AN: Here we are, another piece to this one. Happy New Year!
I hope you enjoy! If you do, please do let me know.
111
Even though they still had a great deal of scavenging to do, they had found some satisfactory knives, among other supplies, while slipping among a few accessible quarters. At first, Jean-Luc had felt that what they were doing was wrong, taking the belongings of others, but he'd quickly reminded himself that these were his crew members, and they were safe. They would have gladly given anything to Jean-Luc and Beverly to help them survive, if they could do that.
The knives had become near-extensions of Beverly and Jean-Luc, along with some of their other found and, at times, altered blades.
Today, in the bright sunlight, they sat on the grass at the edge of the water and both worked at placing points on the ends of sticks they had found—each of them choosing a piece of wood that they felt they could yield in this endeavor. If they were successful, Jean-Luc knew, they would adapt. They would learn what they needed to know about the selection of their tools, and they would make better choices. These were temporary, rudimentary tools that would be discarded, later, in favor of better items. Today was about learning.
More than that, though, and Beverly had stressed this repeatedly on the walk from their little house to the lake, today was a day for rest and relaxation.
"Whether or not this will work is dependent upon the strength we have to thrust the stick downwards, the thickness of the skin or scales of those fish, which we know nothing about, and the reflexes of both us and the fish," Beverly said.
She wasn't educating Jean-Luc. She wasn't assuming that he didn't know what she was saying. She was simply entertaining herself—and him, by extension—while they worked. She'd been discussing various thoughts about their tasks all morning, and he found that he couldn't help but smile as he sat listening to her.
She looked at him and smiled when her words trailed off, and his heart soared in his chest.
He had to very purposefully stop the words "I love you" from rolling off his tongue, and he was surprised by their presence there—a presence that was becoming more and more commonplace as the days wore on—and the fact that they would bubble up so readily over something as simple as Beverly, with a smattering of freckles spilling across her nose and cheeks like he hadn't seen before they began their life there, smiling at him over two sharpened sticks and the prospect of fish for lunch.
"I am quite sure that there will be a significant learning curve involved in this practice," Jean-Luc offered.
Beverly laughed quietly and nodded in agreement. She sat, rolling the soft fabric of the pants she'd chosen up until they were well over her knee. The effect was almost comical. Then, she picked up her stick and started the rest of the way down the bank to the water, holding her stick for balance.
"Wish me luck," she said, stepping into the water.
The temperature variations during the day and night on the planet were somewhat dramatic. The water, which they used for everything from drinking to bathing, was always cold. Jean-Luc saw Beverly's face register the iciness of the water as soon as her feet were submerged. Still, she was determined, and she continued to wade out until the water very nearly touched the bottom of her carefully rolled pants.
Thriving.
Beverly was thriving.
This life suited her in a way that Jean-Luc might never have imagined. She seemed so well-suited to everything. Each day, she seemed to simply become more comfortable with the life that they were facing. More than that, really, she seemed to be shedding so much of her old life. He felt he could practically watch her shaking it off, like shaking off water.
She was lighter. She was happier. And to be around her had always been somewhat magical to Jean-Luc, but now he felt as though the very air around her was somehow easier to breathe.
And the hunger that he felt for her—a hunger he had so long been determined to bury down deep—grew every day and threatened to consume him.
He shouldn't have felt what he did, sitting on the bank, his own sharpened stick in his hand with the point barely finished and probably not entirely suitable for the task he pretended to be anxious to undertake. Yet he did feel it. He felt it coursing through his veins. He watched her, focused on her work, yet still smiling at her own failure each time she stabbed downward and came up with nothing.
He allowed himself to see her, and he realized that he'd been actively working for years not to see her—not to allow himself to truly look at her, for fear that he'd never be able to look away.
She was beautiful. Everything about her seemed perfect to him. Any flaw that he could find seemed only to enhance her beauty, somehow.
And what stirred inside of him felt primal.
One man. One woman. A world that, as far as they knew to date, was uninhabited by other humanoid beings. What he was thinking of was perfectly natural. It was instinctive.
It felt necessary, and the desire felt all-consuming, and it was at least a little frightening to Jean-Luc.
He had loved Beverly for a long time, but he had denied himself.
He was perfectly capable of fulfilling the carnal desires that came to his mind. He was perfectly capable of meeting his own needs and, hopefully, of meeting hers. He was not, however, the kind of man that really knew what came after, or felt any confidence in himself to be able handle what came after.
And, for that reason, he denied himself entirely. He kept his feelings secret. He didn't want to hold her, only to find that the holding was all that he was truly good for—and to lose the friendship that they had? That would be unbearable, even more so now.
Yet the truth of the matter was that he was finding it harder and harder to come up with tasks that took him away from Beverly long enough to try to find some relief for himself—relief that he embarrassingly found thinking of her in a way that he knew was truly disrespectful.
"Jean-Luc! Come on!" Beverly called, laughing at the fact that she'd come up with nothing, yet again, despite her efforts.
Jean-Luc rolled his own pants up, though they wouldn't go quite as high as Beverly's, and made his way down to the water. He stepped into it, and he took a moment to catch his breath and adjust to the cold. She was a few feet away from him and, if she was cold, he couldn't tell. He waded out to her.
"I assume these fish are incapable of being frightened," he teased.
The fish swam quickly around their legs. There were practical swarms of them. Beverly's laughter, and even her attempts to stab the fish, didn't seem to scare them off. They were fast, though, and each time Jean-Luc watched her drive her stick downward into the lake's soft bottom, sure that she would come up with her prize, the fish she'd targeted managed to dart out of the way in an almost unbelievable feat of agility and speed.
