Who: Seven & Marta What: Going back to his place (part 2 of 3) Where: Seven's house (mansion) in Vegas When: Backdated like whoa, post-holiday childhood plot, after this. Warnings/Rating: Language again
The ride from the bar to the house they pulled up in front of was like nothing Marta had ever experienced before. The helmet hadn't fit quite right, and sometimes she hadn't been able to see as well as she might've liked, but she'd kept her eyes closed most of the ride anyway. Being on the back of the bike was a thrill not only for the wind that whipped around them, even hiding and clinging to Seven's back the way she was, but also because of the thrum of the bike itself between her thighs. Every acceleration made her arms tighten around him until she was certain she'd never stop clinging, and she didn't quite care how she figured he was going to laugh at her for it. Between the solidity of his back and power of the bike, the fact that the soft bare skin of her inner thighs was pressed warm to the rough of his jeans, her cheeks were flushed beneath the helmet when they finally stopped, and she laughed a breathless little sound because of it. It took a moment for her to slowly unwind her arms from his waist, and she was smiling something wide when she finally pulled off the helmet. Her eyes were bright as she looked at him and then, finally, at the house.
"You have got to be shitting me," she whispered, awe in a voice that continued to be breathless and not quite steady from the ride. She slipped her way carefully off the bike and stood on legs that were a little watery. "This is where you live?" It set off more warning bells than she wanted to pay attention to - there was no way a little shit with a switchblade could grow up to live in a place like this. Not without shit going on that she didn't really want to think about. "...By yourself? Or with other people?" It couldn't be by himself. She couldn't comprehend one person having all that space to themselves.
Seven always enjoyed giving rides to people who had never been on a motorcycle before. Every person who stepped off that seat had a different sort of expression on their face as they drifted back down to the ground from that high - that heady combination of terror and thrill - and he liked to spend the drive making guesses as to what their faces would look like when they pulled off the helmet. He was more or less on the mark with Marta, because (despite the desperate clinging of her arms around his waist as they sped through the chill of the night’s wind, neon whipping past on either side) he’d known she would laugh once they’d successfully come to a stop and the risk of dying a violent death had been significantly reduced.
“No way,” he said it like he was reassuring her, as he crossed to the electronic gate and punched in a series of numbers on the keypad. “I’m gonna murder the nice little nuclear family that lives inside and steal all their shit.” A smirking glance over his shoulder, and then the whole thing slid slowly open to reveal a driveway large enough to hold two cars across, and three deep, although the only vehicle sitting out there was a ’69 Mach 1 Mustang, almost perfectly restored. (Just a few tweaks left to be done, and he had some of his mechanical guys coming over to finish it up next week.) The rest of his cars and bikes were in the large garage attached to the side of the mansion.
A furious cacophony of snarling and barking had started up as soon as they’d pulled up to the house on the motorcycle, but Seven silenced it with a sharp whistle. As soon as the gate opened they were greeted by three pit bulls, two full grown tan-coloured dogs and one brindle that was clearly still a puppy in that awkward stage where he was all feet and legs, and Seven called out to them with audible affection in his voice as he got back on the bike and walked it into the driveway. “Not afraid of dogs, are you?”
That smirk widened into a grin as he turned to assess her expression now, because his dogs, reassured by the appearance of their master and not some misguided intruder looking to lose a few limbs, were suddenly looking anything but vicious. The puppy tripped his way over to Marta and flopped down at her feet, rolling over to show his belly.
The rush of the ride was still laced through her veins, so she was able to laugh brightly at the smirk and the threat of murdering a family, the flush still pink in her cheeks. She barely even wondered, in that moment, that he was being serious at all. And then there was the car, and fuck, what a car. Her voice went low and appreciative, hot in a way that was usually reserved for people, not things. And maybe she knew shit about cars, but this one was shiny and looked fast and powerful, and she grinned, her words slipping out on a purr. "That is a fuck-me car if I've ever seen one…"
She was about to go over, to slide her hand along sleek black of its hood, but then the snarling and barking began, and she froze in place, her eyes going wide. She'd never been in a house that had dogs growing up - none of the men her mother had been with had cared enough about anything to take care of an animal - but she had the hazy memory of being too young to be out in a yard on her own, living temporarily in a house with people that weren't her mother, and the neighbor's dog (who, at her age, had seemed to be a giant creature) had come over to sniff at her, and had gone suddenly angry when her little hands tried to pet and hold on, ending up with its teeth around her tiny arm. Someone had seen at that point and come to her rescue, leaving nothing more than some deep marks that needed to be cleaned out (and which had faded to nearly invisible scars in the years since), but the experience had left her with a fear of dogs. And so she froze in place, not moving a fraction of an inch, knowing that running would only make them chase, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
With eyes closed, breath quick and shallow, heartbeat racing in her ears, she didn't notice the change in their approach, nor the trip and flop of the puppy. She braced herself for whatever was going to come, and in that fleeting moment, wished that he would have said something about the dogs back at the bar.
