FIC: Clockworks and Cold Steel (Heroes)
(spoilers/canon through 4x12) - Heroes is all NBC's; no commerce here. - beta'd by zelda_zee, who is amazing.
Love is clockworks
and cold steel;
fingers too numb to feel.
When Noah signed the divorce papers, he didn't see a reason for much in his life to change. He'd live in the same apartment, off the same embezzled money. Whoever might be watching him - and surely someone was - would see the same man in horn-rimmed glasses at his routine: the convenience store across the street, the gym next door to it, the sushi place in his building. He had less information and fewer connections than only last year, but that was the game. One party or another would be keeping up reconnaissance, just in case. They'd know about the unplanned trips and sub rosa meetings, and who he spent time with.
What did change after the divorce, he liked to think, was invisible, or if it wasn't, the delusion wouldn't cause anyone too much harm. Maybe no one had ever watched him take out his wedding ring and roll it between his fingers, or train himself to sleep on the left side of the bed, which had always been Sandra's and not his. He chose dishes and linens that he didn't think Sandra would have picked out for herself or for him, left the furnishing to Ikea, and replaced English muffins with sliced bread at breakfast, even though the bread was easier to burn.
Sandra didn't spend too much time commenting on those details when she was over for Thanksgiving, and Claire, bless her, never pressed him either. Lauren had ribbed him on the bachelor decor the minute she set foot in the apartment, but for some reason that didn't bother him. At least she didn't have much basis for comparison, and she couldn't know how strange it was for him, even after six months, to stay somewhere with stark wooden furniture, grey bedsheets, organized and cleaned with military precision: space uncluttered by the life of anyone around him.
Going out with Lauren didn't help entirely. From the minute Noah had gotten engaged to Sandra, he was happy to be done wondering whether to ask girls by for coffee before a movie, or whether to offer to pick them up for dates or meet on-site. Now he didn't like those reminders of where his life was. He consoled himself with a little mantra that this was good for him, that everyone needed the occasional stupid movie or meal that wasn't Japanese takeout or spaghetti and salad. There was an art-house cinema and a cache of little restaurants in their orbit, a concert or two he wouldn't have bothered attending on his own.
Lauren took it upon herself to teach him how to cook semi-competently, regifting him some redundant equipment from her own housewarming for the purpose. Sandra had done their cooking from the very beginning. She liked to cook, while Noah was never particularly interested in it. Now he wished he'd asked her to teach him, or even just taken the time to watch her chop broccoli or sift flour. He could guess that if she'd ever watched the way he flailed through supposedly simple recipes, her amusement would have been a little more open. But he tried to learn.
The first attempt was a disaster, although getting to kiss Lauren made up for it. Apparently she'd gotten over the strangeness of having chosen to forget the past. She stayed the course as his dishes progressed to merely terrible to almost recognizable until, with what Lauren called a very basic risotto, the whole thing reached the point of being a pretext.
He'd stepped away to move laundry into the dryer. When he came back he found her slicing mushrooms at the counter, facing away from him, paying him no notice, and it was the way the dying February sunlight hit her, or at least he thought it was. She looked almost golden, and there was something calm in the way she stood and worked. Even though that was surely an illusion Noah found that he wanted it, badly.
He stood behind her and rested his fingers on her forearms. “You look beautiful,” he said, kissing the top of her head.
“Thanks.” He could see her smile. “Is this a new way of getting out of your half of the cooking?”
“No, you distracted me,” he said. “I was very eager to chop onions and...”
“Butternut squash.”
“Butternut squash, until you came along.”
“Well, if you want to watch me do the easy part, you'll have to let go of my arms.”
“Fair enough.” He clasped his hands over her waist. “Or we could skip the whole cooking thing tonight.”
She tried to suppress another smile. “I wouldn't think you'd want to go hungry.”
“I don't,” he said, kissing her head again. “But there's Japanese takeout downstairs, and right now - ” another kiss - “I'm not really interested in food.”
By now she was smirking. “Persuade me.”
“Persuade you?”
“Yeah. And don't get in the way while you do it.”
“All right.” He set his hands on her shoulders. Sandra always liked to have her neck stroked, like a cat, and now he was careful to avoid touching Lauren's. “Instead of making dinner, we could... I don't know, play charades.”
“I'm pretty good at charades.”
“Then you'd win by a million miles,” he said, drumming his fingers down her arms, “because I'm terrible.”
“That's no fun.”
“Well, then there's a little one-on-one basketball at the gym.”
“You've got seven inches and plenty of muscle on me. You'd have a cakewalk.”
“Oh, I'm not so sure about that. You've got the agility.”
“I still think I'd be better off using it to reach wine and mince garlic right now.”
He ran his hands down her sides and over her hips. “Trust me, there are better uses.”
