A/N: Dedicated to Pepper9603. Thank you for being such a great friend. I'm so glad to have found you here 3
That Counts
"Are you kidding? You're the most beautiful woman in most rooms-"
Monica didn't let Chandler finish his statement. She rushed, clumsiness personified, to throw her arms around his shoulders.
She had always been partial toward that one second before she was about to kiss a guy for the first time — tentative, faces tilted, breath on skin, too close to see anything, only to feel an overwhelming desire for him. And also because it was the moment during which she could reasonably back out of the kiss if she so wished.
She didn't give that second to herself this time. To give in to momentary temptation with a decade-long best friend was questionable judgment to say the least, she knew that even in her less-than-drunk-but-more-than-tipsy state. Thinking would only cause her to falter, which was not an option at this point. So she hurled herself at him and crashed her lips against his, not pausing to wonder for even a split-second if she was just hurtling toward yet another bad decision in a long line of the like.
He stumbled from the force of collision but wrapped his arms around her almost instantly. And he returned the kiss like it was an instinct to kiss her back.
Zing!
It shot through her spine, a flash. She decided then that if this was a bad decision, the right ones were simply overrated.
Perhaps Joey interrupting them was a sign that they should stop? She contemplated this briefly as she pushed herself out from underneath the covers after Joey left. The mood had shifted from the almost playful tone of stripping off their clothes at the count to three, to something more serious, more pensive. Chandler's eyes were wide and alert, his ears tinged red, and he was staring at her face like he was at the crossroads of the biggest decision of his life. And if that was indeed what was going through his mind, he was definitely onto something. He raised an eyebrow after ages in silent question. You still want to do this?
This was the moment, she knew innately, that would divide their lives into two distinct tranches.
Heart thudding heavily in her chest, she laid back on his pillow, pulling him to her with her hand on his nape. Her barrette dug into her skull, just shy of painful. He allowed himself to be drawn but kept his eyes on hers, seemingly seeking something more from her, a verbal reaffirmation. "Chandler," she said softly, and that was pretty much all he needed. He took a leaf out of her book and crashed their lips together once more.
~.~
"Oh, my God," he gasped against her neck.
The dopamine flooding her body made her toes curl. She plunged her fingers into his wavy brown hair and clutched at him tightly, agreeing. "Oh, my God." She'd missed this. She'd missed sex and the emotional intimacy that sex offered. In a strange way, they both had always been emotionally intimate with each other. Was that the reason why the abrupt addition of its physical counterpart didn't feel weird?
One thing that she felt sure about was that it was supposed to be Chandler in the room tonight. She had entered the room looking for Joey, but just the thought of it — the thought of kissing and touching and doing this with Joey — was now nauseating.
Chandler would have always been the one on the other side of the door, no other man. Fate had intended it that way, she knew.
Later that night, lingering at the edge of the fourth time and the beginning of the fifth, he tugged her impossibly close to him as she lay on the pillow beside his. She lurched toward him and so did her heart. He leaned his forehead against her temple, closed his eyes, and sighed a deep, contended sigh.
Where have you been all my life? she wanted to ask him. As ridiculous as that question might sound, she felt that this Chandler — the one who had made her feel things tonight that frankly felt out of earthly realms — would completely understand what she meant.
But she didn't ask him. She just closed her own eyes and prayed futilely that the sun would never rise. That this night would never end.
The night did end, though. And the morning brought with it the embarrassment and awkwardness that she knew it would. He stared at the wall as she got dressed in the previous night's clothes. When she finished pulling the zipper up on her dress, she looked at him and smiled as she found him still resolutely focused on the wall. Leaning across the bed and kissing his cheek would be so easy, but she was still grappling with the enormity of what they'd done, so she decided against it.
"Chandler," she called him instead. He hesitantly turned to look. "Last night was..." she trailed off and swallowed the rest of the statement. Because last night had been a lot of things, a whole lot of things that she doubted she'd ever be able to put into words to him.
It was mind-blowing. Life-altering. We've chanced upon something rare and precious here. Is it fair that it should last only one night?
I don't think I can go back to how things were before last night.
Do you feel the same way, too?
He waited for her to finish with a carefully blank face, but still, she could see the façade cracking as his eyes seemed to turn liquid and dark in the bright morning light of the room.
He wanted her to continue.
She hoped that a sliver of the previous night's bravado would seep into her, but liquid courage no longer coursed through her body, and nothing came other than a rush of blood that flamed her cheeks. "I'll see you at the wedding," she finished, hushed, and left out the door before she could mortify herself further.
Back in her room, she could see traces of their night together everywhere on her. The mussed hair, the mascara smudges on her eyelids, the wrinkles on her practically crumpled dress... They all looked like they wanted to sing a tale of the night before.
She leaned in closer to look into the mirror when she noticed something else — tiny red bumps along her kiss-swollen lips from his stubble— and she flushed with a sense of elation on realizing that he had somehow marked her as his, even if only for a night.
~.~
The wedding had gone downhill so quickly that any other time, she'd have been desperate to wrap her head around how. Now, she couldn't care less about the debacle that her brother's life had suddenly turned into. Not when her singular focus stayed on the goal of being back in bed with Chandler Bing. To her utter relief and delight, his mind seemed to be right there with hers, too.
But after being thwarted at every turn by both fate and their friends, she could feel a pit of despair in her stomach as the landing gear of their flight back home touched down and smoothly slid across the tarmac.
