#never not

And because the universe has a perverted sense of humour, his eyes flick up at the exact moment you pass behind someone’s shoulder before they land on you.

“Oh,” a slow grin unfurls on his face, surprised but absolutely delighted to run into you like this. The person he’d been talking to seems quickly forgotten as he turns his full attention to you now. “Look who’s crawled out of the past.”

You give your politest smile in greeting – you’re in public, other people can see you – and find a spot next to him at the bar, seeking eye-contact with bar staff to order yourself a drink. “Bold of you to assume I’d crawl anywhere for you.”

Joe watches you order a drink, eyes trailing down your arms as you find your phone in your bag.

“Oh, darling,” his low tone of voice gives you pause. Makes you freeze for just a moment, eyes flicking up as you process how the smugness hidden in his voice still has a huge effect on you. “We both know you’d at least consider it.”

God.

You’d forgotten how much you loathe him.

You don’t.

Unfortunately, you really don’t.

The side-eye you give him goes paired with a badly hidden smile just before you receive your drink. You look down for only a moment, opening your card on your phone, but then when you look back up, Joe’s already paid for it. He raises his drink to his mouth as he watches you, awaiting your reaction.

You nod to yourself, then frown and mutter your most unwilling and hesitant, “Thanks.” which makes Joe huff a breath of laugh into his glass.

He’s close enough now for you to smell him. His cologne, layered over the faint smell of smoke he’s carried in from outside and the warmth that’s always just been him. It’s the smell that used to surround you when you’d step into his flat, the smell that overwhelmed you in the best of ways when you’d climb into his bed. You swear you could recognise it anywhere, and the old familiarity drops onto your shoulders like a heavy, warm coat.

“So… what are you doing here?” you ask, because small talk feels mandatory now that he’s paid for your drink, and chatting about small nothings is safer than God, hi, I see your face all the time, it’s everywhere, but it’s so much nicer to see the way your mouth curves in person.

“Work,” he says, casual and vague. You know if you were to ask more about it, he’ll explain it all in great detail but it’s actually nicer to not know, lest you get sucked into his world again. “You?”

“Drinks with some colleagues,” you lift your phone with a shrug. “They bailed early.”

He gives you a look. A raise of his brows, a pull of his lip.

“What?” you try asking lightly, but it still comes out a little defensively.

“And so you decided to come into this hotel bar to have a drink on your own. Makes sense.” he says jokingly, something accusatory in his voice that he knows will piss you off. Joe’s purposefully trying to make it sound like you saw him before you’d decided to get yourself a drink, and, Joe’s right… it pisses you off immediately.

“Still fucking annoying, I see,” you bite back. “Makes sense.”

“Well…” he starts, eyes dropping to your mouth for approximately 0.3 seconds, “Some things just don’t change, do they?”

The air shifts.

You feel it before you think it.

There’s a subtle tightening of the world around you, like someone’s pulled a drawstring. You suddenly notice how the bar’s too warm. Suddenly notice the lines of the muscles in his neck above his collar. Suddenly think of a question that is one you absolutely shouldn’t ask.

So he beats you to it.

“Want to go sit down somewhere?” Joe nods towards a quieter corner. “Unless you’re in a hurry.”

He knows you’re not.

You know exactly what he’s doing. And you hate how well it works.

When you sit across from him, the old rhythm of the two of you, your way of being around each other, it snaps back into place like muscle memory. He leans back in his chair and spreads his legs just wide enough for it to annoy you. You sit upright and lean forward just enough to pretend this interaction will be a short one.

“So,” Joe says. “Should we do the polite ex thing and pretend we’re both totally over it?”

“Are you saying that you’re not?”

“Oh, I’m perfectly well-adjusted,” Joe deadpans. “Remarkably stable, cheers.”

You laugh and nod your head to the side, eyes wide as you remind him, “You’re also a fantastic liar.”

“Also a fantastic liar.” Joe echoes, finishing the sentence along with you, laughing now. It’s a low, throaty sound that you used to fucking die for. You remember how he used to laugh into your mouth sometimes. How you’d be able to feel how his laughter would get stuck in his throat before he’d release it in warm breaths.

Hey.

Stop.

Maybe let’s not think thoughts like those when staring right at him. Maybe let’s tie these thoughts up and shove them into a box and forget about where we store it, just to be safe, you know?

Safety first.

“You look good,” he says suddenly, softer.

Okay, so. You’re definitely not safe.

“Don’t start.”

“What? Can’t compliment an old friend?”

“An old friend?” you make a face at him. That’s just about the last thing you want to be called.

“What would you want me to call you instead?”

Mayday, mayday! Safety fucking last – the bastard’s dimples are showing.

“Ex-girlfriend feels very… definitive, doesn’t it?”

