fic: before the world fell at our feet, Quantico, Alex/Ryan
Title: before the world fell at our feet
Authors: threeguesses and lowriseflare
Fandom/ Pairing: Quantico, Alex/Ryan
Rating: R
Word Count: 3680+
Summary: It legit took me like a full hour to remember how to post fic.
She loses her badge anyway, in the end.
Insubordination, the new interim director tells her (this is after everything, the reek of blood and creosote, the Grand Central Bomber dead in the ground), failure to follow protocol, conspiracy, but more than that as far as Alex can understand she's relieved of her duties by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the simple fact of being who she is.
"You're a lightning rod," he tells her, looking across his massive desk with something like pity. "There's just nowhere for us to put you now."
He thanks her for her service. He sends her on her way.
*
Booth shows up at her apartment two days later.
"I threatened to quit," is the first thing he says. He's dressed up in full G-man kit, a suit and tie and hard soled shoes, like Alex hahas hardly ever seen him. It makes him look older. It makes im look like Agent Fletcher.
"But you didn't, did you," she says, and steps aside to let him in. She watches him glance bullet-quick at the bathroom doorway where they found him, blinks away the memory of him sprawled unconscious on her floor. “Why are you here?”
“To see you,” he says immediately, that way he has of sounding so honest even when she knows he’s probably full of shit.
Alex rolls her eyes. “Where’s Natalie?”
“I wouldn’t know.” He holds her gaze for a full beat, making a point. That’s a trick too, Alex knows, FBI training and group dynamics. She waits until he blinks first.
“Trouble in paradise?” she asks, and it comes out more nastily than she meant, like being too drunk at the poker table and accidentally flashing your hand of cards. She turns away so he won’t see her face.
Ryan ignores her. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want coffee or something?”
“No,” Alex says, and lets him hang there for a moment before she admits, “I have tea.” Then, because the idea of him drinking darjeeling in her kitchen is vaguely ridiculous: “I also have bourbon.”
He smiles at that, just faintly. “Bourbon works.”
Alex keeps her face studiously neutral. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, 2pm. He follows her around the peninsula into her tiny, tidy kitchen, watching as she pours two fingers each into a pair of FBI coffee mugs.
“What’ll you do now?” he wants to know.
Alex shrugs. When she lied to her mother about leaving town to complete her Master’s, she said it was for information security studies. “I don’t know. Go back to school, I guess.”
“I wish I’d met you in college,” Ryan says, taking the mug she hands him. “I bet that would have been more fun than all...this.” His handwave somehow manages to encompass not only the two of them but the bullets in Alex’s doorframe, the busted out wall in the bedroom leading to the apartment next door. The whole mess of their lives.
Alex scoffs. “I doubt it. You look like the kind of guy who peaked late.”
Ryan laughs and takes a sip of bourbon. “Sure, Parrish, think what you want. Better yet, drop by my mom’s house sometime, check out my yearbook photos.”
Suddenly it’s no longer funny. "Right," Alex says, taking a too-big sip from her own mug to cover; her throat and chest burn. "Next time I'm in Hawthorne."
Ryan nods, looks at her, keeps looking. Reaches out and takes the cup from her hand.
"Ah," Alex says as he sets it on the counter--not thinking about his mother's house and the odds of ever seeing it; not thinking about that callus on his finger where his wedding ring used to be. "So that's why you're here."
Ryan’s eyes narrow. "I'm here to make sure you're all right.”
Alex bares her teeth. "I'm fine."
"Are you?"
Alex doesn’t want to talk about this. “Why are you here and not with Natalie?” she asks, pitching her voice low and soft. “You need something specific?” She slings both arms around his neck then pauses, letting her mouth drop open in mock-shock. “Oh, honey. Does she not do anal?”
“All right, enough,” Ryan says, but he’s laughing. He curls a big hand around the back of her neck, burying his fingers in the base of her braid. Ryan loves her hair like all white boys love her hair, but sometimes Alex suspects he loves it extra, like it’s its own separate entity. He fussed with it constantly at Quantico.
“Pity,” she purrs in his ear, arching her back so her breasts press against him. “Especially since Natalie’s got that nice, tight--”
“Enough,” Ryan hisses, and this time he isn’t laughing. He wraps a hand around her braid and yanks, sucking at her neck viciously.
Alex grins. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Ryan and her haven’t done anal either, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. He's thinking about it, too, Alex can tell by the way his teeth sink into the soft skin underneath her jaw. Alex closes her eyes for a moment, lets him imagine.