As ridiculous as it was, the first thought that flitted through Seven’s mind as he turned and observed the girl’s stiffened posture, with her eyes screwed tight and her shoulders practically hunched up around her ears, was that she was messing with him. Tough little bitch with the sharp lines of her heels and her tattoos and her dare-you short skirt, she was more than enough to scare off most guys that he knew and just enough to entice the rest. No way she wasn’t going to be falling over herself oohing and ahhing over the precious little pup with his too-big skin and his brown eyes and that round belly.
And then he remembered. Seven wasn’t her friend. No, he was the son of a bitch who had let her die at the edge of his switchblade, and he wasn’t going to be anything that resembled good news for her and the tough little life she chose to live. Was forced to live. Of course she was terrified; he was bad news, just like whichever piece of shit had let her end up on the wrong side of some abused dog’s jaws. Fuck.
He couldn’t snap his fingers fast enough in the direction of the two older pits, motioning them to lay down, which they did at a distance of about ten feet from the girl. They’d lost interest as soon as Seven hadn’t produced a toy or initiated copious amounts of petting, and weren’t even looking in her direction as they laid there. “Hey,” he murmured into the space between them as he abandoned the bike to approach her, his tone a thing of caution. “Hey, whoa. It’s okay, they’re not going to hurt you. They’re good dogs, okay?”
Then he reached her, and he could only bring himself to hesitate for a moment before he lifted both hands and cupped each side of her face in his palms, ducking down so that his face was more level with her, even though her eyes weren’t open. The puppy, thoroughly confused as to her lack of reaction to his most irresistible display of cuteness, rolled back over and rested his chin on her shoe with an exasperated puppy sigh. “It’s okay, I promise. I swear. I’m not going to let anything hurt you again, okay? Marta, look at me.”
She heard him getting closer, the way his voice crossed the space towards her, but she still couldn't get herself to move, or even open her eyes. The dogs had stopped barking, and she couldn't hear them moving around, but she didn't try to fool herself that they weren't still there. She wanted to move, to open her eyes and walk around and laugh it off, but she found that she was still frozen. But she could talk, which she discovered after a hard swallow past the hot fear in her throat. "Good dogs…" She said it with disbelief, as if the concept didn't quite have a place in her world. "Yeah, they sounded like good dogs there for a minute." And then, as the quick images stuck to the insides of her eyelids, in a voice that wavered. "Are they pitbulls?"
The touch to her face made her entire body jolt, still expecting an attack to come, but it only took a moment for her to realize that it wasn't anything of the sort. His hands were warm and dry and strong, and the touch pulled her out of her paralysis enough so that she could lift her own hands and wrap them tight around his wrists, holding on. And finally opening her eyes to look at him, his gaze holding her steady. Her eyes were still a little wild, the fear was still there, but she'd reached a point where she tried to hide it again. Even though her entire body felt like it was about to start shaking apart from the adrenalin that had dumped into her system. "Fuck you, I hate everything about you right now." But they were only words, because she didn't. Of course she didn't, and it showed in the way her hands refused to let go. It was stupid in the worst sort of way, but she didn't actually hate him. "Why didn't you fucking tell me you had dogs?"
And then the puppy's head settled heavy on her foot, and a strangled sound escaped her throat. She closed her eyes again, but this time only in a long blink to try to steady herself, and pulled a shallow breath, her voice strangled and reedy. "Holy shit, what is that on my foot?"
