Bruce Wainright has (onerule) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-28 23:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, catwoman |
Who: Luke and Wren
What: Talking. (2/2)
Where: Parking lot.
When: Recently, after this call.
Warnings/Rating: More angst.
The pleading desperation in his voice hurt, and it was so very hard to stay strong in the face of it. He was so close, and all she wanted was to make him stop hurting, to make him okay, to not have done this to him. Because it was her fault. All of this, it was her fault. She’d set this in motion years ago, and now she’d pushed him too far, and she just didn’t know what to do in order to fix it. But he was so close, and her fingers came to rest against his stomach, fingernails pressing against the thick fabric of his work shirt. And touching him was the only way she knew to calm him down, but it wasn’t working. One of her hands slid up and over that unforgiving fabric, and she didn’t stop until she could dip her fingertips beneath the fabric at his throat, until her fingers found warm skin and a heartbeat that moved so quickly she couldn’t even hope to count the beats. “I asked. I asked just by being with you,” she said, her fingers fighting with the top button on his shirt in an unthinking twist and tug, until here was more skin under her fingertips there. “I dragged you into everything, just like Thomas said. I broke you before New York ever did, and now I brought it all back, and I made it worse. You shouldn’t have to deal with this, you shouldn’t,” she said, and she could have repeated that litany for years. She could have just said the words over and over, her nails pressing crescents into the skin of his hip, even with the shirt for protection. “I could’ve left you alone,” she repeated mournfully. “I could’ve been your friend, and I could’ve let someone else come into your life, someone sweet and kind and without my past. She shook her head. “Thierry. Thierry just proved it, didn’t it? That I’m not okay, and that I’m not okay in a way that- It dragged so many things to the surface Luke, and I won’t ruin your life by making you deal with them. I won’t. I’ve done enough already.” It was bad enough he had to sleep beside her at night, while she twisted and turned and woke up screaming from nightmares. It was bad enough she couldn’t even work up the courage to buy a pregnancy test at the store, because it all just made her think of how things had been, and it was all too close, too similar, and she didn’t want to do this to him again.
When he whimpered, the hand at his chest moved up, fingers cupping his cheek and trying to get him to stay still. She moved forward, pressed against him, using her body to try to keep him from panicking. She was smaller than him, softer and insignificant, really, compared to the muscles and leanness that came from police academy training. But she tried. “I was the only thing you had,” she said sadly, the effort of actually pursuing this evident in how badly she was crying, “and you missed me because I was all you had. It doesn’t mean I’m good for you, Luke. It doesn’t mean I’m good for you, It just means I made things worse by leaving,” she said, because the truth of that had never seemed as clear as it was then. And maybe she should have feared the things he was saying. Maybe it should have terrified her, his refusing to let her go, but it didn’t. God help her, it didn’t. It just made it harder, and it made her determination waver. When his thumbs dragged across her cheeks, her gazed lifted. She looked up before he even managed to tip her chin up. “I don’t want to leave you,” she agreed, a broken little doll admitting something he already knew to be true. “This isn’t about me wanting to go,” she said, because it wasn’t. And maybe it just muddled things, and maybe it just made things worse, made things hurt more, but she stretched against him and kissed him. The kiss was tear damp desperation, open-mouthed, but no tongue, no pushing for more than what it was. It was feeling, emotion and sorrow, all in the press of lips, and she sobbed helplessly as she broke the kiss and pressed her lips to his jaw. “I can’t stay and force you to relive my past, and I don’t know how to keep it buried anymore. I don’t know what to do, Luke, and I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to be the one who hurts you.” She looked at their joined hands, when he lifted them. She looked at the rings, and she wondered if she shouldn’t have pushed him to marry her. That had been her doing too, hadn’t it? He’d just wanted to get engage. Her expression turned sadder, and her voice was a whisper when she spoke again. “I’ve cornered you into so many things,” she said heartbreak-grave and realization making her heart break.
