Endless Loop
The Runaways, Joan/Cherie, NC-17
- fucked. That’s how Joan feels, what she is. It starts with a kiss - no it fucking doesn’t. How cliche is that? Stupid to pretend it didn’t start the moment she saw her future standing there at the bar, drinking a soda pop, little blonde thing all dressed up to look too cool to dance. Joan wouldn’t precisely say she felt a stirring, but that’s close enough, that under-the-skin feeling like something in her was waking up, perking to attention. Not that she didn’t know she liked girls - of course she did, Joan’s no kid - but that was the first time she felt she could have a girl, the first time she wanted to try.
She didn’t even have to try very hard. In fact Joan thought it would be harder, in all the ways it could be, more coaxing, more moves, shoring up adrenaline, hands bruising up a sweat-slicked back after a show, leather and strobe lights and whatever they’d taken before (always something), letting the cheers carry them off the stage and riding the high until she could get Cherie pressed up to a wall, pressed up to Joan, ready for biting kisses and short fingernails that still manage to scrape. But instead it was slower, smoke and soft exhales and smiles, and Joan finds that she prefers that to her rough imaginings.
She likes the way Cherie fights back by bending to Joan’s will, how little it takes to get Cherie giggling warm and under her, how pleased she is to let Joan pull her between the sheets. Joan scrapes her teeth down the line of Cherie’s ribs and Cherie laughs like it tickles, and Joan shoves her hip hard up between Cherie’s thighs so the laugh chokes off and becomes something else. Cherie’s so dirty she circles back around to sweet again, with her honest delight in the things that Joan does to her, the way she’s up for anything - Joan pulls her into the dressing room after a show and tells everybody else to fuck off, goes to her knees in the bathroom with Cherie leaning up against the door, broken lock rattling every time someone pounds against it, and afterwards she has a zipper mark on her neck, because she couldn’t be fucked to get Cherie’s pants all the way down before she pushed her tongue up inside Cherie, dug her nails into the hot skin of Cherie’s thighs and then sucked on her clit until Cherie shook and pulled too hard on Joan’s hair and came with a cry.
And at some point, between cherry tattoos and cocaine in airplane bathrooms on the way to Japan, somewhere in there (that first night, naked together in bed and warmer than anything had the right to be, like everything was wreathed in the smoke they’d shared) this had stopped seeming like just another teenage goddamn thrill, another stimulant in an unceasing wave of them (the first time they fucked on coke, and Cherie pushed her fingers up inside Joan hard, too hard, but it felt fucking perfect, and the next morning Joan was sore inside and liked it), every fucking person looking at Cherie, always looking at Cherie first (and Joan couldn’t blame them, hated that she couldn’t blame them, because she couldn’t stop looking either), somewhere Joan realized that she wants too much, too hard, too specifically. She wants, she wants Cherie, whenever she can have her; Cherie’s body against hers, Cherie’s mouth open and gasping, Cherie’s voice in her ear, telling her stories when they’re too high to sleep, Cherie looking back, just looking back.
And it doesn’t stop, the wanting, not for drugs or fights or boys or anything. Joan wants Cherie in her arms, in her hands, beneath her body and it’s ceaseless, the wanting, it’s an endless loop, a give and take that doesn’t stop for anything, not a goddamned thing. Joan is fucked. Joan is so, so -