and I wanna tie your wrists with leather, and drill a tiny hole into your head
Title: what swapped your blood
Fandom: Brick
Characters/Pairings: Kara/Brendan
Ratings/Warnings: R. Er, sex - or more precisely foreplay with a fade-to-black, but sex is pretty clearly incoming. D/S. Underage [due ONLY to the restrictions of canon, not through intent to fetishize youth; characters are of an age where people in real life are quite likely to have sex voluntarily without being scarred by it, are the same age, and said age does not inform the dynamic. Also, the reader is invited to envision the actors, who were in their twenties at the time the movie was made.]
Written for: ficcinintherain mix-to-fic challenge, the 'fall to your knees' mix.
Wordcount: ~3,000
A/N: ...I can't believe I wrote this. No, really, I can't. SARA EVERYTHING IS YOUR FAULT. Title is swiped from "Fake Palindromes" by Andrew Bird. I originally intended to write one other scene, but a) I'm not sure it's necessary, b) I'm not sure I can do it justice, c) I'm not sure holding this back another day will cause me to write it, and d) I suspect that if I do not post this now, I never will.
“If we’re going to do this,” Kara whispers, her breath hot against Brendan’s lips, “you have to play by my rules.”
Brendan swallows hard, smiling slightly. “Sure. And they are?”
“Rule number one: if you need me to stop anything, say ‘red.’ Not no or stop or anything else - just ‘red.’”
He shrugs, enjoying the pressure of her hands on his shoulders. “Sure. Red to stop. Rule number two?”
She grins, razor-sharp. “Rule number two, you figure the other rules as you go. I’ll let you know when you break them.”
----
She greets him with two fingers skating down the back of his neck and a soft, husky chuckle in his ear; he’s still processing how pornographic that feels for a hallway as she presses herself against his side and slides her hand into his back pocket. He blinks. “Hey.”
She laughs, leans up to whisper in his ear - “Arm around me.” He tries, and she squeezes, fingernails sharp through the denim. “No, my shoulders.”
That translates to quite a bit of her bare skin hot against the inside of his wrist, distracting him slightly as she keeps whispering: “I have to talk to people - come on. Keep your mouth shut till you pick up the lingo, and when I do this -” she squeezes again, and he bites his lip “- kiss me. Don’t try to make too big a show of it, just enough - temple or cheek, whatever’s easiest. Be ready.”
“Any particular reason?” he asks quietly, letting her guide him down the hall. She kisses his neck, light and quick and just enough to send a shiver down his back.
“It makes a point. Shhh.”
He probably should find that annoying, but hell - he likes her voice, likes the way she whispers especially, and so he does what he’s told and focuses on the shift of her shoulders, the whiff of cheap but sweet perfume he can catch in the curve of her neck. It occurs to him that to anyone watching he must look like he has some clue where he’s going.
“Kara,” a head of blond dreadlocks says with a slight smile, waving a gloved hand. “Who’s the yegg?”
“Name’s Brendan,” Kara says for him, drawing a proprietary finger along his cheek. The fingers of her other hand jab into him, and he manages not to start, just leans in and kisses her forehead. She grins and turns back to Blondie, dropping into a quick light rhythm that’s only half familiar.
“Yegg?” he asks her once they’ve moved on, keeping his voice go. She chuckles again.
“Guy, that’s all. You’ll pick it up.”
“Yeah, I know,” he bluffs, shrugging. “Where’d you get it? And how’d you know that guy? He had two or three years on us.”
“Four, actually,” she informs him, smiling. “Doing his senior year over now. And I’ve been helping out the drama club since sixth grade.”
He raises his eyebrows. “So you’ve got an in.”
“Got an in?” She laughs. “I’m everybody’s lil sis, Brendan. I am in.”
He smiles. “You’re good.”
“Of course I am. You didn’t notice before?” she scolds, shaking her finger at him. “Meanie. No more kisses for you for the rest of the day.”
The bell rings then, and with one last pinch she steps away. He watches her go, smiling.
----
Someone pokes his shoulder. “Hey.”
Brendan glances over the edge of his book; doesn’t close it. The freckled yegg who poked him just leans closer. “You dating Kara?”