He wasn’t sure whether her touching him made this better or worse. Better, because he’d always liked her touch, always craved it, but worse because it made the things she was saying hurt even more, made his fear all the more suffocating. Panic turned to desperation, blind and crazed, with only one goal in mind; to keep her. To not lose her. Because this wasn’t going to end with her leaving, it just wasn’t. “No,” he repeated, and he might as well have just repeated that word, over and over, as a denial to everything she said. She was wrong, she was so, so wrong, and he didn’t understand how she couldn’t see that. “Thomas was wrong. You can’t honestly believe anything he said, Wren. You can’t. You didn’t ask anything, and you didn’t break me. You didn’t. You didn’t make anything worse. You-- you don’t understand, that you only make things better. Please,” he begged. “Please, please, just listen to me. Just this once, believe me. You’re wrong. You think you’re doing all these things, but you’re not.” It wasn’t her fault that he had trouble dealing with her past. It was his, but he could learn to deal, he knew he could. If he just stopped pretending it hadn’t existed, he could. He’d dealt with so much worse, after all. He lived with the knowledge that he’d killed people, that he’d done bad, horrible things in anger and pain that he could never take back. With time, he could be okay. He knew he could. He just had to make her see that. “I didn’t want you to leave me alone, and I didn’t want anyone else. I wanted you. Only you. You are sweet, and you are kind, and your past doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t. It never has.” His words were half-sobbed now, and he had a hard time staying coherent. After everything they’d been through, after she knew how much he’d missed her, he couldn’t comprehend the reality that she was actually considering leaving him again, that she actually thought it might be better for him. “Thierry didn’t prove anything,” he insisted, and there was a newfound fierceness there, strength he didn’t know he had. “You’re not ruining my life. You’ve never ruined my life, do you hear me? You never have, and you never could. Never,” he repeated.
Staying still was so, so hard. He tried, he did, but when she moved forward he couldn’t help pressing against her, wanting to feel that she was there, that she was with him, when he was so very afraid of losing it all. “Stop,” he whispered. It was a broken, desperate plea. “Please, please, stop. That’s not true. None of it is true. Please, don’t do this.” He kept trying to breathe, to compose himself, but he couldn’t do it. “I missed you because I love you. I missed you because I didn’t want you to leave, because I wanted to be with you. That’s why. Don’t- don’t tell me why I missed you. Don’t do that. You don’t know. I know. I know how much I love you, and I know how I felt, and I know what I want. You are good for me,” he told her. “I know that. You can say you’re not as much as you want, but I don’t care, because I know you’re wrong.” He sobbed when she said she didn’t want to leave him, and he clung to that with a wild, desperate sort of hope. He had a chance, didn’t he? If she didn’t want to leave, and he didn’t want her to leave, then he had a chance. “Then don’t leave,” he whispered, just before she kissed him. He responded eagerly, desperately, his fingers curling around her jaw to pull her closer, but he didn’t push or demand more than she gave. “You can stay,” he said immediately. “You can. Stay. Please, please, stay. You’re not hurting me by staying. God, Wren, please, I want you to stay. I need you to stay. We’ll figure it out, okay? We will. Together, we’ll work it out, and it’ll be okay. Just don’t go. You can’t leave. You can’t.” He shook his head when she said she’d forced him into so many things, no, no, no. That wasn’t what he’d tried to show at all when he’d drawn attention to their wedding rings. “You didn’t corner me into anything, dammit. Stop-- you’re making it sound like I don’t want any of this, and I do. I always have. I wanted to marry you just as much as you wanted to marry me. Everything we have, I wanted,” he said, and the honesty in his voice was simple, quiet, and so painfully clear. “Listen to me. Just listen. I’m not going to let you go. Okay? I can’t. I won’t. You leaving won’t be better for me, I promise, it won’t be. So no. No. You’re not doing this,” he insisted, half-sobbed but no less emphatic.
She shook her head as he begged, tears running freely now. “You don’t see it right,” she said. “I haven’t always made things better. Don’t say that, because if you say that, then I know you aren’t telling the truth,” she said, and now she was begging. Because she wanted to believe him, she wanted to believe him so very much. She wanted to lose herself in the reassurance that she hadn’t brought all this on him, but even she couldn’t believe what he was saying, even with how much she wanted to. “The memories,” she reminded him, because those had almost driven him insane. She still remembered how he’d been that day, hardly able to look at her, and hardly able to touch her. “And I left. I left you when you needed me,” she said thickly, so much breaking in her voice that she had to gasp at the end of the sentence. “And I did it because I slept with dozens of other men in Seattle.” And she was on a roll now, her voice picking up speed, picking up intensity. “I’ve let people take terrible pictures of me, and I’ve done films, Luke, everything you can imagine. Anything you can imagine, and I lost Gus, and he went through hell because of me. How can you say that I didn’t make anything worse? All I’ve done is make things worse. All I’ve done is break you down. That’s who I am, and that’s why you have to pretend, because who I am isn’t who you want to believe I am. I’m not, Luke. I’m not that person.” And that was what she’d seen in his eyes in Thierry’s shop, that realization, that truth. And she wanted to wrap herself up in the fierceness of his voice. She wanted to just let it curl around her. She wanted to believe, and she wanted to give in, but how could she? In the face of that, how could she? “Do you remember how much you hated me when you found me here? That was real. That was real. I deserved that."
