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notbang · 5 years

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doors (five of them)

rethaniel appreciation week day 4 → parallels (read on ao3)

The first time she knocks on Nathaniel’s door, she has to believe she’s making him an offer he can’t refuse.

That’s the confidence that brings her to him, all legs and breathy and scantily clad. She’d felt powerless, after the wedding that wasn’t, but she’d taken all that hurt and found a way to wield it like a weapon, and standing on her porch in his running shorts Nathaniel had let her remember what it felt like to have power resting in the palm of her hand.

She thinks he’s interested. He’s not not interested, judging by the inches of him outlined where they’re nestled together, her hips cradling his. His body is warm between her fishnetted thighs where she’s straddled him, and it’s absurd, really, that she wasn’t expecting that—like he should be carved entirely from stone.

If she’s being completely honest with herself (she’s not) it’s not a transaction so much as an excuse—the alarm bells ringing in the background of this particular playing-with-fire endeavour sound suspiciously like the emergency squeal of an elevator. Josh doesn’t know about that night but it’s a special brand of vindictive, implicating the source of her infidelity as her partner in crime. Josh didn’t know about that night and he left her anyway, and it’s almost like retrospective absolution, leading her here.

Nathaniel’s hands are hovering at the back of her, ridiculously large in contrast to their hesitancy and radiating heat. At some point since they settled here her seductive caress of his shoulders turned into a compulsive exploration, the tiny hairs at the nape of his neck prickling against the palms of her hands.

“So what was your point?” he murmurs, clearing his throat, dazed.

She’s feeling a little dazed herself, trying not to think too much about prior knowledge of what it’s like to kiss him. Trying not to wonder what it might be like to kiss him when he’s given the proper warning, with her limbs curling around his in enticing parentheses, or how he might repurpose his skills to areas elsewhere than her mouth.

Anything you want to me, she says, and sees the lightbulb of inspiration’s erratic shutter in his eyes. She wants, needs to know what anything you want to me entails. Has a few suggestions, if he needs help getting started.

(She doesn’t hear from him until she does, and anything you want to me starts with her shoulder blades digging hard into the wood of his door.)

The second time she’s emboldened by the memory of his face buried against her neck and the arsenal of R-rated evidence she has at her perusal on her phone the entirety of her flight back from Buffalo, the wanting that rises up in her and threatens to boil over and overflow quickly backburnered in her stomach at a tortuous low simmer.

I would love to have sex with you again, she’d blurted out three days ago, the elegance of her articulation infinite as always, and she couldn’t have imagined it, the way his eyes had softened in confirmation that the sentiment was gratifyingly mutual. Three days ago she’d spoken the words aloud and since then the thought of it has taken stubborn root inside of her, spreading through her like a one-track-mind creeper vine.

She goes to his door and she jumps and he catches her, and some secret part of her latches onto that—wants to make it into a metaphor and use it in stubborn supporting argument for everything that’s about to follow.

He’s hard and solid and careful with his weight on her as he stumbles towards the bed and drops them down, and this is healthy, right? Because he wants her and she wants him back and she’s not engaged and he’s not her boss, and this is a cocoon she burrow herself inside of, free of therapy, and workbooks, and friends that still worry that she’s fragile while they’re hiding all the knives.

He pulls back from her and she knows what’s coming—can see the crease of it carved into his brow.

I’m bulletproof, she wants to assure him. Can’t you tell? I can rip myself to shreds and scatter them and still this thing won’t break.

“Just shut up,” she breathes instead, dragging him back down to her, over her, into her, letting herself just feel, and then his fingers are on her, teasing her, prising her open and it’s so much better than her own or heated words on a screen and an old lumpy couch in the lowlight of someone else’s living room.

She pretends not to notice, the way he’s so much gentler than the last time, even in his desperation to inhale her; the way he stops to catalogue each pulse point with his mouth, praising her heartbeat for still thrumming beneath her skin and carving I’m glad you’re home into its every expanse. He’s affectionate and eager and she responds to him in kind, and this is warm, this is good—she thinks she can grow to live in it, this loose, liminal space of the in-between. When Josh left and she fell apart she stopped thinking about the future, but here, tangled in Nathaniel’s grey sheets, his grey shirt, his grey life, the jagged black and white of her can see a case for focusing on the here and now.

“You didn’t answer me,” he mumbles against her shoulder once they’re spent from their second round. “About your trip.”

His fingers are tangled in her hair again, like its appeal to them is inherently magnetic and they cannot be pulled away. She hums and closes her eyes and focuses on the five point star of pressure expanding and contracting across her scalp, lets it regulate her breathing as the tingles radiate outwards.

