Treat for venusinthenight: Sucker Punch
Title: Sucker Punch
Recipient: venusinthenight
Author: sanguinity
Verse: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson/Gina Cortes
Rating: Explicit
Tags: Boxing, Hatesex, First Time, Missing Scene
Warnings: blood
Summary: Joan figures she can battle Cortes to a respectable draw, and then they can both walk away, tempers spent and faces saved. Joan is wrong.
I just want to put this whole thing behind me.
And does Detective Cortes feel the same way?
...I guess we'll see.
- 4x04 "All My Exes Live in Essex"
As a rule, Joan doesn’t box. Bouncing people’s brains against the insides of their skulls - her own or others’, it's the same either way - isn't harmless fun in her book. Nor is there much point in Joan boxing for self-defense: boxing privileges both reach and weight, and let's face it, most people are larger and heavier than Joan. Since partnering with Sherlock, Joan has spent just enough time fooling around in a boxing ring to know how to wrap her hands. That’s it.
But even though she's not a boxer, Joan figures she knows enough about fighting in general that she can still battle Cortes to a respectable draw. Then they can both walk away, tempers spent and faces saved, just like Sherlock suggested.
Unfortunately, it takes Joan less than a minute in the ring with Cortes to realize that she critically overestimated her own menace when forced to keep her gloves on. When facing an opponent with superior reach, Joan would normally slip inside their guard to strike from close-in -- within her own comfortable reach, but awkwardly close for theirs. Cortes is too good for that, and Joan keeps catching a fist in the face when she tries. Worse, all the techniques she normally falls back on when outmatched in weight and reach - disabling the secondary targets she can get to as a way-station to the primary targets she can’t, or applying controlling joint-locks and arm-bars to those long, muscular arms that Cortes keeps so helpfully putting in Joan’s range - either lie outside the Queensberry rules or are impossible to execute through the thick padding of her gloves. Joan is nearly helpless while wearing the damned things, and it stretches her temper thin.
Joan is taking nearly all the damage in this fight, and she didn't step into this ring to have her ass handed to her by petty, vengeful, outer-borough, B&Es-and-piffling-burglaries detective Gina Cortes.
And she sure as hell didn't agree to a public humiliation. She and Sherlock already have enough trouble with the detectives of the 11th, without handing them this to crow over.
Joan chews on her mouthguard in frustration, studying her opponent -- Cortes grins broadly back around her her own mouthguard -- and tries not to take too much damage while she watches for her opening. It's not dire yet, but it soon will be.
She slips Cortes' next two jabs, only to be caught by a hook to the temple. Her head snaps hard to the side under the impact.
The leash on her temper snaps with it.
Fine, she snarls to herself, as Cortes takes advantage of her distraction to plant an uppercut in her gut. There's more than one way to fight dirty.
Joan drops her guard, turns, and flees.
There's nowhere much to run to in a ring this size, but she needs only a few steps. She hears Cortes' cry of triumph, feels her footfalls on the canvas close behind her-
-and Joan smoothly spins and sucker-punches a very surprised Cortes right in the nose.
It lands beautifully, the sweet science instantiated, rooted straight up from the canvas through Joan's legs and hips and shoulder, the full momentum and energy of both of their bodies poured into the point of impact. Joan hears Cortes' nose break -- feels it even, despite the heavy padding of her glove -- and she takes the barest instant to admire the look of shock on Cortes’ face before ducking inside the woman's still-dropped guard to pummel her midsection. She gets in two uppercuts before Cortes locks her up in a clinch. Joan thrashes in Cortes' slippery embrace, her face mashed tight against Cortes' sweat-drenched police tank, trying to win enough room to punch her again. The end of Cortes' ponytail drags against Joan's face. She hears Cortes' enraged snarl in her ear, her words wet and indistinct around her mouthguard, "I will fucking get you for this, Watson-"
And then their ad hoc referee pulls them apart.
Joan steps back to see that Cortes' nose is gushing blood like a faucet. Her mouthguard is already full of it. Joan's soul surges with fierce, unseemly joy.
All that blood means the fight is abruptly over, of course: a regular boxing gym wouldn't blink at it, but this is a police-and-fire gym, and everyone's bloodborne training is drilled as deeply as Joan's. It's going to be at least a couple of weeks before Cortes' nose can be trusted not to spout blood every time it's bumped, which means that Cortes is going to have to think of Joan every time she gets dressed or undressed, as she gingerly tries to ease her shirts past her face. Joan grins around her mouth-guard, pleased to be as much a thorn in Cortes' side in these coming weeks as Cortes has been in hers.