She supposes she ought to be insulted, him showing up here out of nowhere after everything that's happened, expecting she'll spread her legs, but the truth is she's been waiting for him to come. They spent five months teasing out each other's weaknesses at the Academy. Alex can't really blame him for knowing he's hers.
"Fine," she says finally, opening her eyes again and sighing like she's doing him a favor. "But you'll have to make it up to me first."
Ryan blinks, his pale face flushed under the short scrub of beard and his eyes gone dark as the sea. "Which part?" he asks.
Alex gets her hands on his shoulders, pushes down until he gets the idea. "All of it."
*
He’s not bad with his mouth, Ryan. Not the best Alex has had, but good, warm and just-this-side of sloppy, his stubble scraping at her skin. They’ve only done this a few times before and always as a warm-up, Alex pulling him up by his ears before he got anywhere interesting.
This time, she doesn’t want to pull him up.
“I missed you,” Ryan confesses to the curve of her thigh. He has her backed up against the kitchenette counter, her ass half-perched on the side. “When I was with her, I did.”
Alex rolls her eyes at the refrigerator. “Don’t,” she says, but there’s a swooping thrill low in her traitorous body that has nothing to do with his tongue. It hurt her feelings, him and Natalie. Alex doesn’t like admitting that, but it’s true.
“Why not?” Ryan asks, rubbing lower than where his tongue is with two fingers. “I thought about you,” he continues. “I thought about doing this.”
“I bet.” Alex rocks her hips so he’ll go harder. He’s giving her a dose of her own medicine, she knows, getting back at her for what she said earlier. She can’t believe she thought he was nice, when she met him. No wonder she didn’t last in the Bureau.
“I thought about your thighs,” Ryan continues, pulling at one until it’s draped heavily over his shoulder. “I thought about getting between them and--”
Alex grabs the back of his head and smothers the rest of his words against her cunt. Talk to me, she remembers saying to the last guy she slept with. Say something dirty. He had just stared at her, stunned.
Your ass is so fucking hot, Ryan had said immediately, when she’d told him the same thing. It’s the roundest fucking ass I’ve ever seen. Alex fell off the hotel bed laughing.
(But she still made him say it again, later. That time it worked.)
“Higher,” she says to Ryan now, reaching down to grab his slippery chin. “Okay, now suck.”
Ryan looks up at her with blue, blue eyes. Alex holds the eye-contact until she comes.
*
“Should you even be here?” she asks afterwards, pulling up her underwear and finishing her bourbon with a swig. “What would the FBI say?”
Ryan is still kneeling on her floor, the front of his suit pants tented and obvious. For a petty, vengeful moment Alex considers about leaving him like that, sending him away aching and unsatisfied. She’s so enormously, ferociously angry, and she doesn’t even know at whom.
“Fuck the FBI,” Ryan says, and Alex smirks.
“All right,” she decides after a moment. “Come to bed.”
She’s going to have to move no matter what she does next, Alex thinks again as she leads him across the hardwood. She can’t walk past her desk without picturing it covered in explosives; the baseboards are scuffed from someone else’s boots. The medicine cabinet is still sitting on the floor in the bathroom, fresh drywall where the hole used to be. When the guys came to patch it, she watched them realize, watched them recognize her face. Just yesterday, the Starbucks barista refused to serve her.
“Are you sure?” Ryan wants to know as they cross the threshold into her bedroom.
“Are you?” Alex fires back. She feels sleazy about it suddenly, Natalie and her mean, sharp shoulder blades. A lightning rod, the interim director had said. Alex is tired of collateral damage.
“Yes,” Ryan says, serious as six o’clock breaking news.
“Okay then,” Alex says, flouncing onto her neatly made bed and crossing her arms and her ankles. The window faces an alley, more shadow than sun in the middle of the afternoon. “Strip.”
Ryan makes a face but he does what she tells him: shrugging out of his suit jacket and draping it over the armchair, toeing off his dress shoes and lining them up beside the door. He reaches back to pull his undershirt off, one fluid motion like a child getting ready for bathtime, and just like that Alex doesn’t want to play games with him anymore.
“Come here,” she says, getting up on her knees on the mattress and squinting at the badly-healed bullet hole in his rib cage. It’s too damn dark in this room to see. Ryan kneels on the edge of the bed and she finds herself clutching at him, curling her arms around his warm, bare back.
He lets her tug him down to the bed, but when she tries to pull him on top of her he locks his elbows, laughing. “I’m not really stripped yet, Alex.”
“Come here,” she insists, wrapping her legs around him, her bare legs slipping against the fabric of his suit pants. “Just--shut up for a second.”
“I’m shutting,” Ryan says, dropping down obediently.