For a moment, you’re not sure where to rest your eyes. It’s silent between the two of you, and the weight of the past settles between you in this new space you’ve not shared before. It’s not heavy or bitter in any sense. It’s more like a bruise you’d forgotten about until Joe just poked at it and you were reminded, Oh. Right. That.   

You ignore the questions he’s asked you and instead decide to ask about his earlier mentioned work. It turns things normal for a moment. You know exactly which questions to ask to get him to tell you more than he’s probably allowed to share, and just when he’s about to spill something he’s definitely signed an NDA on, he changes the subject.  

You briefly wonder if Joe’s thinking what you’re thinking. You don’t have to wonder for long – you never had to with Joe. The conversation quickly slips sideways, something fun and electric humming underneath. It kicks up even more when Joe gets up to come sit next to you in a bid to hear each other over the music better.

You remember this.

You remember it too well.

“I forgot how expressive your face is. Stop doing that with your eyes.”

“I’m just looking.” You scan his features. His stubble is at the perfect length.

“Have I got something on–” Joe rubs a hand down his face.

“No.” You really were just looking.

“Just handsome, then?” Joe asks it like it’s a serious question, speaking right into your ear. He expects you to laugh, but catches you staring somewhere near his collarbone. Moving his hand to touch himself there, he feels how his shirt is unbuttoned enough for you to see into it right there.

“No. I know that look.” Joe smirks, boyish and confident.

“What look?” you sit up slightly, trying to sound as innocent as you can. “I was just looking, look, you’ve got– there’s about six buttons you forgot to do up.”

There’s two. Three if you count that extra one right at the top.

“Mhm,” Joe hums, his smile not wavering in the slightest. “Tell your pupils to dilate a little less next time.”

“Could you just–”

You don’t have to finish your sentence, because Joe leans away from you just enough to get both arms up to fiddle with his buttons. Instead of closing them though, his fingers move to open another one, just to fuck with you. Before you can even think about what you’re doing, your hands are moving to slap his out of the way.

You only get to close one of his buttons before his fingers wrap around both your wrists. And then, because Joe has never once passed up an opportunity to ruin you with a single line, he leans in a little bit to get his mouth right by your ear and says, “Come upstairs with me.”

You swallow. Hard. “Absolutely not.”

His smile is slow and devastating as his grip on your wrists tightens. “Absolutely yes.”

“You don’t get to decide–”

“Darlin’…”

It hits like a knee to the spine.

He says it the exact way he always used to in order to get what he wants, deep and coaxing, with an awful lot of confidence that comes with knowing how to get you to fold instantly.

He’d say it casually, and it’d be fine. But then he’d drop his voice and use the baritone in specific moments, like right before you’d get into the shower, or right before he’d drag you into his bedroom.

You hate that he uses it on you like this.

You hate yourself for reacting in the way that you do.

“That’s not fair,” you whisper too softly for Joe to hear, which isn’t a problem since he was already looking at your mouth anyway, and he can lipread just fine.

“No,” he agrees, letting go of your arms now. “But neither was you showing up here looking the way that you do.”

You take a breath so shaky you hope he doesn’t hear it.

He definitely hears it.

“So, we’ll call it even…” you try, sitting up a little.

“Not yet,” he frowns slightly through a head shake. “One night. Come on. If I remember correctly, we’ve got excellent…” Joe waits a moment for you to finish his sentence. You do, at the same time.

“Coordination.” Joe says when you say, “Chemistry? Oh. Coordination. Yea, sure.”

“Chemistry.” Joe squints his eyes and points a finger at you, picking your answer over his own. “That’s what I was gonna say. I was just… being coy.”

“You’re terrible at being coy.”

He bites his lip. “Yea, well. I’m decent at other things, so.”

You groan and close your eyes in agonized, frustrated, embarrassingly fond defeat.

When you open them again, his gaze is steady. You’re not moving away from him, and you’re still smiling. That’s all Joe needs.

“Let’s go,” he says, standing up, holding his hand out for you to grab.

And you hate that the answer is already yes, simmering under your skin, waiting for you to stop pretending. If you’re totally honest, it would’ve been yes back at the bar after saying hi, but he doesn’t need to know that.

You take hold of his hand, and Joe looks at you like he’s proud of you. A little surprised, amused that whatever he was trying has worked out, but it’s mostly pride.

“This doesn’t mean anything.” You can’t help but warn him, letting go of his hand after he’s helped you up.

He grins, “Of course not.”

Fucking liar.

The walk across the lobby, the wait for the lift, the ride up to his floor, it’s all torture.

Joe has slipped both his hands into his pockets and keeps them in there, not touching your back as he guides you, no fingers secretly trying to find a way to sneak under your top. You’re just following him like a dog, and the air between the two of you might as well be made of static electricity at this point. You can feel it crackling along your forearms, down the back of your neck, across your ribs…

And Joe’s just watching you.

