#target!everlark

It’s not her. It’s one of her friends, the one she calls “Johanna” or, when she’s feeling feisty, “asshole” or “cunt,” but when she says these things she doesn’t mean them, not really— not in the way I do, anyway.  

“Here, Everdeen,” says the one called Johanna, plucking me from the drawer and tossing me through the air until it’s Katniss’ hands that clasp me to her chest. “If those don’t get you fucked, then nothing will.” The abrasive voice reaches me even where I rest, smothered in a ball, cradled against the warmth of Katniss’ breasts.

Katniss groans, the sound a distinct cross between embarrassment and annoyance. “Jo, I don’t think that the underwear I wear will make any earthly difference—”

“It will,” the one called Annie says, her voice earnest and sweet. “It really will. It will boost your confidence.”

“Ha!” Johanna hoots like she’s just won a wet t-shirt contest. “Ya hear that, Everdeen? Even Little Miss Orphan Annie agrees: no granny panties for you. Tonight you’re playing Dick Hunt, and you’ve got to feel fuckable when you’re playing or the boys ain’t gonna play.”

“You’re revolting!” Katniss protests, but I can feel her race pulsing through the skin of her palm, and I know she’s going to cave.

Katniss rests me on her comforter, and from this vantage I can see Johanna walk over to the closet, can hear the mirrored door squeal on its rusty track as she slides it open.   

“Oh God— oh Christ— Jesusfuckme, Katniss. It looks like your closet barfed up business casual.” Johanna rustles through Katniss’ garments, oblivious to the feelings of the skirts, button up blouses, and smart-but-sensible sweaters that she casts aside like they're worth nothing at all. “Tell me, Katniss, exactly when you traded in your vagina for a smooth patch.”

Katniss flushes a furious shade of red and scowls at the she-beast tearing apart her closet. “Jo, it's called ‘being gainfully employed.’ And it's got nothing to do with whether or not I still have a vagina.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” her friend mutters under her breath, scraping the hangers noisily along the rack as she searches through the clothes.  

Katniss doesn't seem to hear her, or at least she pretends not to. But I do. And, as loathe as I am to agree with anything Johanna has to say, it's been far too long since Katniss has bothered to wear me.

Maybe the she-beast has a point.

With a rowdy “a-ha!” Johanna rips a silver dress from one of the hangers and holds it out in front of her, a wicked grin crawling onto her face. “Well, lookie here. The old girl’s got some freak left in her.”

Annie and the one called Madge converge on Johanna, each looking more pleased than the next. Their faces beam as they appraise the dress, their eyes alternating between Katniss and the dress as if to decide how one could possibly have any relation to the other.   

Madge reaches inside the dress and pulls out a price tag, still attached. She frowns as she looks at it. “Why haven’t you ever worn this?” There’s nothing malicious in the question, and I’m thankful Katniss doesn’t take it the wrong way.

...Because I’d really, really like to spend time with her tonight in that silver dress, and that ain’t gonna happen if she gets pissed at her friends.

Katniss shrugs. “I bought it when I was dating David, when I thought he was going to propose… and then after… what happened... I just came to associate it with him, I guess. So in the closet it stayed.”

Johanna grimaces and begins to shove the dress back in the closet, but Katniss practically leaps off the bed in protest. “No, no… don’t put it back.” She sounds so determined, suddenly, as if some thought has occurred to her. “I’ll wear it.”

I can’t help but notice the knowing look Annie shoots at Katniss. If she knows Katniss half as well as I do— which, okay let’s be honest, she probably doesn’t— then she has to be wondering why Katniss is suddenly able to face this particular demon.

I think it must be because of him, the one I’d heard the night before— groaning and moaning and panting her name. He’s a loud one, which is kind of annoying when I’m tucked in for the night and hoping to catch some beauty rest.

His name is either “Oh god” or “Peeee-tahhhhh.”

I’m not sure how I feel about him yet.

Katniss takes the dress from Johanna, refusing to meet her friends’ eyes, and then picks me up and takes me with her into the bathroom. She drops me onto the cold tile, just a couple inches shy of the soft, plush bath mat. It’s moments like these I’d love nothing more than to give her a piece of my fucking mind. (A little consideration is all I’m asking for when I spend my day literally covering her ass… well, maybe not her ass, but other precious cargo).

Through the open door, I can hear Madge. “It’s old school night at the Hob, and they’ve got well drinks for four bucks, so we’re thinking about hitting that up. Sound good to you, Kat?”

Katniss slides me up her legs, one, delicious leg at a time, and I lose myself in the sensation of her smooth skin caressing my fabric. It feels like heaven, how I fit around her so perfectly, cupping her sex like I was made for her.

“Yeah, sounds great,” Katniss mutters, trying her best to sound enthusiastic. “I honestly don’t care where we go.” She slides the dress over her head, the fabric falling just below her ass, and then all I can see is her feet, the way she anxiously, absentmindedly scratches at her left ankle with the big toe of her right foot. Over and over, she scratches, like her skin is crawling off her body. She’s not used to wearing me— or dresses this short— and I think she must be uncomfortable at how exposed she is. But I can tell that she’s trying to resist how the dress and I make her feel.

The one named Annie comes into the bathroom and stands behind Katniss. Her voice is, like always, quiet and patient. “Something is definitely up with you,” she says, the sound of Katniss’ zipper punctuating her words as she zips up her friend’s dress. “No— someone. And when you’re ready, you’re going to have to tell me who that someone is.”

