Love in the Time of Faff and Fancy (30 Rock, Liz/Wesley)
Title: Love in the Time of Faff and Fancy
Author: blithers
Fandom: 30 Rock
Pairing/Character: Liz/Wesley, background Jenna/Paul
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: through the end of season 4
Word Count: 3381
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Also Posted At: AO3
Author's Note: Written for ijemanja for New Year's Resolution 2012. Thank you to my lovely beta, htbthomas!
Summary: She isn't sure how Jenna talked her into this. Scratch that, she knows exactly how Jenna had talked her into this one - it was all girl-bonding time and Liz needing to get out of the house more now that she's married, and yet here they are, with Jenna serenading Paul and Wesley in tow. And Tracy. She's still not sure why Tracy (plus entourage) is here, except for the general theory that Tracy is the cockroach of social events, and just sort of shows up and then sticks around despite threats of a nuclear holocaust or spray-can Raid or work the next day or whatever.
The bar is loud and crowded, alternating between karaoke and something with a techno beat that goes whaa-whaa-whaa-wicka-whicka and lyrics that Liz is pretty sure she should be offended by if she could only understand them. And if the whole song wasn't kind of catchy anyway. Whatever.
"Liz Lemon," shouts Tracy into her face, "I am drunk. And there's a sort of fuzzy feeling on my -"
"No," she interrupts, because this can end nowhere good. "Oversharing, Tracy."
"I think he's a charming bloke," Wesley talk-screams in her ear.
"You would," she mutters and takes another gulp of the purple-pink-magenta screwdriver-sex-on-the-cosmo that Jenna had shoved in her hand before rushing up on stage and hip-checking her way into belting "I Touch Myself" as a love ballad to Paul.
Tracy, meanwhile, pulls his impressed face, which means he looks mildly thoughtful. "Spot on, Mr. Lemon. Chop chop."
Wesley actually toasts the man. "Ta, mate."
She isn't sure how Jenna talked her into this. Scratch that, she knows exactly how Jenna had talked her into this one - it was all girl-bonding time and Liz needing to get out of the house more now that she's married, and yet here they are, with Jenna serenading Paul and Wesley in tow. And Tracy. She's still not sure why Tracy (plus entourage) is here, except for the general theory that Tracy is the cockroach of social events, and just sort of shows up and then sticks around despite threats of a nuclear holocaust or spray-can Raid or work the next day or whatever.
Two drinks later and she's watching Wesley as he makes as he works his way down a rainbow of shot glasses, set out in Roy G. Biv order but of otherwise unknown content. His accent is shifting like a teeter-totter the drunker he gets, dipping into broader tones and thick smothered vowels, then back to crisply pretentious English prep school. Up on the stage, Paul is serenading Jenna with a slurred rendition of "Killer Queen". Liz is pretty sure she can see cartoon hearts in Jenna's eyes as she watches Paul up on stage.
"Elizabeth Snipes." Wesley leans in close to her ear. "Elizabeth Snipes."
"Hyphen. Damn it, hyphen."
He ignores her and whispers "Elizabeth Snipes" again to himself, sing-songing her name, and his breath on her neck gives her goosebumps, like a hand of static electricity running down her arms and legs, making her skin crawl.
"Wesley Lemon," she retorts, because she's three - four? - drinks in and that's the best she can come up with. "Doesn't sound English at all."
He snorts contemptuously and moves back away from her, and she weirdly misses the presence of his body, the warm mass of him leaned in close to her and his lips at her ear. "Like you'd be the judge of that."
She ignores that and points a finger at the last shot glass, shaded a near-fluorescent shade of purple. "Are you going to finish what you started here?"
"Ooh, you'd like that, wouldn't you," he says with this weird, dorkily intense look on his face, and yup, she's pretty sure he's actually trying to flirt with her, which would be the first time that's happened since... ever? Almost ever.
"Are you trying to future husband me, as my actual current husband?" she asks, just to be sure.
He looks vaguely affronted. "Oi! Stop trying to future wife me, then!"
"Bored," announces Tracy, watching them from across the bar with the disinterested fascination Liz gives infomercials at two in the morning. "Is this how married white people flirt? Because it's a miracle there are so many little white babies running around."
"Gross, Tracy," she snaps, but Wesley just laughs and does the last shot, slamming the glass down harder than necessary.