Alex closes her eyes. His weight feels good, the thud thud of his heart and his sweat soap smell. “Stop staring at me,” she says, and Ryan sighs noisily but he turns his head away anyway, tucking his face into her neck. His breath tickles.
“What are we doing?” he asks.
That’s the question, isn’t it. She’s making sure he’s alive, honestly, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing she can say out loud. After she put him in the helicopter she realized he’d been shot two different times in the space of ninety-six hours more or less because he knew her; she thinks he must be made of steel and miracles, his whole body a magic trick. Alex is not going to cry.
“Nothing,” she says firmly, and rolls them so she’s on top.
That makes Ryan smile, that no-braces gap between his two front teeth; Alex scrapes the pad of her thumb along the edge of his incisor, then sits back on his thighs and pulls her own shirt off. If she’d known he was going to be here, she might have worn a different bra.
“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Ryan says.
“I’m a figment of your imagination,” Alex tells him, reaching behind herself to flick the clasp. It’s nude, or what would pass as nude on a tanned white woman. As soon as it’s undone her breasts spill free, heavy and low. She leans forward until her nipples are brushing against Ryan’s cheeks.
“Hi,” he murmurs, turning his head to suck on one. His mouth is stupidly warm, and he isn’t gentle. Alex breathes.
“Hi.” She wants him to swallow her whole. Suddenly she can’t move fast enough, and she reaches behind herself for his belt, fumbling blindly while trying to keep her boobs in contact with Ryan’s mouth. It makes her look silly rather than desperate, and Ryan laughs at her.
“Do you bend that way?” he wants to know, then sits up before either of them can find out for sure. “Here.”
Between the two of them they have him stripped in seconds, Ryan hooking a finger in the elastic of her messy underwear and sliding it back down her legs until they’re both naked. The hair on his thighs is a golden, California blonde. He’s got a nice cock, Alex has thought so since that first afternoon at the airport; she wraps her fist around the warm length of it now, enjoying the low, quiet sound at the back of his throat. Alex likes how he looks in her bed.
Ryan reaches up and laces his fingers through hers, surprising. “What do you want?” he asks, and he sounds so sincere. “You gotta tell me, Alex. Tell me what you want.”
What does she want? Alex almost smiles. She wants the last two weeks not to have happened. She wants her job back. She wants him to stay here forever, and she wants him to walk out for good.
“Fuck me,” she says, more roughly than she means to. Ryan’s eyes widen. He’s so oddly wholesome sometimes, it breaks Alex’s fucking heart.
“Fuck you how?” Ryan demands breathlessly, reaching for her knees so he can fold her legs up. “Hm?”
He likes it when she talks, Alex remembers. She hums, letting him slide his cock dangerously far up her inner thigh without the benefit of a rubber. She’s prickly from her last wax, grown out. “Fuck me how you don’t fuck her,” she says, and closes her eyes so she doesn’t see his face.
“Oh, Alex,” Ryan sighs, letting go of her legs, and his voice hurts worse than any knife wound. “Hey.”
“Condoms are in the drawer,” she tells him, flipping herself over onto her belly. “Hurry up.”
“Hey,” he says again, more forcefully this time. He’s got both hands on the curve of her ass, but instead of squeezing like she’s expecting him to he slides his palms up her spine and across her shoulders until he’s hovering over her on the mattress with both his arms on the outside of hers, his whole body whisper-close but not quite touching. “Come on,” he says, his forehead butting softly at the side of her face.
“You come on,” Alex says stubbornly, arching her back and grinding against him.
Ryan groans. “Jesus, Alex.” His voice is ragged; she knew that would work. She does it again, harder this time, and she’s wet enough now that when she tilts her hips he slips right inside her for a second, blunt tip pressing her open. Let him, she thinks, and she still won’t look at him. She doesn’t care.
Ryan does. “I’m getting a condom,” he says, wrapping an arm around her middle and keeping them locked together while he reaches over to the side of the bed, like he doesn’t want to let her go. He needs both hands to open the wrapper, though, and as soon as he lets go Alex poses herself again, ass up.
“Are we playing?” Ryan asks, kneeling behind her again. “Because this doesn’t feel fun.”
“I’m tons of fun,” Alex tells the pillow, and rolls her hips to prove it. “Come on.”
“I mean it,” Ryan says. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” she says before she can stop herself, and it comes out too much like she needs him. Alex bites her tongue hard enough to taste blood.
“Okay,” Ryan says slowly, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t touch her again, either. What he does do is lie down beside her, the mattress dipping underneath his warm, solid weight. Neither of them say anything for a minute. Finally she turns her head and peers at him from underneath a protective curtain of hair.
“What are you doing?”