But even better, Cortes is clearly incandescent. That snide, smoldering anger that Cortes has nursed all this time -- not for the first time, Joan wonders if Cortes had been fucking her captain, to take Joan's investigation into the woman so personally -- that anger is white-hot now. Her eyes promise that she intends to eat Joan alive the next chance she gets.
Joan just laughs, because fucking bring it.
So much for Sherlock's notion that she and Cortes would be shaking hands right now, all jolly-good-hail-fellow-well-met. Well, Joan ought to know: not all of his ideas are good ones.
Although sometimes, like just now, she's inappropriately fond of some of the bad ones.
"You'll want ice for that," Joan advises, her voice blurred by her mouthguard, and Cortes takes a menacing step forward.
But one of her friends puts a hand on her shoulder and firmly turns her away from Joan. "Lean forward," he instructs her firmly, while someone else snaps on a pair of nitrile gloves.
Joan smiles to herself, and looks around for someone to unlace her gloves.
Joan has already showered and begun to dress by the time Cortes enters the locker room. Joan could have gone home in her gym clothes, of course, but she figures the victor has as much right to a shower here as anyone. Too, if she's going to sport a shiner on the subway, she's going to be well-dressed while she does so.
Cortes glances at Joan, then with a few quiet words, waves off the friend that had been accompanying her. The other woman pauses long enough to give Joan a dirty look, then leaves.
It's just the two of them.
Joan sighs and finishes pulling on her blouse. Cortes would pick now for round two. And while Joan's wearing white, too.
Cortes is still wearing her handwraps, which are grubby and dingy from heavy use. There's no blood on them, however: apparently her friends got the bleeding stopped before anybody bothered getting her out of her gloves. Her bare shoulders gleam under the sodium lights. Joan may not like Cortes, but she can still appreciate that musculature.
Cortes gets right up in her space, of course. Her sweat has the clean, bright smell of someone who works out hard and often.
"If you think you can just walk into my gym--" Cortes snarls, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the blood clogging her nose and draining down the back of her throat. Her voice has the phlegmy, stopped-up sound of a bad head-cold.
"Already did," Joan answers. And then, because the point of all this ridiculousness was to be done with this petty fight between them -- and Joan isn't going to look at her motivations any closer than that -- she adds, with every ounce of supercilious boredom she can pour into it, "Well, c'mon, then, get it all out of your system."
Cortes stares at her, narrow-eyed.
"If you think you can beat me, go ahead, try it," Joan encourages her.
Cortes shifts her weight, Joan responds, and they're off again.
This time, though, Joan's not wearing gloves and she's already inside. They're constrained by the wall of lockers on one side and the dressing bench bolted to the floor on the other -- Joan barks her shins good and hard on it once, which gives Cortes a momentary advantage -- but their second bout is hard and fast and furious, both of them lightning-quick and dirty, each willing to try anything that works. Cortes knows all the techniques to use against bigger opponents, of course: she makes her living wrestling men bigger than she is down to the ground, and all cops are well-versed in control-holds. But cops don't get much practice in reversing control-holds, and none at all in rolling out of them. So it's a fairly short sequence of dirty and close-in jabs, elbows, and stop-kicks, of twisting breakneck holds and counter-holds, before Joan has Cortes smeared face-first against the bank of lockers. Cortes has one arm flung high to protect her injured face; Joan crowds close behind her, corkscrewing her other arm up tight into the small of her back.
Cortes bucks back against Joan's body, all that tight, leashed muscle straining futilely against the harness of her own arm and Joan's far lighter weight. She gives a grunt of pain when the effort wrenches badly at the joints of her arm and shoulder. Joan settles the weight of her hips against Cortes' glutes -- surprisingly well-padded, despite all the muscle everywhere else -- not because she needs to, but simply because she can.
A moment later, Cortes attempts to tap out. As if they're fucking equals.
Joan finds herself extraordinarily reluctant to let Cortes go. Beating Cortes in a fight is like having the tiger by the tail -- when is round three going to be, tomorrow over breakfast? But then Cortes says, her voice still phlegmy with her own blood, "Oh, c'mon, are you going to make me eat dirt? Fine, already. You're still not a cop, but you're nearly good enough to work with us." She's wheezing a little for breath.
