Their first time together wasn't softness and candlelight and champagne and roses. That was how everyone thought it was. But no, they were dirty, tired, sweaty, and their shared grief showed in their urgent pants, his rough thrusts, their oh fuck yeses, demands for more, until they both spiraled away into the heavens where all was right, she could actually touch people without harming them, he didn't have a lifetime of memories erased, they weren't working out their grief in a brief fuck in the woods, he wasn't mourning for a love, she didn't have one still breathing.
That was at two a.m.
They both buried the memory far away from their conscious minds, replaying only in the realms of half-forgotten dreams. He went back to his grief; she went back to Bobby, who was none the wiser that she was no longer a virgin. Bobby was candlelight and roses, all the things that any girl should be happy to have.
But he wasn't what she needed.
She needed a body that would back her up against the nearest surface that could hold their combined weight and fuck her so senseless she couldn't care if she was half-clothed.
She only thought of that when two a.m. snuck up on her.
He sometimes got a stir of memory that penetrated his grief. He only got it when he was alone. So he stayed as close to Scott as he could, both helping to shore up the other's defenses when they were down. To him, Jean was what could have been. To Scott, she was what was. He couldn't deny the man his righteous anger at first. After a while, they quietly buried their differences and leaned on each other when the going got too rough.
His dreams were out of his control. Nightmares, about Aliki Lake, about Jean, about whatever faceless demons he had faced in his forgotten past, they always came back to haunt him. Except for when those flashes of memory intruded, waking him up shaking, breathing hard, wanting to call her name.
When he woke from those dreams, the clock always read two a.m.
Two a.m. came and went for years, and life moved on.
She realized it first. She realized that she didn't need the champagne and roses, she need the dirty talk, the ability to lift her against a wall and fuck her brains out, the unconscious arrogance that he wore like a second skin. But she couldn't get that roughness yet. She still had Bobby, he still had his grief, and she didn't really know what she was doing, thinking so heavily at two a.m., staring at the blank TV like it was a miracle of science. But she still knew.
He realized it when he was waking up more often than not at two a.m., hard, aching, and just on the verge of climax. He realized it when his dreams weren't full of red, but rather her two tone. He realized it when he finally gave into temptation and wrapped a hand around his length, giving himself those final strokes, and quietly moaned her name, that he couldn't go back to his grief.
But he still had to wait for her. She still had Bobby.
Life kept going on, he dealt with the wanting and the remaining shards of his grief, she coped with the numerous pressures: Bobby, college, the team, the kids she taught, the remains of the only time she had ever killed, until she couldn't deal any longer and she and Bobby splintered. To her, it was actually a relief. She could finally get what she needed. But she still had to wait a little while longer.
It was all going well until she took a walk in the woods one night, unable to sleep. It was almost two, and the dreams were especially vivid then. She hoped to walk it off, make herself so tired she could do nothing but sleep. She should have known that he would be out here as well.
He growled a few words at her, and she simply gave up trying to fight the memory. That was their tree just off to their left, still marked by six slashes where his claws had pierced the trunk. It was less than six months after, and she was just so damn tired of fighting the memory of him dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans, barefoot, throwing her against a tree, unwrapping her scarf and moving it over her lips so he could kiss her. She never knew where the condom had come from, probably from his wallet, but he was suddenly there, between her legs, thrusting into her body. She needed it then, just as she needed it now.
Back in the mansion, the clock struck two a.m.
He knew that she had accepted this, accepted them, and to him, that was nothing but a blatant turn on. She accepted that he would rarely give her softness, he was just too wild and untamed for that, she accepted him. She never stopped loving him from the inside out.
That thought humbled him far more than anything anyone could say. He could see her love shining in those dark, fathomless brown eyes, he could see her love reflected in the platinum streaks she never bothered to dye, he could see it in the way she moved her body, opening herself up to him. Thanking God that this time he could actually feel her skin under his, he held his hand out to her.
They'd both been waiting too long to go slow.
She knew that he would lead her to their tree, strip her of her clothes and her defenses and wrap himself around her so completely that come morning, everyone would know. She took his hand without a second thought.
Her shoes came off first, tossed off to the side carelessly, and followed quickly by her shirt and jeans. She wasn't wearing a bra this late at night and her tiny cotton panties were easily torn from her body with one flex of his arm. His hands, so large, dark, and yes, deadly traveled from the smooth skin of her hips up to her breasts, cupping the warm flesh. Her head went back and she moaned into the night. Her legs shifted, giving him a message that he had best hurry up and get himself naked and in her. The warm hands disappeared, replaced by cooler air, and she shivered, opening her eyes to see him already pushing his jeans down over his hips.
God, he was just as big as she remembered. Still liked to go commando, too. She looped her arms around his neck as he came closer and swayed towards his body. He easily lifted her, as if she still weighed no more than when she did when they last did this, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, opening herself to him. He growled softly in her ear, plunging into her just as swiftly as he did that last time. The tree bark was rough against her sensitized skin, but it wouldn't be painful for very long. Those rough thrusts were quickly making her head swim. One arm left his neck and drifted down to between their bodies. It only had two soft rubs of her clit before she came, biting down on the junction of his neck and shoulder in an effort to stop the piercing scream of his name.
He grunted when he came, just like the last time. But this time, instead of immediately withdrawing and the both of them awkwardly straightening their clothing before dashing off in opposite ways, he stayed in her, idly sucking on the patch of skin she had marked on him. He wanted to tell her that he loved her in return, but he suspected that she already knew, just from the way she shushed him with a finger over his lips before replacing that finger with her soft mouth.
That was love to them, the hard thrusts, the dirty talk, the scalding orgasms, their tree, and two a.m.
They stayed there in the woods until daybreak when they walked back to the mansion with his arm over her shoulders, their steps perfectly in sync, just like they had always been. It only took them several years to figure it out.
She was right. As soon as they walked into breakfast, everyone knew. And no one said a word. Everyone just accepted that they were and moved on.
-fini