Jesus Christ. Another product of the smear campaign against ‘dangerous’ dog breeds, except that he was willing to bet the Mustang sitting in his driveway that whichever dog had attacked Marta had been one of the breeds that shitty people liked to use as scary accessories. Seven groaned inwardly and worked very hard not to roll his eyes, glancing over at the two older dogs. One of them had gotten up and wandered halfway across the yard where she’d begun to busy herself with a stick, and the other one was snoring faintly as she lay flopped on her side, a hind leg sticking straight up in the air like some absurd caricature of a chicken wing taped to a barrel-chested beast. Yeah, real scary specimens. “They’re guard dogs,” he said, having to work at sounding patient. “They’re supposed to sound mean. If you’re not some shithead junkie trying to hop the fence to rob me, they’re harmless. I’m sorry that an asshole put you in a situation to be this scared right now, okay?”
Seven released his held breath in a sigh of relief when she moved to grasp tightly to his wrists, holding on rather than pushing away, because he really didn’t want to fuck this girl up any more than he already had. He could be an anchor, if that’s what she needed, and he let his thumbs trace light touches over the curves of her cheeks. “No, you don’t. And if you did, that would say a whole lot more about you than it does about me, love.” This time he didn’t have to play at patience, because lashing out as a mechanism to disguise your fear, that was something he could understand. “And I didn’t think to mention it because I was kind of distracted by everything else that’s happened. Not to mention that about ninety percent of the population doesn’t go into a paralyzed state when they encounter somebody’s pets.”
He watched her closely, saw the way that she closed her eyes again, though only for a moment. He knew that neither of the older dogs were looking like anything close to a threat right now, so his best bet was to get her focused on the adolescent at her feet. He was about five months old, with a body barely bigger than a football and legs just too-long enough to be amusing. His eyes were closed as apparently he’d claimed the girl’s shoe as his pillow, and Seven gently pulled his hands back from her face, still letting her hold onto his wrists. “Marta. Relax. Look down.”
Marta was too scared still to pay any attention to what the dogs were doing, still clinging to Seven's wrists hard enough that her fingertips pressed hard even through the leather of his coat. She couldn't bring herself to look away from him, to see what they were doing, afraid that they'd be closer. She knew that the fear was more than most other people had to deal with, and she knew that there wasn't really a reason for her to be so afraid, but it didn't stop her body from shaking or her stomach from crawling its way up into her throat. But then his thumbs were tracing lightly over her face, and it startled her enough that she forgot, just for a second, to be afraid. She wasn't used to that sort of delicate touch, and the newness and strangeness of it distracted her enough that she leaned into it for just a moment before it was gone again.
Even when Seven pulled his hands away, she still kept her grip on his wrists and her gaze on his. She had no idea what the strange weight on her foot could be, and she found herself fighting to not close her eyes again to shut out the world and the things she didn't quite want to think about. He was right, at least, about so much happening in such a short period of time, and she didn't want to add anything else to it.
But she looked down when he told her to (though, granted, with enough hesitation to seem as if she never actually would), and frowned at the sight. Her feet didn't move as she tried to figure out what was happening. And finally, with another frown and something that might have almost been a desperate little laugh, she shook her head. "Oh god. It's not dead is it?"
At this point, he knew that they had long since moved past exercises in patience. Seven’s hands were starting to tingle with the lack of blood flow that the girl’s desperately-pressing fingertips had cut off on their clinging, even through the thick sleeves of his leather jacket. His thumbs and the tip of each index finger were complaining about the lack of blood flow, and he felt the ache like it was a bolt of electricity shot through his extremities, and he was getting pretty sick of feeling like the bad guy.
And still he didn’t pull away. Seven allowed himself to remain trapped within her determined grasp, slender fingers wound around all the bones in his wrists even as she worked to swallow the mouthful of panic that had made itself known on her face.
“No,” he began, briefly closing his eyes because otherwise he would have just rolled them, and he didn’t think that the girl would find a whole lot of comfort in his exasperation. This time his thumbs pressed against the line of her wrists where a pulse could be felt, and he couldn’t help but breathe in time to the flutter of a one-two, one-two heartbeat. “I don’t think that he decided to just up and die on your shoe, love. Something tells me that he likes you.”
The puppy had, in fact, opened his eyes at the sound of her voice, and now he yawned in a fashion that suggested the two of them were proving to be thoroughly uninteresting companions. He stood up and began to lead the way over to the house, and Seven took the opportunity to follow - tugging gently at one of Marta’s arms after he’d turned his palm upwards and gathered her hand in his own once more, guiding her up the steps to the veranda that wrapped around the house, leading to the front door. The puppy was the only one of the dogs who routinely slept in the house, since he was still so young, and Seven wasn’t about to waste the pup’s inherent ability to win over women with his big eyes and his gangly limbs.