Because of her broken nose, Joan realizes, and the doctor in her kicks back in and she lets Cortes go -- but not before wrenching her wrist just a little tighter, just because she can. It's petty and vindictive, but if there's one and only one thing that Cortes understands, it's petty and vindictive.
Cortes turns herself around -- there's a bit of a dance while they unthread their legs from each other -- and comes to a rest, leaning back against the wall of lockers, Joan still between her legs. Cortes’ nose is dribbling blood again, and Joan tosses her one of the threadbare gym towels. Cortes takes it with a lazy sneer, although this one is better-natured than any expression Joan has seen from the woman yet. Cortes ineffectually blots at her nose, eyeing Joan.
"Oh, for god's sake," Joan says, and steps forward to help, keeping well clear of the blood. Cortes starts to pull back, but Joan pauses with her hands palm-out. "I just want to look at it. You know I used to be a doctor." Cortes watches her warily, but lets her palpate the bridge of her nose. It doesn't feel too bad to Joan, but it'll be easier to tell in a few days after the swelling goes down. "So barbaric," she mutters to herself, after giving Cortes her diagnosis. "I should never have let Sherlock talk me into this."
"Into foxy boxing, is he?" Cortes smirks. Then she makes a face. "Ugh, all I want is to blow my nose."
"You'll start it bleeding again," Joan warns. She's sympathetic to Cortes' discomfort -- there are almost certainly blood clots the size of small slugs in there -- but any attempt to clear them out will start the faucet gushing again.
But Cortes laughs, low and mocking, never mind that Joan just kicked her ass twice. "Not my first rodeo, sweetheart." Then she drops her bloody towel and reaches for Joan.
It's Joan's turn to bat Cortes' hand away, but Cortes mimics Joan's pacifying, palm-out gesture. Except when Cortes does it, she smirks. Joan's blood is still simmering from the fight, and she feels the petty urge to break Cortes' nose all over again.
"Scared?" Cortes challenges.
"Of what? I licked your ass twice."
"From where I'm sitting, you haven't licked my ass at all," Cortes rejoins, and the line is so breathtakingly bad that Joan just stands there while Cortes grabs her arm and reels her in.
At the last second Joan turns her face away -- she doesn't want Cortes' blood in her mouth -- which puts her face in the fringe of damp, loose hair that the headgear had pulled loose from her ponytail. Joan can smell the stale mank of the plasticized foam clinging to Cortes' temple and jaw, but behind that, along her neck, the woman mostly just smells of good, clean sweat, and Joan's body remembers that last clinch in the ring, her face mashed into Cortes' tanktop. Joan's stomach unexpectedly twists in response.
Then Cortes' mouth is on Joan's ear, her breath hot and moist, and a convulsive shudder passes through Joan. When her hands land on the disgusting, cold tank, Joan's impulse isn't to pull back from dank garment, but to burrow under it, to the chilled skin and muscle underneath. "Get this off," she instructs, pulling at the tank, but then is distracted by Cortes' thigh pushing between her legs. She pushes down into that muscular length, chasing the proper angle, her fingers digging into Cortes' back. The salt of Cortes' sweat is bright on Joan's tongue.
Cortes tugs at the knot of Joan's hair, once, twice, and it comes tumbling down from where Joan had piled it high for the shower. Cortes pushes her hand into it, her fingers wrapping tightly around Joan’s skull, and then the woman is muscling them both upright off the wall of lockers. For one tantalizing moment, her thigh slides past exactly where Joan wants it -- and then Cortes reverses the two of them, pushing Joan back into the lockers. The doors rattle under their combined impact.
It doesn't even occur to Joan to object, because she knows how to slither out of this hold if she wants to -- down and out like an eel, and she's gone -- but also because Cortes' thigh is pressing against her just so, and she wants more of that. Joan digs her fingers into the muscle of Cortes' back and lets herself ride. For a short while it's all muscle and hands and salt and dirty motion and that thigh, but then Joan can feel the damp of Cortes' tanktop seeping through her blouse, and she's overcome by sudden revulsion. "Get this off," Joan insists again, pushing Cortes away, and this time the other woman complies, pulling back just enough to grab the hem of her tank and strip it off over her head. Joan reaches to help keep it clear of Cortes' nose -- she doesn't want her bleeding on them again. Joan strips her own blouse off, and then Cortes reaches behind Joan, one-handed, to unsnap her bra. A second of wriggling and it, too, is shrugged to the floor. Cortes' thumb brushes Joan's nipple.
