his forehead to hers. Her own hands slip from his face. On reflex, her eyes slide shut and she forces a quick inhale, but he doesn't move further. He simply hovers there, still as a statue.
An involuntary shiver darts down her spine, zipping the heat of his touch down her neck, down, down, to where the small of her back presses against the wall.
"What are you doing?" she manages at last. She should be speaking quietly anyway, but right now, her voice sounds but small.
"Making an uncomfortable scene," he murmurs. His broad palms curve against her skin, gently dragging her hair along with them, and she realizes, belatedly, that he's trying to hide her face from view. Meanwhile, the only place her hands can fall naturally is on his shoulders, along the crook of his neck above his collar.
She swears she can feel his pulse fluttering beneath her fingers, too.
"The scene of the musician who left the stage to canoodle with a fan?" she asks. She'd think it a resourceful distraction – who likes looking at PDAs directly, after all? – if only a number of other ways to describe the situation didn't come to mind first. A bad idea, she curses faintly. The best idea he's ever had. "I thought you weren't interested in an adoring harem."
"I'm not," he says. There's a long pause, during which she takes the chance to swallow the lump in her throat. She's afraid to breathe – afraid if she does, she might involuntarily shift closer into the warmth between her cheek and his palm, and stay there. "Truthfully, love, there's only one person here whose opinion I care about."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Would it be too obvious if she wrapped her arms around his neck?
"Do you think he's gone?" She can feel the vibrations of his words, the sweet huff of warmth they make on her tongue. If she pulled him closer, she could feel them everywhere.
And, somehow – she's not surprised to realize how much she wants to.
"I don't care." It's barely a whisper against his skin, and then it takes but a tilt of her head upwards for her to lean in and kiss him, soft as the push it'd taken to fall.
The morning he'd woken up on her couch, she still remembers, he'd looked up at her like she was the sun: brilliant, breathtaking, as though his gravity had shifted very suddenly and thoroughly, for which she was the sole cause and culprit. He'd been hungover and completely disoriented, but she swears her mind has never been clearer right now, and still she knows – nothing but the soft yield of his lips, the rich taste of his muffled sound of surprise, the way he hesitates, stiffening, before his mouth begins to move with careful, deliberate purpose, a smooth slide, a rough bristle of scruff against her skin.
A sigh escapes her – an embarrassing noise of bliss – but it's lost somewhere between where she ends and he begins as she slips her tongue into his mouth, feels his quiet groan in response. Though she isn't sure when it'd happened, she realizes belatedly that she's well and fully backed into the wall from shoulder to hip, trapped against every hard line in his body, and she lets her head fall backward between the gentle grip of his hands, allowing him to deepening the kiss. It doesn't take very much coaxing for his lips to grow more insistent, a slow plunge out of the realm of her capacity for rational thought.
But even if she can't think, she does know one thing: this, whatever this is, feels like something sliding into place, a heavy bolt shifting with a perfect, satisfying click into a spot deep in her chest she'd almost forgotten existed. It feels right, and real, and so good she has to grasp the collar of his jacket tighter for fear that it might all disappear in a flash, before she can admit that she wants it to stay.
He breaks away for air much sooner than she thinks should be necessary, regardless of how urgently her lungs protest, as every other part of her body protests for something entirely different. Her eyes squeezed shut, she can still feel his warmth trickling gooseflesh across her skin, like tiny rivulets of static hauling her towards him still, and she refuses to let go even as he feels his breathing slow.
He doesn't move away either.
Without completely meaning to, her hands wander up his collar, around the back of his neck, to run through the short hair behind his ears. The way every one of her nerve endings seems to have come alight, the simmering glow brewing just under the surface of her skin – it feels a lot like the brimming ache of desire, and, in putting a name to it, she's ashamed to realize that it's not as wholly unfamiliar as she'd like to believe.
"I'm getting out of here," she says quietly. It takes him a moment longer to pull back, and she opens her eyes to watch him stare, his blue gaze dark, dazed, with the remnants of their kiss; he keeps blinking, as if trying to regain focus on her words. Her nose brushes against his. "What are you going to do?"
His exhale is a flutter on her lips. "Emma…" he mutters, hoarse, trailing – but she knows she's not imagining the way his fingers twitch tighter around her face.
Still, she hesitates. "Do you have to stay?"
"No, but—" he begins, before he seems to cut himself off. "Swan, your friends—"
"I'll text Mary Margaret," she assures him, when it seems like he has no intention of speaking in full sentences. "She'll know." She'd left them in the trajectory of the reason she's back here in the first place, after all, and that's probably more of an explanation than they really need – even if it isn't the full truth.
(For both David's sanity and her own, she'll spare them those details.)
But Killian remains silent, his eyes darting between hers with something she can't place. When they slowly draw down her face, back to her mouth, she feels her skin prickle down the curve of her back, and she licks her lips out of instinct.
She curls her fingers into his hair, though it isn't enough for what she forces herself to say.
"Either way, I'm calling a cab." His mouth twitches, and she wants to lean back in, coax it out of a frown. He wants it, too – that kiss aside, she knows he does – which is the only reason why she doesn't dread his response, for all her quivering heart seems to disagree. "I'm not going back out there."
She can't find a hint of shame in admitting it, either. The lopsided rhythm that floods her pulse is born, instead, from quiet anticipation, one that leaps at the sight of his jaw clenched as tight as the look in his eyes. She doesn't know what to make of it, except for the hot breath that he exhales, torn between desperation and frustration – but whatever he's thinking, there's nothing she can do but wait, wanting, trying to contain the thought of how that muscle in his cheek might feel under her fingers in a very different set of circumstances, with a very different kind of tension running through every inch of his body.
He watches her for a long, agonizing moment, and then, with barely a second of warning, he's surging forward across that tiny space between them, crushing his lips to hers in a rough kiss that sears.
She might be chagrined at how quickly her nerves dissolve into relieved gratification, but, as it is, she has better things on her mind – things that only hitch higher into the realm of pure distraction when he pulls away and she makes out the look on his face, darker than ever.
"We both know your apartment is within walking distance from here," he says, quietly. "It'd be remiss of me not to make sure you made it back safe." The rough edge to his tone makes it sound like it might be the worst sin in the world, but she doesn't care. She smiles, and she doesn't even bother checking if anyone's looking as she takes his hand and leads him backward, towards the door at the rear of The Jolly Roger.
Towards home.
Towards something more.