---
They're sitting on a black leather couch against the back wall, and, really, the whole place is so stupidly pretentious that Liz is pretty sure you can catch douche from just rubbing up against the furniture. Paul has taken the blonde wig off, his plain dark hair sticking up in short boyish spikes and his eyeshadow heavy and dramatically glittery. Wesley's tie has regressed to a single line of fabric draped through his collar.
Wesley tips his head back on the couch and slits an eye in her direction. "We should sing a karaoke together, my sweet American pickle."
Jenna's head pops up from behind the couch like a groundhog, a swath of hair sticking up in the back and wearing sunglasses half the size of her head. "Did somebody just say karah-ohke?" Like that isn't what she had been doing all evening anyway
"Instant replay, Grizz," Tracy demands.
"Wesley just informed Beth that they should sing karaoke together."
Liz inclines her head regally in his direction and swirls the last of her drink around in the bottom of her glass with a plastic sword.
Wesley's still staring at her, head leaned back. "Is that a yes, then?"
She points the hot pink sword at Wesley, brandishing the array of marshino cherries she's been carefully hording. "Trust me, you don't want me to sing karaoke." She narrows her eyes. "ARE YOU TRYING TO EAT MY MARSHINO CHERRIES."
Wesley spits the cherry back out into her empty glass and gasps, "Banshee!"
Jenna pauses in the process of crawling back up over the arm of the couch into Paul's lap to play her best friend card in a proudly drunken haze. "Liz is legally banned from singing karaoke in three national chains and one state." She slumps forward as Paul wraps his arms around her, juggling the simultaneous impressive feats of arranging a wrecked Jenna on his lap and keeping his skirt from riding up.
"Only one of the midwestern ones," Liz demurs.
Tracy nods, understandingly. "It's okay, L.L. I'm banned from things too."
"I'm a big supporter of Britain's Bairns Have Got Warbling," says Wesley, like that somehow explains everything.
Jenna sits up straight again. "Did you see the episode where the little girl with the hideous purple dress sang the song about her mother? She was terrible." She enunciates the word like it's the most delicious thing ever.
Predictably, he perks up. "Yes indeed! She was all, whatsa-whatsa-mummy..."
"...pub-jammy-tally-ho!" Jenna finishes, and they laugh like anything they said had made actual sense.
Wesley sighs nostalgically when they finish laughing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Ah, yes. Let's just hope the Yanks don't get their greedy hands on a true English tradition."
"Cheers," agrees Jenna in the happily drunken spirit of multi-culturalism, and that's when Tracy orders the next round of shots.
---
She holds the glass up to the light and it blinks a baleful red at her.
"Sauron," she mutters suspiciously, and presses the cool evil glass against her forehead.
"Tehta tri grond linnod," says Tracy, and she stares at him. He shrugs and does another shot like he's mainlining something that isn't basically a thousand proof. "Don't look at me like that, Liz Lemon. I know things."
"Elvish?"
"Angie and I like to -"
"Never mind," she says, and Wesley quirks an eyebrow at her like, You know that shit is English.
"Yes," she snaps, "I know that Tolkien was English."
"It just makes my cockles swell," Wesley sighs with suddenly and suspiciously misty eyes, "to think what a small damp little island..."
"One," she says before this can get any worse, "no. And eew. Two, I feel like we've had this conversation already tonight. Three, my wedding ring has stick figures playing cricket on it. You have nothing to be proud of."
"It's traditional, Elizabeth, which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the pamphlet I provided you -"
"English Countryside Orthodox Weddings and You? Oh, I read it, Snipes." She leans in close to him, and his pupils are huge this close up, dilated black with the dim light and alcohol. He licks his lips absently, running the tip of his tongue along the corner of his mouth, and she has to resist the urge to let her gaze flicker downward. She leans in a little closer, and their noses touch. "I read it," she finishes in a whisper.
"I loved your wedding," slurs Jenna sentimentally from her perch on Paul's lap. Her sunglasses are pushed up on her head now, gleaming like insect eyes, and she's waving an empty martini glass that Liz doesn't remember any of them drinking from. "Paul and I had the most amazing sex in your dressing room."
"Twice," Paul elaborates cheerfully, tightening his arms around her waist, and Jenna collapses into him, giggling into his shoulder.
She diverts attention from Wesley to glare, but the look falls short because, really, she's kind of distracted at this point by the way Wesley's tie is slung loose around his neck and bits of his hair are sticking out and curling gently at the ends, making him look less like a pretentiously polished Mr. Bean and more like... well, somebody with really touchable hair. (Oh god. She wants to touch his hair. Like, sink her hands into it and rake her fingernails down his scalp style, so that he starts breathing all fast and just stares at her and maybe shivers under her fingers touch his hair.)