Altogether, the reduction of clothing is only a slight improvement. Cortes' sports bra is just as sodden as her tank was and presses wetly against Joan's bare skin -- although at least it's warm. But then Cortes drops to her knees, pausing to suck one of Joan's nipples as she goes. Joan spreads her legs obligingly. "Hold still," Cortes instructs, and places a forearm solidly across Joan's hips. Then she puts her mouth over Joan's panties, and hot, moist warmth floods her vulva. Joan scrabbles for a handhold in Cortes' hair, reaches to undo her ponytail, but Cortes irritatedly knocks her hand away. "Hold still," she snaps, and this time Joan settles her hands on the other woman's deltoids -- they are every bit as fine as they looked under the light -- and tries to comply.
Cortes is good -- of course she's good, some dim part of Joan's mind natters, how could she not be good? -- and when she finally pulls Joan's panties out of the way to thrust her hand under the fabric, she doesn't rudely push her fingers into Joan, which is a nice change. What Cortes isn't, though, is nice. She is rough and cruel, deliberately using her teeth on Joan's clit -- which somehow only ramps the tension up, instead of killing it -- and reaching up to viciously press her fingers into the bruises she left on Joan's ribs. Joan hadn't thought she was wired to like pain, but then she hadn't thought she was wired to like women, let alone people she didn't even like, so this evening is just full of surprises, isn't it? Cortes' knuckles make the pain bloom bright in her skin and Joan pushes up into that twisting, cruel hand--
Cortes pulls off her cunt with a muffled shout. "I told you to hold still," she snarls, dragging the back of her arm across her upper lip, and Joan sees she's bleeding again.
Joan can't help her grin. She's giddy with lust, high on the bright ache of her bruises. Some dark, primitive thing in her likes the sight of Cortes' blood.
Cortes surges to her feet, apparently done with having her nose bumped, and Joan reaches for her, their thighs shoving past each other just so. Cortes pushes her teeth into Joan's neck, and Joan bats her away before she can leave bruises where Sherlock will see. Joan will probably have to wash the woman's blood out of her hair, but she doesn't care about that right now, she just wants the hard grind of Cortes' lycra-clad thigh, the straining muscles of her back. Joan's teeth seek Cortes' neck, her fingers the few bruises she gave Cortes. She pushes into them expertly -- once a surgeon, after all -- and rides her thigh hard while Cortes growls rebelliously in her ear. She makes Cortes make that noise again, then comes, shudderingly hard.
Getting Cortes off in turn is an exercise in irritation and frustration. Joan is bad at this, having practiced only with herself, and it makes her temper flare again, because there are very, very few things in her life that Joan has been bad at. But she refuses to be bested, either, and Cortes is bossy and vocal about what she likes, which helps some, even if it does leave the two of them snapping over whether Joan is or isn't doing what Cortes has told her to do. But Cortes is nearly as hot for it as Joan had been, and when Joan finally gives her the slide of her knuckles to ride, backed by Joan's own thigh, the nails of Joan's free hand dragging down the exposed shoulder in the scallop of her t-back, Cortes comes with a shout. Joan’s own cunt clasps in sympathy. It's not quite like coming, but not quite not like coming, either. She could go another round. She doesn't particularly want to.
There’s a pause, both of them breathing heavily, and then Cortes pulls back. She looks down at Joan. That sardonic, knowing, patronizing smile is back again. The blood crusted around her nostrils doesn’t undercut the smugness of it, not one tiny bit. She doesn’t look like a woman who had her ass kicked -- twice -- and then engaged in frantic, juvenile, mutually-demeaning locker room sex.
Gina Cortes looks like a woman who has won something.
With a sinking feeling in her gut, Joan thinks maybe she has: Cortes has finally succeeded in dragging Joan down to her level. Joan sets her jaw; if this is the price of peace with the woman, then fine, she’s paid it.
At least Cortes is going to have a hell of a time wrestling that sports bra off without bumping her nose. Too bad she doesn’t take help from consultants.
“Quite a shiner you’re gonna have tomorrow,” Cortes gloats, as Joan strips off what little she's still wearing and heads back to the showers. The last thing Joan needs is to parade into the brownstone smelling of sex and Gina Cortes. Sherlock's going to be inappropriately gleeful about the evening as it is.
“Not my first rodeo, sweetheart,” Joan calls back as she turns the water on, trying to shake the feeling that she did in fact lose their fight. "Pretty sure you're going to have two."