“Holding onto this slimy fucking condom and waiting for you to talk to me,” Ryan tells her flatly. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Alex says, because it’s the truth. Then she rolls over to face him fully. “But probably you should put that condom on.”
Ryan looks at her for another beat before obeying. He doesn’t even have to jack himself to do it, Alex notices, like this conversation is having no effect whatsoever on the strength of his erection. She hates him and also she really, really doesn’t.
“Feel good?” she asks, pushing up on an elbow and watching as he rolls the latex down. “Feel slimy?”
“Fuck you,” Ryan says. Once he’s fully sheathed he keeps touching himself, fingers stroking down around the condom rim and lower, one whispering over his balls. It makes Alex’s mouth dry. “I mean it, Alex. I don’t want to do this like we’re punishing each other.”
“We won’t,” she promises, swinging a leg over him. “I’ll be sweet.”
“You’re never sweet,” Ryan says grudgingly, but he doesn’t stop her.
She braces her hands on his shoulders as she lowers herself onto him, mindful of the fresh pink scar near the jut of his collarbone. They haven’t actually done it like this much before. Alex tilts her head forward as she works herself onto him, the ends of her hair brushing his chest.
“There,” she says as he bottoms out inside her, sitting all the way up and throwing her shoulders back. Ryan’s eyes almost fall out of his head.
“Jesus Christ, Alex,” he says. “You look like a damn queen.”
That makes her laugh--a real laugh, oddly charmed in spite of herself. And that’s been the problem with Ryan from the beginning, really: all this would have been exponentially easier if she didn’t like him so much. “What kind of queen?” she asks, baiting him. “An exotic one?”
“Fuck you,” Ryan says again, reaching up and cupping the whole of one breast in his hand. He lifts it a little, testing the weight, then pinches the nipple and uses it to pull her down toward his mouth.
“Oh,” Alex hears herself breathe. She leans down even further, planting her hands on the mattress so he’s practically buried in her chest, feeling edgy, feeling like she wants to show off. The look on his dumb, beautiful face alone would be enough to fuel her fantasies for months. Years.
“A queen,” Ryan murmurs, sliding both hands around her hips as she starts to move. “I mean it. Oh fuck, Alex.”
Oh fuck Alex indeed, she thinks, doing just that, fucking herself onto him over and over and over. He feels good, thick and hot. Her breasts sway back and forth in front of his face as she rocks. Ryan’s hands are on her everywhere, her thighs and her ass and her rib cage, on the back of her head pulling her face down close to his.
“Wanna kiss you,” he says and then he’s already doing it, licking his way into her mouth with a singularity of purpose, like he wants to devour her whole. Alex is faintly surprised. They haven’t done much of this either, really, not because she fancies herself Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman but because there simply isn’t a lot of time for foreplay when you’re fucking in a shower you share with two other NATs. Still, it feels intimate, his soft tongue and sharp teeth and the scrape of his beard along her jawline. Alex hears herself sigh into his mouth.
The orgasm doesn’t take her long like that, the build and then the break of it; she’s always liked being on top. Ryan bites at the edge of her tongue as she comes. A little, then, she thinks, squeezing her eyes shut and riding it out on top of him, the zip of pain honing the pleasure into something sharper and more delicate than glass. He wants to punish her a little.
“Shit,” she says when she’s done, resting her face against his neck and telling herself it’s only for a minute. Ryan rubs up her back with big, warm hands, suddenly gentle.
“There,” he tells her. “There you go.” Alex breathes.
“Okay,” she says finally, sitting up and shaking her hair out. “Now you.”
“Now me?” He reaches for her again but she’s too far. He rubs at her thighs instead, his thumbs coming down to ghost over her knees. “What, on cue?”
“If you can manage,” Alex tells him, and holds out her hands. It takes Ryan a moment to realize what she’s after, and when he does his eyes go almost comically wide.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Alex says, lacing their fingers together and watching as he locks his elbows, getting ready to brace. “Don’t you dare drop me,” she warns him, and starts to bounce.
"I won't drop you," Ryan promises immediately, breathless, his pale face gone pink and feverish. "I swear to Christ I won't."
Alex smirks. It's just this side of uncomfortable, two orgasms already and how swollen she is, but she barely has time to feel it before he's coming on a groan, his face gone slack and so vulnerable she feels something twist behind her ribs. Dumb boy. She's had her hands inside his chest but this feels closer.
When he’s finished he collapses down onto the pillows, pulls her on top of him with a careless kind of strength. "I wanted you," he says into her hair. "Fuck, I wanted you so bad." Then, before she can tease him: "I was scared I lost you.”
Oh. “You didn’t,” Alex says into his shoulder, closing her eyes tight. “I was always right here.”
