a/n - Thanks again to everyone who's left comments on this little story, and for adding it to your follows and favorites. Unfortunately, due to the holidays this will be the last update before the New Year. I plan to wrap up the story in the first week or two of January.
In the meantime, come find me on tumblr, where I blog about… well, all sorts of random things. Info in my profile.
Peeta wakes up just before dawn. Katniss is still asleep, her small, strong body wrapped tightly around his like a protective cocoon.
Peeta cranes his neck a little and looks down at her face.
He realizes that he loves watching her sleep. She looks so relaxed right now. So peaceful. Her lips are slightly parted and her unbraided hair tickles his arm.
He gingerly touches his own face. His eyes feel puffy and warm from crying.
A rush of mortification hits him when he thinks about what happened last night. How he broke down and sobbed – like a complete tool, his brother would say – in her arms.
Katniss moves a little in her sleep, settling even closer to him. As she shifts, her leg, already entwined with one of his, unconsciously rubs against his cock.
She leaves her leg there and presses into him.
Peeta gasps, and all remorse he feels about last night evaporates.
All he can think about now is that he needs to get out of this bed. And fast. His cock – already half-hard to begin with (because he just woke up with a girl wrapped around him and he's seventeen) – is growing noticeably harder by the second.
But he doesn't know how to get out of bed without waking Katniss. And, more importantly, without alerting her to the fact that she's pressed up against his dick.
Peeta quickly decides that he'd rather die than have Katniss find out she's pressed up against his dick.
As he worries, Katniss sighs into his neck and tightens her hold on him. The feel of her warm breath on his sensitive skin is otherworldly. He shudders involuntarily. And his cock twitches, hard, against both the fabric of his sweatpants and her thigh.
Oh, fuck.
Peeta tries to displace Katniss from his body as gently as he can.
"Wait… what?" Katniss asks, sleepily, waking up.
Peeta's eyes go wide with terror. But a moment later she rolls over onto her side and away from him.
Peeta throws himself out of bed and sprints for the safety of the motel bathroom.
Once there he closes the door quietly behind him. He looks down at his crotch. The front of his sweatpants sticks out from his body cartoonishly.
He closes his eyes and shakes his head.
With a quiet sigh, he braces himself against the sink with one hand and reaches into the waistband of his sweatpants with the other.
He grasps himself firmly. He groans.
He tries not to think about how good it felt to have Katniss' leg pressed up against him like that.
They set out shortly after 8 a.m.
They don't like Nevada much and quickly agree that their best course of action is to just get through the rest of it as quickly as possible. Given the speed of the other cars they see on the road, Peeta wonders if perhaps their fellow travelers have a similar idea.
They decide to stop for lunch at a Denny's once they're only fifty miles from the Utah border.
And it's there, over burgers and fries, that Katniss abruptly insists that they need to check their voicemails and text messages sometime today.
Peeta almost chokes on his hamburger.
"Do we… really have to?" he asks her once he's recovered. His voice comes out whinier than he'd intended.
Katniss looks at him sternly. Which surprises him a little, given how gentle she was with him last night. She waves her fork at him. "Yes, Peeta. Of course we do." She turns back to her milkshake, wordlessly telling him that this conversation is over.
Peeta spends the rest of the meal swirling one of his french fries around in a pool of ketchup. He isn't hungry anymore.
They agree to do it separately.
Peeta waits until they've stopped the truck at the edge of the salt flats in western Utah.
Peeta doesn't want to stop here. The bright, white wasteland is so bizarre, so surreal, that he isn't quite certain they're still on planet Earth. The salt that stretches for miles in all directions permeates the air and irritates his eyes, his nose, his everything.
It freaks him out, this place.
But Katniss begs him to stop the truck so she can have a look, and so he does.
Peeta watches her as she gracefully walks across the ancient sea. She holds her arms aloft as she walks, as if she's trying to balance carefully on a log that's been suspended over a rushing river.
He looks down at the phone in his hand and turns it on.
He does the texts first.
There are eleven of them. Eight are from his mother. The first few demand to know where he is. Most of the rest are descriptions of what she'll do to him if he doesn't come home immediately.
Her last one, sent this morning, simply asks him to contact her.
There's a text from Katniss from about fifteen minutes ago: You can do this, Peeta, I know you can.
He smiles and rolls his eyes.
There's one from his friend, Cato, the only person to whom he'd confided his plans, wishing him luck. And then one from his brother Rye, sent last night, telling him to stop being an asshole and just call their mother already.
Peeta listens to the voicemails next. Two hang ups from his mom. One irate message from his boss at the Starbucks on Solano Avenue, asking him where the hell he is.
He thinks about what he should do with all these messages.
He told Katniss he'd check them. But he never promised her he'd respond to them.
In fact, the thought of responding to any of them makes him want to throw up. So he deletes them all.
After, he walks out to join Katniss in the salt.
They decide to leave the salt flats after another fifteen minutes of exploration, their eyes stinging.
As Peeta drives, out of the corner of his eye he sees Katniss delicately swipe the tip of her tongue across her forearm.