“You want something to drink? Coffee? Something stronger?” His words echoed slightly as they crossed the threshold of his place and he shrugged out of his leather motorcycle jacket, keeping his boots on because they were clean. He motioned towards the kitchen with a tilt of his head, and he still wasn’t sure just what the fuck else he was supposed to do, so he swallowed hard and busied himself in the methodical folding and hanging of his jacket on the hooks in the hall.
He may have hidden the roll of his eyes behind a blink, but she could easily hear it in his voice, and it was enough to pull her attention (just a bit, just enough) away from her fear and back toward what was (mostly) normal for her. She looked up at him (and up, even in her heels) and made a face. "Don't. Don't sound like that at me right now." The demand was more a request than anything overly forceful, and she swallowed hard. "It could've been dead." She blinked then, though, and her fingers slowly and so slightly eased their hold on his wrists when his thumbs pressed against her pulse. It was quiet enough for a moment that her breath matched his, and she was finally able to sigh away some of her fear. "He likes me?" The gaze she sent down at the puppy was full of disbelief and more of that confusion, and she smiled uncertainly when the dog sent those wide eyes up toward her.
It was easy enough to follow along when the puppy and then Seven led the way toward the house, still trying to navigate what was happening. It was easier to just wait for something bad to happen and then react to it than to try to figure out everything in advance. And maybe that was going to get her into trouble, but she found herself somewhere between not having a choice and not caring.
And then they were inside, and all of her attention was stolen by the house itself. She'd never, not in her entire life, been in a place like this. It was wide open spaces and clean surfaces, no signs of anything too worn or old. No furniture stolen from the side of the street because it was better than what was in the living room already. No sign of anyone else other than them and the puppy. "Fuck. Me." It wasn't an invitation in the moment. No, it was a barely-heard whisper of words that slipped out because she couldn't keep them in, and the space required some sort of awed response.
She didn't respond to his question about drinks, but she did take the tilt of his head as an invitation to head for the kitchen to look at it. But barely a handful of hard-strike steps of her heels on the floor made her stop and look down and curse softly at her feet. She wasn't used to a space like this, and while he might be comfortable tracking his boots across his own floor, she wasn't going to take the chance of making shit any dirtier than she had to. A quick shift of weight and press of toes to heel, and she'd slipped out of her shoes, leaving her barefoot (toenails painted a dark ruby) on the slick floor and several inches shorter. Crossing to the kitchen, it was hard to tell just how much shorter, and she easily ignored her height in favor of sliding fingers along the slick of modern countertop (with the same sort of awe that she would have given, had she reached the car outside to touch it as well). "This is yours?" she finally whispered, looking at him across the space. "All of it?"
Maybe it was all starting to catch up with him, but Seven found himself feeling thoroughly uneasy as he crossed the entrance into his kitchen, with the tap-tap of the girl’s heels on the hardwood that turned into the slap-slap of bare feet as she crossed the room after him. He’d let go of her hand without any sort of deliberation before he’d taken off his jacket, so it wasn’t some conspicuous thing, and yet he was all sorts of aware of the space between them that kept growing and closing between tentative steps and hesitant breaths. Christ, they were worse than two high school kids at their first prom - or maybe they were just like two teenagers who had been through the wringer and shared a horrible memory. Was there a difference?
That tension was momentarily eased, perhaps, by the puppy - he had lingered in the hallway so as to smell the girl’s discarded shoes, and now he trotted past them through the kitchen and into the living room area where he flopped down on a rug without ceremony and began to snore, loudly.
“Mine,” Seven confirmed with a cursory nod, occupying himself at the bar that sat atop one stretch of marbled countertop and pouring himself a generous helping of golden liquid into a rocks glass, along with a scoop of ice from the freezer. “My whole life, I knew I wanted a house like this. I wanted everything that my sorry excuse for my mother couldn’t have given me in a million years.” A pause then, as he lifted the glass to his mouth and took a swig, just barely hiding the grimace that was more a result of his conflicted emotions than a weak stomach for tequila. And then he raised his eyebrows in the girl’s direction, leaning back against the counter and crossing his long legs in front of him, somehow a perfect mirror of the stranger at the bar with his smug smile and his lengthy limbs and his sharp, narrowed gaze.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
For all her fear of the dogs outside, the puppy inside actually made her smile. The smile was small, and still uncertain in its response to something that normally made her freeze with apprehension. But it was hard not to be amused by the snort of puppy snores.