Recipient: venusinthenight
Author: sanguinity
Verse: Elementary
Characters/Pairings: Joan Watson/Gina Cortes
Rating: Explicit
Tags: Boxing, Hatesex, First Time, Missing Scene
Warnings: blood
Summary: Joan figures she can battle Cortes to a respectable draw, and then they can both walk away, tempers spent and faces saved. Joan is wrong.
I just want to put this whole thing behind me.
And does Detective Cortes feel the same way?
...I guess we'll see.
- 4x04 "All My Exes Live in Essex"
As a rule, Joan doesn’t box. Bouncing people’s brains against the insides of their skulls - her own or others’, it's the same either way - isn't harmless fun in her book. Nor is there much point in Joan boxing for self-defense: boxing privileges both reach and weight, and let's face it, most people are larger and heavier than Joan. Since partnering with Sherlock, Joan has spent just enough time fooling around in a boxing ring to know how to wrap her hands. That’s it.
But even though she's not a boxer, Joan figures she knows enough about fighting in general that she can still battle Cortes to a respectable draw. Then they can both walk away, tempers spent and faces saved, just like Sherlock suggested.
Unfortunately, it takes Joan less than a minute in the ring with Cortes to realize that she critically overestimated her own menace when forced to keep her gloves on. When facing an opponent with superior reach, Joan would normally slip inside their guard to strike from close-in -- within her own comfortable reach, but awkwardly close for theirs. Cortes is too good for that, and Joan keeps catching a fist in the face when she tries. Worse, all the techniques she normally falls back on when outmatched in weight and reach - disabling the secondary targets she can get to as a way-station to the primary targets she can’t, or applying controlling joint-locks and arm-bars to those long, muscular arms that Cortes keeps so helpfully putting in Joan’s range - either lie outside the Queensberry rules or are impossible to execute through the thick padding of her gloves. Joan is nearly helpless while wearing the damned things, and it stretches her temper thin.
Joan is taking nearly all the damage in this fight, and she didn't step into this ring to have her ass handed to her by petty, vengeful, outer-borough, B&Es-and-piffling-burglaries detective Gina Cortes.
And she sure as hell didn't agree to a public humiliation. She and Sherlock already have enough trouble with the detectives of the 11th, without handing them this to crow over.
Joan chews on her mouthguard in frustration, studying her opponent -- Cortes grins broadly back around her her own mouthguard -- and tries not to take too much damage while she watches for her opening. It's not dire yet, but it soon will be.
She slips Cortes' next two jabs, only to be caught by a hook to the temple. Her head snaps hard to the side under the impact.
The leash on her temper snaps with it.
Fine, she snarls to herself, as Cortes takes advantage of her distraction to plant an uppercut in her gut. There's more than one way to fight dirty.
Joan drops her guard, turns, and flees.
There's nowhere much to run to in a ring this size, but she needs only a few steps. She hears Cortes' cry of triumph, feels her footfalls on the canvas close behind her-
-and Joan smoothly spins and sucker-punches a very surprised Cortes right in the nose.
It lands beautifully, the sweet science instantiated, rooted straight up from the canvas through Joan's legs and hips and shoulder, the full momentum and energy of both of their bodies poured into the point of impact. Joan hears Cortes' nose break -- feels it even, despite the heavy padding of her glove -- and she takes the barest instant to admire the look of shock on Cortes’ face before ducking inside the woman's still-dropped guard to pummel her midsection. She gets in two uppercuts before Cortes locks her up in a clinch. Joan thrashes in Cortes' slippery embrace, her face mashed tight against Cortes' sweat-drenched police tank, trying to win enough room to punch her again. The end of Cortes' ponytail drags against Joan's face. She hears Cortes' enraged snarl in her ear, her words wet and indistinct around her mouthguard, "I will fucking get you for this, Watson-"
And then their ad hoc referee pulls them apart.
Joan steps back to see that Cortes' nose is gushing blood like a faucet. Her mouthguard is already full of it. Joan's soul surges with fierce, unseemly joy.
All that blood means the fight is abruptly over, of course: a regular boxing gym wouldn't blink at it, but this is a police-and-fire gym, and everyone's bloodborne training is drilled as deeply as Joan's. It's going to be at least a couple of weeks before Cortes' nose can be trusted not to spout blood every time it's bumped, which means that Cortes is going to have to think of Joan every time she gets dressed or undressed, as she gingerly tries to ease her shirts past her face. Joan grins around her mouth-guard, pleased to be as much a thorn in Cortes' side in these coming weeks as Cortes has been in hers.