Authors: threeguesses and lowriseflare
Fandom/ Pairing: Quantico, Alex/Ryan
Rating: R
Word Count: 3680+
Summary: It legit took me like a full hour to remember how to post fic.
She loses her badge anyway, in the end.
Insubordination, the new interim director tells her (this is after everything, the reek of blood and creosote, the Grand Central Bomber dead in the ground), failure to follow protocol, conspiracy, but more than that as far as Alex can understand she's relieved of her duties by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the simple fact of being who she is.
"You're a lightning rod," he tells her, looking across his massive desk with something like pity. "There's just nowhere for us to put you now."
He thanks her for her service. He sends her on her way.
*
Booth shows up at her apartment two days later.
"I threatened to quit," is the first thing he says. He's dressed up in full G-man kit, a suit and tie and hard soled shoes, like Alex hahas hardly ever seen him. It makes him look older. It makes im look like Agent Fletcher.
"But you didn't, did you," she says, and steps aside to let him in. She watches him glance bullet-quick at the bathroom doorway where they found him, blinks away the memory of him sprawled unconscious on her floor. “Why are you here?”
“To see you,” he says immediately, that way he has of sounding so honest even when she knows he’s probably full of shit.
Alex rolls her eyes. “Where’s Natalie?”
“I wouldn’t know.” He holds her gaze for a full beat, making a point. That’s a trick too, Alex knows, FBI training and group dynamics. She waits until he blinks first.
“Trouble in paradise?” she asks, and it comes out more nastily than she meant, like being too drunk at the poker table and accidentally flashing your hand of cards. She turns away so he won’t see her face.
Ryan ignores her. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want coffee or something?”
“No,” Alex says, and lets him hang there for a moment before she admits, “I have tea.” Then, because the idea of him drinking darjeeling in her kitchen is vaguely ridiculous: “I also have bourbon.”
He smiles at that, just faintly. “Bourbon works.”
Alex keeps her face studiously neutral. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, 2pm. He follows her around the peninsula into her tiny, tidy kitchen, watching as she pours two fingers each into a pair of FBI coffee mugs.
“What’ll you do now?” he wants to know.
Alex shrugs. When she lied to her mother about leaving town to complete her Master’s, she said it was for information security studies. “I don’t know. Go back to school, I guess.”
“I wish I’d met you in college,” Ryan says, taking the mug she hands him. “I bet that would have been more fun than all...this.” His handwave somehow manages to encompass not only the two of them but the bullets in Alex’s doorframe, the busted out wall in the bedroom leading to the apartment next door. The whole mess of their lives.
Alex scoffs. “I doubt it. You look like the kind of guy who peaked late.”
Ryan laughs and takes a sip of bourbon. “Sure, Parrish, think what you want. Better yet, drop by my mom’s house sometime, check out my yearbook photos.”
Suddenly it’s no longer funny. "Right," Alex says, taking a too-big sip from her own mug to cover; her throat and chest burn. "Next time I'm in Hawthorne."
Ryan nods, looks at her, keeps looking. Reaches out and takes the cup from her hand.
"Ah," Alex says as he sets it on the counter--not thinking about his mother's house and the odds of ever seeing it; not thinking about that callus on his finger where his wedding ring used to be. "So that's why you're here."
Ryan’s eyes narrow. "I'm here to make sure you're all right.”
Alex bares her teeth. "I'm fine."
"Are you?"
Alex doesn’t want to talk about this. “Why are you here and not with Natalie?” she asks, pitching her voice low and soft. “You need something specific?” She slings both arms around his neck then pauses, letting her mouth drop open in mock-shock. “Oh, honey. Does she not do anal?”
“All right, enough,” Ryan says, but he’s laughing. He curls a big hand around the back of her neck, burying his fingers in the base of her braid. Ryan loves her hair like all white boys love her hair, but sometimes Alex suspects he loves it extra, like it’s its own separate entity. He fussed with it constantly at Quantico.
“Pity,” she purrs in his ear, arching her back so her breasts press against him. “Especially since Natalie’s got that nice, tight--”
“Enough,” Ryan hisses, and this time he isn’t laughing. He wraps a hand around her braid and yanks, sucking at her neck viciously.
Alex grins. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Ryan and her haven’t done anal either, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. He's thinking about it, too, Alex can tell by the way his teeth sink into the soft skin underneath her jaw. Alex closes her eyes for a moment, lets him imagine.
She supposes she ought to be insulted, him showing up here out of nowhere after everything that's happened, expecting she'll spread her legs, but the truth is she's been waiting for him to come. They spent five months teasing out each other's weaknesses at the Academy. Alex can't really blame him for knowing he's hers.
