Kisstory
Kisstory
by luthien
Rating: PG
Summary: Rodney's kisstory.
Word count: ~2500
Note 1: I found this lurking on my hard drive, almost finished. So... I finished it.
Note 2: This story mentions various additional pairings, including McKay/Keller, McKay/Brown and McKay/various OFCs
Rodney lies flat on his back, not moving a muscle and looking straight up at the shadow being cast across the ceiling from the light of the lamp. He needs a little time inside his own head right now without any distractions. Normally, tuning out every possible source of interruption and focusing on the situation at hand isn't any sort of problem for him. But this particular situation isn't one he's experienced before, and as for the nearest possible source of distraction… Rodney shifts closer to the edge of the bed so he's not touching anything except the sheets.
It's funny, the sorts of thoughts that occur at a time like this. Which is not to say that Rodney has ever imagined that a time like this would happen to him. All the available evidence, years and years worth of it, consistently pointed to an entirely different conclusion. Right up until it didn't. Right up until tonight.
Of all the physical things that two human beings can do together, across the entire spectrum from terrible hurt to terribly intense pleasure, Rodney's always found kissing to be the most problematic.
He doesn't remember his first kiss. Well, that's not quite true. He remembers the sound of loud, bad music and the smell of strange - strange to him then - sweet smoke. He remembers the taste of the innocuous-seeming drink he tried instead of the possibly-containing-citrus fruit punch. (With the benefit of an adult's hindsight, he estimates that drink has to have been at least fifty percent vodka.)
And he remembers a curtain of midnight hair, the fleeting awareness of someone else's lips touching his own and of not having a clue how to respond before the lips moved on to other things.
After that, recollection gets murky. If not for the fact that it was his first, the kiss wouldn't stand out at all in the tangle of sensations that make up his memory of that night. He only still thinks about it at all because it proved to be the shape of things to come.
He didn't kiss anyone for nearly three years after that, apart from the brief, disastrous episode with April Bingham that he truly doesn't want to think about. Then, when he was least expecting it, there was Erica. He's still not quite sure how they ended up together. He was close to completing his first PhD at the time, and hadn't been looking for anyone. She found him anyway. One minute she was a vaguely familiar face obscured by long, messy dark hair that he bumped into in the corridor every now and then; usually late at night on the way from his lab to the snack machine. The next minute he had a girlfriend, one that was seemingly plastered to his side every free waking moment. Not that there were a lot of free waking moments for either of them as they negotiated the obstacle course towards completion of their dissertations. What moments they had together did turn out to be memorable, though, because Erica liked to spend most of those sitting on the couch at home, kissing.
It should have been reasonable to suppose that Rodney quickly got the hang of kissing once he had Erica to force him into practice on a regular basis but… he didn't. It wasn't that he didn't work out the basic mechanics of it before very long. There really wasn't much to it once you broke it down into its component parts. It was just a case of opening your mouth, pressing your lips against those belonging to the other person and then…
That was the point where Rodney started experiencing difficulties. What to do next? There was only a finite number of options available, but he didn't have a clue how to work out the proper sequence or the most effective rate of application. Should he just keep on with lip action only for a few seconds - or minutes? - before slipping in a bit of tongue? And when was it acceptable to bring his hands into play, to supplement the kissing with, say, a gentle caress at shoulder or hip or even breast? And, most importantly of all, exactly how long was the minimum appropriate length of time to maintain that sort of lip lock before it was okay to stop and move on to more interesting activities - or at least to stop and breathe freely for a while?
'Never' seemed to be the answer to that last one, at least so far as Erica was concerned. She just kept kissing and kissing every time until Rodney's lips were bruised and numb and tingling in a very unsettling way. He faked a coughing fit a few times, in desperation to get out of it, but when he tried it on three successive evenings without displaying any other signs of a cold, Erica's eyes narrowed and he knew he wouldn't be able to use that one again.
Fortunately their careers took them in different directions - quite literally, with Rodney moving to the west coast and Erica going off to Europe - before Rodney's suspicions that he was developing an allergy to kissing could progress into full-blown certainty. He wasn't heartbroken when they broke up, mainly because they never did break up, officially. They just weren't together any more. Rodney supposes that in a purely technical sense Erica may still be his girlfriend.
After Erica, there was a long drought. One year turned into two turned into three and he was beginning to think that his love life was just going to be one huge, ever-expanding desert when he stumbled upon the first oasis in the form of… God, what was her name? And the one after that? He has no idea, but it hardly matters. Neither of them lasted more than a night or two, and all he remembers now is dark hair and eyes and a willingness to get the kissing over and done with in a hurry. Kissing didn't have to matter nearly so much when all you had was one night together. There was no point in wasting time. Still, he would feel his stomach clench unpleasantly at each first kiss, and when her lips left his, his breath would leave him too, in a sigh of a relief.