But even better, Cortes is clearly incandescent. That snide, smoldering anger that Cortes has nursed all this time -- not for the first time, Joan wonders if Cortes had been fucking her captain, to take Joan's investigation into the woman so personally -- that anger is white-hot now. Her eyes promise that she intends to eat Joan alive the next chance she gets.
Joan just laughs, because fucking bring it.
So much for Sherlock's notion that she and Cortes would be shaking hands right now, all jolly-good-hail-fellow-well-met. Well, Joan ought to know: not all of his ideas are good ones.
Although sometimes, like just now, she's inappropriately fond of some of the bad ones.
"You'll want ice for that," Joan advises, her voice blurred by her mouthguard, and Cortes takes a menacing step forward.
But one of her friends puts a hand on her shoulder and firmly turns her away from Joan. "Lean forward," he instructs her firmly, while someone else snaps on a pair of nitrile gloves.
Joan smiles to herself, and looks around for someone to unlace her gloves.
Joan has already showered and begun to dress by the time Cortes enters the locker room. Joan could have gone home in her gym clothes, of course, but she figures the victor has as much right to a shower here as anyone. Too, if she's going to sport a shiner on the subway, she's going to be well-dressed while she does so.
Cortes glances at Joan, then with a few quiet words, waves off the friend that had been accompanying her. The other woman pauses long enough to give Joan a dirty look, then leaves.
It's just the two of them.
Joan sighs and finishes pulling on her blouse. Cortes would pick now for round two. And while Joan's wearing white, too.
Cortes is still wearing her handwraps, which are grubby and dingy from heavy use. There's no blood on them, however: apparently her friends got the bleeding stopped before anybody bothered getting her out of her gloves. Her bare shoulders gleam under the sodium lights. Joan may not like Cortes, but she can still appreciate that musculature.
Cortes gets right up in her space, of course. Her sweat has the clean, bright smell of someone who works out hard and often.
"If you think you can just walk into my gym--" Cortes snarls, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the blood clogging her nose and draining down the back of her throat. Her voice has the phlegmy, stopped-up sound of a bad head-cold.
"Already did," Joan answers. And then, because the point of all this ridiculousness was to be done with this petty fight between them -- and Joan isn't going to look at her motivations any closer than that -- she adds, with every ounce of supercilious boredom she can pour into it, "Well, c'mon, then, get it all out of your system."
Cortes stares at her, narrow-eyed.
"If you think you can beat me, go ahead, try it," Joan encourages her.
Cortes shifts her weight, Joan responds, and they're off again.
This time, though, Joan's not wearing gloves and she's already inside. They're constrained by the wall of lockers on one side and the dressing bench bolted to the floor on the other -- Joan barks her shins good and hard on it once, which gives Cortes a momentary advantage -- but their second bout is hard and fast and furious, both of them lightning-quick and dirty, each willing to try anything that works. Cortes knows all the techniques to use against bigger opponents, of course: she makes her living wrestling men bigger than she is down to the ground, and all cops are well-versed in control-holds. But cops don't get much practice in reversing control-holds, and none at all in rolling out of them. So it's a fairly short sequence of dirty and close-in jabs, elbows, and stop-kicks, of twisting breakneck holds and counter-holds, before Joan has Cortes smeared face-first against the bank of lockers. Cortes has one arm flung high to protect her injured face; Joan crowds close behind her, corkscrewing her other arm up tight into the small of her back.
Cortes bucks back against Joan's body, all that tight, leashed muscle straining futilely against the harness of her own arm and Joan's far lighter weight. She gives a grunt of pain when the effort wrenches badly at the joints of her arm and shoulder. Joan settles the weight of her hips against Cortes' glutes -- surprisingly well-padded, despite all the muscle everywhere else -- not because she needs to, but simply because she can.
A moment later, Cortes attempts to tap out. As if they're fucking equals.
Joan finds herself extraordinarily reluctant to let Cortes go. Beating Cortes in a fight is like having the tiger by the tail -- when is round three going to be, tomorrow over breakfast? But then Cortes says, her voice still phlegmy with her own blood, "Oh, c'mon, are you going to make me eat dirt? Fine, already. You're still not a cop, but you're nearly good enough to work with us." She's wheezing a little for breath.