I can feel Katniss tense up, but she doesn’t reply.

The next hour is a fog of preparations and fussing, the constant prattle of Katniss’ friends as they pluck and paint and perfume every last inch of her. I can tell she’s anxious; her temperature is raised, and the heat from her body radiates into me, making me delirious.

Finally, after what seems like days, she moves into the refreshing night, sliding onto the cool leather of Johanna’s car seat, and when the bare skin of her ass touches it, she hisses and crosses her legs to conceal a secret only I know.

Her secret?

Tonight Katniss Everdeen feels sexy and alive.

As we enter the club, I’m rendered blind and deaf by the low lights and thumping bass. I don’t know where we’re going or who we’re with, but Katniss starts to drink.

And drink.

And then she drinks some more.

She starts to dance, and when she moves, I move too. Her slender thighs and curves rub against my fabric sensually, agonizingly, but it isn't long before her body comes to a halt.    

The music is droning on, some man talking about how he loves big butts and he cannot lie (a sentiment I happen to share), when I feel it— the warmth and wetness of her arousal.

It happens suddenly, and I can feel her arms knock in frustration at her sides, her fingers mindlessly worrying the fabric of her dress, as she fights an unwinnable battle.  

I think it must be him— her lover, this Peeta— that she sees.

There’s nothing worse than knowing someone, loving someone, existing for someone, and not being able to protect them. But you can’t protect anyone in this world.

Especially when you're a pair of panties.

I don’t know what this “Peeta” looks like, I can’t discern his intentions. Right now I can’t even hear him. All I know, all I intimately know, is how Katniss responds to him. Maybe I know this better than she does herself.

At just the sight of him, her body comes to life.

The next few minutes are an overload of feelings I don’t have the time or ability to process. All I know is this:

Her pulse rages, her temperature rises, and just when I’m certain that she’s going to pass out and take me down with her, I feel something inside of her burn up and disintegrate to ash.

She runs away, and as she crashes into the street, I can see the cracked pavement glowing orange from the light of the street lamps. She’s crying, her entire body racked with sobs, and over the din of the people on the street I can hear her gasping for breath. She grows chill in the night air, and when she shivers I shiver, too.   

She's heartsick over him.

I think I hate him for it.

But then I hear his voice.

I know it’s him, I recognize the way he says her name, how every letter is filled with urgency and desire. I know that feeling, the need for her warmth and closeness, and it's the way he's speaking to her, begging her, that makes me think I’ve underestimated him after all.

She's a difficult, headstrong girl. I know this about her. Her neglect of me tells me something fundamental: she doesn’t let anyone get too close. She protects herself with reasons and justifications and shabby excuses why she deserves to be alone— and will always be that way. She keeps the world at arm’s length. Anything that could lead to intimacy she casts aside in some masochistic, misguided form of self-preservation.

Every day that Katniss passes me over for a more sensible pair of panties— the Old Bitties, as I like to call them— it reaffirms something else I know about her: she rejects the frivolous and ostentatious for the simple and true. In the battle between show and comfort, the latter always wins.

And the way her body responds to him, even as they fight and he curses and she curses back, makes me think that he's as natural and right a fit for her as any of her favorite clothes. She may be crying and trembling, but when he touches her, her pulse thrums and her clit throbs, and, in the time I've known her, no other man has had that effect on her.

That has to rate for something.

As they skirmish, an unfamiliar voice interrupts them, asking if she’s alright, and I can feel Katniss’ embarrassment, the way her entire body flushes at  feeling so vulnerable and exposed. But the boy is sensible, even now.  

He touches her— I know this because I can actually feel her aching for him— and he takes her somewhere dark and quiet to talk. His voice is low, nearly inaudible over the bass, but each decibel courses through her bloodstream anyway, travels through every vein and capillary until it suffuses her bloodstream. “If you want to ask me how many girls I’ve slept with, Katniss, that’s fair. I’ll tell you. But I think what you really need to know is how many I’ve slept with since the day I met you.”

When he tells her this I want to scream, “Ask him, motherfucker, just ask him,” and I know her pussy does, too, but her pride won’t allow it. Her pulse hammers inside her body, and I think that his pulse must, too because when he speaks again he sounds furious.

“You won’t ask… And why’s that? Afraid you’ll hear something that might prove your idea of me wrong?”

I want to exalt to the heavens, to slap him a high five and then set myself on fire, because it is in this moment I know Katniss Everdeen has met her match.

And he loves her, I know he does. He murmurs to her body, “The answer is one. You. Only you. From the minute we met, it’s just been you.” He thinks this is a song he sings just for her. He can’t hear how every cell of her body sings it back to him, word for word and note for note. His words are an incantation summoning all her passion.

And she has so much passion.

Katniss fights it, she tries to stop him from saying what I know he wants to say— needs to say— and she does what she does best: she pushes him away.

She lies to herself, she lies to her feet, she lies to the sky and to him and to everything and anything that will listen. She insults herself, she insults him. She pushes and bristles and fights because that’s what she does.

But she wants, too, with every ounce of her being. She’s so wet for him that her need for him soaks me, drowns me. It’s suffocating to hunger for someone the way she’s hungering for him.

When he presses his body against hers, his warmth seeps into me, intoxicating me. His voice infects me like it infects her, and I’m useless against it, useless to protect her. I couldn’t if I wanted to.