Not in New York. When he'd said that the previous day, 'tomorrow' had felt like an eternity away. The promise that she'd agreed to so effortlessly yesterday haunted her now.
She glanced at him across the aisle and over Joey's head and could only see his profile. His features held the same look of forlornness that she imagined her own did. Sensing her eyes on him, he turned to look at her and held her gaze as the other passengers scrambled to get off of the aircraft. Then he gave her a weak smile and rose to help her with her bags.
"It's great to be back in New York, huh, guys?" Joey gave them both hard, ecstatic thumps on their backs, grinning.
She just nodded dejectedly as Chandler muttered, "Yep, great to be back."
The ride home was quiet as she'd expected, but what she hadn't expected was to be left alone with Chandler within mere seconds of being back home. Utterly unprepared but determined not to be a coward again, she told him the rest of what she'd begun to say in his hotel room the previous day. At least partly. "That night meant a lot to me," she said earnestly, her hands instinctively rising to her chest. "I guess I'm trying to say thanks."
The smile that he gave her in return was... She'd never seen him smile like that at anyone before. It made her heart erratically flutter. And she realized how deeply in crush she'd fallen with him in just two days, and how terrifyingly easy it had been.
God help her.
He continued to smile as he said all the right things, the most endearing things, which only served to intensify her already ginormous crush on him. When he hugged her finally, her mind flashed a memory of being entwined with him like this on his bed in London — naked and with an insatiable desire for each other. She felt an intense pang of yearning for something more; more than friendship, more than what they had agreed to the day before. But before she could process the thought, the hug ended, a high-five was given, and he was out the door along with a piece of her heart that he had unwittingly stolen.
She contemplated rushing after him and did in fact start to do so, but her last shred of rationality kicked in, and she stopped herself just before she opened the door. The door still clicked open, though.
If she'd counted the seconds between his exit and return, it would have been exactly ten. He didn't look composed like he had been just moments before. He looked serious, agitated.
The living room clock ticked twice somewhere behind her. It didn't take long for him to speak, but as she waited for him to say the words that she desperately wanted him to say, even those scant seconds seemed to draw on and on.
"I'm still on London time, does that count?" he asked, arms spread wide in the quintessential pose of a man trying to seize his one last shot, longing and hopeful, all at once.
And she gave him the only answer that could possibly exist. "Oh, that counts."
His 'Oh, good' would be the last words spoken between them for the next several minutes. He strode forward purposefully and pressed her lips hard against hers, stroking her cheek tenderly with his knuckles.
It was dizzying to experience such a sudden burst of profound happiness that it felt like she could sense the world tilting on its axis. On her toes and with her arms around him, fingers tangling in his hair to pull him closer so that there would be no space between them — it wasn't enough. This wasn't enough.
She was wound taut like a bowstring that was threatening to snap from the incredible tension of the past couple of days. She could feel it in him, too; in the way he tightly clutched and twisted the material of her dress over her waist. In the way that he was kissing her right now — rough — teeth nipping, tongue soothing, kissing her, kissing her, kissing her until she felt drunk, until breathing was but a long-forgotten instinct.
It still wasn't enough.
He was awfully overclothed for her liking, so she set about pushing the jacket off of his shoulders and slid a palm up under the hem of his shirt and undershirt, feeling his abdomen twitch beneath her touch. That seemed to be all the permission he needed to return the favor in kind.
The clothes were soon reduced to floor décor. The couch was cool against her back, but he provided all the warmth. At one point, he frantically dove to the floor in search of his just-discarded pants in order to retrieve the condom that he'd been carrying around in vain since the morning of the wedding. If she hadn't been so turned on and filled to the brim with exactly the same desperation as him, she'd have laughed at how frenzied he looked.
Finally, finally, when he was right where she wanted him, a deep sigh of relief escaped her lips. He drew back from her neck, stilling, and gazed into her eyes, into her soul, and she wondered once again why it had taken them so long to get here.
They lay pressed together on the couch afterward, completely spent and finally satiated, their Not-in-New-York rule having been annihilated into oblivion. "Why haven't we been doing this all along?" she asked him rhetorically.
"I've no idea, Mon." He ran a finger down her arm and watched in fascination as the light hairs there stood to attention. "Because we were two stupid, stupid people." She could only nod and agree with his conclusion.
He squeezed her once before he reached back to the floor to retrieve his pale blue shirt that smelled like cinnamon Altoids for some reason, and draped it haphazardly over them both. The sun was setting. Twilight poured in, drenching everything in yellow and gold, making the arm that he wrapped across her torso gleam. He drew her in, all urgency now gone, for a languid, decadent kiss.
How could a kiss be so all-encompassing, so... ruinous? There was no mental bandwidth to ponder over it, so she allowed herself to just feel.
Rachel would be back tomorrow. Ross would be back home soon too, along with his in-all-likelihood-destroyed marriage. Work would start again in a couple of days. Phoebe's babies were due any day now. The next few days ahead would probably be the most hectic ones for her in recent times.
And yet, when the kiss ended, she nuzzled into his chest and fell asleep, not remembering the last time she'd felt this peaceful. Content.
~.~.~
A/N: Sorry for the incredibly long (unplanned) hiatus. Life, y'know? Anywho. This piece was stuck in my head, and I wanted to write it before I lost my inspiration. I realize the fandom looks pretty slow at this point, but I'd appreciate any feedback on this :)
Regularly scheduled programming should hopefully resume soon on WIPs. Thanks to every single person who'd reviewed my other works while I was gone. Thank you also for your patience, and I hope you've all been wonderful!