She closed her eyes when he pressed against her. His whispered plea for her to stop kept her quiet. She was breath, gasped and quick, but she didn’t say anything while he spoke, not after he told her to stop. Her hands were everywhere. Her fingers were everywhere, and she sobbed at her own weakness, because she wasn’t helping. Kissing him and clinging to him, it wasn’t helping. It wasn’t making anything better, but it was desperation. It was the possibility that this might be the last time she could touch him. Her hands slid beneath the hem of his shirt, and she wedged her fingers beneath his bulletproof vest, and beneath the undershirt that protected his skin from that fabric. She sighed a broken sigh when her fingers found skin, warm and muscled and okay. She shuddered, and she was having trouble remembering her argument, remembering why this was important. “I did-“ she began of cornering him into marrying her. She started, but he kept talking, and she was wet grey eyes and a trembling lower lip. “It’s better,” she insisted, but there was no strength to the argument, not like before. “You could meet someone nice, someone who would be good for Gus, and who wouldn’t go hide in a tent for weeks. Someone who didn’t need to leave the house because of a CIA agent, and someone who could help you with the bills, and someone who could be strong when you needed them to.” She shook her head, but even that had no kind of strength behind it. “Someone not me. Try? For me? Try?” she begged, but she wanted him to say no. God help her, but she wanted him to say no. She didn’t even know what she would do if he said yes. She kissed him again, and she leaned into him, her hand wedged between their bodies and her fingers pressing bruises into his skin.
He was already shaking his head before she’d finished speaking, the pain merely a dull ache by this point. Tears kept blurring his vision despite his best attempts to keep them at bay, and his cheeks were wet, but they’d both completely bypassed calm and it didn’t matter anymore; his world had shrunk to just the two of them, no one else. “No, I do see it right,” he insisted, gasped and hiccupy with tears. “I am telling the truth. I wouldn’t lie to you about this, Wren. I never have. It’s the truth. It’s always been the truth.” His palms slid along her jaw on either side, and his thumbs brushed over her cheeks, and he tried very, very hard not to make his hold too tight as he listened. He didn’t flinch when she mentioned the men in Seattle, or the films, or any of it. They were all things he wanted to pretend didn’t exist, but they did, and he wasn’t going to shrink away from them like a coward anymore. “The memories weren’t your fault,” he told her. “It wasn’t your fault that any of those things happened to you, and it wasn’t your fault that I saw them. They were hard to see because-- because I love you, and it always hurts to see someone you love being hurt,” he said, voice catching in his throat. “But that’s it. And I know, now, I can’t change the past. I know.” He still wished, sometimes, that he could, but he didn’t drive himself crazy with pointless what ifs anymore. “I understand why you left. I didn’t, before, but I do now, and I’ve forgiven you for that. I don’t blame you, and it was my fault too. It was. Whatever you’ve done, all those things, it doesn't matter. And Gus-- he was taken from you. Don't you dare blame yourself for that, okay? Don't," he repeated, and then he was sobbing again, forcing the words out in between. "No, no, you're wrong. That's not who you are. You haven't made things worse, and you haven't broken me down, and I've never, ever pretended you're someone you're not. I know exactly who you are. You're kind, and sweet, and selfless, and there isn't a part of you I don't love. I see who you really are, even if you don't." His expression became almost pained when she asked I'd he remembered how much he'd hated her, and he took a quick, sharp breath to keep from breaking down completely. "I never hated you," he whispered. "I was angry, and I was hurt, but I didn't hate you. I could never hate you. I love you too much. Even after all that time, I wanted you back the second I saw you. I don't know what I would've done if you'd moved on. I wouldn't have been able to take it," he admitted.