"Fine," she says finally, opening her eyes again and sighing like she's doing him a favor. "But you'll have to make it up to me first."
Ryan blinks, his pale face flushed under the short scrub of beard and his eyes gone dark as the sea. "Which part?" he asks.
Alex gets her hands on his shoulders, pushes down until he gets the idea. "All of it."
*
He’s not bad with his mouth, Ryan. Not the best Alex has had, but good, warm and just-this-side of sloppy, his stubble scraping at her skin. They’ve only done this a few times before and always as a warm-up, Alex pulling him up by his ears before he got anywhere interesting.
This time, she doesn’t want to pull him up.
“I missed you,” Ryan confesses to the curve of her thigh. He has her backed up against the kitchenette counter, her ass half-perched on the side. “When I was with her, I did.”
Alex rolls her eyes at the refrigerator. “Don’t,” she says, but there’s a swooping thrill low in her traitorous body that has nothing to do with his tongue. It hurt her feelings, him and Natalie. Alex doesn’t like admitting that, but it’s true.
“Why not?” Ryan asks, rubbing lower than where his tongue is with two fingers. “I thought about you,” he continues. “I thought about doing this.”
“I bet.” Alex rocks her hips so he’ll go harder. He’s giving her a dose of her own medicine, she knows, getting back at her for what she said earlier. She can’t believe she thought he was nice, when she met him. No wonder she didn’t last in the Bureau.
“I thought about your thighs,” Ryan continues, pulling at one until it’s draped heavily over his shoulder. “I thought about getting between them and--”
Alex grabs the back of his head and smothers the rest of his words against her cunt. Talk to me, she remembers saying to the last guy she slept with. Say something dirty. He had just stared at her, stunned.
Your ass is so fucking hot, Ryan had said immediately, when she’d told him the same thing. It’s the roundest fucking ass I’ve ever seen. Alex fell off the hotel bed laughing.
(But she still made him say it again, later. That time it worked.)
“Higher,” she says to Ryan now, reaching down to grab his slippery chin. “Okay, now suck.”
Ryan looks up at her with blue, blue eyes. Alex holds the eye-contact until she comes.
*
“Should you even be here?” she asks afterwards, pulling up her underwear and finishing her bourbon with a swig. “What would the FBI say?”
Ryan is still kneeling on her floor, the front of his suit pants tented and obvious. For a petty, vengeful moment Alex considers about leaving him like that, sending him away aching and unsatisfied. She’s so enormously, ferociously angry, and she doesn’t even know at whom.
“Fuck the FBI,” Ryan says, and Alex smirks.
“All right,” she decides after a moment. “Come to bed.”
She’s going to have to move no matter what she does next, Alex thinks again as she leads him across the hardwood. She can’t walk past her desk without picturing it covered in explosives; the baseboards are scuffed from someone else’s boots. The medicine cabinet is still sitting on the floor in the bathroom, fresh drywall where the hole used to be. When the guys came to patch it, she watched them realize, watched them recognize her face. Just yesterday, the Starbucks barista refused to serve her.
“Are you sure?” Ryan wants to know as they cross the threshold into her bedroom.
“Are you?” Alex fires back. She feels sleazy about it suddenly, Natalie and her mean, sharp shoulder blades. A lightning rod, the interim director had said. Alex is tired of collateral damage.
“Yes,” Ryan says, serious as six o’clock breaking news.
“Okay then,” Alex says, flouncing onto her neatly made bed and crossing her arms and her ankles. The window faces an alley, more shadow than sun in the middle of the afternoon. “Strip.”
Ryan makes a face but he does what she tells him: shrugging out of his suit jacket and draping it over the armchair, toeing off his dress shoes and lining them up beside the door. He reaches back to pull his undershirt off, one fluid motion like a child getting ready for bathtime, and just like that Alex doesn’t want to play games with him anymore.
“Come here,” she says, getting up on her knees on the mattress and squinting at the badly-healed bullet hole in his rib cage. It’s too damn dark in this room to see. Ryan kneels on the edge of the bed and she finds herself clutching at him, curling her arms around his warm, bare back.
He lets her tug him down to the bed, but when she tries to pull him on top of her he locks his elbows, laughing. “I’m not really stripped yet, Alex.”
“Come here,” she insists, wrapping her legs around him, her bare legs slipping against the fabric of his suit pants. “Just--shut up for a second.”
“I’m shutting,” Ryan says, dropping down obediently.
Alex closes her eyes. His weight feels good, the thud thud of his heart and his sweat soap smell. “Stop staring at me,” she says, and Ryan sighs noisily but he turns his head away anyway, tucking his face into her neck. His breath tickles.