(She doesn’t plan to stay. Doesn’t plan for any of it. She just never gets around to making the decision to leave, to slow down, to stop before either of them gets hurt.)

He opens the door too quickly, like he was waiting for her; could somehow sense her there.

It’s been two, three weeks at most but she feels like she’s done this a thousand times before, and something inside of her trills in answering anticipation to his smile on agonising autopilot. This time is different, she has to remind herself, and draws her conviction tighter around her like a cape.

“What is it, like a sex thing? Because I’m not sure what else is still on the table for us.”

The laughter bubbles up out of her at that and it only makes it all the more harder, being hit with the deluge of memories of all their teasing turned challenges—her googling the most ridiculous Kama Sutra poses she could find and his ever creative solutions to negating the exigent issue of their height difference, her hamstrings still twingeing from their most recent acts of contortion. She can’t let herself think about the way his leather armchair sticks to her sweaty skin, or the way he makes her laugh then smiles with a hint of surprise every time like he’s never heard the sound before, like no one else around him has ever let him think he’s funny.

I’m happy but it’s not real, is all she can offer him, and she can sense his confusion—see the denial in his eyes that’s protesting you sat right across from me at that table and begged me not to do what you’re doing right now—and the sour taste of it twists in her gut. She’d wanted so desperately to believe that the point of all this was to be happy, too, but there’s so much left for her to sort out for herself separate to fusing to another person before happy can even begin to be a consideration.

She’s had this conversation with him countless times in her head on the way over, but none of it’s playing out the way it’s supposed to. Just speaking the words and tasting kiss and snuggle and cuddle on her tongue weakens her resolve and threatens to have her reaching for him, burying her head in his chest and the blue stripes of his shirt and telling him she’s sorry, that she takes it all back, undo.

Nathaniel takes a step towards her, and it’s like she can’t breathe beneath the weight of how much she wants to let him change her mind.

(I have to go, she repeats to herself like a mantra, blinking back tears as she takes the stairs blindly, two at a time. I have to go I have to go I have to go.)

She hasn’t been to his apartment for the better part of a year—not since she broke it off and ran away, not since Mona came along and occupied her empty space, not since a handshake led to a kiss and a kiss led to an inevitable mistake. Not since that mistake became bigger than the both of them and they let themselves keep making it, let themselves pretend it was an outside force compelling them from inside that supply closet and not something they both consciously chose, until suddenly she couldn’t let herself pretend, not anymore.

He told you he loves you, in not so many words, was how Dr Akopian had phrased it, and she yearns so much for that to be true and something she can let herself deserve.

But then she thinks about how opening doors leads to other things slipping inside, too, to billow outwards and fill up a space. Lets certain other parts of you escape to make room.

If that’s what you want, he’d told her. As if she’s ever had any proper idea of what she wants in all this.

(She doesn’t knock, but the whole way home she thinks of the alternate version of herself in a parallel universe who does, and hopes with all her heart somewhere, someplace, she’s managing to get things right.)

She pounds on his door with such focus and force she imagines herself breaking through it in her urgency, and when he finally answers she collapses against the door frame with an air of something she imagines resembles seductive, as if the slur of her words and heavy lids are entirely by design.

Look, she wants to goad the memory of her frozen, deer-in-headlights former self. Knuckles to wood, rinse and repeat—was that so fucking hard?

Nathaniel lets her in and his shirt is soft beneath her fingers, soft like the way he started looking at her at some point and never quite stopped, soft enough to scare her sometimes. But she’s feeling bruised and broken and raw, and it’s a softness she wants to crawl inside and pull tight around her until every last battered inch of her is covered in its gentle armour; until it seals itself shut over her and the desperation can’t get out. She wants to feel warm and wanted in a way Nathaniel has never denied her, wants to feel bad and brazen and better.

She’s high, but not high enough. She’s drunk, but she wants to be drunk off him, too.

Her senses are dulled but the defensive part of her mind is still whittled razor-sharp, the sting of perceived rejection still burning bright and hot enough to forge the blade. She knows every last button to press, the exact notch between the ribs to dig her fingers into and claw her way inside. You know I still think about you, she tells him, at night when I’m alone in my bed, because it’s what she’d like to believe is true of him, thinking about her. She didn’t pick him, but the idea of him letting her go is sweet and sour to her all at once. Especially when it feels like Greg just threw her overboard and turned his back as she began to buoy away.

Greg hates everything but Nathaniel wants her to be happy, and right now he’s like her very own personification of a butter commercial that she wants inside her and around her and swallowing her whole.