He lets the pause drag out. “Yes.” Back to his book.
“I heard she’s…” Freckles lowers his voice. “Freaky. Like, in bed.”
Brendan glances back up and raises his eyebrows pointedly.
Once the yegg looks away, he squirms slightly in his seat.
----
“This is kind of my spot,” Kara explains, running one hand fondly along the wall while her other hand traces circles on Brendan’s palm. “And a few other freshmen, but it’ll be mine once the seniors graduate.”
“Nice place,” he says dryly, glancing around; it’s tiny and dark, full of heaps of glittering costumes and papered in two-dollar posters, stocked with a chair and a heap of cushions, but Kara’s smile at her bit of ground makes him mean it more than he planned. “Didn’t know the theater wing was so big.”
“Gets pretty small with eighty people crowded in it,” she says, leaning back against the wall. “But for now it’s ours.” She smiles conspiratorially. “Just stay out of the closet on C hallway.”
“Any particular reason?” he asks, running his thumb along the backs of her knuckles. She squeezes his hand, and he stops.
“Ash and Les are back there.”
“And?” He mostly wants to keep her talking.
“Well…” She sounds amused. “They’re probably fucking.”
Oh. Well, then. The tips of his ears go hot.
“Oh, Brendan,” Kara purrs, “don’t tell me you’re shocked.”
He clears his throat. “Not even a little,” he lies.
“So you knew that back here is the place for that kind of fun, then?” She inches closer to him, and the room’s a lot warmer than it was a moment ago.
“You could say that.”
“Did you think that’s why I brought you back here?” Even closer.
“I -” He stops. Thinks. She’s smirking, inches from his lips. “Should I have?”
She grins, pulling him down to her. “Clever boy.”
He’s fairly sure this counts as a hell of a kiss, forceful and ferocious and hungry and God, and he just tries to echo what she does with her tongue - it’s not like he hasn’t kissed anyone before, but this is a different story, and if she actually meant - which he isn’t quite sure -
She breaks the kiss, shoves him back. He blinks. “Sorry -”
“Shh. Back up.” She’s still shoving, and he half-falls into the rickety chair. “Stay still. And keep your hands out of the way.”
He glances at his hands and hesitantly reaches back, grabs the spindles of the chair, still uncertain. She braces herself against the chair, nudging his knees outwards as she does.
“Wait -”
She pauses halfway to her knees, sighs. “Brendan. Remember what I told you a few weeks ago?”
“Play by your rules.” His voice is husky, low, strange. She frowns, straightening slightly to stand over him.
“Do you remember the first rule? What you’re supposed to say?” she murmurs, bracing one hand against his shoulder. She’s wary - testing him, too, he thinks. And God, but he loves a challenge.
“Yeah.”
She raises her eyebrows, shifts her hand to his knee, the pressure of her weight - she’s leaning hard - almost but not quite enough to hurt. “But that’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
He can’t speak; he shakes his head. She smiles, sliding her hand along his thigh, tracing circles with her thumb, a delicate counterpoint to the not-quite-pain. The chair spindles dig into his hands, enough of a distraction to keep him almost calm, to keep him motionless as ordered. She raises her eyebrows.
“So you don’t, in fact, want me to stop.” Her fingers are almost at his hip. “You’re lying to me.”
“You could say that,” he breathes. He’s not sure he can move, anymore; he feels strange, weightless, hypnotized. She smiles, shakes her head in mock despair.
“Ah, Brendan,” she sighs. “What am I going to do with you?”
He licks his lips. “Whatever you want.”
She grins, wraps her other hand into his hair and pulls his head back to kiss him ferociously, biting at his lips as her hand digs into the fold of his hip, thumbs open the button on his jeans, and at this point she’s not going to have to do much more than breathe on him.
----
“I don’t like her,” the Brain says, tapping his fingers against the locker. Kara’s chatting with a senior on the other side of the hall. “She’s trouble.”
Brendan grins, gazing at her. “Yeah, she is.”
The Brain glances over, sighs. “And you love it.”
Hard to argue with that. (He always played with matches, too.)