The feel of her fingers against his skin beneath all those layers made him press closer, and he made a quiet, needy sound against her lips that became a whimper when she said it was better. "It's not. It's not better," he said, and while there might not have been strength in her insistence, there was in his. There was, however, no hesitation when she asked him to try, not even a second in which he considered agreeing. "No. No, no, no," repeated over and over, as though doing so somehow made the words more powerful. "I can't. I can't, and I won't. I don't want to find someone else. I want to be with you. I love you. You're all I need, so no, I won't try." He didn't mind that the press of her fingers was hard enough to bruise, and he kissed her back with enough intensity to silence any further protests as he slid one hand down from her face so he could slide an arm around her waist to keep her close.
She closed her eyes when his palms slid along her jaw, and she couldn't hold back a hitched sigh when his thumbs brushed over her cheeks. She didn't care how tight his hold was, and she would have told him, had she known he was worried about it. She always wanted more from him, as if that would make all of this more permanent. But the thought of permanence was like a dull knife between her ribs right then, and it made it hard for her to breathe. When his voice caught in his throat, she wanted to take back all the memories he'd seen, all the things he knew. She wanted to turn back time and give him another life, a good life. A life where he stayed with his parents, and where he never went to Seattle. Even if it meant never having him, and even if it meant never having experienced love. She shook her head, even with the press of fingers against her cheeks, when he said her leaving was his fault too, and she just shook her head harder when he insisted Gus had been taken away from her. "Don't absolve me," she pleaded. "What I did mattered. The things I did wrong, they hurt you, and they hurt Gus. Don't absolve me." Because forgiveness was one thing, but sharing blame in her crimes, that was something she wasn't going to let him do. Even if she gave in and stayed, she wasn't going to forget the things she'd done. She'd earned that hurt; she deserved that hurt. And she didn't know how to explain to him that he was wrong about her. Maybe she was the things he said, but that wasn't all she was, and she was still positive he didn't understand that. How could he? How could he understand and still want to be with her? His pained expression made her take a step back, because she hadn't thought she could make things worse still, but she was. Somehow, she was. She started crying more freely, and she didn't know what to do when he echoed her thoughts. If he'd found someone, what would she have done? She didn't know. She shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts from her mind. She needed to be okay with that, didn't she? She needed to be okay with that, for this to work.
Even with the step back, her fingers were still pressed hard against his skin, and she didn't try to maintain the newly won distance when he pressed closer and made that needy sound into the kiss that followed. "This is so hard," she said, whisper-sobs and agony against his mouth. "I just want to stay, and I want to wrap my arms around you, and I want to make it better. But how do I do that, when I'm the one who made this happen? I don't know how to make this not happen again, Luke," she admitted, and there was so much wavering there. "I don't know how to be who I was. I can't figure out how to not want things anymore." The wavering in her words was almost as tangible as the sway when he lowered the hand from her face and slid it around her waist. She moved closer a second later, a sagging of her shoulders and defeat in the way her breath began hitching worse against the kiss. She whimpered when she finally gave up the fight, parting her lips and taking more from the kiss than she had before. When she pulled back, it was with her hands clinging to his biceps, and with her forehead against his chest, head bowed and voice quiet. "You have to promise to meet me in the middle. If I don't make you go, then you have to be willing to do something to make it better for you. You have to," she said, guilt in the concession.
It was a widely known fact that Luke would do just about anything for her, but her pleas for him to not absolve her were difficult to hear; he might have spent years being angry and hurt because she’d left, but he never had been very good at blaming her for things, or letting her take the blame onto herself. “I want to,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to blame yourself. I don’t want you to feel guilty. How can I not absolve you?” He could, and would, forgive her anything. What had been so disconcerting at Thierry’s shop was not the act itself, necessarily, but the lack of regard she expressed afterward, as though she felt nothing at all and didn’t care about the potential consequences-- for her, like jail time. She could kill dozens of men, come home and tell him as much, and he wouldn’t stop loving her. He wouldn’t think any less of her. His first instinct would be to protect her, to keep her from going to jail. Maybe it was because of his own tainted past, but he wasn’t capable of thinking poorly of her. He immediately leaned forward when she stepped back, alarmed that he’d done something wrong, especially when her tears began flowing more freely. He wasn’t sure what he’d said, exactly, that had triggered the change and made things worse, but he sought to soothe it through touch, as though the simple pressure of his fingers through her dress could somehow make everything better.