“Like what?”
“Hmm... I might have a Twister mat around here somewhere.”
She laughed. “You definitely don't have a Twister mat in this apartment, Noah. And even if you did, I doubt either one of us has enjoyed Twister since sophomore year in college.”
“No, probably not.” The smell of garlic began to fill the kitchen, and under Lauren's pastel blouse there were firm lines of muscle, compact and sloping. He whispered suggestions in her ear: a walk in the sludge, redecorating the living room; and he felt soft hair and a taut body and the rhythm of her hands as she brushed the minced garlic into a bowl. Underneath the blouse her skin was warm. He was about to take some liberties with the buttons when his phone rang.
He bit back a curse. “Excuse me for one second.”
“Of course.”
He found the phone in his coat pocket, on the last ring, and ducked into the bedroom to talk. “This is Bennet.”
“Noah?”
“Sandra? Is everything all right?”
“Everything's fine... You sound out of breath.”
“Just finished running the stairs. What's going on?”
“I was going over some college application things with Lyle, and he needs to fill out the financial section.”
At least it wasn't an emergency. That made it a cause for gratitude, not irritation. “He won't need any aid. His fund's in good shape.”
“Yes, but they still require the information.”
“Okay... let's say I make six percent more than we put for Claire's, and I give you three fifths.”
“That'll wash?”
“That'll wash. And I'm a free-lance consultant.”
“Of course you are. Thanks, Noah.”
“You're welcome.”
There was a second's silence, and then the line went dead. He'd always ended their conversations with “I love you,” but a few months ago Sandra had asked him to stop.
He snapped the phone shut and sank onto the bed, which he supposed was his bed even if he didn't use that name for one he'd never shared with Sandra. For weeks after stumbling out of that hotel room he'd slept on floors, a measure that was as necessary to him at the time as it was nonsensical. Getting used to being in a bed again, in a hotel or here, had taken a good six months, six months during which he didn't even want to think about Sandra or any other woman. On some mornings he'd found the linens stained and damp, but it wasn't until the end of that time that he woke up before the critical moment arrived, prick burning heavy in his hand.
So he'd re-learned, sort of, suddenly, what it felt like to get the occasional hard-on, to feel arousal. He kept to basic courtesy and jerked off in the shower even though staying in bed wasn't going to freak out a roommate or a hotel maid. Or offend a wife who he'd protected into a state of being too tired or having headache an in increasingly frequent portion of the time. It didn't matter. He let the torrid dreams and, eventually, the conscious thoughts drive him out of the bed that was colder than he was used to and always felt too big. It left him plenty of space to think everything over, which he probably needed but desperately did not want. Once he might have preferred a hotel room; he was used to spending time alone in those. When he'd stayed in them lately, though, he'd had unwanted company from his sense memory: the taste of fear, Sandra's curls, cold steel. The last time he'd stood behind a woman, close to her. He wondered now whether he should think about it, or try not to.
Before he' could, Lauren came into the room, apron gone. “I figured you'd be out of chef mode,” she said, and shut the door behind her. “Do you want to talk about it, or do absolutely anything except talk about it?”
“Anything but.”
“I thought so.” She sat down next to him. “So. How about those Redskins, huh?”
“I don't know.” He could think about sports, anyway; he should always be able to think about sports. “For a hometown team, I like the Ravens more.”
“And football isn't your favorite sport in the first place, right?”
“Right. Too much brawn and not enough brains.”
“That's not true,” she protested. He almost didn't want to disagree, but he at least respected her enough to argue. “Yes it is. Outside of football, most jocks aren't dumb.”
“Let me guess: you didn't just pick up basketball with the guys at the gym when you moved here.”
“No, I was varsity. High school and college.”
“What position?”
“I started off as a center, but in college they switched me to a power forward.”
“Up against bigger guys?”
“Pretty much. I can't block as much as one of those six-foot-ten walls of muscle they've got.”
“I bet you could block a lot more than them these days.”
“In theory, but there's certain equipment you're not allowed to carry on the court.”
“Is that a double entendre?”
He thought that over for a second. “I didn't intend it to be.”
“Too late now,” she said, laughing, and put a hand on his knee. “You're so tense, Noah.” Before he could reply she kissed him, long and deep.
He made himself think of being in the kitchen just a few minutes earlier. That was close to him, within reach, right there. He laced his fingers through her hair, which was utterly unlike his wife's - his ex-wife's - but he didn't dwell on comparisons; feeling was gaining ground steadily on thinking. Eventually Lauren caught her breath and made him catch his. “How long has it been since you had sex with a woman other than Sandra?”
He looked down for a minute and then forced a rueful grin. “Twenty-four years this April, if you can believe it.”
“I can believe it if you don't claim you were a virgin when you met her.”
