A Dark Place That Knows Things

The flat was settled into the kind of cold that lived in the stone of the walls and didn't come out for the radiators no matter how long they ran. The tip of your nose was cold, your hands felt cold, but they’d felt that way since you'd come in from the street two hours ago, and the warmth of your Captain’s arm under your fingers was the warmest thing you'd touched all night.

Price was sitting on the edge of the kitchen table with his shirt off and the medical kit open beside him. He'd peeled the shirt off without comment when you'd told him to, dropped it onto one of the chairs, and now he sat there in nothing but his tactical trousers with his good arm braced behind him on the wood.

The kitchen light was a single yellowing bulb above the table and it caught the thick slope of his shoulders, down into the dark hairs on his chest, the old scars that ran in pale pink jagged lines across his ribs and left shoulder. There was a fresh bruise the size of your fist coming up below his left collarbone where something must have caught him through the vest.

And sure, you'd seen him without his shirt before in the gym, the locker room corridor, the time he'd come in after a run and you'd been at the coffee maker.

You looked then, you’re looking now.

The difference was now you had a reason to be.

The cut on his forearm was longer than he'd lead on at extraction – a six inch clean split where a piece of debris sliced him open on the way out – and you’d looked at it under the kitchen light and said ‘table, sit, now,’ and he'd sat without protest which, from Price, was practically a ‘thank you’.

You’d settled your hip against the outside of his knee and worked in silence.

He didn’t flinch when you flushed it out with the antiseptic. You watched the muscle in his jaw work once – a small involuntary movement of it as the alcohol bit into the wound – but his arm under your hand didn't so much as twitch. He held it perfectly still for you.

You were on the second pass with the gauze, blotting the area dry so that the butterfly zips would hold, when you noticed his arm was still quite warm under your touch, and how you could feel that same heat radiating from his chest. It was a heat you were familiar with, you were still feeling the same kind now, the kind that had to do with being shot at just a few hours before. It was still in your hands as you worked. You could feel it on him; the small imperceptible vibration of a body that had spent the entire day dumping chemicals into its own bloodstream to keep you moving.

His flesh beneath the pads of your fingertips felt electric, there was this specific current, a buzz that could only be recognized if you understood it.

You reached for the first butterfly and peeled it off the backing. He turned his arm half a degree to give you the angle and his knuckle brushed the inside of your wrist, and you felt it all the way up to your collarbone. It went through you like a livewire.

You took a steadying breath and set the butterfly, smoothed it, pressed the edges once to make sure it stuck.

You glanced up without meaning to and found him already looking at you and locked on to him unintentionally.

He didn't drop his eyes when you caught him at it. He just held your gaze for one long second and then went back to looking at his arm. His throat moved, you watched the swallow travel down the cord of muscle running from his jaw to his collar, and you had to remind yourself to inhale.

You picked up the second butterfly and applied it, then straight on to the third. You kept your eyes on the work because if you looked up again you weren't sure you'd be able to look back down. Your fingers were doing fine, you’d done this kind of thing a hundred times. The trouble was everything around the you – the heat coming off his skin, the way his chest was moving in quicker and deeper breaths than a man at rest ought to be taking, the way you could see his pulse at the side of his throat going too fast for someone sitting still.

On the fourth butterfly, the side of your hand dragged across the outside of his bicep on the way to setting it and his hand flexed against his thigh.

You smoothed the last strip down with your thumb.

“Just have to close them. Might hurt a bit,” you murmured.

You moved in front of him to pull the zips properly, settling between his knees, drawing his arm forward across your hip. You pulled the tabs one bandage at a time, the split flesh tugging closed under your fingers.

When you were done, you didn’t move right away.

You could smell him this close. Two days of sweat and gun oil and the cheap jasmine soap from the bathroom he’d used to scrub under his fingernails just before this. His bare chest was at eye level. You could see the small movement of his breath below his ribs.

You looked up. His face had no expression on it at all, which was how he looked when he was holding something back – eyes dark, mouth slightly open. The light caught the bob of his adams apple as he swallowed thick, and you understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with adrenaline, that he wasn’t going to move either.

Somehow, you don’t remember when, your face had arrived very close to his, your noses a shift of weight from bumping. Close enough that you could feel his breath across your lips. His eyes were on yours and they didn’t move, and you were acutely aware of your own heart thumping up in your throat, and you stayed there because your body had committed to crossing the line a beat before your brain had caught up.