In the lift he leans back against the side and watches you, like he’s remembering every single version of you he’s ever peeled out of an outfit.

“Stop staring…” you mutter.

“Can’t.”

“Well, try.”

“Don’t want to.”

The lift dings.

You accidentally inhale his exhale.

It’s a whole disaster.

You should’ve turned around right when you’d walked in and saw him pretending to listen to whoever that other person was.

Yet, here you are, being welcomed into Joe’s hotel room for the night.

His hotel room oozes old money. It’s too large, too patterned, every detail  around you curated to make you feel like royalty. It’s all meant to convey that the people staying here didn’t pay the amount they did for nothing, because look at the brass wall lights and the curves of the doorhandles.

Pretentious bullshit, is what it is.

Joe looks a little out of place, which you like, but he’s also got this ability to fill the room the way he always fills every space. It all sort of fits him just right, doesn’t matter where he is, and in here, he makes the room feel a little more casual, like it had been waiting for him to walk in and it can finally relax now.

You don’t even get your jacket off before he’s in front of you, one hand braced near your hip against the wall, not touching you, not yet, but close enough that the intention throbs between you.

“Still sure about this?” he checks.

“No,” you smile, which makes him move even closer. “I might need some extra convincing.”

He huffs a laugh, and you feel it warm against your cheek.

“What are you going to do about it?” you challenge, which results in a low throaty sound from Joe.

“God, I missed that mouth.”

And then he finally, finally kisses you. His wide palms find your sides to hold, warming your ribs as he breathes you in, and, shit, it’s terrible how good it still is.

It’s immediate, and greedy, and devastatingly present.

He doesn’t give you a chance to slip into nostalgia, into reliving something that you’ve lost. Before you can, he’s moving you, mouth warm and hands confident in ways that bypass your brain entirely.

You melt.

You try to fight it.

But you fail.

He tastes like the drink he had downstairs. That and old patterns. Patterns you’d grown bored of a while back, but that feel fun and exciting to be a part of again for a night. Joe still knows how to undo you with depressing efficiency, and he uses what he remembers of familiar gestures to make your ribs constrict.

This kiss is better than it has any right to be.

When he pulls back, both your breathing is uneven. Your half choking on air, embarrassed at how disheveled you feel already.

“Still nothing?” he asks, teasing softly.

“Shut up,” you breathe.

He laughs against your throat. “I’ll take that as a no.”

You shove him onto the bed.

He goes willingly, grinning wide, hands already reaching for you as you follow him there.  

You undress each other in a blur of heat and limbs and the specific type of instinct that Joe responds to on autopilot. There once was a time where you fit together as perfect puzzle pieces, and you’re surprised how easily you both fall back into your slots together. You remember every sound he makes, every place he likes to be touched, every button that he’s got hidden from view which your hands know by heart.

He remembers, too.

The familiarity of it all is infuriating, and the pleasure of it worse.

When you find yourself straddling him in nothing but your underwear, he looks up at you and the glint in his eye looks like he’s going to say something heartfelt. Something that he’ll likely regret later, you think. If not that, it’ll at least be something you’ll regret having heard him say whilst underneath you like this. He opens his mouth to speak, and to quickly shut him up, you undo the clasp of your bra behind your back.

It works.

You knew it would.

His hands are firm on your hips as he sits up a little, and instead of using words, Joe lets his mouth do the talking with slow tracing patterns down your chest.

“Still hate pet names?” he murmurs against your skin.

“With a passion,” you gasp with both your hands in his hair now.

“Good,” he whispers. “Darling.”

Your head drops back and you swear out loud.

All Joe can do is laugh, his breath warm on your sternum. This is stupid. It’s ridiculous. It’s perfect, and it’s so fucking doomed.

Joe lets a hand slip into your underwear as you sit up on your knees to give him more room. His other arm is hooked around your hips, holding you close to him, and you go a little quiet as you focus on where Joe’s fingers are going.

He looks up at you to study your face, then asks “Same spot as–”

Before he can even finish the question, Joe touches you just right and you jolt slightly as your breath hitches. “Oh yea, same spot as always.” he smirks, answering the question he didn’t even finish, too sure of himself, and you decide to just… let Joe be smug. Let him be his dickhead-self if it means he’s going to keep doing all the right things, because, honestly, you’d tell him off for it any other time, but right now, you’d rather just let him win. If he thinks he knows exactly how this is going to go just because he’s been here before and can predict every note you’ll hit, that’s okay. You will let him play at confidence until you decide to take it away from him.  

When Joe starts trying to pull at the last bit of fabric on your body, you sink your weight down onto him until his breath catches and both his hands grip onto your thighs.  

“Same spot as always?” you flip the script on him.

“W-why don’t... why don’t you find out?” he teases, though it comes out a little breathless, a little cracked around the edges.

You lean in close, ducking so your mouth’s near his ear. “That’s cute.”