His body's reaction is explosive and unexpected. He needs to adjust the front of his pants, right now. But he can't do it here. Not in front of her, and not while he's driving.
He squirms in his seat.
"I can still taste the salt, Peeta," she tells him, sounding awed, licking her arm again. "That place was really weird, wasn't it."
Peeta likes eastern Utah a lot better than the salt flats.
It's beautiful here. It reminds him of the Sierras, in a way, all mountains and valleys and streams. But it's much greener than the Sierras.
Or perhaps it just seems greener to him after a day spent driving across the desert wastelands of Nevada and western Utah.
They stop and stretch their legs at a scenic lookout near Park City. Katniss leans over the railing, the mountains behind her creating a stunning backdrop.
Peeta wishes, suddenly, that he'd thought to bring some of his drawing stuff with him on this trip.
He stands behind Katniss for a long time as she looks out into the distance, seemingly lost in thought, her long braid draped over one shoulder. He tries to commit her features, the scene, all of it, to memory.
The next time he's in the same room as a decent pencil and some paper, he wants to be prepared.
Katniss pulls out the road map the next time they stop for gas.
She tells Peeta they're almost to Wyoming. She asks if he wants to stop for the night here, near Park City, or keep driving.
Peeta shrugs. "Doesn't matter to me," he tells her. And it doesn't.
Katniss nods.
"Well, if we keep going, we can stay on the air base in Cheyenne," she tells him. "It's cheap, and the place we'd be staying will probably be pretty nice for what we're spending. One perk to technically being a military brat, I suppose." She rolls her eyes, the way she does whenever she mentions her father.
As beautiful as this area is, Peeta is intrigued at the idea of spending the night on a military installation. Other than Alameda, which hardly counts, he's never been on one before.
"How far is it to Cheyenne?" he asks.
Katniss digs out her phone to check. She's quiet for a moment as she looks at the directions. "Um. It's pretty far away," she tells him. "It looks like… six hours away, probably."
The sun is beginning to set, and if they drive all the way to Cheyenne tonight Peeta knows they'll be getting to the military base in the middle of the night.
But he tells her he thinks they should press on all the same. Says that aside from this little area, he's been kind of underwhelmed by everything they've seen since Tahoe.
"So let's, like, maybe just have today be one long driving day," he proposes. "And then maybe, tomorrow, we can set out for Colorado? See Denver, or the Rockies or something."
Katniss nods. "Sounds good to me."
She puts her phone back in her pocket and gets in the truck.
It's late, and Katniss is hungry.
As they pull through the McDonald's drive-thru, Peeta decides to ask her.
"Did you check your messages, Katniss?"
"Yeah. Just my mom," she says. But she doesn't elaborate further. "Did you check to?"
He nods. "My mom, too," is all he says.
He doesn't want to elaborate further, either.
He refuses to cry in front of Katniss. Ever again.
And Katniss doesn't pry. She only whispers, "I'm so proud of you, Peeta." She reaches over and puts her hand on his thigh. She gives it a squeeze.
She leaves her hand there.
Peeta, summoning all of his courage, and with his heartbeat thudding in his ears, covers her hand with his own. Terrified, even as he does it, that this gesture will freak her out, somehow. That she'll pull her hand away.
But she doesn't pull her hand away.
She flips her hand over on his leg and grasps his hand in her own.
They drive on in silence for a long time after that.
Peeta doesn't remember exactly what he used to think about when he'd try and imagine what his first kiss would be like.
What he does know is that he never, in his wildest dreams, imagined that Katniss would initiate it in the middle of a bed, on a military base, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
One minute, Peeta is getting ready for bed in the bathroom. Splashing cold water on his face with shaking hands and trying to calm himself down. Telling himself that the way she was looking at him in the truck, at the gas station an hour ago, and just now, in the bedroom, meant nothing.
That she's just his friend. That he's just her friend.
And the next minute, Katniss is closing the distance between them in the bed and kissing him.
At the first gentle press of her lips to his, he pulls back in surprise before he can stop himself.
"Katniss? What –" he stammers, thunderstruck. The synapses in his brain are misfiring. He is reeling.
But she cuts him off before he can finish his question with another kiss. A more forceful one this time.
"I just… want to kiss you," she murmurs after she pulls away a moment later. She shrugs as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
Peeta wouldn't be more shocked if she had just sprouted wings and started flying around the room.
"You… you do?" he asks her, incredulously.
She pushes Peeta onto his back and climbs on top of him by way of response.
His eyes go wide.
"Katniss," he whimpers, knowing, even if he can't quite remember what he used to dream about, that in this moment he wants nothing more than to kiss her, too.
Katniss insists they leave their clothes on. Even still, Peeta isn't really sure what to do. Where to touch her, or how. But Katniss guides his hands, his mouth, and his fingertips, and soon enough she's whimpering, too, as he trails open-mouthed kisses down her neck and twines his tongue with hers.
Later, as he drifts off to sleep, her head on his chest and her arms wrapped around him, Peeta can't help but wonder if any of this is real.