Because of her broken nose, Joan realizes, and the doctor in her kicks back in and she lets Cortes go -- but not before wrenching her wrist just a little tighter, just because she can. It's petty and vindictive, but if there's one and only one thing that Cortes understands, it's petty and vindictive.
Cortes turns herself around -- there's a bit of a dance while they unthread their legs from each other -- and comes to a rest, leaning back against the wall of lockers, Joan still between her legs. Cortes’ nose is dribbling blood again, and Joan tosses her one of the threadbare gym towels. Cortes takes it with a lazy sneer, although this one is better-natured than any expression Joan has seen from the woman yet. Cortes ineffectually blots at her nose, eyeing Joan.
"Oh, for god's sake," Joan says, and steps forward to help, keeping well clear of the blood. Cortes starts to pull back, but Joan pauses with her hands palm-out. "I just want to look at it. You know I used to be a doctor." Cortes watches her warily, but lets her palpate the bridge of her nose. It doesn't feel too bad to Joan, but it'll be easier to tell in a few days after the swelling goes down. "So barbaric," she mutters to herself, after giving Cortes her diagnosis. "I should never have let Sherlock talk me into this."
"Into foxy boxing, is he?" Cortes smirks. Then she makes a face. "Ugh, all I want is to blow my nose."
"You'll start it bleeding again," Joan warns. She's sympathetic to Cortes' discomfort -- there are almost certainly blood clots the size of small slugs in there -- but any attempt to clear them out will start the faucet gushing again.
But Cortes laughs, low and mocking, never mind that Joan just kicked her ass twice. "Not my first rodeo, sweetheart." Then she drops her bloody towel and reaches for Joan.
It's Joan's turn to bat Cortes' hand away, but Cortes mimics Joan's pacifying, palm-out gesture. Except when Cortes does it, she smirks. Joan's blood is still simmering from the fight, and she feels the petty urge to break Cortes' nose all over again.
"Scared?" Cortes challenges.
"Of what? I licked your ass twice."
"From where I'm sitting, you haven't licked my ass at all," Cortes rejoins, and the line is so breathtakingly bad that Joan just stands there while Cortes grabs her arm and reels her in.
At the last second Joan turns her face away -- she doesn't want Cortes' blood in her mouth -- which puts her face in the fringe of damp, loose hair that the headgear had pulled loose from her ponytail. Joan can smell the stale mank of the plasticized foam clinging to Cortes' temple and jaw, but behind that, along her neck, the woman mostly just smells of good, clean sweat, and Joan's body remembers that last clinch in the ring, her face mashed into Cortes' tanktop. Joan's stomach unexpectedly twists in response.
Then Cortes' mouth is on Joan's ear, her breath hot and moist, and a convulsive shudder passes through Joan. When her hands land on the disgusting, cold tank, Joan's impulse isn't to pull back from dank garment, but to burrow under it, to the chilled skin and muscle underneath. "Get this off," she instructs, pulling at the tank, but then is distracted by Cortes' thigh pushing between her legs. She pushes down into that muscular length, chasing the proper angle, her fingers digging into Cortes' back. The salt of Cortes' sweat is bright on Joan's tongue.
Cortes tugs at the knot of Joan's hair, once, twice, and it comes tumbling down from where Joan had piled it high for the shower. Cortes pushes her hand into it, her fingers wrapping tightly around Joan’s skull, and then the woman is muscling them both upright off the wall of lockers. For one tantalizing moment, her thigh slides past exactly where Joan wants it -- and then Cortes reverses the two of them, pushing Joan back into the lockers. The doors rattle under their combined impact.
It doesn't even occur to Joan to object, because she knows how to slither out of this hold if she wants to -- down and out like an eel, and she's gone -- but also because Cortes' thigh is pressing against her just so, and she wants more of that. Joan digs her fingers into the muscle of Cortes' back and lets herself ride. For a short while it's all muscle and hands and salt and dirty motion and that thigh, but then Joan can feel the damp of Cortes' tanktop seeping through her blouse, and she's overcome by sudden revulsion. "Get this off," Joan insists again, pushing Cortes away, and this time the other woman complies, pulling back just enough to grab the hem of her tank and strip it off over her head. Joan reaches to help keep it clear of Cortes' nose -- she doesn't want her bleeding on them again. Joan strips her own blouse off, and then Cortes reaches behind Joan, one-handed, to unsnap her bra. A second of wriggling and it, too, is shrugged to the floor. Cortes' thumb brushes Joan's nipple.