He sees her for exactly who she is and calls her on her games. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing… It’s not fair. You’re not being fair. It’s not fucking fair—”

Every syllable, every sound out of his mouth courses through her, and she reaches out and touches him to create a conduit for everything that’s mounting within her. It’s too much, too unbearably much. And I know she’s touching him because I can feel the hard, unrelenting press of Peeta’s cock against her body as he responds to her.

It doesn’t matter who’s talking anymore or what they’re trying to say, all that’s left is Katniss’ aching need and the way Peeta’s length feels grinding against me, grinding against her. Everything they’re saying is just words, words, words, empty placeholders for what was always going to happen anyway. They deny what they want. They elide the truth. But they take what they want and, in the taking, make a new truth.

He’s kissing her, and she’s throbbing, and he’s biting her, and she’s bucking, and when his hands skate below the hemline of her dress and hike it up over her ass, exposing me, I want to gasp with her, too. The night air is so cold it feels like fire on my wet fabric, and when his fingers begin to rub her they rub me, too.

I think I fall in love with his hands first.

They’re rough and callused, but his fingers are gentle and dexterous. They dance across her body, pressing and massaging and dipping, and what he’s doing feels so good I don’t even notice that its his hands that have ripped me down Katniss’s hips until I land in a pool around her ankles.

I fall to the ground, gasping and delirious, but before I can make sense of what’s happened, and why I’m suddenly so cold, I’m flying through the air.

I land several feet away from her— from them— between a smashed piece of chewing gum and a pile of cigarette butts. The ground here is mercifully dry, but the smell of the butts is nauseating.

As I collect my bearings I can see that Katniss’ leg is wound around Peeta’s hip, her arms snaked around his shoulders, and when both of her legs hook around his back, he reaches down to press his cock inside her. Every time his hips undulate she slides up against the wall, moaning and keening and pleading to her absent god. He kisses her, roughly, and swallows her frantic words, her senseless babble. Through his jeans I can see the muscles of his ass clench as he buries himself in her.   

Her fingers grasp the tense muscles of his shoulders, and through the darkness, over the din of the music and their bodies colliding, in the distance between me and them, I can feel them fighting to hold onto each other. She cries and he groans, she wails and he grunts— their bodies finally speaking a language worth using.  

They move together like this, a frantic dance to a bitter song, until she comes and he comes, too.

They’re panting and sweaty, and the air around them reeks of sex. He holds her to his chest, and I can practically hear everything he wants to say to her— his thoughts are so loud— but she does what she always does and pushes him away.

“That was—” he begins, his voice filled with awe.

“A mistake,” she tells him. A lie, as hollow and empty as the alleyway carrying their echoes.

She’s kisses him gently in goodbye.

And that’s when she leaves me.

There is a flickering, drowned light and the sensation of familiar fingers curling around me. They hold and stroke and caress me, and as soon as I hear the voice, I know who’s taken me.

“Look at you,” he says, his voice soft and kind. “You’re coming with me.”

It’s not her. It’s him. The one called Peeta.

He tucks me into the front pocket of his jeans, and as he walks down the alleyway and into the night, his fingers stay tangled in me.

Her ass keeps grinding against his dick in time to the beat, and every time she rubs against him he takes half a step back, trying to escape the friction. In the darkness of the club, in the crush of bodies, with the narrow beams of the spotlights flashing and strobing overhead, he’s having a hard time keeping his balance. The tequila courses through him, warming him, and he’s already feeling hot, so uncomfortably hot, that he has to remember to breathe.

She lifts an arm above her head and reaches behind her, drawing him closer to her, inviting him to touch her, to exhale feverishly in the crook of her neck as they move in tandem. Her fingers card through his sweaty hair, massaging his cool perspiration back onto his scalp, making him shiver.

“Glim, what are you doing?” Peeta protests, his voice a guttural growl in her ear. He plants his hands firmly on her hips in an effort to create enough space between them for the Holy Ghost.

“Having a good time,” she yells over her shoulder, thrusting her ass smoothly against his groin in one quick move, coaxing his cock to respond to her as if to say: This. This is how we have a good time. Remember?

He’s disappointed in himself as he begins to harden against her, his dick involuntarily stiffening at the press of another body to his.

He closes his eyes and thinks of Katniss, wishing he were dancing with her instead of Glimmer. No matter how hard he tries to have a good time, the truth has followed him all night and hounds him as he moves on the dancefloor. He can’t escape her.

Katniss is all he wants. Her lips. The way her hips rock and sway when he’s inside her. The smile that creeps its way, unbidden, onto her face, whenever she sees him. Her throaty moans. The flush on her chest and neck as he makes her come. Her body curling into his as they snuggle on the couch, Katniss tucked into the hollow of his arm, rooted to his chest like some tenacious vine. Her voice, its musicality when she speaks, inviting him to lose himself in her words, her words that are never enough. Every single one of her eccentricities— like the way she places her spoon in her mouth upside down when she eats ice cream, pulling it out so that the metal lightly scrapes against her front teeth— all of her, that’s what he wants.

The rest of the world is shadows and echoes, reverberations and ghosts.

He doesn’t care if she is too tired to hang out or if she has to work early tomorrow. Whatever excuse she might have had for not getting together is fundamentally flawed because he would have been content to watch her nap on the couch all night, to feel her sleep beside him, her chest rising and falling peacefully, knowing that she feels safe and protected enough with him to do that, to be like that.  