A few more years - and oases - later, Rodney had mastered the art of spending the night with someone while avoiding almost all opportunities for kissing without also being thrown out the door minus his shoes in the middle of the night. (Nearly always.) But by then the whole thing was starting to eat away at him inside, just a little. He didn't like not excelling at kissing any more than he enjoyed not excelling at anything else. He wasn't even really competent at it. Competent! He'd never settled for mere competency in his life. Clearly he needed to introduce some extra variables and gather more data, and identify (if possible) the crucial factors that, once accounted for, would enable him to master the art of kissing.
Once he started working on the problem, it didn't take him long to notice that all of the people he'd ever kissed had one particular attribute in common. Suddenly it was all becoming clear. Obviously, he'd been kissing the wrong sort of people all along, all those women with their rounded hips and breasts and soft, curving mouths. His type wasn't his type at all!
He resolved to try a blonde next time.
This turned out to be easier said than done. Another two years passed without presenting any opportunity to test his hypothesis when at last the perfect candidate crossed his path in the flesh for the first time.
Rodney prefers not to dwell on his personal history with Sam Carter, but since tonight he's already gone back over everything else from his first kiss onwards he can't quite stop himself from flashing back on that time that she kissed him on the cheek. It was sweet and entirely unexpected, and completely failed to provide the answer he'd been searching for. It didn't elicit so much as the slightest tingle. He was so shocked that he just stood there, as unsure of how to respond as his very first time, and watched her walk away.
They did share a proper kiss, a better kiss, much later. It was easily the best kiss Rodney's ever been involved in, at least until… one other. But that kiss with Sam doesn't count and never will because it wasn't real. It was just a hallucination with Rodney in charge of both sides of it at once. Of course it was great. There were no extraneous variables getting in the way.
That kiss with Carson doesn't count either, for the opposite reason. And likewise the first, over the top, kiss with Katie Brown. The rest of his time with Katie, on the other hand, was like being with Erica all over again, fumbling his way in the dark and never really sure of where he was at any given moment. The main difference was that at least he didn't have to endure the endless kissing sessions this time, since Katie turned out to be his equal in skill when it came to that, if nothing else.
After it was all over, once he got over the immediate pain and the related humiliation of initially failing to realise that it was all over, he found that he didn't miss Katie quite as much as he'd thought he would, which was probably just as well. And at least he was able to cross "redheads" off his list.
Unless Jennifer counts as a redhead, too. Which she doesn't. She's strawberry blonde, at the most. And anyway, Jennifer is… Jennifer. He doesn't want to think about her. It's easier to dwell on people whose names he can't remember or never knew in the first place than think about someone who should have been, and so nearly was, the one.
Sex with him was nice, she'd said. That was the problem. It wasn't bad, he mustn't ever think that, but even when they kissed, well, it wasn't exactly fireworks, was it?
And that was pretty much that.
After Jennifer… well, that brings him back to the here and now. Right on cue, an arm flops across his chest, tightens, and then a warm body presses in close. Rodney resolutely closes his eyes and forces himself to remain lying stiffly on his back, arms laid out straight on either side of him.
He'd thought Jennifer was the one, even after they broke up, because he really had liked her, and she'd liked him. Besides, what were the odds of finding anyone who suited him better? He had a list, and she ticked every single box on the page. How was he to know that a box was missing?
A face presses against his neck, warm breath heating his skin, and Rodney's eyes fly open again. He stares up at the shadowy ceiling. He wasn't expecting what happened tonight, not any of it. He feels like he's been walking around his whole adult life with blinkers on, and seeing the world in shades of grey. He lets out a long, shuddering breath and turns over so he's facing the wall - or tries to. A wordless rumble of protest sounds in his ear and the sensation of soft breath against his neck is replaced by the rasp of an unshaven cheek.
A hand tugs at his hip, forcing him over onto his side so he's facing the other way. And, yeah, okay, he doesn't put up much resistance.
"Whassup?" John murmurs, sounding half asleep.
"Nothing," Rodney says. "Just thinking about a few things, but they don't matter now."
"You okay?" John asks, suddenly sounding much more awake. There's the hint of an edge to his voice, too, just enough for anyone versed in the ways of Sheppard-speak to detect a note of… something. He can't be wondering whether Rodney's been thinking of someone else, can he? Thinking of someone else, and maybe regretting ending up here with John tonight? It seems ridiculous. And yet…
His arms come up and around as his lips find John's easily in the darkness, and the kiss is happening before Rodney has a chance to think about how to go about it.