There were too many things to focus on, though, and when she gave her attention to the puppy, she stole it from anything else. It took Seven's voice to pull her back and remind her that she was standing barefoot in a house that cost more than she could ever even imagine to make in an entire lifetime. She wanted to pull out an attitude that would have her hoisting herself to sit on the countertop, curling up on the clean lines of furniture, exploring the parts of the house she knew had to be there unseen - to treat the space as casually as the puppy did. But instead she felt like a fake. An obvious one, at that. Both of them knew she had no right to be in a slick house with a staggering pricetag. Fuck, even the puppy probably knew it. And it kept her in the transitioning space between living room and kitchen, watching as Seven poured himself a drink.
"You always knew?" The question was soft, and she shifted her weight and curled the toes of one foot under toward the floor, out of habit and nervousness. "Fuck, I didn't even know real people could have shit like this. Not outside of TV and movies." She grinned at that, a little bit of the comfort sneaking back in for a second, but it disappeared again when she thought about mothers. His, hers, she didn't see how there was much of a difference. Not with the way that they seemed to speak the same language there. "Yeah?" she asked, still quiet but this time with a bitter blade struck through it. "Yours a piece of shit too?"
It was the bitterness that cut through her uncertainty, pushed her back toward being a girl that could take care of herself, thank you very much. And though she suddenly wished that she'd kept her shoes on, wishing for those extra 4 inches they gave her, she walked closer to him, taking in the way he leaned while she stepped carefully on the smooth floor. And then she stopped. Strange to be so close again in such a large space, but she was just close enough that she could reach out and tap his glass with one black-painted nail (because she didn't give a fuck about the people who said that toes and fingers had to match) while she looked up and up and up at him, the first time she could really take in how much of a height difference there was between them. "I can't just take yours?"
And for all that she was plotting and feigning at her own particular, pseudo-scornful sense of action - simultaneously, it was nothing and it was everything. Taken up were some of the reserves of patience that Seven had started to gather within himself to keep from arching both brows towards her, avoiding those expressions of smug impatience that came so easily to his green eyes and his full mouth. And yet some part of him wondered if he couldn’t hear all those imaginings that she managed to imply with so many words, just like that, slender limbs sprawled over all the straight and marbled lines of his kitchen counter while velvet-brown eyes bored holes through the stuff that made him solid and unyielding. Tempting and taunting like she didn’t know any better, which was possibly the most laughable bullshit he could have considered in the moment. If anyone knew exactly what they were doing, it was this girl. More likely it was at least something that she couldn’t manage: to actually give a shit. Or rather, to act like she did.
Seven decided in that moment that he liked her barefoot in his kitchen.
“Neither did I,” he allowed with a lopsided shrug of one shoulder, even as the corner of his mouth tucked up into grim half-smile that spoke more of absence than anything real or tangible. “I just saw that shit on TV, when I was lucky enough to be at some other kid’s place, whose family could afford one. But there were all those bad guys who had everything they wanted, and I thought it’d be alright if I wanted it, too.”
I wasn’t supposed to be a bad guy.
But he couldn’t hide his face and that godforsaken guilt forever. Seven wasn’t programmed to be a methodical series of rational emotions and logical reactions all arranged in a neat little line, and it was the dredged-up disgust of his biological mother that had his skin crawling. “What, like there’s some other kind? Not in our world. Not yours and mine. There’s just mothers who are better at pretending.”
And then his tone was cool and measured, calculated, even if he wasn’t fooling anyone. The words were practically spit out to stain the tiled floor beneath a girl’s bare feet with their sour spiral of derision. “Good thing for me that she’s just a dead piece of shit.” And no, he wasn’t just hyperbolic; he was the taught-upright-wound-tight version of the man who had simply tried to relax in his kitchen with a drink, his shoulders stiff and carving out bolts of electricity with his angle-bent posture. Kidding himself.