Every time Glimmer presses herself against him, Peeta regrets that he didn’t just go to Katniss’ apartment, even if she hadn’t wanted him there (and why? As Glimmer bumps and shifts against him, rubbing her crotch now against his thigh, he wonders why Katniss didn’t want to see him. He’d thought that last night had been perfect, but what if she didn’t feel the same way? Had he missed something, done something wrong? Was she embarrassed to be seen with him?). What he wants to tell Katniss— right this minute, in fact, as he resists the urge to pull out his cellphone and text her— is that she could make cleaning toilets fun. And that, without her, everything else seems dull and compulsory. Like tonight: required fun. It’s fun that, in the miles spanning between them, feels like torture.

He shoves his fingers into the small of Glimmer’s back to make her stop humping his leg, but she’s drunk, too, and, taking his touch as a sign of encouragement, she bears down harder.   

Peeta had hoped Katniss would come out tonight to meet his friends. Since the first time he’d spoken to her at the store, months ago, he’d wanted to show them, to tell them, “This girl. Look at this fucking girl.” And now that they are together— or whatever it is she’ll allow them to be— he wants them to know she’s his (inexplicably his) and that he’s hers. Aside from Glimmer, who insists on complicating a fairly uncomplicated situation, he’s positive his friends are going to love her. How could they not?

When Thresh mentioned it was old school night at the Hob, where their fake IDs are graciously accepted like VIP backstage passes, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. All of his best friends, his girl, some classic rap and hip hop. What could go wrong?

The answer to that is currently getting herself off on his leg.

The answer to that is in his bloodstream, driving him, infecting him.

He should have guessed from the text Glimmer sent him last night that she was going to be in the mood to start shit. The first words out of her mouth as she walked up to him at the bar confirmed that, as she scanned the room for Katniss and, not seeing her, barbed, “What, no ladyfriend? And here I was thinking it was old school night.”   

It had been one time— one passionless hookup months ago, inspired by the fact that Glimmer’s dickwad boyfriend Cato had just dumped her and Peeta’s shoulder just happened to be the one she’d been crying on. They’d been friends before and friends after, and Glimmer had never seemed to mind in the least that’s all they were until she noticed him talking to Katniss.

Then the texts started flooding in and the late-night phone calls— he’d learned quickly never to answer or return those. He’s given her no encouragement, but the less he gives, the more aggressive she gets. It’s like some game she’s playing, and Peeta’s way of dealing with it so far has been to ignore it and hope she gets bored when she realizes she's the only one playing. She’s not into him, he knows that. Really. She’s even seeing someone now—  casually, anyway.

No, Glimmer isn’t into him. She just doesn’t want him being into anyone else.

Spinning around, she faces him, straddling his thigh, and drapes her arms casually over his shoulders. In the brief pause between songs, the mere fraction of a second between beats, she leans in as if to kiss him.

Her lips are a bright pink, her heavily made up face glittering under the spotlights. Long, blonde hair cascades around her shoulders, hanging around her four-plus inches of cleavage. She’s busty and outgoing and bursting with self-confidence. Tonight her eyes are green.  

She’s nothing like Katniss.

Glimmer tilts her face up, her chin jutting toward him as her eyes fall to his lips. His shoulders tense up, his voice sounds a warning, “Glim—”

Before he can tell her they’re not like that, that they’re never going to be like that, the RZA’s voice pipes in over the loudspeakers, heralding the beginning of the next song with a triumphant cry, “Up from the 36 Chambers!” As the bassline kicks in, the entire crowd springs to life around them, jumping and dancing in time to the repeated lyrics, “Wu-Tang killa beez, we on a swarm!” Glimmer begins to sing along, recklessly throwing her arms in the air, and Peeta joins in, thankful for the distraction. Within seconds he forgets what he’d meant to say, the moment swallowed in a haze of inebriation.

A few songs later Thresh, Delly, and Rue swing by with another round of shots, and they’re knocking them back when Peeta spots a woman over by the bar who reminds him of Katniss, even though he knows it can’t be her because Katniss is at home exhausted. The bartender grins flirtatiously at the woman at the bar, leaning forward much closer than necessary to take her drink order. A couple guys gape at her ass, nudging each other with their elbows and arguing over something. Probably over who gets to try to get in her panties, based off the fact that they’re total douchebags.

Peeta watches her from across the club as the next song begins, considering her.   

This speech is my recital.

This woman’s dark hair falls in soft waves around her slight shoulders.

I think it's very vital.

She’s wearing a scrap of fabric that passes as a dress, some shiny silver thing that barely covers her ass, that accentuates the smooth olive skin of her legs.

To rock a rhyme

The calves of her legs are toned, the muscles taut as she balances in a pair of towering black heels, heels that don’t conceal her diminutive stature.  

That's right on time

Her dress is backless, her skin an unblemished, blank canvas calling to him.

It's Tricky.

If she’d been wearing sweatpants, her hair casually plaited into a braid, her face clean and unmarred by all that makeup, she’d be a ringer for Katniss.

He rips his eyes away, not interested in checking out random women. But the similarity is so uncanny Peeta briefly contemplates approaching the girl to ask if her name happens to be Prim. They could be sisters, Katniss and that girl. He decides not to say anything to her because, no matter how he’d phrase it, it would only come across as some skeevy pickup line.

Glimmer grabs his arm, squeezing it impatiently, beckoning him to dance more with her. Beckoning him to do more than he wants to do with anyone but Katniss.  

Over the course of the next forty minutes Peeta loses a few things:

The doppelganger, who disappears somewhere in the crowd, flanked by a couple girls.

His sense of time as the music propels him forward, one song after another.