He knew, though he wouldn’t verbalize it, that this was his fault. Had he not reacted badly to her picture, they wouldn’t be here right now, and neither of them would be in tears or sobbing against each other, and she wouldn’t have tried to convince him that he was better off without her. It made him determined to change, even while she claimed that she was the one who needed to fix this. “It doesn’t have to be hard,” he told her, reassuring quiet and warmth against her mouth. “You can stay. You will stay. I want you to. And I want your arms around me, and you being here makes it better, it does. This wasn’t your fault. You didn’t do this,” he insisted. “You don’t have to not want things. You don’t have to be anyone other than who you want to be, okay? I just-- I need to learn to deal, and I need to stop hiding from the past. I need to do that, and I will. And then this won’t ever happen again.” Maybe he was doing exactly what she’d asked him not to and absolving her, but he just couldn’t see this as her fault. She’d chosen to show him the picture, she’d wanted him to see it, and he should have been able to accept it for what it was instead of upsetting her like this. He sighed against her mouth when she gave in, a mixture of relief and pleasure, and he stroked her hair in a continuous motion when she leaned her forehead against his chest. He’d do anything to make her stay, but he didn’t want to promise something at her expense either. “What do you want me to do?”
"Because I don't actually deserve it," she told him, of absolution. She believed it, and she would always believe it. Making mistakes that affected her was one thing, but making mistakes that affected him, that affected Gus, that was something entirely different. It hurt her to think about it, and she thought that was a good hurt. She thought that ache needed to be there, and she thought that it was her penance. Their lives could have all gone so very differently, and she would never forget that. She didn't, not for a moment, think that his willingness meant anything bad about him, that it hinted at anything negative or tainted. She never thought of him as tainted. She thought of him as being too good, and as the world just not understanding that in the way that she did. The pressure of his fingers through her dress drew her back to the moment, grounded her, and she was staring at him by the time he said that this didn't have to be hard. Her vision was tear blurred, and she had to fight her fingers from beneath his shirt to rub at her eyes. And then he was reassuring warmth against her mouth, sob-tear kisses, and she stopped trying not to cry again. "It's not that easy," she said of him learning to be okay with the past, of not hiding. She knew him; she knew that was how he survived, and she didn't want him crumbling because he was trying to deal with something for her. But his hand in her hair was soothing enough to make her shoulders stop trembling, and the soothing drag of his fingers through tangled locks made her breathing even out in order to match the speed he set with his fingertips. She sniffled, and she looked up at him, reluctant to break the contact. "I don't know. Something. A break. Time to breathe. No figuring things out until we can think," she suggested, because he had to be as exhausted as she was just then, he had to be. One of her hands cupped his cheek, and her thumb brushed against his lips. "It would be so much easier for you if you let me go," she said, sad and knowing, but no longer pushing for him to do so.
“I think you do, though,” he said of her not deserving absolution. It was so very indicative of how they were, really, that he was so willing to absolve her when he could never give himself that same absolution. He thought she was so much better than him, that she deserved things he would never be worthy of. They would probably never see eye to eye on that, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that they could see good in each other; it made up for what they couldn’t see in themselves. “Why?” It was a quiet question, a response to her tearful assertion that it wasn’t that easy. “Just this once, why can’t it be easy? I can do it, I know I can,” he insisted, with the same sort of stubborn determination he’d had back in Seattle, when he wanted to do something no one thought he could. He kept up the soothing repetition of his fingers through her hair, while his hold on her waist didn’t loosen in the slightest. “I don’t want a break,” he said immediately, alarm entering his expression. He’d agreed to a break once before, and he’d never stopped regretting it; he wasn’t about to make that same mistake again. “Us being apart never works, Wren. Please. Not that,” he begged. He leaned into her touch when she cupped his cheek, and his breathing hitched when she ran her thumb over his lips. “No, it wouldn’t be,” he said simply. “I’ll never let you go, Wren. Not ever.”