But Marta was sidling up to him in less than a span of a breath, and he was so fucking sorry about what he’d put her through (and angry, somehow, furious enough to want to leave ugly marks and permanent damage on his own hands, those instruments of her suffering) that he felt his jaw lock in disapproval, and his gaze darted out to linger on the delicate line of her wrist as she flicked at his glass. “Why?” He murmured, leveling a glare at those bones that looked like fragile things all sewn together against impossible odds. “You any better at swallowing tequila than scotch, love?”
With the bitterness about absent mothers (and didn't her eyebrows go way up at the revelation that his was dead - not touching that one at all), the continued back and forth between honesty and her usual sorts of attitudes, and confusion about what the hell each of them were actually doing or expecting, the exhaustion hit her all at once. She shook her head at his question, tried to ignore the sort of glare that almost had her flinching away again, and when she spoke, though she tried to smile, it was just a shade too quiet. "Nah. Shit at drinking any of it. Doesn't stop me, though." And then a loose shrug. "Last time there was tequila, we all had limes and salt." It had been at her old club, after a long night that had been filled with too-grabby assholes that didn't tip and couldn't get the concept of 'don't touch' into their heads. The girls had pitched in to buy a bottle of something cheap from the bar, and had taken turns licking each other's skin and passing limes between their teeth. It was a bright, if cloudy memory, but a million miles away from Seven's mansion.
She dropped her hand away, even though her original intention had been to slip her fingers around that glass and tug carefully until the ownership of it had transferred to her. Instead, she stood still, no fidget for a moment, and pressed her hands to her hips, angling her elbows back and away. Her shirt's collar slid again, half a pale shoulder exposed as she stood there in front of him. She caught a hint of something in his expression that might have been regret or sadness, but it shifted again back into the sort of scowl she couldn't quite read. And then she sighed. "Relax, okay?" And there was vaguely hidden hope on her face that he wouldn't toss her out again for telling him so. "You look like you're ready to… I dunno. Get right back on your bike or something. Kick me out or bail or shit."
It was her wrist. For some reason that escaped the most desperate, clawing reach of his grasp, Seven’s eyes were drawn to the shadowed lines and hollow angles of all the small bones that formed the place where her forearm met her hand. He couldn’t look away from her wrist. And when she pulled back to rest those fingers on her hips, it felt like something more. Like something being pulled away, a greater distance than he could ever make up, and it was an unconscious effort when he stepped forward to close some of the gap between them. An automatic moment when he caught her wrist with a thumb and forefinger, his hold fervent but not ungentle.
“I can’t,” he admitted, eyes lowered nearly to the floor because it hurt, to be honest with Marta. “Relax? Haven’t known how to do that for months. Not because of the shit that I sell or the bad people that I hurt every day. What I’ve done to you, and other people, because of that fucking hotel? Christ, Marta,” and he spoke her name with a sort of unconscious reverence that lit up the surrounding air.
“It kills me. I was never supposed to hurt innocent people, whether you think that’s what you are or not.” Still he held onto her wrist with his hand, and the other came up to set down his glass on the kitchen island behind her - because he had covered more ground, backing her up against the opposite counter without even realizing that he did so. Then his palm cupped her cheek, with the cool kiss of condensation on his fingers smearing small, wet lines on her skin. “And I don’t know why this time is any different, okay? But I can’t bail. And I’m not going to kick you out.”
She hadn't expected him to reach out for her, and finding her wrist wrapped in his fingers made her blink at him in surprise. Her bare feet were silent under the sound of his words as she moved back with every one of his forward steps. It was like the sort of dancing she didn't do, the sort that needed two people instead of just one woman onstage for the pleasure of those watching. For all that she'd teased and pushed and thrown sass in his direction since sitting down on that barstool next to him, being backed up against the counter, short enough for him to loom easily over her, made her go quiet, tongue pressed drily to the roof of her mouth.
And maybe those red flags should have been going up all over the place, talk of him hurting people, talk of him selling shit. But hadn't she guessed, back when he was laying claim to the bouncer and bartender, the easy flash of money and the goddamn house - from a kid who grew up no better than she had? Hadn't she known that there had to be something between that desperate kid and the man who ordered old scotch and had bikes and cars that were expensive enough to scream money at anyone who looked? She'd known, and she'd still climbed on the bike behind him, still allowed herself to walk inside, still let herself be crowded step by step until the counter pressed a hard line across her back.