His grasp on reality as the alcohol soaks deeper and deeper into him, saturating him, blurring the edges of his vision and casting a sheen on everything he sees.

...And his ability to keep Glimmer off his dick.

He still knows the music, though— it’s inherent to him, ingrained in him— and he raps along with the crowd, looking around and laughing as they sing in unison. “I like big butts and I cannot lie. You other brothers can't deny that, when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face, you get…”

KATNISS.

It’s her. He realizes it’s her, and suddenly there’s no air left in the room. The room is a vacuum, choking him, and his lungs burn for oxygen.

His eyes lock on hers, and her eyes lock on his, and they gravitate toward each other like two neutron stars colliding. Glimmer follows in his wake, into whatever black hole Katniss and Peeta’s collision will inevitably, inexorably make.

If it weren’t for her scowl he’d doubt it was Katniss at all. He’s too drunk to consider why she’d be looking at him like that, too lost in the sight of her, but he’s thankful for that scowl, for that little reminder that it’s Katniss, his girl, who is standing in front of him.  

It’s been sixteen hours since he last saw her. Sixteen hours since he touched her. Since he heard her voice, tasted her on his lips. Too long. The way his stomach clenches at the sight of her reminds him how famished he’s been for her.

He’s starving for her.

Peeta gapes at Katniss in that dress that’s no dress at all. It barely covers her breasts, and he wants to cover her with his body, to cover her in kisses, to draw those perfect breasts into his mouth one by one and worship them. The dress hugs her body, snugly accentuating every curve and swell. But it doesn’t hug her like her could.

He wants her— needs her— out of that dress.

“Is this a dream?” he murmurs, refusing to believe his eyes, unable to accept the reality that just this morning he’d been between her legs, that he knows how this woman tastes on his tongue. “All my good dreams start with you dressed like that.” His eyes fall down her body, raking slowly across her as if to memorize each inch. “Fuck. I’m getting hard just looking at you.”

He licks his lips and reaches out for her, needing to touch her. Wanting to touch all of her, to climb up inside her and root there, remain there, die there, but settling instead for the feel of her cheek against his heated palm.

Katniss’ face is flushed, the hair at her temples damp from the humidity of the room. He’s not sure why, but he thinks she looks sad to see him. Disappointed, even.

The world is spinning, the floor is writhing beneath him, the strobes are painting streaks of light through the air, and the music is pumping through his veins. But all he can notice is Katniss standing in front of him.   

He’s about to ask her how... how is she here? how did they find each other? how is she his?, but Glimmer possessively twines her arms around him and asks, in a saccharine voice filled with daggers and landmines and poison, “Peeta, aren’t you going to introduce me?” His stomach fills with lead when she looks at Katniss and adds, “Who is the old lady? An older sister? Cousin?” She laughs, and the vicious sound slices through the air like a guillotine. “His Mom?”

He watches Katniss’ face fall and her eyes glaze over, and he wants to beg no no no please god no, not this, but before he can open his mouth to speak she is pushing frantically through the crowd. Her small hands jostle and shove at the shoulders and backs and arms of every oblivious person standing in her way, and in the blink of an eye she’s disappeared.

Glimmer’s laugh carries over the music and Peeta reels, stupidly trying to process what just happened, what the fuck just happened, raking both hands through his hair.

She has the nerve— Glimmer actually has the nerve— to touch him. One of her hands curls around his bicep, trying to pull an arm around her, but he easily wrests it from her grasp.

His voice is ice and hellfire wrapped into one. He sounds like a monster. He sounds like his mother. “Don’t,” he cautions her. “Don’t ever fucking touch me or talk to me again.”

Glimmer’s eyes grow wide, her mouth falls open in a silent “o” of shock. “But, Peeta,” she begins, “I was just jok—”

“No,” he shakes his head, his fists clenching and unclenching at his side. He’s never hit someone, would never hit a girl, but he’s so angry he wants to punch the wall and—  goddammit— he can’t think straight. “You’re despicable and pathetic.” The syllables sound slurred, the alcohol robbing him of the words he wants to use as weapons against her. He’s not used to this, the alcohol-induced aphasia, and his inability to grasp onto what he’d like to say frustrates him.

But he’s said what he could to Glimmer, for now.

Now he needs to find Katniss.

He heads for the front door, weaving through the thick crowd as quickly as he can, his heart thundering in his chest. People gripe at him and bicker to his back, but he doesn’t care. He unceremoniously cuts in front of people, pushing them aside with his shoulders. But the truth is that manners are for grandparents and job interviews and church. They’re not for chasing down the one person in this universe you’re fucking desperate for.

It’s a cloudy, moonless fall night, and when Peeta finally bursts through the front door and onto the damp pavement, it takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the unnatural glow of the light cast by the sodium street lamps. He surveys the crowd of smokers milling around the door, scanning each person’s face to see if she’s hidden among them. Pedestrians rush by on the packed sidewalk, their coat collars turned up to ward off the chill, shopping bags and purses clutched defensively to their chests. There’s so many people. Too many people. But none of them are Katniss.  

A yellow cab pulls up to the curb, the squealing of its brakes drawing Peeta’s gaze to it. Through the small crowd standing at the taxi stand, he spots her. She looks small, so much smaller than he knew a person could be, and as she rummages through her bag he can see her shoulders shaking.

“Katniss!” he yells, sick to his stomach, trying not to vomit from panic and terror and grief and desperation. “Wait!!”