----
She’s right about being already in. They’re the only dealers in the freshmen class who aren’t just fronting for somebody else, and Brendan isn’t sure how he feels about the glazed eyes he sees, but at least they’re not scamming or cutting the junk, and it isn’t as if anyone’s going to buy less if they’re buying it somewhere else. Besides, they’re fast on the track to dealing in information more than anything else, buying contacts as much as they are dealing.
Brendan mostly runs with Kara’s plans; they tend to play out smooth as could be, and she’s less new to the business than he.
Doesn’t mean he’s always exactly happy about being kept in the dark, though.
“What’s going down with the Matherson yegg?” he asks her, toeing off his shoes at the edge of the living room rug. Kara, curled on the pink and copper couch, doesn’t look up.
“I told you at lunch today,” she says, flipping through a science textbook. “Can’t you remember?”
“Course I can. But the word on the street runs counter. I don’t think you’re telling me everything.”
“I’m telling you all you need to know,” she says, still not looking at him. “There a reason you should know what I’ll be doing?”
“Maybe I’d like to,” he says, because he can never actually win an argument with Kara. She laughs.
“Well, you’ll have to ask me nicely for that.” She slams the book shut with a sound like a slap and drops it on the chipped-paint table besides the couch. Brendan rocks back and forth, licks his lips.
“Please could you let me know what you’ll be doing?” He feels ridiculous, but hell - he knows she likes to hear him ask. (To beg. And he’s not going to think about that.)
“Hmmm…” She taps her finger against her lips; her lipstick’s pink with flecks of gold, and he finds his train of thought dissolving. Fingernails to palm, stay focused. “No, I don’t think so.”
Breathe in, breathe out. “Do you have to do this?” he snaps.
“Ohhh, tsk-tsk-tsk. You’ll have to be very nice to me to find out after that.” She sits up, smiling, and meets his eyes. “The house is ours till nine.”
Oh. “Nice to you, huh?” he asks, reaching for the zipper on his jacket and slowly pulling it down, suddenly very grateful that the shirt beneath is thin. “Anything particular in mind?”
“Hmmm.” Tap, tap, tap, gold-painted fingernail against her lips. “You look so pretty on your knees.”
“On my knees?” He glances across the yards from him to her. “You want me to crawl?” He’ll do it; he’ll feel ridiculous and clumsy and spineless, but with her looking at him all calculating and expectant, by God he’ll do it. She tilts her head, considering.
“No, I think I’ll let you come here first.”
Let him. Christ, but he loves her, and he pads his way across the carpet inch by inch, shrugging his jacket off properly and tossing it on the chair, keeping everything quiet and slow and watching Kara smile and hike her skirt up inch by tantalizing inch. He pauses at her side, waiting to see if she’s got anything more specific to say; her hands close around his wrists, pulling him closer in to her. She leans close enough to kiss his knuckle, teasing and light.
“I made a suggestion, Brendan,” she points out, low and faintly threatening. He shivers, breathing shallow. “I don’t suggest things twice.”
He kneels, slowly, her hands tightening around his wrists, digging in, leaving him unsteady, off-balance, breathless and hot. He presses his lips to the inside of her knee, falls compliant and loose as she pulls him closer, arms stretched above his head and good as bound - she’s strong, stronger than he looks. He might be able to pull free, but he’s not about to try, can’t even want to, just cranes towards her; trails kiss after kiss along her legs to the edge of her hauled-up hem, nuzzling softly at her thighs. She hums appreciatively, shifts his wrists to one hand clasped around them both, flicks her skirt up the last few inches - and fuck, it’s all she’s wearing - and she twists her hand into his hair. He’s breathing hard, gasping, eyes half-closed and squirming desperately closer to her, Kara smirking like a victory goddess, and there’s probably something horribly wrong with the both of them but he cannot give a damn when it feels as good as this.
----
“Hey.” The Matherson yegg thumps against the locker next to Brendan’s, primed to sneer. “So tell me, are you anyone’s bitch, or are you a one-woman dog?”
Brendan goes tense, white-knuckled on the bag that he still carries. “Sorry,” he says, fighting to keep his voice calm and succeeding to his own surprise, “but I don’t really like dick, and if I was going to try it out I’d want one more than an inch long.”