The touch to her cheek, as strong and gentle as the last had been when she'd panicked outside the house, startled her more than the fingers around her wrist. It was a carefully delicate touch from hands that she was beginning to suspect didn't often show gentleness. But if that wasn't enough, the way he said her name, like it was something almost special… She closed her eyes and breathed out something long and slow through her nose, a tiny hitch near the end. This was dangerous - she knew it was. Her body and mind were still twisted around with the thoughts and memories of dying, the adrenalin from the ride to the house and fear of the dogs, and now his touch. It was a situation made for bad decisions. And she was so good at bad decisions.
Eyes open again, her next step decided on, she looked up at him as she arched just enough to anchor her hands on the countertop behind her, and lifted herself up, smooth and easy with no little hop or jump, to sit there, closer to his height than she had been since sliding off the barstool. The move was easy with the practice of slinking up and down from stages to audiences, and made every muscle in her arms and stomach go tight. And then she sat there, almost eye to eye with him, and lifted her free hand (the one not still braceleted by his fingers) to press against the back of his hand against her cheek. Her smile was slow in coming, brain trying to rush through all the different things that could happen until she told it to shut up, and it was small and a little sly when it appeared. And of course she wasn't going to talk (not yet) about that admission of serious things. "You might not wanna say shit like that, b-" She cut herself off before she finished the word, teeth sinking viciously into her lower lip for a second to keep from calling him "baby" again. She pushed past it. "I've got a shit apartment and too many roommates. I might decide your place is a lot fucking nicer, and that not kicking me out counts as an invitation to stay."
There she went, derailing him with just the simple action of pressing the palm of her hand against his knuckles. And that was to say nothing about the nonchalant way in which she helped herself up onto his counter, slender legs pressing against marble as a quick and dangerous hem hiked up even higher on her pale skin, something that drew his gaze lower, down, and down some more. As if he was supposed to help himself. Like he was some superhuman specimen? Yeah, right.
Instead, Seven just had another one of those moments of unrelenting clarity, and he was swearing inwardly as he realized that something dangerous had been lodged in his stomach in the same moment that this girl had reached his eye-level and resumed the unconscious batting of her lashes in his direction. That moment being the point when he began to seriously consider all of his own trouble. That moment when he realized that he wasn’t ready to go back from whatever this was, or might have been, or might turn out to be.
And still Seven felt the brush of her fingers against the hand that held her cheek, so he decided that he would relent to that sort of touch - a hesitant gesture if ever he’d felt one, painstaking plucking of the wires designed to string him up so tight. Tentative, when all he needed was bold.
To be fair, how was he supposed to answer her question? Should he have brought up Sam, and the time that she had spent as her own refugee in his house? The fact that young and damaged girls seemed particularly skilled at working their way into Seven’s life and home? The corrosive truth that she was hardly the first pretty young thing to spend the night or twelve, but the first one who had made him think twice about how he felt with her being in his house? No. He was more than that, and also there was the precise cut of her incisors that bit tender lines of infinite possibilities and apprehension into her lips and their tentatively-shared reality at the same time.
“Yeah? Why not?” It was more of a challenge than a question, as with everything, and it was his contemplative mouth that found the words and made them more suggestive than combative. “You think I don’t know something about taking in strays? And here I was, real concerned about some pretty girl finding her way into my home. Because I couldn’t handle that shit nearly as well as your stand-up roommates handle you, right?”
But he wasn’t a total an asshole about it. The usual portrait of the smugness that came from totally assurance of one’s good looks, maybe - but the light in Seven’s eyes was deliberately amused. Like he knew just what he was doing, and what she was doing, and why the muscles in his arms grew taut as he leaned against the counter with his hips finding their way between Marta’s bare knees. It was almost funny, as if he was just-so willing to make himself a small and insignificant thing that might bend to her whims, if only she might dare to let him stay there (- even while he was letting her stay here). Because he was there, yes, pressing himself against the counter with one of her slender legs on either side, and she had her hand covering his own and it was all going on in the same moment that Seven chose to lean in and kiss her.
The slick of the countertop was cold against the backs of her thighs, the inked lines of Ganesha's feet finally peeking out on her left thigh from the too-high hem of her skirt where it rode up with her new perch. She followed Seven's gaze down, caught sight of the too pale, too exposed skin, and actually angled a smile at him. Even with everything else that had happened (was happening), men looking at her was something she knew how to handle. She didn't cover up, didn't reach down to tug at and readjust her skirt's hem. Neither did she spread her legs into something wanton. No, instead she simply let him look.