"If we relied on your abilities to feed us," Jean-Luc teased, "I believe that we would starve, unless we could find something appropriate to eat that lacks the ability to dart away to safety at the last available moment…"
He was teasing, and he'd made it clear that he was teasing. He hadn't expected, though, that retaliation would come in a wave of ice-cold water being splashed over his torso and face.
He lost his breath for a second in shock. It was Beverly's laughter that drew him out of the momentary stupor.
Jean-Luc looked at her, and he couldn't help but laugh. She was wide-eyed—not just wide-eyed, but wild-eyed. She laughed at him with the kind of genuine smile that must have made her face ache. Her body was poised, stick now hovering above the water as nothing more than something she refused to let go of after having obtained such a prize, and she was clearly waiting for something.
For a moment, Jean-Luc felt like a boy. He recognized the stance and the silent challenge from his tussling with Robert.
For a second, he hesitated—but only for a second.
Jean-Luc lunged at Beverly as much as the depth of the water would allow any kind of fast movement. For her part, she let out a sound that he couldn't register as sincerely negative, and pretended to try to run from him, impeded by the water and the soft lake bottom beneath her bare feet. His second attempt to lunge at her took him off his feet, thanks to the mucky bottom, and he took her down with him, both of them plunging into the icy water until the muck stopped her forward momentum and she stopped his—neither badly damaged thanks to the water's properties.
Just as quickly as they went down, both of them came up gasping for the air that the shock of being wrapped in the cold had taken from their lungs.
Beverly grabbed for Jean-Luc and he wrapped his arms around her to support her as both of them regained their footing on the slippery ground beneath them.
Some part of Jean-Luc was aware that he must be freezing. Another part of him, though, and perhaps the part that was speaking the loudest at the moment, was only aware of Beverly. Her eyes were on his. Her hands felt warm, in contrast to everything else, as her fingers clung to his shoulders. He felt her hips beneath his hands, and he flexed his fingers without really planning to do so, examining the contrast of her wet clothes and the skin beneath where two of his fingers had slipped between the clinging shirt and the soaked pants.
He could hardly breathe, and it had little do with the shock of the cold water.
He let his eyes trail to her lips. They were relaxed and slightly parted as she studied him. They had a slight purple hue to them, indicating, as surely as her chill-dimpled skin, that her body temperature hadn't returned to normal from the icy plunge.
And Jean-Luc felt himself thankfully drawn upward and out of his thoughts.
"You're freezing," he said, still feeling like he couldn't even be aware of his own cold. The earlier joviality was gone for the moment—replaced by something else, entirely. "Come—let's get you to the blanket. The sun will warm you."
Jean-Luc wrapped his arms around her as though she were incapable of walking herself out of the water. He felt that Beverly was truly incapable of very little. Her muscles were probably no tighter than his own in response to the cold—perhaps even less so, since she was much more diligent about stretching and exercise than he was, at times. Still, he felt the need to hold onto her and to try to protect her from something that even he would have been at a loss to identify.
In response to his assertion that she was freezing, her teeth chattered, and Jean-Luc held her a little closer, clenching his own teeth against the same involuntary action.
"You're freezing, too," she managed, once Jean-Luc had practically lowered her down to the spread-out blanket on the bank. She pulled him after her, her arms wrapped around his waist. He wondered, for a moment, if she felt too cold, and if her muscles were too contracted, for her fingers to release him more quickly.
He fell practically on top of her again, much like he had in the water.
She moved her leg, her foot brushing against his leg, and Jean-Luc closed his eyes a second before opening them again. The slight bit of friction between them was simultaneously delicious and nearly unbearable. She hadn't released him, but her hold on him was much looser than it had been. He should pull away and put distance between them, but all he wanted was to be closer to her—as close as their bodies would allow them to be.
He wanted to be inside her, and he struggled against the thought, his imagination running wild for the moment.
"I don't feel cold," he said. The quality of his own voice surprised his ears. His chest tightened with a sort of fear over his own words.
And yet…he couldn't stop himself.
"I do," Beverly said. A hint of a smile turned the corners of her lips slightly. "Stay close to me. We'll warm each other up."
Jean-Luc swallowed against everything bubbling inside him. He was warm. Everything about him felt warmed—heated by the fever that had been boiling his blood for days. Even the parts of him that normally would have been at least momentarily disabled by the cold felt fully ready to rally to the cause.
Part of him wanted to move away from her, knowing how close he was. Too close. The other part was desperate.
It took him a moment to realize that the sound he heard—something like a low, guttural growl of desperation—had come from his own throat.
"Jean-Luc…" Beverly said, her voice soft—too soft. It ran through him like electricity. It was pleasant, and painful, and instinctively he moved his hips, grinding down into her and forcing her body against the blanket.
The next sound that was emitted came from her throat, not his, but whatever it was inside of him that had made the first sound responded in kind—as if they had discovered a new language with which to communicate.
Her fingertips dug into his back. He felt the bite of her short nails as her hands found their way under the wet, clinging fabric of his shirt. She leaned her face up, toward him, and he met her. The kiss wasn't anything like he might have imagined it would be. There was no delicate brushing of their lips. There was no tentative first kiss between himself and the woman that he had loved for all these years.
He'd denied himself the taste of her for so long, and the hunger felt all consuming.
He might have apologized for the roughness of the kiss, but then she bit his lip in response, rolling her body as far upward as his would allow, somewhat instinctively pinning her against the blanket with his hips, and he tasted the metallic tang of iron.
"Beverly…I want to be closer to you," he said. He moved his face against her neck. It was still somewhat cold. Water still hung there, running down her skin in still icy drops, thanks to her hair. "I want to be inside you," he confessed against her cool skin, almost feeling like he could cry for the relief of the admission and also for the sense of horror that he felt at having admitted it, now left to fear how she might react.
He brought his eyes back to meet hers. She held his eyes.
"Come on," she breathed out.