Altogether, the reduction of clothing is only a slight improvement. Cortes' sports bra is just as sodden as her tank was and presses wetly against Joan's bare skin -- although at least it's warm. But then Cortes drops to her knees, pausing to suck one of Joan's nipples as she goes. Joan spreads her legs obligingly. "Hold still," Cortes instructs, and places a forearm solidly across Joan's hips. Then she puts her mouth over Joan's panties, and hot, moist warmth floods her vulva. Joan scrabbles for a handhold in Cortes' hair, reaches to undo her ponytail, but Cortes irritatedly knocks her hand away. "Hold still," she snaps, and this time Joan settles her hands on the other woman's deltoids -- they are every bit as fine as they looked under the light -- and tries to comply.
Cortes is good -- of course she's good, some dim part of Joan's mind natters, how could she not be good? -- and when she finally pulls Joan's panties out of the way to thrust her hand under the fabric, she doesn't rudely push her fingers into Joan, which is a nice change. What Cortes isn't, though, is nice. She is rough and cruel, deliberately using her teeth on Joan's clit -- which somehow only ramps the tension up, instead of killing it -- and reaching up to viciously press her fingers into the bruises she left on Joan's ribs. Joan hadn't thought she was wired to like pain, but then she hadn't thought she was wired to like women, let alone people she didn't even like, so this evening is just full of surprises, isn't it? Cortes' knuckles make the pain bloom bright in her skin and Joan pushes up into that twisting, cruel hand--
Cortes pulls off her cunt with a muffled shout. "I told you to hold still," she snarls, dragging the back of her arm across her upper lip, and Joan sees she's bleeding again.
Joan can't help her grin. She's giddy with lust, high on the bright ache of her bruises. Some dark, primitive thing in her likes the sight of Cortes' blood.
Cortes surges to her feet, apparently done with having her nose bumped, and Joan reaches for her, their thighs shoving past each other just so. Cortes pushes her teeth into Joan's neck, and Joan bats her away before she can leave bruises where Sherlock will see. Joan will probably have to wash the woman's blood out of her hair, but she doesn't care about that right now, she just wants the hard grind of Cortes' lycra-clad thigh, the straining muscles of her back. Joan's teeth seek Cortes' neck, her fingers the few bruises she gave Cortes. She pushes into them expertly -- once a surgeon, after all -- and rides her thigh hard while Cortes growls rebelliously in her ear. She makes Cortes make that noise again, then comes, shudderingly hard.
Getting Cortes off in turn is an exercise in irritation and frustration. Joan is bad at this, having practiced only with herself, and it makes her temper flare again, because there are very, very few things in her life that Joan has been bad at. But she refuses to be bested, either, and Cortes is bossy and vocal about what she likes, which helps some, even if it does leave the two of them snapping over whether Joan is or isn't doing what Cortes has told her to do. But Cortes is nearly as hot for it as Joan had been, and when Joan finally gives her the slide of her knuckles to ride, backed by Joan's own thigh, the nails of Joan's free hand dragging down the exposed shoulder in the scallop of her t-back, Cortes comes with a shout. Joan’s own cunt clasps in sympathy. It's not quite like coming, but not quite not like coming, either. She could go another round. She doesn't particularly want to.
There’s a pause, both of them breathing heavily, and then Cortes pulls back. She looks down at Joan. That sardonic, knowing, patronizing smile is back again. The blood crusted around her nostrils doesn’t undercut the smugness of it, not one tiny bit. She doesn’t look like a woman who had her ass kicked -- twice -- and then engaged in frantic, juvenile, mutually-demeaning locker room sex.
Gina Cortes looks like a woman who has won something.
With a sinking feeling in her gut, Joan thinks maybe she has: Cortes has finally succeeded in dragging Joan down to her level. Joan sets her jaw; if this is the price of peace with the woman, then fine, she’s paid it.
At least Cortes is going to have a hell of a time wrestling that sports bra off without bumping her nose. Too bad she doesn’t take help from consultants.
“Quite a shiner you’re gonna have tomorrow,” Cortes gloats, as Joan strips off what little she's still wearing and heads back to the showers. The last thing Joan needs is to parade into the brownstone smelling of sex and Gina Cortes. Sherlock's going to be inappropriately gleeful about the evening as it is.
“Not my first rodeo, sweetheart,” Joan calls back as she turns the water on, trying to shake the feeling that she did in fact lose their fight. "Pretty sure you're going to have two."