Bells ring out and trumpets sound, and he feels like he's going up in flames. It's as astonishing this time as it was the first time their lips touched - hours or minutes or possibly even days ago. Time seems to have stopped, or speeded up, since then - maybe both. All the tired clichés are true. Who knew? Rodney's never had any trouble understanding the concept of combustion, but now he knows what it feels like to actually take part in it.
It feels like fireworks, in fact.
Tonight, for the first time ever, someone kissed him and it was so good that he didn't want it to end. It's as simple and as baffling as that. After all these years of trying to devise the formula for the perfect kiss, he's fully aware of the irony that now he's finally discovered it he doesn't have the first clue about how to describe how it works. He doesn't need to, though. The knowledge was there all the time, waiting for the right person to unlock it - which also provides a pretty clear answer to the question of what his type is.
The kiss deepens and he follows the pull of it, the need to be closer, the hungering of skin to touch skin. He doesn't want it to end, and he's almost certain that once they start the next kiss he's not going to want that one to end, either. This is going to become a problem very quickly. The only real solution he can come up with is that they'll just have to stay joined at the hip, maybe permanently. This possibility doesn't worry him nearly as much as it should. After all, they were almost there already, just waiting for one or the other of them to close the final gap without even knowing that that's what they were doing. Or at least, without Rodney knowing that that's what they were doing.
John's the one who ends the kiss. He's going to have to get used to doing that.
They lie there in silence for a little while, but this time Rodney doesn't try to roll away. It's almost a physical impossibility, anyway, since they've ended up in such a tangle of limbs. How they got that way is a mystery. Rodney doesn't even remember moving his legs. Like the kiss itself, it just happened.
"You know, it's funny," Rodney says after a while. "I've been trying to work something out, for a long time now, and I've just finally come up with the answer."
"Yeah?" John asks. The word is muffled against the side of Rodney's jaw and maintaining that position can't be good for his neck, but John doesn't seem inclined to try to move away, either.
"I realised that I really do like dark hair," Rodney says, trailing his fingers through the short hair at the nape of John's neck. He feels a shiver run through John's body and his mouth opens in a soft gasp.
Rodney smiles, and closes his mouth over John's before he has the chance to say anything else. He has much better uses in mind for John's lips than wasting them on conversation.
by luthien
Rating: PG
Summary: Rodney's kisstory.
Word count: ~2500
Note 1: I found this lurking on my hard drive, almost finished. So... I finished it.
Note 2: This story mentions various additional pairings, including McKay/Keller, McKay/Brown and McKay/various OFCs
Rodney lies flat on his back, not moving a muscle and looking straight up at the shadow being cast across the ceiling from the light of the lamp. He needs a little time inside his own head right now without any distractions. Normally, tuning out every possible source of interruption and focusing on the situation at hand isn't any sort of problem for him. But this particular situation isn't one he's experienced before, and as for the nearest possible source of distraction… Rodney shifts closer to the edge of the bed so he's not touching anything except the sheets.
It's funny, the sorts of thoughts that occur at a time like this. Which is not to say that Rodney has ever imagined that a time like this would happen to him. All the available evidence, years and years worth of it, consistently pointed to an entirely different conclusion. Right up until it didn't. Right up until tonight.
Of all the physical things that two human beings can do together, across the entire spectrum from terrible hurt to terribly intense pleasure, Rodney's always found kissing to be the most problematic.
He doesn't remember his first kiss. Well, that's not quite true. He remembers the sound of loud, bad music and the smell of strange - strange to him then - sweet smoke. He remembers the taste of the innocuous-seeming drink he tried instead of the possibly-containing-citrus fruit punch. (With the benefit of an adult's hindsight, he estimates that drink has to have been at least fifty percent vodka.)
And he remembers a curtain of midnight hair, the fleeting awareness of someone else's lips touching his own and of not having a clue how to respond before the lips moved on to other things.
After that, recollection gets murky. If not for the fact that it was his first, the kiss wouldn't stand out at all in the tangle of sensations that make up his memory of that night. He only still thinks about it at all because it proved to be the shape of things to come.
He didn't kiss anyone for nearly three years after that, apart from the brief, disastrous episode with April Bingham that he truly doesn't want to think about. Then, when he was least expecting it, there was Erica. He's still not quite sure how they ended up together. He was close to completing his first PhD at the time, and hadn't been looking for anyone. She found him anyway. One minute she was a vaguely familiar face obscured by long, messy dark hair that he bumped into in the corridor every now and then; usually late at night on the way from his lab to the snack machine. The next minute he had a girlfriend, one that was seemingly plastered to his side every free waking moment. Not that there were a lot of free waking moments for either of them as they negotiated the obstacle course towards completion of their dissertations. What moments they had together did turn out to be memorable, though, because Erica liked to spend most of those sitting on the couch at home, kissing.