He didn’t move or lean in. He didn’t lean back either.

His jaw flexed again.

You closed the distance with a bit more force than you thought you were going to.

His mouth was hotter than you'd expected, his lips were soft but dry and tasted like tobacco and the whisky he'd had with the lads when you all got in.

His hand came up to the back of your neck inside of the first second, like he’d been waiting. The warm weight of his palm rested against your nape, his fingers spread at the base of your head. He kissed you back like a man who'd be damned to waste the opportunity. His tongue found yours and swept across it, and he made a low quiet sound into your mouth that you felt in the soft of your stomach, low, lower.

His other hand came forward and found your hip, the grip of it told you everything about where this was going – wide calloused palm, fingers spread across your hipbone, thumb pressing into the soft just below it.

You broke away long enough to look at him, breathless with your lips puffing up already. His eyes had gone dark, the pupils had eaten most of the cerulean you’d come to admire.

And that look was all the conversation you had.

You went back in and his hands went to your trousers and yours went to his belt. You got him open faster than he got yours and slid a hand inside and closed your fist around him.

He was hot there too, fully hard, the skin tight and silky, and he jumped against your palm with a push of his hips that you felt in your own pelvis. His mouth went to the side of your throat. His teeth were on your skin, not biting, just pressed there, and his beard scraped along your jaw and you felt that drag travel down the entire side of your neck like a struck match.

He shoved off the table in one smooth motion, walked you backward until your spine met the counter and his hand reached through your open zipper and went between your thighs, fingers sliding down through the wet of you. Your breath hitched and he responded with a groan low in his chest. He stroked through your folds once, twice, three times before the pad of his middle finger found your clit and circled it slowly. You bit the inside of your mouth so hard to keep quiet that you tasted iron.

He took his hand away just as quickly as it arrived and rucked your trousers and knickers down off your hips and just one leg, hoisted you up by the waist onto the counter's edge like the lift of you was nothing to him, and stepped between your knees. He held his cock in his hand and dragged the head of it through you once, entrance to clit and back, slick and sticky, before he lined up and pushed in with a relieved exhale against your temple.

The stretch of him went up your spine. He was thick, maybe thicker than anyone you’d ever had before. The head of him caught at your entrance and he pushed past, and the slow drag of him into you made your whole body go tight around him in a way you couldn't help. Your hands came up off the counter and gripped his shoulders. His skin was softer than you expected under your palms.

The hand at your hip was shaking, just slightly, and you felt the fine tremor of him holding himself in check more than you saw it. He was breathing through his teeth above you. He bottomed out and held there for a beat – the deep low ache of him fully in you bloomed up through your stomach and you made a small sound you couldn't catch – and then he moved.

The first stroke pulled almost all the way out and pushed back in just as slow as the first time. He did it again. Then again. Then he gave up on slow.

There was no version of it that was going to stay slow, not like this, not in here. He started fast. The angle was deep and the buzz was still in both of you and you were running on the chemistry of having survived something you likely shouldn’t have. His hips were snapping against yours hard enough to bump the loose counter against the wall behind it on every thrust. You hooked one ankle behind his thigh to anchor him in tighter, anchor yourself to him, and he made a low broken noise into your hair when you did.

His rhythm shortened, deepened, found the spongy spot inside of you that made your breath go out in strangled puffs.

He hit it again. And again. Then again. He'd found it and he wasn't moving off it.

Your forehead went to his shoulder, brain dizzy with it.

You felt the heat start to gather in your stomach low and tight, a wound spring you couldn't undo, and you made a small desperate sound into his shoulder that you couldn't take back. His response was immediate – his hips drove harder and his free hand came up off your hip and slid into your hair, gripping, holding your face against himself, and you understood that he was keeping you quiet by giving you something to bite.

So, you bit.

You bit down on the meat of him – bare skin, a slope of muscle salt-warmed and humming under your lips – and he made a sound through his teeth that was akin to a hiss, his hand at your hip tightened to the point of bruising, and that was where it stayed, gripping to ground.

Your nails were at his back. You didn't remember putting them there, but you dragged them down across the flesh below his shoulder blades and felt skin give under the blunt of your nails, felt the wet sting of it where you'd broken through him. He grunted a low ‘fuck’ into your hair. And that was the first word he’d uttered since you started on his bandages.