She gave him a sad, adoring smile when he said he thought she deserved to be absolved, because that was just like him. And he was right about them not seeing eye to eye. Sometimes, she could almost believe that what he thought of her was true, and that alone was such a difference. Before him, she'd never thought anything positive of herself at all, and now she found herself catching herself forgetting. As for why it couldn't be easy, she just gave him a tiny shake of her head. "Because you shouldn't have to," she told him, and she very much believed that to be true. He shouldn't have to face horrors for her. She didn't want him to face horrors for her. "I know you can, but you shouldn't have to." And she didn't like that alarm that entered his expression. "I won't go," she promised. She could give him space without going, couldn't she? She worried her lip as his breath hitched, and she brushed her thumb back over his lips, tracing the path it had just traversed. "You shouldn't say that," she whispered of him saying he wouldn't let her go, but there was something hopeful in her eyes, something that said she didn't want him to actually let her have her way. She kissed him then, fingers curling behind his nape to tug him down into the kiss. It was a kiss that savored of desperation, of hot breath and fear, of a heart that raced too faced, and of holding on too tight. She was breathless by the time she pulled back, and she had to remind herself to breathe. "I won't go, but no touching. Promise?" she asked, and maybe that would help. Maybe the kiss should have told her otherwise, but her intentions were good, and she wanted to give him time without anything to distract him.
She backed away, glancing over as someone walked into the lot, then looking back. "Promise," she asked, a hand reaching out, fingers tracing along his hip, sneaking in that tiny touch before he agreed.
He could understand why she thought he shouldn’t have to face her past. He didn’t agree with it, but he could understand. It was the same way he felt about her, about certain things he didn’t think she should have to face even when she insisted upon it. “I know you think I shouldn’t have to,” he told her, “but I think I do. I want to, for you. I’d do anything for you, and you’d do anything for me. That’s just how it works when you’re as in love with someone as I am with you.” He’d gotten better at expressing how he felt over the years, but he still flushed a little, actually saying the words aloud making him feel oddly bashful. There was evident relief in his expression when she said she wouldn’t go, though a hint of worry still lingered. “Yes, I should,” he said firmly, when she said he shouldn’t say that he’d never let her go. “It’s true, Wren. I promised you that once, didn’t I? And I meant it. No matter what happens, I’ll never let you go.” Coming from someone else, those words might have been cause for alarm, but Luke didn’t mean them in that context at all; he would never, ever actually keep her against her will. He shuffled forward when she pulled him into the kiss, responding with just as much desperation and need as she gave, a groan muffled against her mouth. It was hard to let her pull back, and confusion clouded his features when she mentioned no touching. He’d promise her anything, he would, but he hesitated before promising this; it was always hard for him to not touch her when they were in the same room. He wasn’t exactly sure how it would help, either.
“I don’t know if that’s a promise I can keep,” he admitted, glancing down when her fingers traced along his hip. He caught her wrist gently, carefully, running his thumb along the skin underneath. “But I can try, if that’s what you want.”
If he'd gotten better at expressing his feelings, she'd gotten better about believing them. She didn't doubt that he loved her; that wasn't part of this at all. But she still loved that flush in his cheeks, and it made her smile for the first time since they'd been standing there. She almost told him that he was beautiful. She almost wound herself around him, and she almost let herself forget all of her convictions in that moment. That kiss made it even harder to stand her ground, when all she wanted was to crawl inside him and never, ever leave. And she wasn't scared of him. She never worried that he'd do anything against her will, because what she wanted hadn't changed. She wanted him, and she always had, and she always would. This wasn't about that, and it had never been about that. She made a sound that was all whimpered need and regret at having to break away from him, and she looked down when he caught her wrist. When his thumb traced the underside of her wrist, she forgot to breathe, and she didn't look away until he'd finished talking.
When she looked up, the longing on her face was stark and raw. "I don't want it," she admitted, because she knew it would be impossible to even pretend she did. "But I want you to be able to think, and I want you to be able to think without me distracting you." She'd always drawn him in with sex, all the way back to that ice locker all those years ago. She didn't say it, but it showed on her face. And maybe this time she'd be strong enough to really give him the time to figure things out. She'd always folded in the past. She'd always given in to her own desire to touch him. "You have to tell me no, okay? If I try something."