She wants to use him the way she used him to get back at Josh, the way she used him to get her A plus in living C plus, the way she used him for eight months to make a point to herself about how broken she is again and again and again. They way he lets her, every time; the sucker that sees every terrible part of her and never turns away.

He’s turning her away now, though, and how dare you, she thinks. How dare you not join me in this self-destruction when you’re just as messy and terrible as me.

(I thought you wanted me, she sneers to herself as she stumbles down his hallway, lip curling, spurned. I thought you’d always want me, but you’re just like everyone else.)

She can’t be completely sure, the last time she knocks on his door; at which point she stops knocking because it isn’t locked or he’s with her or he gives her a key and the door is no longer just his but her own.

There’s a beginning to the end, though, where she goes to him and it is raining.

He’s fresh out of the shower when he swings the door open to look at her, his hair wet and spiky and stray droplets glistening on his skin where his throat rises up from the damp neckline of his burgundy sweatshirt, and then she’s laughing, because her curls are saturated from the downpour and plastered to her coat and the deep red pile of her sweater underneath. They’ve always been good at this part—the unconscious mirroring, this dance on an unpredictable delay—and a reassuring warmth starts to blossom through her at this suggestion that the page they are on is the same.

“Hi,” she says, giddy, breathless.

“Hi,” he echoes, cautious and confused because he can’t share in her excitement, not yet, not when he’s not privy to the decision she’s made in her head.

She only hesitates a moment and then her keys hit the floor and she tugs him down toward her by his neck, slow enough to give him every opportunity to stop, but then the resistance melts out of him all at once and she’s kissing him and he’s kissing her back, and it’s the first time in such a long time.

He’s kissing her gentle at first, then like she’s his sole source of air and she’d thought long and hard about taking this slow, but her body knows his and they have other plans.

“Rebecca,” he says once they’ve shoved her coat down over her shoulders and she’s fought her way out of the tangled armholes of her sweater to pull his body close to hers, his shower-seared skin hot against the damp-chilled surface of her own. “Not that I’m—” He breaks off on a groan when she sinks her teeth into the sinews of his neck, and she hides her pleased grin in the slope of his collarbones. “Not that I’m complaining, but what is this? What are we doing, here?”

It would be so easy, she thinks, to settle back into that well-worn groove; to shush him with her lips and her fingers and the eager trace of her tongue, to cant her hips forward and lock her thighs until he forgets what he’s asked her, forgets words. She could tell him any number of things, present him with a hundred variations on every unfairness with which she’s come to him before and he’d still give her this, she knows. But they’ve been down so many ill-fated paths already, the both of them burned for their lack of clarity, and he’s so tentative in his hopefulness that it makes her heart squeeze.

She takes his face in her hands, thumbs sweeping his cheeks, reacquainting herself with every last one of its lines.

“It’s been a year,” she tells him, lilting low. “And I don’t know about you, but… I don’t want to waste any more time.”

That sets free a desperate kind of whine in him that has him crushing her in his endless arms, pressing her down into his bed so hard it could make a mould of the two of them, the mattress recasting around them to reset every bittersweet memory they’ve left in it. His hand is unsnapping her bra and she’s squirming to get at the fly of her jeans and all the while he’s nuzzling against her, kissing her chin, sighing his relief into the space below her ear.

“I might need to borrow some clothes,” she breathes, back arching, hips tilting into where he’s slid his hand. “All mine are—oh—all mine are wet.”

“Soaked,” he agrees, his fingers slick against the silk.

He’s reluctant to shift off of her, after, and slides back into the bed to wrap himself around her as if afraid to blink and find her gone.

His nose nudges hers and she can see in his expression that he wants to tell her, the words curling and ready on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t know if it’s appropriate, or he’s allowed, and she’s overcome with so much answering affection that her entire body hums with it, warming her from the inside out.

“Hey,” she begins, and waits until his eyebrows slope upward expectantly to beckon him closer with a crook of her finger, as if there aren’t already mere millimetres between them. She drags his earlobe between her teeth, eliciting a shudder, chuffing softly against the flushed shell of his ear. “There are feelings inside me that are still pertinent to you,” she confesses, seriously, then descends into laughter as he rolls over, growling, taking her with him, trapping the delighted sound of it with his mouth enmeshed with hers.

#crazy ex girlfriend #rebecca x nathaniel #rethanielAW #my fic #this kinda ran outta steam halfway but i was determined to have it finished tonight to fulfil my goal of producing fic for this week #the ending..... was not supposed to quite go like that but y'know #they #i'm done spamming today with content now i promise

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