Lady up, Lemon she tells herself firmly, and tosses back the shot, hardcore lady-style.
---
She thinks about the wedding, sometimes.
It had involved an ungodly amount of tea and what Wesley had assured her were crumpets and what she had hoped, given the alternatives, might be clotted cream. Wesley had kissed her softly at the altar, with his eyes closed, and it had been warm and soft and for one moment she thought this might be okay until he started to do something with his tongue that he later informed her proudly was writing the alphabet in her mouth, because he'd read online that it did things for the ladies.
Then there was the part, much later in the evening, when it had been dark and quiet outside her apartment windows and all the guests had left, when Wesley had called her his girl, assured her that she was the bookkeeper's wellies, and kissed her again, sans alphabet.
She thinks about that part sometimes, too.
---
"I had a slumber party with the theme Staying up Late with Watergate when I was seven. I had a crush on David Frost. It was the hair. Maybe the accent. Also, I was seven. The only people who attended were Dwight D. Eisenbear and Mao Zeteddy. I ate a meatball sub for breakfast this morning and three doughnuts for dinner that I arm wrestled Frank for. I'm really drunk right now. Oh god. Wesley, stop me."
"You're pretty," he says vaguely into her hair, his accent thick and rough when he's this far gone. She's starting to feel all warm, a comfortable sort of heat starting in her toes and stroking its way upward through her belly and into her cheeks, like she just drifted into the warm spot of the pool when she was a kid and didn't know what a warm spot was yet.
She shifts a little, and Wesley tightens his grip where his fingers are hooked into the loops of her jeans, his head a heavy weight on her shoulder and his lips close to the pulse at her neck. They're alone on the couch now, tucked away in the back corner of the club, and she's lost track of everybody else.
"You're..." he says a moment later, snuffling delicately at the skin at her neck, "... you smell like cheese."
She slugs him affectionately in the shoulder. "Shut up."
"Cheese," he repeats in a low, disbelieving murmur, and sleepily buries himself back into the side of her body.
---
She shuts her eyes for a second and when she opens them again she's materialized into the backseat of a taxi. It's a neat trick. Wesley has his arm slung haphazardly around her waist and his face buried sloppily in the area somewhere above and to the east of her right knee, drooling into her jeans. His fingers are clutched into the bottom hem of her shirt, his knuckles skimming the top of her hip bone.
"You," she says, and shoves at his shoulder to make it clear who she's addressing. "Hey, you!"
Wesley mumbles something, and rolls the other side of his face into the bend behind her knee.
"Sorry," she says loudly to the driver, "my husband had too much to drink," before she realizes that the privacy glass is up and the taxi driver is reenacting the dance to Single Ladies as he weaves them haphazardly through traffic. She giggles then, and points at Wesley's chin, which seems suddenly, unbearably English to her. "Too much to drink," she repeats, pleased with the cleverness of the statement.
She decides to close her eyes again, and when she opens them this time she's propped up neatly over a nearby tree, arms tangled in the low-hanging branches, and Wesley is staring helplessly at his wallet and asking the driver what the total is in pounds.
"The world is my rape whistle," she says darkly, under her breath, and gives the tree an I-know-where-you-live look.
"Charming," Wesley says, pulling out a wad of cash and surrendering it to the cabbie with the air of a man totally defeated by basic mathematics and foreign social customs.
Her phone beeps, and she shifts her grip on the tree to tackle the vast complications of pulling a vibrating phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. She stares at the screen for a moment, jabs at a few likely looking buttons, and holds it in front of her like a Star Trek communicator and says hello a few times before realizing that she has, in fact, just received a text message from Jack.
"Wesley. Wesley. Jack says we each need to drink water and take an pin asap. Wait, no." She squints again. "Aspirin."
Wesley's phone gives a little shake, as if on cue, and he stares at it blearily. "Jackie sent me a textual as well."
"It's not..."
"He says no karaoke."
"Didn't I already say that?"
He sniffs. "Jack's statement is more authoritative than yours." Wesley pockets the phone with a firm air of purpose that Jack's text has apparently imparted, and Liz makes a self-patented face she likes to think of as whaaaaaat.
A staircase chooses that moment to loom up out of nowhere.