His hold on her wrist tightened when she looked up at him, and even though she’d tried to put distance between them he couldn’t help taking a step towards her, unthinking, at the sight of all that longing in her expression. He didn’t want it either, and he’d never been very good at self-control when it came to her. Back when he was a teenager, inexperience had held him back, but now he didn’t have much incentive to keep from touching her. “What do I need to think about?” He tipped his head to the side, honestly curious. There was no denying that he had a hard time thinking straight, or at all, when they were together, but that had never bothered him before and he didn’t see a problem with it now. He tugged on her wrist, a wordless request for an explanation. “If you try something?” He repeated the words, disbelieving, and couldn’t help a small laugh at the way it sounded. “That makes it sound like-- I don’t know, like you’re going to try seducing me or something. Like it’s a bad thing.” He glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot, and shuffled a little closer. “I’ll think about whatever you want me to think about, Wren, but what if I don’t want to tell you no?”
All that tugging on her wrist made it hard to think, and she made a sound that was all whimpered restraint, because all she wanted to do was lean into him when he did that. But she couldn't, and she shook her head, drawing back when he shuffled closer, her voice mournful. "No," she said, and it was the hardest thing for her to say, and it was obvious she didn't actually want to say it, thanks to the way the words choked in her throat. "I always made your choices for you using sex, ever since the very beginning. I don't want to do that this time," she insisted. "I want you to take a few days and think about whether or not you want this, and if it's bad for you, and then maybe we should talk, once you've had time to think," she suggested. She scuffed one shoe against the other, and she bit her lip, and she hiked the fabric of her dress up at the hip. "I can sleep in Gus' room," she offered. She almost offered the couch, but she really didn't want Jack wondering why she was sleeping there, and maybe he wouldn't notice if she was in Gus' room.
He stopped abruptly when when she drew back, and his expression became something sad. "You didn't," he protested of her making his choices for him using sex, quiet but stubborn even though he didn't expect to change her mind. His hold on her wrist loosened, and then he let go altogether, rubbing his newly free hand along his jaw as she spoke. "I don't need time to think, Wren. I want this, and I want you, and a few days isn't going to change that." But he'd kept repeating that, hadn't he, and she still didn't believe him. Maybe agreeing to her terms was the only way to convince her of the truth. "But if it'll help you believe me, then okay," he relented, albeit reluctantly. "I can take a few days." At least she wasn't leaving, right? As for her sleeping in Gus' room, he just shrugged, scuffing at the ground with the toe of his shoe. "If you want. I bet Gus would like that." He knew he wasn't supposed to be touching her or whatever, but he couldn't help reaching for her, just once, fingers brushing over the bunched fabric at her hip as he managed a weak smile.
The combination of the way he rubbed his jaw, plus the scuffing of his toe on the ground, made her move forward quickly. Just as his fingers brushed over that bunched fabric at her hip, she kissed him, a quick, desperate little kiss that savored of hard choices and the desire to linger. She made a keening sound when she tugged back, needy-quiet and the look in her grey eyes just as reluctant. But she stood her ground, even when her body threatened to sway toward him. "I love you. More than anything, I love you," she said, and maybe she should've kept that to herself, but nothing would change it, and this didn't make it any less true. A few days, just for him to think, she reminded herself. Life hadn't been normal for months, and it would be good for him to deal with that, without her muddying it up. She pressed her lips together thoughtfully, and she looked at him for a very long span of minutes, and then she turned with a whimper, not wanting to go, but knowing she'd just end up clinging to him if she stayed. Tears welled up in her eyes, as soon as her back was turned. But she'd make it back to the car without sobbing; she would.
He wasn’t expecting her to kiss him, not after all but deciding that they had to keep their distance from one another until he had time to think about things that he didn’t really need to think about at all, and he was loathe to let her pull away afterward. The reluctance in her gaze was mirrored in his own, and he had to force his hand back down to his side to keep from pulling her towards him and making her forget all about her determination to not touch him. “I love you too,” he said, raw and honest. She wasn’t leaving, he told himself, and all he had to do was last a few days with her sleeping in Gus’ room, and then he could reassure her that he still wanted her, still wanted to be with her, and they could put all this behind them. He didn’t say anything else, even though he wanted to, and he met her gaze with his heart in his throat until she turned away. “I’ll see you at home,” he said to her back, but it was too quiet, too much a whisper, and he doubted she heard it as she walked back to the car. He leaned back against the trunk with a long, heavy sigh, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes to get rid of any lingering wetness. As much as he wanted to just find somewhere quiet to hide for a while, he needed to get back to work.