It should have been reasonable to suppose that Rodney quickly got the hang of kissing once he had Erica to force him into practice on a regular basis but… he didn't. It wasn't that he didn't work out the basic mechanics of it before very long. There really wasn't much to it once you broke it down into its component parts. It was just a case of opening your mouth, pressing your lips against those belonging to the other person and then…
That was the point where Rodney started experiencing difficulties. What to do next? There was only a finite number of options available, but he didn't have a clue how to work out the proper sequence or the most effective rate of application. Should he just keep on with lip action only for a few seconds - or minutes? - before slipping in a bit of tongue? And when was it acceptable to bring his hands into play, to supplement the kissing with, say, a gentle caress at shoulder or hip or even breast? And, most importantly of all, exactly how long was the minimum appropriate length of time to maintain that sort of lip lock before it was okay to stop and move on to more interesting activities - or at least to stop and breathe freely for a while?
'Never' seemed to be the answer to that last one, at least so far as Erica was concerned. She just kept kissing and kissing every time until Rodney's lips were bruised and numb and tingling in a very unsettling way. He faked a coughing fit a few times, in desperation to get out of it, but when he tried it on three successive evenings without displaying any other signs of a cold, Erica's eyes narrowed and he knew he wouldn't be able to use that one again.
Fortunately their careers took them in different directions - quite literally, with Rodney moving to the west coast and Erica going off to Europe - before Rodney's suspicions that he was developing an allergy to kissing could progress into full-blown certainty. He wasn't heartbroken when they broke up, mainly because they never did break up, officially. They just weren't together any more. Rodney supposes that in a purely technical sense Erica may still be his girlfriend.
After Erica, there was a long drought. One year turned into two turned into three and he was beginning to think that his love life was just going to be one huge, ever-expanding desert when he stumbled upon the first oasis in the form of… God, what was her name? And the one after that? He has no idea, but it hardly matters. Neither of them lasted more than a night or two, and all he remembers now is dark hair and eyes and a willingness to get the kissing over and done with in a hurry. Kissing didn't have to matter nearly so much when all you had was one night together. There was no point in wasting time. Still, he would feel his stomach clench unpleasantly at each first kiss, and when her lips left his, his breath would leave him too, in a sigh of a relief.
A few more years - and oases - later, Rodney had mastered the art of spending the night with someone while avoiding almost all opportunities for kissing without also being thrown out the door minus his shoes in the middle of the night. (Nearly always.) But by then the whole thing was starting to eat away at him inside, just a little. He didn't like not excelling at kissing any more than he enjoyed not excelling at anything else. He wasn't even really competent at it. Competent! He'd never settled for mere competency in his life. Clearly he needed to introduce some extra variables and gather more data, and identify (if possible) the crucial factors that, once accounted for, would enable him to master the art of kissing.
Once he started working on the problem, it didn't take him long to notice that all of the people he'd ever kissed had one particular attribute in common. Suddenly it was all becoming clear. Obviously, he'd been kissing the wrong sort of people all along, all those women with their rounded hips and breasts and soft, curving mouths. His type wasn't his type at all!
He resolved to try a blonde next time.
This turned out to be easier said than done. Another two years passed without presenting any opportunity to test his hypothesis when at last the perfect candidate crossed his path in the flesh for the first time.
Rodney prefers not to dwell on his personal history with Sam Carter, but since tonight he's already gone back over everything else from his first kiss onwards he can't quite stop himself from flashing back on that time that she kissed him on the cheek. It was sweet and entirely unexpected, and completely failed to provide the answer he'd been searching for. It didn't elicit so much as the slightest tingle. He was so shocked that he just stood there, as unsure of how to respond as his very first time, and watched her walk away.
They did share a proper kiss, a better kiss, much later. It was easily the best kiss Rodney's ever been involved in, at least until… one other. But that kiss with Sam doesn't count and never will because it wasn't real. It was just a hallucination with Rodney in charge of both sides of it at once. Of course it was great. There were no extraneous variables getting in the way.
That kiss with Carson doesn't count either, for the opposite reason. And likewise the first, over the top, kiss with Katie Brown. The rest of his time with Katie, on the other hand, was like being with Erica all over again, fumbling his way in the dark and never really sure of where he was at any given moment. The main difference was that at least he didn't have to endure the endless kissing sessions this time, since Katie turned out to be his equal in skill when it came to that, if nothing else.