It’s a middle-school insult, even with the traces of the rhythm he’s learning, and Matherson just blinks. “So, seriously, you just let her do whatever she wants to you? Pussy.”
Brendan clenches his jaw and walks away, knowing it’s an admission. He manages to hide the humiliation till he’s on his own.
----
The thing about Kara is that she lies, and Brendan hates it. Except that lying is part of what makes her the brilliant manipulative genius that she is, that he loves; it’s part of what makes her powerful, like lightning, and he loves how strong she is with everything in him.
And more than that, he’s never actually sure if he hates that; he’s never truly sure what he loves about her and what he hates, what of her he loves to hate and what he loves but has to pretend to hate because admitting he loves those bits of her saps the fun for both of them; he doesn’t know what he loves or hates to love, or should hate to love but doesn’t at all, or should hate point-blank but loves entirely.
And when she’s bent over him, when he’s on his knees, when she’s got her silk around his wrists - then he knows he’s saying no so she’ll ignore it, because (he’s a sick twisted bastard) he loves the helplessness and danger. Then he’s sure. But sometimes he’ll stop her, with a scam or in the hallway, and he doesn’t know whether or not he wants her to listen, doesn’t know if he wants the game to go on hold.
(And it’s a game he doesn’t want to win, or where winning is enjoying her victory, or - whatever. He’s learning the rules, the language of this school, as Kara must have, and the undercurrent of it all is victory and triumph and power for yourself.)
The fight happens two months into sophomore year, with chafe-marks hidden under Brendan’s sleeves, a bruise openly blackening his cheek, and whispers bouncing around the crowded hallway as he leans against her locker and demands, “A bet?”
Kara closes her eyes, opens them. Sighs. “Let’s not do this here, Brendan.”
“You bet on the fight last night.”
She slams her locker shut, meets his eyes. “I said, we’re not going to do this here, Brendan.” It’s the voice that sends him to his knees with a whimper ready at his throat, every time, but tweaked off the balance between promise and threat. He swallows hard.
“You told me the fight was the only way to square the deal with Clark and his girls,” Brendan says, quiet and calm and channeling danger into his voice exactly as he’s seen her do. “You told me we’d been maneuvered into it and then you bet the take from the last three jobs on the outcome.”
“I knew you’d win it for me.”
“How long does it take to find someone who’ll make a bet that big, Kara?”
It’s the one and only time he’s ever seen her shaken.
“You set me up.”
Her fingers tighten on her purse; she straightens. “It settled the deal and it turned us a profit - which I was going to split like we always do.”
“And you lied to me.” He shrugs, almost casual, almost like it’s nothing, but he keeps his gaze drilling into hers. “You lied to me and you played me like your trash.”
“And what would you have done if I’d told you all of it, straight-up?” She’s testing him, and he decides to give the truth a go.
“Fought him.”
Her fingers clench, relax. She smiles - he isn’t sure whether it’s real. “Next time I’ll tell you, then. Come on.”
He doesn’t move. “This time I trusted you.”
She touches his shoulder, sighs. “Brendan. I kept you safe, didn’t I? And in your depth. If you need to know the details, next time we’ll work it out and I’ll let you know it all.” She leans in to whisper, low and enough of a purr to make him swallow, “I bet it’ll be a lot of fun.”
He looks past her at the hallway, at the groups of silent people who’ve somehow paused to watch them.
“So,” he says, low but making sure it carries, “is there anything you don’t think you’ll get away with?”
It all falls apart in what feels like seconds after that.
She tells him not to move. He walks away.
Someone whistles. “Guess you grew some real balls after all.”
Brendan sucker-punches him and continues on, ignoring the grunt and the shout of protest, keeping his eyes on the dirt-stained floor. He knows that Kara’s keeping her head high behind him. No one says a word until the bell calls them all to class.
Fandom: Brick
Characters/Pairings: Kara/Brendan
Ratings/Warnings: R. Er, sex - or more precisely foreplay with a fade-to-black, but sex is pretty clearly incoming. D/S. Underage [due ONLY to the restrictions of canon, not through intent to fetishize youth; characters are of an age where people in real life are quite likely to have sex voluntarily without being scarred by it, are the same age, and said age does not inform the dynamic. Also, the reader is invited to envision the actors, who were in their twenties at the time the movie was made.]