“What are we doing?” he asks.
That’s the question, isn’t it. She’s making sure he’s alive, honestly, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing she can say out loud. After she put him in the helicopter she realized he’d been shot two different times in the space of ninety-six hours more or less because he knew her; she thinks he must be made of steel and miracles, his whole body a magic trick. Alex is not going to cry.
“Nothing,” she says firmly, and rolls them so she’s on top.
That makes Ryan smile, that no-braces gap between his two front teeth; Alex scrapes the pad of her thumb along the edge of his incisor, then sits back on his thighs and pulls her own shirt off. If she’d known he was going to be here, she might have worn a different bra.
“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Ryan says.
“I’m a figment of your imagination,” Alex tells him, reaching behind herself to flick the clasp. It’s nude, or what would pass as nude on a tanned white woman. As soon as it’s undone her breasts spill free, heavy and low. She leans forward until her nipples are brushing against Ryan’s cheeks.
“Hi,” he murmurs, turning his head to suck on one. His mouth is stupidly warm, and he isn’t gentle. Alex breathes.
“Hi.” She wants him to swallow her whole. Suddenly she can’t move fast enough, and she reaches behind herself for his belt, fumbling blindly while trying to keep her boobs in contact with Ryan’s mouth. It makes her look silly rather than desperate, and Ryan laughs at her.
“Do you bend that way?” he wants to know, then sits up before either of them can find out for sure. “Here.”
Between the two of them they have him stripped in seconds, Ryan hooking a finger in the elastic of her messy underwear and sliding it back down her legs until they’re both naked. The hair on his thighs is a golden, California blonde. He’s got a nice cock, Alex has thought so since that first afternoon at the airport; she wraps her fist around the warm length of it now, enjoying the low, quiet sound at the back of his throat. Alex likes how he looks in her bed.
Ryan reaches up and laces his fingers through hers, surprising. “What do you want?” he asks, and he sounds so sincere. “You gotta tell me, Alex. Tell me what you want.”
What does she want? Alex almost smiles. She wants the last two weeks not to have happened. She wants her job back. She wants him to stay here forever, and she wants him to walk out for good.
“Fuck me,” she says, more roughly than she means to. Ryan’s eyes widen. He’s so oddly wholesome sometimes, it breaks Alex’s fucking heart.
“Fuck you how?” Ryan demands breathlessly, reaching for her knees so he can fold her legs up. “Hm?”
He likes it when she talks, Alex remembers. She hums, letting him slide his cock dangerously far up her inner thigh without the benefit of a rubber. She’s prickly from her last wax, grown out. “Fuck me how you don’t fuck her,” she says, and closes her eyes so she doesn’t see his face.
“Oh, Alex,” Ryan sighs, letting go of her legs, and his voice hurts worse than any knife wound. “Hey.”
“Condoms are in the drawer,” she tells him, flipping herself over onto her belly. “Hurry up.”
“Hey,” he says again, more forcefully this time. He’s got both hands on the curve of her ass, but instead of squeezing like she’s expecting him to he slides his palms up her spine and across her shoulders until he’s hovering over her on the mattress with both his arms on the outside of hers, his whole body whisper-close but not quite touching. “Come on,” he says, his forehead butting softly at the side of her face.
“You come on,” Alex says stubbornly, arching her back and grinding against him.
Ryan groans. “Jesus, Alex.” His voice is ragged; she knew that would work. She does it again, harder this time, and she’s wet enough now that when she tilts her hips he slips right inside her for a second, blunt tip pressing her open. Let him, she thinks, and she still won’t look at him. She doesn’t care.
Ryan does. “I’m getting a condom,” he says, wrapping an arm around her middle and keeping them locked together while he reaches over to the side of the bed, like he doesn’t want to let her go. He needs both hands to open the wrapper, though, and as soon as he lets go Alex poses herself again, ass up.
“Are we playing?” Ryan asks, kneeling behind her again. “Because this doesn’t feel fun.”
“I’m tons of fun,” Alex tells the pillow, and rolls her hips to prove it. “Come on.”
“I mean it,” Ryan says. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” she says before she can stop herself, and it comes out too much like she needs him. Alex bites her tongue hard enough to taste blood.
“Okay,” Ryan says slowly, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t touch her again, either. What he does do is lie down beside her, the mattress dipping underneath his warm, solid weight. Neither of them say anything for a minute. Finally she turns her head and peers at him from underneath a protective curtain of hair.
“What are you doing?”
