Christopher Pike (daretodobetter) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-05-11 16:30:00 |
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Pike was exhausted. They were halfway through the second bottle of wine and the credits on Mulan were rolling when he sighed running his fingers through Barbara's hair. He meant to tell her when he got back, but he got distracted. And then this morning, but he was depressed enough and he wanted to wait till after the picnic. "There's something I need to tell you." Barbara shifted a big, half asleep from watching the movie, but she nodded and pulled back from where she was enjoying leaning against him, to look at him. "What's that?" she asked tiredly, stretching forward to her now cold tea and sipping it anyway. He set down his glass of wine and ran a hand over his hair. "On our road trip, Cameron and I went to bar - got fairly plastered and, well, we kissed. Nothing's going to come of it, but I thought you ought to know." Whatever Barbara was expecting, she was sure that wasn't it. She nodded, slowly, looking at him. "You kissed Cameron," she repeated. She shouldn't be upset, or jealous (even though the feeling in her stomach was absolutely jealousy), especially because they weren't, not really, together … "Well, it's not like we're exclusive, Christopher," she pointed out carefully. Christopher raised an eyebrow. They hadn't talked about it, any of it, due to his vehement dislike of anything approaching a relationship. "I was drunk, it was a one time thing," he explained. "I was functioning under the notion that we were." She almost pointed out that if they were, then being drunk enough and kissing someone else wouldn't have happened. Or, at the least, one would hope he wouldn't have put himself in a situation like that. "We've had the relationship conversation in enough vague ways to make it clear that that's not what we're in," she said. "Apparently we're the only ones who think that," Pike said, drawing on something cameron had said on the network. "I don't know what we're doing, Barbara, but I care about you. I want to keep doing.. this.." He sighed and ran a hand over his hair again. "It was a strange week." "What do you mean? Who else is talking about the two of us?" she asked, sitting up a bit more and frowning. She knew that they both had friends that they talked to about one another, but she was pretty sure she'd never used the word 'relationship' or 'boyfriend' or anything like that to describe him. She nodded. "It was a strange week. And not a very nice one, in the end, to taunt us like that." Was this a subject change, then? "Cameron made a joke that we're the only ones who don't say we're in a relationship," he explained with a shrug. "It was. I don't know. Being young.. it was, well, an experience. Out on the road with Cam.. felt like I'd gotten back things I'd lost." Again, she couldn't suppress the feeling of jealousy but she tried to. "Well, I guess the question would be, do we want to say that? Or do we want to be able to kiss other people, drunk or not." Christopher ran a hand over his face. This wasn't going how he had planned. "What do you want, Barbara?" he asked, turning the tables and trying not to control the situation. "I've come to determine that it doesn't entirely matter what I want," she said. "It has to be a mutual decision," Barbara added quickly, so he didn't think that she was inferring that the only thing that mattered was what he wanted. Even though, to a fair point, that was the case. "A mutual decision is a compromise that takes into account what both of us want. I don't know what you want unless you tell me, Barbara. I don't want to assume anything," he said quietly, reaching for the wine and refilling his glass. Barbara set her tea aside. "Well, I like you, and I like spending time with you, and I like kissing you and sleeping with you and if we want to call all of that a relationship, I think I'm okay with that." After all, she was very good, in the past, at avoiding relationships and the naming of them. "And would you prefer we not kiss other people?" he asked after another sip of his wine. She nodded. "Yes, I'd prefer that neither of us kiss other people." Pike took a sip of his wine and considered it. He wanted to blame kissing Cameron on being young and drunk but he had a sneaking suspicion it was more than that. Not that it mattered - Cam was with Moya and he was with with Barbara. But he'd been "I can work with that. I'd like that, but-" He took another drink. "If Phillip were to come through the Tesseract, it would complicate things. In the meantime, though, we work with what we have, one day at a time. And I want to pursue a relationship with you as long as we're both here." Barbara understood what he was saying. "It would be an entirely different scenario were someone from either of our pasts arrive," she said. "I think it would be unfair of either of us not to take that into consideration were it to happen." She rubbed his arm. "So you don't have to worry about the what-ifs of that, all right?" He nodded, putting his hand over hers and squeezing. "All right," he said with a small nervous smile. "So, we're doing this then? A monogamous relationship?" He hadn't said anything about the sex, mostly because he didn't want to ruin the current conversation. Barbara nodded and smiled a bit. "Yeah, I think that's a good idea, that we should do this. Call it monogamous if you want; I'll just call you my boyfriend." Christopher chuckled, leaning in and kissing her tenderly. "I feel a bit old for that term. Makes me feel like a teenager." "Well, then what term would you prefer?" she asked, leaning into the kiss for a moment. "Didn't say you couldn't use it," Pike teased with a smile, threading his fingers through her hair. "You can call me whatever you like." She gave him a look but kissed him all the same. "And how are you going to refer to me when someone asks?" "Partner?" he suggested. It seemed a bit more serious than where they were, perhaps, but there was a part of his brain that still had problems with the concept of a girlfriend. Barbara nodded. "That works," she said, leaning back in against his side and taking a deep breath. "Are you okay to stay the night?" Christopher raised an eyebrow. "I don't have anywhere to be early in the morning," he said with a smile as he poured himself another glass of wine. She nodded. "Great," she said, closing her eyes. |