Written for: ficcinintherain mix-to-fic challenge, the 'fall to your knees' mix.
Wordcount: ~3,000
A/N: ...I can't believe I wrote this. No, really, I can't. SARA EVERYTHING IS YOUR FAULT. Title is swiped from "Fake Palindromes" by Andrew Bird. I originally intended to write one other scene, but a) I'm not sure it's necessary, b) I'm not sure I can do it justice, c) I'm not sure holding this back another day will cause me to write it, and d) I suspect that if I do not post this now, I never will.
“If we’re going to do this,” Kara whispers, her breath hot against Brendan’s lips, “you have to play by my rules.”
Brendan swallows hard, smiling slightly. “Sure. And they are?”
“Rule number one: if you need me to stop anything, say ‘red.’ Not no or stop or anything else - just ‘red.’”
He shrugs, enjoying the pressure of her hands on his shoulders. “Sure. Red to stop. Rule number two?”
She grins, razor-sharp. “Rule number two, you figure the other rules as you go. I’ll let you know when you break them.”
----
She greets him with two fingers skating down the back of his neck and a soft, husky chuckle in his ear; he’s still processing how pornographic that feels for a hallway as she presses herself against his side and slides her hand into his back pocket. He blinks. “Hey.”
She laughs, leans up to whisper in his ear - “Arm around me.” He tries, and she squeezes, fingernails sharp through the denim. “No, my shoulders.”
That translates to quite a bit of her bare skin hot against the inside of his wrist, distracting him slightly as she keeps whispering: “I have to talk to people - come on. Keep your mouth shut till you pick up the lingo, and when I do this -” she squeezes again, and he bites his lip “- kiss me. Don’t try to make too big a show of it, just enough - temple or cheek, whatever’s easiest. Be ready.”
“Any particular reason?” he asks quietly, letting her guide him down the hall. She kisses his neck, light and quick and just enough to send a shiver down his back.
“It makes a point. Shhh.”
He probably should find that annoying, but hell - he likes her voice, likes the way she whispers especially, and so he does what he’s told and focuses on the shift of her shoulders, the whiff of cheap but sweet perfume he can catch in the curve of her neck. It occurs to him that to anyone watching he must look like he has some clue where he’s going.
“Kara,” a head of blond dreadlocks says with a slight smile, waving a gloved hand. “Who’s the yegg?”
“Name’s Brendan,” Kara says for him, drawing a proprietary finger along his cheek. The fingers of her other hand jab into him, and he manages not to start, just leans in and kisses her forehead. She grins and turns back to Blondie, dropping into a quick light rhythm that’s only half familiar.
“Yegg?” he asks her once they’ve moved on, keeping his voice go. She chuckles again.
“Guy, that’s all. You’ll pick it up.”
“Yeah, I know,” he bluffs, shrugging. “Where’d you get it? And how’d you know that guy? He had two or three years on us.”
“Four, actually,” she informs him, smiling. “Doing his senior year over now. And I’ve been helping out the drama club since sixth grade.”
He raises his eyebrows. “So you’ve got an in.”
“Got an in?” She laughs. “I’m everybody’s lil sis, Brendan. I am in.”
He smiles. “You’re good.”
“Of course I am. You didn’t notice before?” she scolds, shaking her finger at him. “Meanie. No more kisses for you for the rest of the day.”
The bell rings then, and with one last pinch she steps away. He watches her go, smiling.
----
Someone pokes his shoulder. “Hey.”
Brendan glances over the edge of his book; doesn’t close it. The freckled yegg who poked him just leans closer. “You dating Kara?”
He lets the pause drag out. “Yes.” Back to his book.
“I heard she’s…” Freckles lowers his voice. “Freaky. Like, in bed.”
Brendan glances back up and raises his eyebrows pointedly.
Once the yegg looks away, he squirms slightly in his seat.
----
“This is kind of my spot,” Kara explains, running one hand fondly along the wall while her other hand traces circles on Brendan’s palm. “And a few other freshmen, but it’ll be mine once the seniors graduate.”