"Damn it." She rubs her shin and glares at the thing, which is currently projecting an inappropriately self-satistfied air of contempt for both her and her life choices. She kicks it and stubs her toe, and Wesley's right there beside her as she hops, a hand at her elbow.
"Need some help, love?"
He brings an arm up under her shoulders and attempts the manly leg sweep, staggers upward a few steps, and slowly sinks to the ground, puffing like a landed fish. They end up tangled together on the sixth step, his forearm still under her knees and with no mutual idea of how to move further up or down from their current location.
"Blerg," she says, and Wesley sighs in what she assumes is agreement.
"Blerg," he says.
---
She peers down at the ground, miles beneath their precarious perch, and turns her head carefully to gaze longingly at the landing far above their heads. A small voice in the back of her head is attempting to inform her that the situation was ridiculous, that she is stuck on a staircase and the only reason this is a situation at all was that she has had far too much to drink, but the evidence of her eyes is telling her something quite different.
"I think we're stuck."
Wesley purses his lips and examines their situation with a critical eye.
"We might be," he agrees.
"We're doomed," she says glumly, because this is apparently her life now. "I can't believe this is my life now."
"Now, there. Chuff up, sweetheart." Wesley wraps an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him, resting her gently spinning head on his shoulder and shuts her eyes in a valiant attempt to steady the ground. "We'll figure a way out."
She cracks an eye open again to look skeptically at his profile. His nose is a bit pointy from this angle, and his hair has a light fringe of grey at the edges. There is a determination to the set of his mouth, and a slight frown at the corner.
"Yeah," she says finally, and closes her eyes again.
---
Half an hour and one way out later, Jenna is standing in front of them like some sort of judge-y, blonde avenging angel, hands on her hips and an expression plastered across her face that Liz knows by name as Outraged Bystander Number Three.
"Ugh," Liz says, and buries her face back into Wesley's coat, which smells a little of mint and a faintly musty Britishness that it seems ridiculous for a person to ever smell like. "My husband smells like England," she mumbles into Wesley's sleeve.
"And my boyfriend is currently trussed up and playing the part of Switzerland, so if you don't mind I'd like to get this situation," Jenna waves disdainfully in a gestures that encompasses everything from Liz's rucked-up hair to Wesley's shoes (which Liz has a shamefully vague memory of throwing up on) to the fact that they seem to be stuck on an ordinary staircase as though it was a deserted island and they need to repopulate the world with babies or making shelters out of bamboo and banana leaves or die alone of exposure and loneliness, "straightened out so I can go back and be the Germany that he deserves."
"Germany's the best," Liz says quietly, but what she really kind of means is You're the best.
"I was the one who remembered our mobiles," Wesley brags, as Jenna hooks an arm under his shoulders and helps him stumble over to the elevator (the elevator!) door. Wesley frowns at the silvers doors. "Forgot about the lift. Did you know that Liz smells like cheese?"
"Please. I was her roommate through multiple cheese eras." Jenna draps her over Welsey and presses the button for the elevator. "The best was cheddar. That was mostly when she was dating Conan."
"That Irish bastard," Liz mutters.
Wesley nods. "I think she's drifted into more of a powered variety at this point."
"You had more to drink than both of us combined. How are you functional?" Liz asks Jenna suspiciously, feeling that a change of subject can only help things here and eyeing her costume change to a crisp and low-cut military uniform with a wide black belt with reluctant admiration.
"I'm a professional, Liz. This is what I do." Jenna waves a hand around herself in a curt and vaguely Vanna White-ish gesture.
The elevator chimes cheerfully as the doors close, and Wesley winces at the noise and drops his face against the cool metal ringing the lift, mashing his cheek into the wall. Liz sympathizes. She leans her forehead onto the sign explaining maximum load capacity in a spirit of solidarity.
But Jenna doesn't leave until they both follow Jack's instructions and down a glass of water and a two shot of aspirin, though she spends half that time gesturing with a riding whip that Liz doesn't remember her having a minute ago. Liz collapses into her pillow as Wesley pulls the covers up over them and falls asleep before Jenna even switches the lights off, and the rest is darkness.
---
She wakes up with the sun attempting to beam a highly important message straight into her skull, her mouth stuffed full of dry fabric, and an arm slung heavy over her waist.
Somehow, everything seems right with the world.
She makes an executive decision not to question it. With infinite care (because she's pretty sure her eyelids might be broken) she closes her eyes again. Wesley curls his hand in his sleep and pulls her in a little closer, his breath light on the back of her neck, and maybe he says something softly into her hair.