She felt something shiver between them, and didn't know whether it stemmed from him or from her. It was a decision that had been made, felt heavy in the space between them, and it took another moment for it to make itself known. But in the interim, she didn't know of the thoughts of other girls in his home. She hardly thought herself the first at anything, though. He had years on her, a handsome man, dangerous but with that stubborn streak of sweetness that she kept finding in their quiet moments.
And then she was laughing at his words, his agreement to her invading his house. She didn't know a thing about Sam, likely wouldn't have even made the connection to the girl she'd talked with only a time or two on the journals. Neither did she consider his words an actual invitation. It was only a joke to threaten to invade his big, peaceful home. Oh, she wouldn't say no to the night (it being late already, and him probably with at least one extra guest room), but to assume that he'd meant anything longer than that was foolish. She smiled as she shook her head, and there was laughter in her words. "Well if one does, she'll have to wait until tomorrow. I got first dibs tonight." Her eyes tried to laugh too, but that sharpness and jagged hurt was back, hidden almost (but not quite) perfectly around the edges.
"My roommates barely know my name, much less how to handle m-" She was about to finally let her hand fall away from his when he stepped closer, and though she didn't tense, she did go very still, even her words stopping in mid-thought. The texture of the denim on his hips rasped along the bare insides of her knees, and she couldn't quite decide if it meant she should bring her legs together (to hold and grip, as he was already too close to keep out and away) or let them fall wider, opening more in an invitation of her own. So she kept them where they were, savoring that electric roughness that made the hair on her arms stand on end. Her fingers twitched over his, and then slid down, over his wrist to follow the lines of lean muscle and rest carefully at his elbow.
It should have been obvious enough what he was planning. And maybe if she'd had a normal upbringing (a normal childish and adolescent introduction to a love life), she would have recognized what he was planning on doing before his lips were actually pressed to hers. But she didn't, and it took a frozen moment of open-eyed surprise before the dark smudges of her eyelashes were lowering as she let out the smallest sigh of breath. And then she kissed back, something caught between experience and being almost too-young. It only lasted for a moment before she moved just enough to press, angle her mouth, and the kiss focused itself. And if the smallest sort of surprised-yet-pleased sound escaped her throat? Neither one of them had to acknowledge it.
Seven couldn’t help but wonder, and not for the first time, if he was one of those intended to feel the sharp-bitten cut of this girl’s sarcasm against the softened edge of his own careful words. He was perfectly aware of the granted permission to his wandering looks: that which allowed his green-eyed gaze to filter over the contrast of ink against skin, on the smooth canvas of her thigh, and he knew that she had more than just a smile to give in exchange for looking (because the price of stolen glances had not risen quite so much). An unwanted wandering of his eyes would have had much greater lengths to suffer, without that sort of doubt.
But even as she laughed, the soft sound that brushed aside the weight of any words he’d allowed past his lips, even then Seven could feel the hollow place in his stomach that churned and roiled as the girl shook her head adamantly. If one does… He could practically feel the smirk of her self-deprecation refracting with each unwarranted shake of her head.
No. She didn’t get it. Nice try, though.
“One already has,” Seven said quietly, head canted to the side as he considered her words and her expression with a thoughtful look, even while a dimpled smirk was still present on his mouth. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of the razor-edged cut that aimed from her eyes, but he was in no particular mood to be sliced wide open. “You’re here as long as you want to be.” While there was a part of him that didn’t feel comfortable accepting the sour twist to her smile, still he decided that he liked the sensation of her fingers clutching at his elbow as she narrowed the space between them. Yes, Seven was alright with the hold she had on him. For now.
He liked a lot of things that she had on him.
Nearly at the top of the list was the surprised sound that she made against his mouth somewhere into that kiss, because her breath felt warm against his lips and he could still taste her rum and coke in addition to that expensive scotch, all mixed with some sort of mint gum. And as he was encouraged by the drifting of her soft fingertips against his arm, Seven’s tongue dared to trace the curve of her mouth before his teeth closed over the swell of her bottom lip and gave a gentle tug. At the same time, his hand slid from the curve of her jaw up and back, strong fingers threading into the dark hair at the nape of her neck. Holding her close. Something between desperation and greed, and he’d have been at a loss to make the distinction.