“Nice place,” he says dryly, glancing around; it’s tiny and dark, full of heaps of glittering costumes and papered in two-dollar posters, stocked with a chair and a heap of cushions, but Kara’s smile at her bit of ground makes him mean it more than he planned. “Didn’t know the theater wing was so big.”
“Gets pretty small with eighty people crowded in it,” she says, leaning back against the wall. “But for now it’s ours.” She smiles conspiratorially. “Just stay out of the closet on C hallway.”
“Any particular reason?” he asks, running his thumb along the backs of her knuckles. She squeezes his hand, and he stops.
“Ash and Les are back there.”
“And?” He mostly wants to keep her talking.
“Well…” She sounds amused. “They’re probably fucking.”
Oh. Well, then. The tips of his ears go hot.
“Oh, Brendan,” Kara purrs, “don’t tell me you’re shocked.”
He clears his throat. “Not even a little,” he lies.
“So you knew that back here is the place for that kind of fun, then?” She inches closer to him, and the room’s a lot warmer than it was a moment ago.
“You could say that.”
“Did you think that’s why I brought you back here?” Even closer.
“I -” He stops. Thinks. She’s smirking, inches from his lips. “Should I have?”
She grins, pulling him down to her. “Clever boy.”
He’s fairly sure this counts as a hell of a kiss, forceful and ferocious and hungry and God, and he just tries to echo what she does with her tongue - it’s not like he hasn’t kissed anyone before, but this is a different story, and if she actually meant - which he isn’t quite sure -
She breaks the kiss, shoves him back. He blinks. “Sorry -”
“Shh. Back up.” She’s still shoving, and he half-falls into the rickety chair. “Stay still. And keep your hands out of the way.”
He glances at his hands and hesitantly reaches back, grabs the spindles of the chair, still uncertain. She braces herself against the chair, nudging his knees outwards as she does.
“Wait -”
She pauses halfway to her knees, sighs. “Brendan. Remember what I told you a few weeks ago?”
“Play by your rules.” His voice is husky, low, strange. She frowns, straightening slightly to stand over him.
“Do you remember the first rule? What you’re supposed to say?” she murmurs, bracing one hand against his shoulder. She’s wary - testing him, too, he thinks. And God, but he loves a challenge.
“Yeah.”
She raises her eyebrows, shifts her hand to his knee, the pressure of her weight - she’s leaning hard - almost but not quite enough to hurt. “But that’s not what you’re saying, is it?”
He can’t speak; he shakes his head. She smiles, sliding her hand along his thigh, tracing circles with her thumb, a delicate counterpoint to the not-quite-pain. The chair spindles dig into his hands, enough of a distraction to keep him almost calm, to keep him motionless as ordered. She raises her eyebrows.
“So you don’t, in fact, want me to stop.” Her fingers are almost at his hip. “You’re lying to me.”
“You could say that,” he breathes. He’s not sure he can move, anymore; he feels strange, weightless, hypnotized. She smiles, shakes her head in mock despair.
“Ah, Brendan,” she sighs. “What am I going to do with you?”
He licks his lips. “Whatever you want.”
She grins, wraps her other hand into his hair and pulls his head back to kiss him ferociously, biting at his lips as her hand digs into the fold of his hip, thumbs open the button on his jeans, and at this point she’s not going to have to do much more than breathe on him.
----
“I don’t like her,” the Brain says, tapping his fingers against the locker. Kara’s chatting with a senior on the other side of the hall. “She’s trouble.”
Brendan grins, gazing at her. “Yeah, she is.”
The Brain glances over, sighs. “And you love it.”
Hard to argue with that. (He always played with matches, too.)
----
She’s right about being already in. They’re the only dealers in the freshmen class who aren’t just fronting for somebody else, and Brendan isn’t sure how he feels about the glazed eyes he sees, but at least they’re not scamming or cutting the junk, and it isn’t as if anyone’s going to buy less if they’re buying it somewhere else. Besides, they’re fast on the track to dealing in information more than anything else, buying contacts as much as they are dealing.
Brendan mostly runs with Kara’s plans; they tend to play out smooth as could be, and she’s less new to the business than he.