And maybe she smiles.
A little.
Author: blithers
Fandom: 30 Rock
Pairing/Character: Liz/Wesley, background Jenna/Paul
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: through the end of season 4
Word Count: 3381
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Also Posted At: AO3
Author's Note: Written for ijemanja for New Year's Resolution 2012. Thank you to my lovely beta, htbthomas!
Summary: She isn't sure how Jenna talked her into this. Scratch that, she knows exactly how Jenna had talked her into this one - it was all girl-bonding time and Liz needing to get out of the house more now that she's married, and yet here they are, with Jenna serenading Paul and Wesley in tow. And Tracy. She's still not sure why Tracy (plus entourage) is here, except for the general theory that Tracy is the cockroach of social events, and just sort of shows up and then sticks around despite threats of a nuclear holocaust or spray-can Raid or work the next day or whatever.
The bar is loud and crowded, alternating between karaoke and something with a techno beat that goes whaa-whaa-whaa-wicka-whicka and lyrics that Liz is pretty sure she should be offended by if she could only understand them. And if the whole song wasn't kind of catchy anyway. Whatever.
"Liz Lemon," shouts Tracy into her face, "I am drunk. And there's a sort of fuzzy feeling on my -"
"No," she interrupts, because this can end nowhere good. "Oversharing, Tracy."
"I think he's a charming bloke," Wesley talk-screams in her ear.
"You would," she mutters and takes another gulp of the purple-pink-magenta screwdriver-sex-on-the-cosmo that Jenna had shoved in her hand before rushing up on stage and hip-checking her way into belting "I Touch Myself" as a love ballad to Paul.
Tracy, meanwhile, pulls his impressed face, which means he looks mildly thoughtful. "Spot on, Mr. Lemon. Chop chop."
Wesley actually toasts the man. "Ta, mate."
She isn't sure how Jenna talked her into this. Scratch that, she knows exactly how Jenna had talked her into this one - it was all girl-bonding time and Liz needing to get out of the house more now that she's married, and yet here they are, with Jenna serenading Paul and Wesley in tow. And Tracy. She's still not sure why Tracy (plus entourage) is here, except for the general theory that Tracy is the cockroach of social events, and just sort of shows up and then sticks around despite threats of a nuclear holocaust or spray-can Raid or work the next day or whatever.
Two drinks later and she's watching Wesley as he makes as he works his way down a rainbow of shot glasses, set out in Roy G. Biv order but of otherwise unknown content. His accent is shifting like a teeter-totter the drunker he gets, dipping into broader tones and thick smothered vowels, then back to crisply pretentious English prep school. Up on the stage, Paul is serenading Jenna with a slurred rendition of "Killer Queen". Liz is pretty sure she can see cartoon hearts in Jenna's eyes as she watches Paul up on stage.
"Elizabeth Snipes." Wesley leans in close to her ear. "Elizabeth Snipes."
"Hyphen. Damn it, hyphen."
He ignores her and whispers "Elizabeth Snipes" again to himself, sing-songing her name, and his breath on her neck gives her goosebumps, like a hand of static electricity running down her arms and legs, making her skin crawl.
"Wesley Lemon," she retorts, because she's three - four? - drinks in and that's the best she can come up with. "Doesn't sound English at all."
He snorts contemptuously and moves back away from her, and she weirdly misses the presence of his body, the warm mass of him leaned in close to her and his lips at her ear. "Like you'd be the judge of that."
She ignores that and points a finger at the last shot glass, shaded a near-fluorescent shade of purple. "Are you going to finish what you started here?"
"Ooh, you'd like that, wouldn't you," he says with this weird, dorkily intense look on his face, and yup, she's pretty sure he's actually trying to flirt with her, which would be the first time that's happened since... ever? Almost ever.
"Are you trying to future husband me, as my actual current husband?" she asks, just to be sure.
He looks vaguely affronted. "Oi! Stop trying to future wife me, then!"
"Bored," announces Tracy, watching them from across the bar with the disinterested fascination Liz gives infomercials at two in the morning. "Is this how married white people flirt? Because it's a miracle there are so many little white babies running around."
"Gross, Tracy," she snaps, but Wesley just laughs and does the last shot, slamming the glass down harder than necessary.
---
They're sitting on a black leather couch against the back wall, and, really, the whole place is so stupidly pretentious that Liz is pretty sure you can catch douche from just rubbing up against the furniture. Paul has taken the blonde wig off, his plain dark hair sticking up in short boyish spikes and his eyeshadow heavy and dramatically glittery. Wesley's tie has regressed to a single line of fabric draped through his collar.