Her face whips around, and as he bolts toward her he can see the dark tracks lining her face, the kohl-colored rivers of mascara and eyeliner forming gullies for her tears.

She takes a precarious step backward, and it sends a pang searing through his heart that her first instinct is to recoil from him.

“No,” he begs her. “Please don’t go yet.”

“Go away, Peeta,” she rasps, the words sounding like shredded ribbons or some beautiful glass bauble crushed underfoot, pulverized by a boot heel on unforgiving asphalt. “Go back inside to your girlfriend.”

He lunges forward and grabs her arm, pulling her away from the taxi stand and back, back until they’re beneath the awning of the building and it seems like it’s just the two of them. Katniss winces at the contact, and they both stare at where his hand clutches the bare skin of her arm, gripping her so tightly he’s leaving impressions of his fingertips on her. He releases her quickly.

“Shit,” he moans, staring at her thin arm, watching the blood pool back to the spots where his fingers had held her fast. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she tells him, and then, biting her lip, she looks off into the gloom of the night, her eyes unfocused and indistinct, and adds, “Yes.” She wraps her arms around her body and shivers, her body visibly shaking. A fat tear drops down her cheek, and she swipes it away impatiently, refusing to look at him. She shivers again, and Peeta thinks he can hear her teeth chattering, even over the noise of the street. He doesn’t have a coat to offer her, only his arms. But he doesn’t think she wants those, not after what just happened inside the Hob. Not after what she just said.

“It’s not what it looks like, Katniss,” he tries to assure her, but his words taste like a lie in his mouth because, if she asks, he’ll have to tell her that it’s sort of what it looks like. At least it was that one time. He adds, because it is the bald truth, “She’s not my girlfriend.”

Her gray eyes meet his then, and the look he sees in them silences him, shuts him down. “Don’t lie to me. I saw you two in there. I know, Peeta.” Her voice is hateful as she mimics Glimmer’s text, “Hey babe! Missed you tonight.” She spits the words at him, hurls them back in his face.

His initial reaction is mortification, and in a sober state of mind he would try to reason with her, to explain that it was a text Glimmer had sent him. A text he never replied to, one in a long line of unanswered missives.  

But he’s not sober, not at all, and so his desire to reason with her is subsumed by anger. “You were looking at my fucking phone? While we were sleeping together, and I was holding you, you were looking through my phone— for what? For shit to call me on? A way out?”

“No,” she retorts defensively, “The message woke me up when it came through at two fucking a.m.” She impatiently swipes at her lower lip, unconsciously smearing her dark red lipstick onto her chin.

Peeta can’t help but notice that it looks like Jackson Pollock put her makeup on for her. Katniss’ mess of a face looks like his heart—  breaking, splattering, exploding violently, tragically open. A wreck. They’re wrecked. She’s wrecked him, and he’s wrecked her, and maybe that’s all that’s left of them.    

Her voice is deadly. “Should I have been?”

He scrubs his face, not understanding, not following. “You’re going to have to be more specific. Should you have been what, Katniss?”

She huffs humorlessly. “Looking for shit to call you on.”

He searches her face, his pulse throbbing so loudly in his ears he can’t hear himself speak. “Say it. Whatever it is you want to say to me, just say it. Because I’ve never lied to you, not once. You tell me you’re too exhausted to go out with me and my friends, and wouldn’t you know it? I run into you at a bar.” He chokes on the next words, hates himself for even thinking them, much less saying them. “I run into you in a bar… in that dress… and shit, Katniss. You’ve got your ex calling you, showing up at your front door, so what shit are you going to call me on?” As he says the words, he wants to hate her, but even though he’s angry and jealous and defensive, he can’t hate her. He hates himself.

But he kind of loves her.  

She replies, but she doesn’t speak.

Speaking would be the rational response of a clear and sober mind, one unfettered by jealousy and gin.

Instead, she yells— or maybe it just feels that way.  

Her voice carries through the night, and everything around them falls silent to listen. Planes fall from the sky, the wind dies, the subway screeches to a halt, shoppers freeze mid-purchase, their credit cards extended outward to eager cashiers with fake smiles plastered on obsequious faces, and pigeons hunch in their roosts, cocking their heads. Everything stops to listen to Katniss.

Her voice is beautiful. Her voice is terrible. “Don’t pretend you haven’t fucked around, Peeta.”

He looks over his shoulder, suddenly conscious that they have an audience.

“You alright?” a lanky, bronze-haired guy asks Katniss, ignoring Peeta altogether, as he leans casually against the brick facade of the building. When she nods, the watchful eyes around them disperse, instantly disinterested.

Like all people, they just want a good show.

Peeta grabs her arm, lightly this time, and leads her around the corner of the building, into the alleyway between the Hob and the nondescript building next door. If they’re going to have this conversation now, and he guesses that there’s no choice in the matter, then it’s going to be in private.

“Where are we going?” Katniss grumbles, walking unsteadily on the deeply potholed, pocked pavement of the alley. Peeta doesn’t exactly know, but he steadies her as they walk, sloshing through filthy puddles of water. Halfway down the alley, between two hulking, overfilled dumpsters, he spots the stage door of the club. It’s slightly ajar, the stage lights illuminating the doorframe. The heat of the club radiates outside, dispelling some of the chilly night air.

“Over there,” he nods, figuring that they’ll be safe here and hopefully less cold too.

Katniss leans against the brick wall of the club for support and bites the inside of her cheek, waiting for Peeta to speak.

