FIC: The Way Things Work (Cordelia/Gunn, R)
TITLE: The Way Things Work
RATING: R
FANDOM: Angel
PAIRING: Cordelia/Gunn
SPOILERS: Early AtS S2
SUMMARY: As it turns out, Cordelia is not completely disinterested in physics.
PROMPT: Written for marenfic for the hetfic_minis Cordelia round. Requested was the truck and teasing.
Despite her lifelong attempts to appear both emotionally cool and uninterested in physics, Cordelia is both a romantic and a fan of the laws of motion. For a moment, rocking, the phrase “centripetal force” enters her head, and Cordelia thinks that thank God no one from Sunnydale will ever know she thinks thoughts like that; and then she thinks that, if they saw her now, no one from Sunnydale would recognize her.
Gunn’s hands, strong hands, good hands, cradle her rib cage. Cordelia rocks in his lap, swelling around him. She wishes she could increase her force-higher, faster, deeper-but then she’d bump her head.
“You need. A bigger. Truck,” Cordelia says. The torn upholstery has already puffed up her hair; left a pink, patterned rash on her cheek. One hand gripping the cracked vinyl of the dashboard, the other the cool metal of the back window. Cordelia thinks of The Matrix, the impossible kung-fu crane midair.
“No talkin’ trash about my girl. We’ve been together longer than-”
Cordelia stops rocking, and narrows her eyes dangerously at Gunn. In the streetlight, the moonlight, all the hardness is gone from his face.
“We’re not together,” Cordelia says. “You and me.”
Gunn is smiling as he shakes his head. “Nuh uh. ’Course not.”
Cordelia, appeased, resettles her hands on Gunn’s broad shoulders, uses the leverage to lift herself up, up, yes . . .
Midnight silence, only soft breaths and the old house creaks and groans of the truck around them. Cordelia keeps her eyes closed, and in her self-imposed blindness, the feel of Gunn around her becomes more pronounced: his hands and arms around her; his broad, strong chest resisting her soft, swollen breasts as she arches against him. The feel of Gunn inside her, of him all around her, is comfortingly familiar but not boring. And Cordelia bores easily; didn’t that happen to Einstein, too? Bleh, more physics.
They fit. They work, and they fit; Cordelia doesn’t have to show Gunn how to touch her, doesn’t have to tell him to go faster or slower. They just work, automatically. She doesn’t know how; she could sooner explain to you how Gunn’s dumb beloved truck works. And that’s not a thing she knows much about; Cordelia doesn’t understand, really, how cars work. Since the IRS waged war on her family, she doesn’t even have one of her own anymore. It’s just parts, gross greasy parts. Somehow, they work together to get you from place to place. But she doesn’t know how. And she doesn’t understand, at least not as well as she’d have everyone believe, how men work, either.
And yet these things keep right on working whether you understand the physics or not.
Cordelia’s world floods with lights, and she loses her breath as the incredible tension within her releases. Her world is insular, insulated; somewhere far off, miles off, she hears Gunn grunt, feels his hands grow hard around her. And then they’re collapsing, sweating and panting, onto each other, onto the old truck’s terrible upholstery.
“I don’t think this is what Angel had in mind when he told us to stakeout,” Gunn says.
“This works better for me if we don’t talk,” Cordelia says, but it’s a lie. They both know it.
It’s just part of how they work.