Wesley tips his head back on the couch and slits an eye in her direction. "We should sing a karaoke together, my sweet American pickle."
Jenna's head pops up from behind the couch like a groundhog, a swath of hair sticking up in the back and wearing sunglasses half the size of her head. "Did somebody just say karah-ohke?" Like that isn't what she had been doing all evening anyway
"Instant replay, Grizz," Tracy demands.
"Wesley just informed Beth that they should sing karaoke together."
Liz inclines her head regally in his direction and swirls the last of her drink around in the bottom of her glass with a plastic sword.
Wesley's still staring at her, head leaned back. "Is that a yes, then?"
She points the hot pink sword at Wesley, brandishing the array of marshino cherries she's been carefully hording. "Trust me, you don't want me to sing karaoke." She narrows her eyes. "ARE YOU TRYING TO EAT MY MARSHINO CHERRIES."
Wesley spits the cherry back out into her empty glass and gasps, "Banshee!"
Jenna pauses in the process of crawling back up over the arm of the couch into Paul's lap to play her best friend card in a proudly drunken haze. "Liz is legally banned from singing karaoke in three national chains and one state." She slumps forward as Paul wraps his arms around her, juggling the simultaneous impressive feats of arranging a wrecked Jenna on his lap and keeping his skirt from riding up.
"Only one of the midwestern ones," Liz demurs.
Tracy nods, understandingly. "It's okay, L.L. I'm banned from things too."
"I'm a big supporter of Britain's Bairns Have Got Warbling," says Wesley, like that somehow explains everything.
Jenna sits up straight again. "Did you see the episode where the little girl with the hideous purple dress sang the song about her mother? She was terrible." She enunciates the word like it's the most delicious thing ever.
Predictably, he perks up. "Yes indeed! She was all, whatsa-whatsa-mummy..."
"...pub-jammy-tally-ho!" Jenna finishes, and they laugh like anything they said had made actual sense.
Wesley sighs nostalgically when they finish laughing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "Ah, yes. Let's just hope the Yanks don't get their greedy hands on a true English tradition."
"Cheers," agrees Jenna in the happily drunken spirit of multi-culturalism, and that's when Tracy orders the next round of shots.
---
She holds the glass up to the light and it blinks a baleful red at her.
"Sauron," she mutters suspiciously, and presses the cool evil glass against her forehead.
"Tehta tri grond linnod," says Tracy, and she stares at him. He shrugs and does another shot like he's mainlining something that isn't basically a thousand proof. "Don't look at me like that, Liz Lemon. I know things."
"Elvish?"
"Angie and I like to -"
"Never mind," she says, and Wesley quirks an eyebrow at her like, You know that shit is English.
"Yes," she snaps, "I know that Tolkien was English."
"It just makes my cockles swell," Wesley sighs with suddenly and suspiciously misty eyes, "to think what a small damp little island..."
"One," she says before this can get any worse, "no. And eew. Two, I feel like we've had this conversation already tonight. Three, my wedding ring has stick figures playing cricket on it. You have nothing to be proud of."
"It's traditional, Elizabeth, which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the pamphlet I provided you -"
"English Countryside Orthodox Weddings and You? Oh, I read it, Snipes." She leans in close to him, and his pupils are huge this close up, dilated black with the dim light and alcohol. He licks his lips absently, running the tip of his tongue along the corner of his mouth, and she has to resist the urge to let her gaze flicker downward. She leans in a little closer, and their noses touch. "I read it," she finishes in a whisper.
"I loved your wedding," slurs Jenna sentimentally from her perch on Paul's lap. Her sunglasses are pushed up on her head now, gleaming like insect eyes, and she's waving an empty martini glass that Liz doesn't remember any of them drinking from. "Paul and I had the most amazing sex in your dressing room."
"Twice," Paul elaborates cheerfully, tightening his arms around her waist, and Jenna collapses into him, giggling into his shoulder.
She diverts attention from Wesley to glare, but the look falls short because, really, she's kind of distracted at this point by the way Wesley's tie is slung loose around his neck and bits of his hair are sticking out and curling gently at the ends, making him look less like a pretentiously polished Mr. Bean and more like... well, somebody with really touchable hair. (Oh god. She wants to touch his hair. Like, sink her hands into it and rake her fingernails down his scalp style, so that he starts breathing all fast and just stares at her and maybe shivers under her fingers touch his hair.)