He takes his thumb and swipes a streak of mascara off her cheek, looking at the black smear on the pad of his thumb like he can read their futures in it. He takes a deep breath to steady himself and rests his right hand on the brick wall above Katniss’ shoulder, leaning in close to her so that she can hear him over the music filtering out of the club.

His voice is low in her ear, as low and steady as the bass. “If you want to ask me how many girls I’ve slept with, Katniss, that’s fair. I’ll tell you. But I think what you really need to know is how many I’ve slept with since the day I met you.”

He pulls away slightly to look at her face, gauging her reaction to his words. Peeta wants her to ask him more than anything. Ask me, he begs her silently. Ask.

Naturally, then, she doesn’t. She’s too proud, too stubborn, this hard-headed, maddening woman. She holds her chin high, and meets his eye, holding his gaze. Even in the dark of the alley, he can see the red lining her eyes and the way the alcohol has flushed her face. Her features are swollen, her makeup smeared, and she looks like a goddamn masterpiece anyway.

“You won’t ask,” he scoffs, so pissed at her he can barely stand. “And why’s that? Afraid you’ll hear something that might prove your idea of me wrong?”

He drops his head to her neck, his lips brushing her chilled skin. She feels the answer rather than hears it; he lets it sink into her nerves, traveling through her body to whatever damaged place within her that needs to hear it most. “One, Katniss. The answer is one. You. Only you. From the minute we met, it’s just been you.” His lips travel upward, skimming along her jaw, hovering at the corner of her mouth. “I can live with that. I want to live with that. Can you?”

Her voice cuts him off before he can kiss her. “Don’t—”

It feels like he’s just been sucker punched, and he doesn’t exactly know why. He stands up straight and falters backward. It’s so silent between them he can hear the clacking of heels on the pavement from the end of the alleyway as someone passes by. After a moment, he clears his head enough to ask her why. He thinks she owes him that much, just an answer.

Why can’t she live with it?

Her shoulders slump, and she rests her ass heavily against the wall as if the damn thing could take the weight off every burden she’s carrying. She stares at her heels, transfixed by them, apparently, and Peeta wants to rip them off her feet and chuck them down the fucking alley just so that she’ll look at him again. When she finally answers, her voice is so quiet he thinks he’s imagining her words.

“Because she’s right, and you know it. Ten years, Peeta. Do you know what people would say when they saw us together? Do you know what they would say about me? About you?”

Peeta shrugs, the words coming to him easily for the first time tonight. “I don’t honestly care.”

He wishes he knew why she did.

Katniss scowls and looks down the alleyway, the distant lights of the street catching in her charcoal gray eyes. “What’s this about anyway?” She takes a long, shuddering breath. “What are you trying to prove? Are you trying to get back at your parents… working out some mommy issues or something?”

He rends at his hair and resists the urge to growl at her, to actually, honest-to-fuck-growl in frustration. “For chrissakes, Katniss.” And then, because he can’t stand being so far from her, he storms toward her and pins her in place by resting both his arms against the wall. At this distance, he gives her no choice but to meet his eyes. When he’s this close he can count every goosebump on her skin, can feel her hot breath condensing on his neck and then dissipating in the bitter night air. His eyes fall to her lips, and she licks them, the moisture glistening from the low light pooling through the stage door.

Peeta hears himself speak, but he can’t control the words tumbling out of his mouth. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. It’s not fair. You’re not being fair.” His right palm smacks the cold brick wall, and the rough texture abrading his skin is the first thing that has felt right all night. “It’s not fucking fair—”

“No.” She cuts him off, her voice filled with resignation and regret. “It’s not fair.” He watches her hand skate up his chest, and his heart thunders with hope. He closes his eyes, relishing

the feel of her fingers toying with his hair, loosely running through the strands. This is the second thing that has felt right all night.

But her hand freezes and the world implodes and Peeta dies inside when she tells him, “This was a mistake.”

He shakes his head, refusing to accept that, and grinds his jaw, trying to work out some of the panic and anger swelling within him. “Don’t say that.” His hands fall to her waist, and he squeezes her tightly, his fingers digging into her hipbones with every syllable like some desperate Morse code, an SOS, being tapped through her body. “Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.”

She meets his gaze, and he reads the goodbye written across the planes of her face. He wishes he couldn’t, begs himself to become illiterate to her. “It was a mistake,” she repeats, her voice inflectionless.

His head drops onto her shoulder, and he buries his face in her smooth, naked skin. So this is how I die, he thinks. Holding her like this. Listening to her traitorous chorus, a lie. A lie.

Thoughts of me, thoughts of she, thoughts of he—

Asking what happened to the feeling that her and me—

The music creeps through the door and into the dark alleyway, and the angst in the lyrics rocks him, punching him in a way he’d never been hit before. This pain is new to him, this anguished longing.

He had thought himself something of an expert on pain, but this… this is an entirely new kind.

He runs his mouth along her shoulder, and her head falls back against the brick wall “Repeating yourself doesn’t make it real, Katniss.” He drags his tongue along her exposed collarbone, and because he’s beyond fucking pissed she would believe that of them, do this to them, he nips her skin roughly. He bites her again and again, along her collarbone, on her neck, working his way up to her earlobe, where he clamps down and draws it into his mouth, sucking and working the sensitive skin until she hisses and her pelvis bucks against him.

He lowers himself to grind against her, rubbing his hardening cock against her, and she moans into his ear, goading him on. His hands skate down along her waist, down to the bare skin of her legs, and begin to drag a path upward, hitching her short scrap of a dress up over her ass.    