“Holding onto this slimy fucking condom and waiting for you to talk to me,” Ryan tells her flatly. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” Alex says, because it’s the truth. Then she rolls over to face him fully. “But probably you should put that condom on.”
Ryan looks at her for another beat before obeying. He doesn’t even have to jack himself to do it, Alex notices, like this conversation is having no effect whatsoever on the strength of his erection. She hates him and also she really, really doesn’t.
“Feel good?” she asks, pushing up on an elbow and watching as he rolls the latex down. “Feel slimy?”
“Fuck you,” Ryan says. Once he’s fully sheathed he keeps touching himself, fingers stroking down around the condom rim and lower, one whispering over his balls. It makes Alex’s mouth dry. “I mean it, Alex. I don’t want to do this like we’re punishing each other.”
“We won’t,” she promises, swinging a leg over him. “I’ll be sweet.”
“You’re never sweet,” Ryan says grudgingly, but he doesn’t stop her.
She braces her hands on his shoulders as she lowers herself onto him, mindful of the fresh pink scar near the jut of his collarbone. They haven’t actually done it like this much before. Alex tilts her head forward as she works herself onto him, the ends of her hair brushing his chest.
“There,” she says as he bottoms out inside her, sitting all the way up and throwing her shoulders back. Ryan’s eyes almost fall out of his head.
“Jesus Christ, Alex,” he says. “You look like a damn queen.”
That makes her laugh--a real laugh, oddly charmed in spite of herself. And that’s been the problem with Ryan from the beginning, really: all this would have been exponentially easier if she didn’t like him so much. “What kind of queen?” she asks, baiting him. “An exotic one?”
“Fuck you,” Ryan says again, reaching up and cupping the whole of one breast in his hand. He lifts it a little, testing the weight, then pinches the nipple and uses it to pull her down toward his mouth.
“Oh,” Alex hears herself breathe. She leans down even further, planting her hands on the mattress so he’s practically buried in her chest, feeling edgy, feeling like she wants to show off. The look on his dumb, beautiful face alone would be enough to fuel her fantasies for months. Years.
“A queen,” Ryan murmurs, sliding both hands around her hips as she starts to move. “I mean it. Oh fuck, Alex.”
Oh fuck Alex indeed, she thinks, doing just that, fucking herself onto him over and over and over. He feels good, thick and hot. Her breasts sway back and forth in front of his face as she rocks. Ryan’s hands are on her everywhere, her thighs and her ass and her rib cage, on the back of her head pulling her face down close to his.
“Wanna kiss you,” he says and then he’s already doing it, licking his way into her mouth with a singularity of purpose, like he wants to devour her whole. Alex is faintly surprised. They haven’t done much of this either, really, not because she fancies herself Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman but because there simply isn’t a lot of time for foreplay when you’re fucking in a shower you share with two other NATs. Still, it feels intimate, his soft tongue and sharp teeth and the scrape of his beard along her jawline. Alex hears herself sigh into his mouth.
The orgasm doesn’t take her long like that, the build and then the break of it; she’s always liked being on top. Ryan bites at the edge of her tongue as she comes. A little, then, she thinks, squeezing her eyes shut and riding it out on top of him, the zip of pain honing the pleasure into something sharper and more delicate than glass. He wants to punish her a little.
“Shit,” she says when she’s done, resting her face against his neck and telling herself it’s only for a minute. Ryan rubs up her back with big, warm hands, suddenly gentle.
“There,” he tells her. “There you go.” Alex breathes.
“Okay,” she says finally, sitting up and shaking her hair out. “Now you.”
“Now me?” He reaches for her again but she’s too far. He rubs at her thighs instead, his thumbs coming down to ghost over her knees. “What, on cue?”
“If you can manage,” Alex tells him, and holds out her hands. It takes Ryan a moment to realize what she’s after, and when he does his eyes go almost comically wide.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Alex says, lacing their fingers together and watching as he locks his elbows, getting ready to brace. “Don’t you dare drop me,” she warns him, and starts to bounce.
"I won't drop you," Ryan promises immediately, breathless, his pale face gone pink and feverish. "I swear to Christ I won't."
Alex smirks. It's just this side of uncomfortable, two orgasms already and how swollen she is, but she barely has time to feel it before he's coming on a groan, his face gone slack and so vulnerable she feels something twist behind her ribs. Dumb boy. She's had her hands inside his chest but this feels closer.
When he’s finished he collapses down onto the pillows, pulls her on top of him with a careless kind of strength. "I wanted you," he says into her hair. "Fuck, I wanted you so bad." Then, before she can tease him: "I was scared I lost you.”
Oh. “You didn’t,” Alex says into his shoulder, closing her eyes tight. “I was always right here.”