Lady up, Lemon she tells herself firmly, and tosses back the shot, hardcore lady-style.
---
She thinks about the wedding, sometimes.
It had involved an ungodly amount of tea and what Wesley had assured her were crumpets and what she had hoped, given the alternatives, might be clotted cream. Wesley had kissed her softly at the altar, with his eyes closed, and it had been warm and soft and for one moment she thought this might be okay until he started to do something with his tongue that he later informed her proudly was writing the alphabet in her mouth, because he'd read online that it did things for the ladies.
Then there was the part, much later in the evening, when it had been dark and quiet outside her apartment windows and all the guests had left, when Wesley had called her his girl, assured her that she was the bookkeeper's wellies, and kissed her again, sans alphabet.
She thinks about that part sometimes, too.
---
"I had a slumber party with the theme Staying up Late with Watergate when I was seven. I had a crush on David Frost. It was the hair. Maybe the accent. Also, I was seven. The only people who attended were Dwight D. Eisenbear and Mao Zeteddy. I ate a meatball sub for breakfast this morning and three doughnuts for dinner that I arm wrestled Frank for. I'm really drunk right now. Oh god. Wesley, stop me."
"You're pretty," he says vaguely into her hair, his accent thick and rough when he's this far gone. She's starting to feel all warm, a comfortable sort of heat starting in her toes and stroking its way upward through her belly and into her cheeks, like she just drifted into the warm spot of the pool when she was a kid and didn't know what a warm spot was yet.
She shifts a little, and Wesley tightens his grip where his fingers are hooked into the loops of her jeans, his head a heavy weight on her shoulder and his lips close to the pulse at her neck. They're alone on the couch now, tucked away in the back corner of the club, and she's lost track of everybody else.
"You're..." he says a moment later, snuffling delicately at the skin at her neck, "... you smell like cheese."
She slugs him affectionately in the shoulder. "Shut up."
"Cheese," he repeats in a low, disbelieving murmur, and sleepily buries himself back into the side of her body.
---
She shuts her eyes for a second and when she opens them again she's materialized into the backseat of a taxi. It's a neat trick. Wesley has his arm slung haphazardly around her waist and his face buried sloppily in the area somewhere above and to the east of her right knee, drooling into her jeans. His fingers are clutched into the bottom hem of her shirt, his knuckles skimming the top of her hip bone.
"You," she says, and shoves at his shoulder to make it clear who she's addressing. "Hey, you!"
Wesley mumbles something, and rolls the other side of his face into the bend behind her knee.
"Sorry," she says loudly to the driver, "my husband had too much to drink," before she realizes that the privacy glass is up and the taxi driver is reenacting the dance to Single Ladies as he weaves them haphazardly through traffic. She giggles then, and points at Wesley's chin, which seems suddenly, unbearably English to her. "Too much to drink," she repeats, pleased with the cleverness of the statement.
She decides to close her eyes again, and when she opens them this time she's propped up neatly over a nearby tree, arms tangled in the low-hanging branches, and Wesley is staring helplessly at his wallet and asking the driver what the total is in pounds.
"The world is my rape whistle," she says darkly, under her breath, and gives the tree an I-know-where-you-live look.
"Charming," Wesley says, pulling out a wad of cash and surrendering it to the cabbie with the air of a man totally defeated by basic mathematics and foreign social customs.
Her phone beeps, and she shifts her grip on the tree to tackle the vast complications of pulling a vibrating phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. She stares at the screen for a moment, jabs at a few likely looking buttons, and holds it in front of her like a Star Trek communicator and says hello a few times before realizing that she has, in fact, just received a text message from Jack.
"Wesley. Wesley. Jack says we each need to drink water and take an pin asap. Wait, no." She squints again. "Aspirin."
Wesley's phone gives a little shake, as if on cue, and he stares at it blearily. "Jackie sent me a textual as well."
"It's not..."
"He says no karaoke."
"Didn't I already say that?"
He sniffs. "Jack's statement is more authoritative than yours." Wesley pockets the phone with a firm air of purpose that Jack's text has apparently imparted, and Liz makes a self-patented face she likes to think of as whaaaaaat.
A staircase chooses that moment to loom up out of nowhere.
"Damn it." She rubs her shin and glares at the thing, which is currently projecting an inappropriately self-satistfied air of contempt for both her and her life choices. She kicks it and stubs her toe, and Wesley's right there beside her as she hops, a hand at her elbow.