“It was a mist-” she begins, but he kisses her to shut her up because he can’t hear her say that another time or he’ll go mad. His lips press savagely against hers, stealing her breath, and as he pulls her closer to him by the bare skin of her ass, she kisses him back, biting his lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

Peeta pulls back to look at her, to make sure that what he’s doing is okay, but she pulls him back down to her mouth, sucking at his wound, worrying it with her tongue.

“Fuck,” he groans into her mouth, running his tongue along her teeth to taste the sharp metallic tang of his own blood.  

So who you placing the blame on, you keep on singing the same song—

Let bygones be bygones, you can go on and get the hell on—

You and your mama—   

Maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the liquor, maybe it’s the way Katniss is grinding herself against him, but his hands drag upward until one rubs her clit through the thin fabric of her thong and the other kneads her ass, working her like dough. He runs his index finger along her slit to her entrance, feeling how wet she is, already soaking through her flimsy underwear.

Their chests heave in unison, both of them smothered by want, and when Peeta feels Katniss’ hands reach for his fly and unzip, reaching into his boxers to pull his cock out, he yanks her underwear down. The fabric pools around her ankles, and she clumsily kicks it off, pumping his erection while she teeters in her heels.

The discarded garment hasn’t hit the ground before Peeta wraps Katniss’ right leg around his waist, begging her to climb him so that he climb inside her.

She slings her arms around his broad shoulders, and he hoists her up, pressing her back against the brick wall for support. She hisses as the cold, harsh clay touches her bare skin, but he kisses the sound away and pushes inside of her.

“Oh god—” she moans loudly, almost crying, and Peeta kisses that sound away too, flicking his tongue into her mouth, caressing her tongue in penance for any pain.

Her fingers gouge into his back, and she digs her heels tightly around his waist, so tightly it feels like she’s pinching every damn nerve in his back. But she’s so warm and wet, and all he can think about is the feel of her pussy on his bare skin, the sound of their flesh smacking in time to the music, that he can’t care about the pain.

He fucks her hard and fast, and every time he drives deep inside her, his pelvic bone rubbing harshly against her clit, she wails and cries and moans and begs him for more.

The music from the club and the noise from the street are loud.

But Katniss is louder.

Peeta presses a palm to her cheek. “Shhh,” he whispers, searching for words, any words, when everything he knows is lost somewhere inside of Katniss. “Someone’s gonna hear…” He feels her muscles clench in response, squeezing him tighter, and she throws her head back against the wall, the brick snagging and grabbing at her locks, mussing and tangling it into a rat’s nest.

She turns her head so that his palm is over her mouth and licks his skin. It’s hot, it’s fucking hot, and just the thought of Katniss asking him to silence her moans makes him want to explode inside her. He presses his palm firmly against her mouth and watches her.

She watches him too, her eyes glazed over with pleasure and pain and booze and heartbreak.

He fucks her as long as he can, his legs trembling from carrying most of their weight, until he she squeezes her eyes shut and comes hard, her pulsating muscles wringing his own orgasm from him.

He leans in and kisses the back of his hand, where her mouth would be, as he spills inside of her.

He’s still dizzy and euphoric, holding her tightly to his chest and grappling for the right words to tell her what she means to him, what effect she has on him, when her legs slip from his waist. His hand falls from her mouth as he remembers there’s no more moans to stifle. Peeta tucks himself back into his pants, making sure Katniss has solid footing before taking half a step back to look at her.

He can’t wipe the moony smile off his face because he’s a drunken, stupid fool.

A drunken, stupid fool who just fucked the girl he loves in a filthy, grimy alleyway.

Katniss pulls down her dress and smooths her hair, her colossally snarled hair, her gaze fixed to the ground.

Peeta begins to speak, to tell her every single thing she makes him feel, or at least to try. “That was—”

“— A mistake.”

It’s a broken record, this lie she tells him— just words repeated, their potency gleaned from the galling repetition of one false note, not from any basis in truth.

She walks up to him, kissing him gently like he might break and tells him, “I’ll see you at the store.”

Peeta stand there, dumbfounded and helpless, watching the girl he loves walk away, down the alley toward the street. She disappears into the jungle of the city, swallowed by the shadows of the night.  

She turns around to look at him one last time, something like a wistful smile toying at the corner of her mouth.

And that’s when he loses her.

********************************

His semen is still warm and sliding down the inside of her thighs when she walks away from him. He doesn’t know it, but she’s left her heart with him for safekeeping.

She won’t need it anymore, she doesn’t think.

He can keep it and live with it and then, when he finds the right girl, he can stow it away in a box of memories in some dark place, some alcove in his basement where no one ever goes, some secret spot, danky and musty and forgotten, where it can beat alone, and die one day, unattended and unmourned.

She tries not to trip, tries not to fall, because once you fall it’s impossible to pick yourself back up, to stitch yourself back together in one piece. It takes so long to do that, to put yourself back together. She doesn’t have the time to do that again.  

But she can’t resist turning back for one last glimpse of him. He stands there, fists clenched at his side, his jaw rolling from tension and hurt.

And she’s crying, the tears sliding down her face, falling to the dank and dirty ground. But she’s smiling.

Because he’s hers, and she’s his. And they’re wrong, all wrong, but there’s something so perfect in that symmetry.

At the curb she raises her arm, hailing a cab.

She’s hasn’t even shut the door behind her when her phone buzzes in her bag. She fumbles and reaches for it, and when she sees the message on the screen she smiles.