“I won't even try to.” He set his glasses on the bedside table and didn't mention that it was two years since he'd had sex at all. “I hope you weren't planning to spend the whole night sitting at the foot of the bed.”
“Definitely not,” Lauren said, kicking her shoes off and sprawling next to him.
Kissing was worth going back to, worth having a fair amount of time devoted to it. Noah engaged in some degree of cognition throughout it, despite his best efforts, until eventually his thoughts started to repeat themselves, worked into a rut that, in time, was trodden into nothing. Lauren was here, warm and pretty and wanting him, and she knew what he was, more or less. There was no need to lie to her as a matter of course, but there was the unspoken acknowledgment that sometimes he would, and that she would lie to him too. Maybe they were each what the other deserved.
For now, though, they kissed. Lauren had soft lips and a supple tongue. Her mouth tasted like nothing in particular, good to him, and the roughness of his hands on her down-soft cheeks didn't bother her. They drew closer together, Lauren pulling him into her arms, and she was warm, glad to touch him, increasingly energetic. Eventually she went into multi-tasking mode and made deft work of unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it from his shoulders. He felt soft fingertips move across the skin they'd exposed, lingering with a certain intensity over what seemed like every muscle. Noah closed his eyes so that he couldn't meet Lauren's, hoping she wouldn't say anything that would remind him of what he was used to hearing in the bedroom, or had been.
He told himself again not to think. The clasps on Lauren's blouse were damnably tricky cloth nubs, and he focused on getting them unfastened. “I'm going to need my glasses back for these things.”
“Chastity devices have gone fashion-forward, didn't you know?” Lauren said, and had them all open in about five seconds. Noah decided to let himself go then, kissing his way across her shoulders and her clavicles and the hollow of her throat. He stopped thinking about all the sins of his own body, killing and stealing but never adultery, and gave himself permission to care only about what Lauren was doing to it, and about hers. He let his hands wander wherever they wanted and buried his face in her breasts because it had been so long, because he was sick of trying not to want anything, because thinking over everything he wished had never happened and all that he wished could happen again wasn't going to replace what was done and gone.
So he gave in to feeling the firm thighs he couldn't admit to admiring a few years earlier, gave himself permission to do things he hadn't, of late, freely allowed himself to imagine. There had been plenty of chances for things to change, if they'd wanted to change them, in all the times they'd talked and cooked and made out, and by now maybe it was time just to lie in bed letting their bodies run miles ahead of their minds.
He shifted one of his thighs between hers and got a nice little gasp from her, one that was easy enough to get her to repeat. They'd both had enough teasing. He untangled them, and it gave Lauren just enough room to press her palm to the erection that was making itself known against his fly. “Oh, God.”
He didn't need his glasses to know that she was smirking. “Anything you want me to do with that, cowboy?”
“Just say yes.”
“Kind of beyond the need at this point, don't you think?”
He groaned as he went for her slacks. “Please tell me these are easier than your blouse.”
“Much easier.” That didn't make their presence any less aggravating at the moment, though; once he'd gotten them unzipped, he let her wriggle her way out of them while he worked his fingers under her panties. They might have been the kind suitable for a whore or for an elderly nun for all Noah cared. He didn't bother to look at them; he just wanted them gone. Her bikini line was bare, which was no surprise. He pushed his fingers past the elastic and found smooth skin, and the little pause it gave him was enough to make Lauren say, “Please, don't tell me you're that repressed.”
“No, just... vanilla.”
“You're behind the times.”
“Yeah.”
She moved his hand. “Feel like a real woman to you now?”
“Oh, fuck.”
“That's a yes?”
“Yeah.” It didn't take him long to hit on the right thing to do and get Lauren writhing like an eel. His own body felt like it was humming with electricity that got stronger when Lauren said, “I can believe I've wanted this for years... Christ, Noah, don't - ”
“I won't make you wait.” He'd thought his mind was gone, but it wasn't, not completely. It took a little fight not to stop himself short. He wouldn't make her beg for anything. Anything at all. His fumbled at this bedside table, wishing for his glasses and then knocking them to the floor. He left Lauren to retrieve them while he rolled on the condom he'd managed to find, and it might have been a minute or an hour of their having their hands all over each other again before Lauren stumbled on the memory to channel the sweet little waitress in Odessa: “Any special way you want it, sweetheart, or just the house special?”
“Ladies' night,” he said, because some things would always be the same, or because there was nothing here that was just Sandra's. She'd liked to throw everything into the mix once in a while, Flashes of memory had taken to startling Noah from time to time lately, with a rhyme and reason he didn't like. “Just let me see - oh, God - just get on top of me.”
“All right.” She went still for a second and then put her lips on his ear. “How about we pull that little chair around... and you sit in it like a good boy - ” she gave him a squeeze - “and I get to be the rodeo queen?”