After it was all over, once he got over the immediate pain and the related humiliation of initially failing to realise that it was all over, he found that he didn't miss Katie quite as much as he'd thought he would, which was probably just as well. And at least he was able to cross "redheads" off his list.
Unless Jennifer counts as a redhead, too. Which she doesn't. She's strawberry blonde, at the most. And anyway, Jennifer is… Jennifer. He doesn't want to think about her. It's easier to dwell on people whose names he can't remember or never knew in the first place than think about someone who should have been, and so nearly was, the one.
Sex with him was nice, she'd said. That was the problem. It wasn't bad, he mustn't ever think that, but even when they kissed, well, it wasn't exactly fireworks, was it?
And that was pretty much that.
After Jennifer… well, that brings him back to the here and now. Right on cue, an arm flops across his chest, tightens, and then a warm body presses in close. Rodney resolutely closes his eyes and forces himself to remain lying stiffly on his back, arms laid out straight on either side of him.
He'd thought Jennifer was the one, even after they broke up, because he really had liked her, and she'd liked him. Besides, what were the odds of finding anyone who suited him better? He had a list, and she ticked every single box on the page. How was he to know that a box was missing?
A face presses against his neck, warm breath heating his skin, and Rodney's eyes fly open again. He stares up at the shadowy ceiling. He wasn't expecting what happened tonight, not any of it. He feels like he's been walking around his whole adult life with blinkers on, and seeing the world in shades of grey. He lets out a long, shuddering breath and turns over so he's facing the wall - or tries to. A wordless rumble of protest sounds in his ear and the sensation of soft breath against his neck is replaced by the rasp of an unshaven cheek.
A hand tugs at his hip, forcing him over onto his side so he's facing the other way. And, yeah, okay, he doesn't put up much resistance.
"Whassup?" John murmurs, sounding half asleep.
"Nothing," Rodney says. "Just thinking about a few things, but they don't matter now."
"You okay?" John asks, suddenly sounding much more awake. There's the hint of an edge to his voice, too, just enough for anyone versed in the ways of Sheppard-speak to detect a note of… something. He can't be wondering whether Rodney's been thinking of someone else, can he? Thinking of someone else, and maybe regretting ending up here with John tonight? It seems ridiculous. And yet…
His arms come up and around as his lips find John's easily in the darkness, and the kiss is happening before Rodney has a chance to think about how to go about it.
Bells ring out and trumpets sound, and he feels like he's going up in flames. It's as astonishing this time as it was the first time their lips touched - hours or minutes or possibly even days ago. Time seems to have stopped, or speeded up, since then - maybe both. All the tired clichés are true. Who knew? Rodney's never had any trouble understanding the concept of combustion, but now he knows what it feels like to actually take part in it.
It feels like fireworks, in fact.
Tonight, for the first time ever, someone kissed him and it was so good that he didn't want it to end. It's as simple and as baffling as that. After all these years of trying to devise the formula for the perfect kiss, he's fully aware of the irony that now he's finally discovered it he doesn't have the first clue about how to describe how it works. He doesn't need to, though. The knowledge was there all the time, waiting for the right person to unlock it - which also provides a pretty clear answer to the question of what his type is.
The kiss deepens and he follows the pull of it, the need to be closer, the hungering of skin to touch skin. He doesn't want it to end, and he's almost certain that once they start the next kiss he's not going to want that one to end, either. This is going to become a problem very quickly. The only real solution he can come up with is that they'll just have to stay joined at the hip, maybe permanently. This possibility doesn't worry him nearly as much as it should. After all, they were almost there already, just waiting for one or the other of them to close the final gap without even knowing that that's what they were doing. Or at least, without Rodney knowing that that's what they were doing.
John's the one who ends the kiss. He's going to have to get used to doing that.
They lie there in silence for a little while, but this time Rodney doesn't try to roll away. It's almost a physical impossibility, anyway, since they've ended up in such a tangle of limbs. How they got that way is a mystery. Rodney doesn't even remember moving his legs. Like the kiss itself, it just happened.
"You know, it's funny," Rodney says after a while. "I've been trying to work something out, for a long time now, and I've just finally come up with the answer."
"Yeah?" John asks. The word is muffled against the side of Rodney's jaw and maintaining that position can't be good for his neck, but John doesn't seem inclined to try to move away, either.
"I realised that I really do like dark hair," Rodney says, trailing his fingers through the short hair at the nape of John's neck. He feels a shiver run through John's body and his mouth opens in a soft gasp.
Rodney smiles, and closes his mouth over John's before he has the chance to say anything else. He has much better uses in mind for John's lips than wasting them on conversation.