"Need some help, love?"
He brings an arm up under her shoulders and attempts the manly leg sweep, staggers upward a few steps, and slowly sinks to the ground, puffing like a landed fish. They end up tangled together on the sixth step, his forearm still under her knees and with no mutual idea of how to move further up or down from their current location.
"Blerg," she says, and Wesley sighs in what she assumes is agreement.
"Blerg," he says.
---
She peers down at the ground, miles beneath their precarious perch, and turns her head carefully to gaze longingly at the landing far above their heads. A small voice in the back of her head is attempting to inform her that the situation was ridiculous, that she is stuck on a staircase and the only reason this is a situation at all was that she has had far too much to drink, but the evidence of her eyes is telling her something quite different.
"I think we're stuck."
Wesley purses his lips and examines their situation with a critical eye.
"We might be," he agrees.
"We're doomed," she says glumly, because this is apparently her life now. "I can't believe this is my life now."
"Now, there. Chuff up, sweetheart." Wesley wraps an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him, resting her gently spinning head on his shoulder and shuts her eyes in a valiant attempt to steady the ground. "We'll figure a way out."
She cracks an eye open again to look skeptically at his profile. His nose is a bit pointy from this angle, and his hair has a light fringe of grey at the edges. There is a determination to the set of his mouth, and a slight frown at the corner.
"Yeah," she says finally, and closes her eyes again.
---
Half an hour and one way out later, Jenna is standing in front of them like some sort of judge-y, blonde avenging angel, hands on her hips and an expression plastered across her face that Liz knows by name as Outraged Bystander Number Three.
"Ugh," Liz says, and buries her face back into Wesley's coat, which smells a little of mint and a faintly musty Britishness that it seems ridiculous for a person to ever smell like. "My husband smells like England," she mumbles into Wesley's sleeve.
"And my boyfriend is currently trussed up and playing the part of Switzerland, so if you don't mind I'd like to get this situation," Jenna waves disdainfully in a gestures that encompasses everything from Liz's rucked-up hair to Wesley's shoes (which Liz has a shamefully vague memory of throwing up on) to the fact that they seem to be stuck on an ordinary staircase as though it was a deserted island and they need to repopulate the world with babies or making shelters out of bamboo and banana leaves or die alone of exposure and loneliness, "straightened out so I can go back and be the Germany that he deserves."
"Germany's the best," Liz says quietly, but what she really kind of means is You're the best.
"I was the one who remembered our mobiles," Wesley brags, as Jenna hooks an arm under his shoulders and helps him stumble over to the elevator (the elevator!) door. Wesley frowns at the silvers doors. "Forgot about the lift. Did you know that Liz smells like cheese?"
"Please. I was her roommate through multiple cheese eras." Jenna draps her over Welsey and presses the button for the elevator. "The best was cheddar. That was mostly when she was dating Conan."
"That Irish bastard," Liz mutters.
Wesley nods. "I think she's drifted into more of a powered variety at this point."
"You had more to drink than both of us combined. How are you functional?" Liz asks Jenna suspiciously, feeling that a change of subject can only help things here and eyeing her costume change to a crisp and low-cut military uniform with a wide black belt with reluctant admiration.
"I'm a professional, Liz. This is what I do." Jenna waves a hand around herself in a curt and vaguely Vanna White-ish gesture.
The elevator chimes cheerfully as the doors close, and Wesley winces at the noise and drops his face against the cool metal ringing the lift, mashing his cheek into the wall. Liz sympathizes. She leans her forehead onto the sign explaining maximum load capacity in a spirit of solidarity.
But Jenna doesn't leave until they both follow Jack's instructions and down a glass of water and a two shot of aspirin, though she spends half that time gesturing with a riding whip that Liz doesn't remember her having a minute ago. Liz collapses into her pillow as Wesley pulls the covers up over them and falls asleep before Jenna even switches the lights off, and the rest is darkness.
---
She wakes up with the sun attempting to beam a highly important message straight into her skull, her mouth stuffed full of dry fabric, and an arm slung heavy over her waist.
Somehow, everything seems right with the world.
She makes an executive decision not to question it. With infinite care (because she's pretty sure her eyelids might be broken) she closes her eyes again. Wesley curls his hand in his sleep and pulls her in a little closer, his breath light on the back of her neck, and maybe he says something softly into her hair.
And maybe she smiles.
A little.