He let her push him down while he fumbled with the chair to recline it. “Thanks,” Lauren said. She swung a leg over him. “If you didn't wear glasses, I might think you were less excited about the room to maneuver - ”
“It's good - ”
“Than the better view. Then again,” she said, “I'm close enough to see, aren't I?”
A grin tugged at his lips. “Yes, you are.”
“Good.” There was a flash of motion, too quick to make sense of. Lauren bucked against him and took him in, and if Noah were fifteen years younger he would have lost it right then. Some sliver of his mind was grateful for the inevitabilities of middle age. “Christ. Lauren.”
She stopped for a second. “Didn't figure you for a talker,” she said, and she was smiling until his fingers found a good pattern on her clit, and the smile turned into a wild bedroom laugh, and he said, “Love that - ”
“Oh - ”
“Fuck. All wet.” Not a very eloquent talker, but Lauren didn't care any more than he did, just kept going, adjusting her tempo and angle to get the most from his fingers. “You love this.”
The sheen of sweat was all over her body: flushed face, hard nipples that drew his free hand. She moved one of hers to help. “Oh, God.” Her head and her thighs rolled up a little, and of course she would be one of those women who felt a long series of little earthquakes. The thought of it, and feeling the first one, brought him too close to the edge again. He closed his eyes and bit his cheek, and then she kept going. “Christ.”
It built. Little spirals of pleasure in her, getting wider, deeper. He was moaning through it all, cursing. “Fuck. Lauren. Oh, Christ. You're going to kill me. Lauren. Fuck. God.”
She rode it like she rode him, getting taste after taste while he was tantalized, and he would've been begging if he could have made any sense. She clenched around him and then froze, not letting him do anything but swear and, as she repeated it, descend into incoherent moans. He found a rhythm in it, started to let it carry him, and then Lauren pressed herself around him, tight, and while it wasn't true that Noah had never come so hard in his life, for that moment he would've sworn that it was.
He didn't know how long it took to come down from that. It felt like no time at all. It felt like hours.
He got to his feet carefully and felt himself process relief at feeling the first easings of near-pain. He was covered with sweat. The world was spinning more slowly than it had been. Soon it would reach an agreeable pace and he'd be able to walk.
By the time he'd dealt with the basic clean-up, Lauren was snuggled under the covers. It was another few minutes before he felt equal to talking. “Tired already?” he asked, once he could.
“Nope, just cold. And I'm entitled not to change back into work clothes for anything less than a Category-5 emergency.”
“Fair enough.”
“I wouldn't mind if you brought me dinner in bed.”
“Really?” She might not have been tired, but he was.
“Yes, really. I'll even forgive you if you just get Japanese takeout.”
He indulged in a yawn and pinched himself alert. “Right. What do you want?”
“Whatever's good.”
“I'll see what I can do.” He pulled on clothes and tossed Lauren his robe. “In case you were tempted to steal a pyjama shirt.”
“I'll try to resist. Just don't be gone too long.”
“Half an hour, tops.”
He headed down probably looking a little rumpled but figuring that the take-out joint on ground level had seen worse. They were too used to him to care, past being bothered that he scanned the place like a hawk every time he came in.
He ordered without looking at the menu and sat down with a paper while he waited. The front pages were all foreign policy debates, financial crises, environmental problems; garden-variety crime and human interest took over as he worked his way back. Stories of the world going by, nothing that encroached on him or threatened him, really. And nothing that was of any use in accomplishing what he needed to get done.
He went through the basketball coverage and scanned the Ravens' stats, then perused the culture reviews before deciding to let Lauren take her pick. It took him a few minutes to knock out the ostensibly top-difficulty sudoku. He let the comics page disappoint and amuse him and learned that it was a good weekend for Leos to start gardening projects. He took a first glance at the crossword and noted, idly, the blanks he thought Sandra could fill: Controversial Virginian d. 2007, home of French silks, '80s soap nemesis. He wondered if she'd filled out the identical one syndicated in the Costa Verde paper, if she'd had to look up where Gertrude lived (eight letters) or could have helped with the spelling of Marie Let-them-eat-cake, which had gone into his head wrong in junior high and stuck that way with damnable obstinancy. Lauren might not know Elsinore, he thought, but she could probably get the unfortunate Queen Louis XVI. She'd do better with some of the sports and the pop culture clues than he could.
The counter called his order. Noah got up and told the kid on shift to keep the change, which amounted to an overly generous tip but seemed only fair now that he was cooking more and ordering less. Then he tore out the puzzles page and left it for the next person, and he tucked the rest of the newspaper into the carry-out bag to bring back up to Lauren.
image credits: photographis quiet_graphix (2x) iluvbsbkevin