He laughs, and you feel it, a pulse beneath his ribs, and his hands, predictably, move up to your waist. “Yea? You’re cute. Take this off.”

You do, and when you try to get back into the same position, Joe flips you over onto your back and grabs hold of both your legs, pushing them upward. He sways his hips forward and back a few times, testing the waters, letting his skin meet yours, watching your face.

He does it for just a second too long.

“Are you done showing off yet? Because this isn’t doing it for m–”

Joe sinks into you, cutting you off mid-sentence and turning it into a sharp gasp. When you look at him, he’s smiling, and you move a hand up to cover it.

There.

That’s better.

Joe can be a smug bastard all he likes, but that doesn’t mean you have to look at it.

You stay like that, hand over his mouth, as Joe starts to move, slow and measured, like he’s testing the limits of your patience. It’s not even been a fill minute and you can already feel him falter slightly. You can feel how the smile disappears behind your palm, smirk then gone and replaced by something darker, a little more helpless.

“Fuck,” he breathes through your fingers, and you almost smile, because there it is: the slip. The crack. The moment where Joe stops performing and starts feeling.

He picks up his pace.

Bites into the fleshy bit of one of your fingers and pushes your legs down, folding you in half.

When you moan a little louder, Joe bites down harder too. It makes you yelp and finally pull your hand away from his face, and with his mouth free, he takes his chance and bends down to kiss you.

It’s truly something to be kissed exactly how you want to be kissed during sex.

There’s no need to nudge your nose into his a certain way, no need to grab onto his neck to guide him. He’s doing what you want before you can think to tell him what to do, and it feels like coming home.

In your movement, your legs slink to the side, and Joe uses a stretched-out arm to hold them down there, finding the best angle to make this nice for you.

Idiot.

It’s been nice for you since downstairs.

Suddenly, he slows down. His breath stutters, and his throat works around your name, soft and desperate, as he leans down and lets your foreheads brush.

“What’s the matter, da–” your own giggles cut you off. You wanted to say it because you know he was going to if you didn’t, and you can see the exact millisecond the words you haven’t finished hit him. The flicker in his eyes. The way his mouth opens and closes like he can’t decide whether to groan, or laugh, or beg.

Joe looks absolutely ruined.

That’s when you move, switch places with him and get back on top of him like you were before.

“Are you warm enough?” Joe asks, just checking in, words he’s used hundreds of times before with you. It’s sort of cute how realizing how he still fits and still feels has turned him into absolute mush for you.

For a second, it’s almost too much.

All of it, way too much.

The closeness as you ride him, as you writhe in his lap, the heat coming from your bodies, the strong arms behind your back that press you firmly against his front, the sound of your name from his mouth like it means something again.

It’s why you press your forehead harder to his, grounding yourself and avoiding eye contact as you finish the job for the both of you.

You move until you feel him unravel beneath you, his breath catching on every half-word, his fingers twitching like he wants this, wants you, and doesn’t care about the past.

You move until he forgets himself entirely, until the confidence he had mountains of before is gone, and it’s just Joe and just you, raw and wordless, moving in a rhythm that makes you both feel good until it builds enough and you both feel great.

After that, it goes quiet.

The air settles.

Your heartbeat slows, and you let yourself breathe again.

You move like you’re about to get up, but Joe reaches for you instinctively and moves his arms around you, holding you in a way he used to, before. It’s like he’s remembering every single bit of vulnerability that ever existed between the two of you at once and needs a moment to come to terms with it all.

Joe’s thumb finds a spot below your collarbone to slowly rub, and for one dangerous heartbeat, you almost let it mean something.

Then, you pull away.

He looks a little dazed and soft-eyed, and you know he’s thinking of poetically sweet words to say that’ll make the moment special. You don’t let him, and instead get up to go and find your clothes, hoping you’ll also find your composure and your backbone on the carpet somewhere.

Joe gets the hint.

Just offers you his shower, if you want it.

You don’t answer. Just smile as you pull your top over your head. It makes Joe chuckle a little, and you can’t help but laugh yourself.

No other words are shared until you sling your arms back into your jacket and reach the door.

“This is never not going to happen when we run into each other,” Joe says, voice a little rough from the weight of what just happened. “You know that, right?”

You take the words in with your hand on the doorknob, then turn back and take a few steps back into the room so you can look at him, still in bed, hair a mess, his grin trying its hardest to make a comeback and almost making it.

“Take those words with you.”

You give him a knowing smile that grows wider when you think of what you’re going to say next.

“We’ll see, darling.”

And you leave him there, sprawled across now-damp hotel-white sheets, a ghost of a smirk on his lips.

“Never not!” he calls out when he hears you open the door.

You let it shut without saying goodbye.

You leave smug and satisfied, with a newfound confidence in your chest and words heavy in your pocket that you’ll never cash in.

---

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