The wound spring in your belly pulled tighter.

He was breathing in short hot bursts against the side of your head. You could feel the strain in the muscle of his arm when it came off your hip and braced on the counter, the small fine tremor of a man holding himself in check. His chest was slick where it pressed against your shirt, the cotton damp now, clinging to you beneath it. His entire torso was tight. Every snap of his hips drove the breath out of you in a bitten-off sounds that started to make you worry you’d wake someone in the house.

His hand left your hair and came up to cover your mouth roughly.

You moaned into his palm – the sound your body wanted to make, all of it caught against the rough skin of his hand – and you felt him shudder against you at it, a full spine shudder that went all the way down to where he was inside you. His thumb stroked once across your cheekbone. You bit at the heel of his hand on a particularly deep stroke and came around him without any warning.

The coiled spring let go in one long pull of a wave that started low in your stomach and went out through every limb, and your thighs locked around his hips and your body clenched down hard around him and he made a noise into your hair that you’re not sure you’ll ever forget, just a low broken sound of a man coming completely undone. You felt him try to keep his rhythm and lose it. Felt him try to slow down and fail. Felt him break, half a minute later, with two hard stuttering thrusts deep within you walls.

He held himself there, pushing into you like he was trying to make more space inside.

You felt the pulse of his release. Felt the warmth of it. Felt him breathe out shakily against the side of your face.

His hand slid off your mouth slow. His forehead came down to your shoulder. You could feel his heart going against your ribs. You both stayed like that until the atmosphere had cooled.

Eventually, he kissed the side of your neck once like some sort of apology and stepped back.

You slipped down off the counter on legs that nearly didn't hold. He caught your elbow without looking. He let go as soon as you were steady.

You fixed your trousers. He fixed his. He picked his shirt up off the chair and pulled it back over his head, and his hair came out of the collar tousled, and you watched him push it back through his fingers. He was completely flushed from chest to ears.

You both moved like you were trying not to wake anyone, which was true, but it was also the only speed your bodies had left.

Once you were dressed you stood there. The radiator hissed, Soap snored from the other room.

You looked at him, he looked back, and you both stood in the middle of the kitchen not knowing what came after. You hadn’t exactly thought that far. Or at all, frankly.

There was probably, definitely, something either of you could’ve said, you could feel the shape of it on your tongue but didn’t know what it was. He didn't know what it was either. You both opened your mouths and neither of you found it.

He looked down at his arm and took a breath.

"We should, uh… get some sleep," he said finally. "Thanks for the— the arm,” he gestured to it.

You felt the corner of your mouth twitch and saw a faint pull at the edge of his.

"Yeah," you breathed. "Anytime, Cap."

He nodded once, you turned and you went down the hall to an empty room and shut the door behind you, then stood with your back against it for a full minute before you moved.

Your hands and thighs were shaking.

You weren't sure if it was the adrenaline finally letting go or something else entirely, but you didn't try to work it out.

———

The kitchen looked different in the daylight.

You'd come down the hall expecting it to feel like a scene from a film – the counter where it happened, the table with the kit and bloodied gauze still there– but instead it just looked like the safehouse kitchen. Someone had cleared the kit off the table, put the antiseptic and the leftover butterflies back in the bag and zipped it shut. Which meant either Price had done it before going to bed or someone else had got there before you did this morning.

Soap was at the stove with a pan and a bag of bacon looking deeply offended that the safehouse only had one decent knife. Gaz was reading something on his phone at the table. Ghost was leant in the doorway with a steaming mug.

Price was at the window with his back to the room.

You went to the coffee machine beside him. The pot was full and he nudged a clean mug toward you, which was a kindness you didn't read anything into, then poured yourself a cup, drank it black because there was nothing there to add to it.

He turned from the window and looked at you. He tipped his chin slightly; A Good Morning, or I see you, or we're alright. You couldn't tell which it was and it didn't really matter because you simply tipped yours back the same fraction, and that was the whole conversation before he turned back to the window.

By the time you were on the helo home that afternoon you'd both spoken to each other twice about logistics and once about the weather and not at all about anything else, and you understood without having to talk about it that this was how it was going to be: neither of you would bring it up.

You leaned your head against the bulkhead and closed your eyes for the flight.