Doesn’t mean he’s always exactly happy about being kept in the dark, though.
“What’s going down with the Matherson yegg?” he asks her, toeing off his shoes at the edge of the living room rug. Kara, curled on the pink and copper couch, doesn’t look up.
“I told you at lunch today,” she says, flipping through a science textbook. “Can’t you remember?”
“Course I can. But the word on the street runs counter. I don’t think you’re telling me everything.”
“I’m telling you all you need to know,” she says, still not looking at him. “There a reason you should know what I’ll be doing?”
“Maybe I’d like to,” he says, because he can never actually win an argument with Kara. She laughs.
“Well, you’ll have to ask me nicely for that.” She slams the book shut with a sound like a slap and drops it on the chipped-paint table besides the couch. Brendan rocks back and forth, licks his lips.
“Please could you let me know what you’ll be doing?” He feels ridiculous, but hell - he knows she likes to hear him ask. (To beg. And he’s not going to think about that.)
“Hmmm…” She taps her finger against her lips; her lipstick’s pink with flecks of gold, and he finds his train of thought dissolving. Fingernails to palm, stay focused. “No, I don’t think so.”
Breathe in, breathe out. “Do you have to do this?” he snaps.
“Ohhh, tsk-tsk-tsk. You’ll have to be very nice to me to find out after that.” She sits up, smiling, and meets his eyes. “The house is ours till nine.”
Oh. “Nice to you, huh?” he asks, reaching for the zipper on his jacket and slowly pulling it down, suddenly very grateful that the shirt beneath is thin. “Anything particular in mind?”
“Hmmm.” Tap, tap, tap, gold-painted fingernail against her lips. “You look so pretty on your knees.”
“On my knees?” He glances across the yards from him to her. “You want me to crawl?” He’ll do it; he’ll feel ridiculous and clumsy and spineless, but with her looking at him all calculating and expectant, by God he’ll do it. She tilts her head, considering.
“No, I think I’ll let you come here first.”
Let him. Christ, but he loves her, and he pads his way across the carpet inch by inch, shrugging his jacket off properly and tossing it on the chair, keeping everything quiet and slow and watching Kara smile and hike her skirt up inch by tantalizing inch. He pauses at her side, waiting to see if she’s got anything more specific to say; her hands close around his wrists, pulling him closer in to her. She leans close enough to kiss his knuckle, teasing and light.
“I made a suggestion, Brendan,” she points out, low and faintly threatening. He shivers, breathing shallow. “I don’t suggest things twice.”
He kneels, slowly, her hands tightening around his wrists, digging in, leaving him unsteady, off-balance, breathless and hot. He presses his lips to the inside of her knee, falls compliant and loose as she pulls him closer, arms stretched above his head and good as bound - she’s strong, stronger than he looks. He might be able to pull free, but he’s not about to try, can’t even want to, just cranes towards her; trails kiss after kiss along her legs to the edge of her hauled-up hem, nuzzling softly at her thighs. She hums appreciatively, shifts his wrists to one hand clasped around them both, flicks her skirt up the last few inches - and fuck, it’s all she’s wearing - and she twists her hand into his hair. He’s breathing hard, gasping, eyes half-closed and squirming desperately closer to her, Kara smirking like a victory goddess, and there’s probably something horribly wrong with the both of them but he cannot give a damn when it feels as good as this.
----
“Hey.” The Matherson yegg thumps against the locker next to Brendan’s, primed to sneer. “So tell me, are you anyone’s bitch, or are you a one-woman dog?”
Brendan goes tense, white-knuckled on the bag that he still carries. “Sorry,” he says, fighting to keep his voice calm and succeeding to his own surprise, “but I don’t really like dick, and if I was going to try it out I’d want one more than an inch long.”
It’s a middle-school insult, even with the traces of the rhythm he’s learning, and Matherson just blinks. “So, seriously, you just let her do whatever she wants to you? Pussy.”
Brendan clenches his jaw and walks away, knowing it’s an admission. He manages to hide the humiliation till he’s on his own.
----
The thing about Kara is that she lies, and Brendan hates it. Except that lying is part of what makes her the brilliant manipulative genius that she is, that he loves; it’s part of what makes her powerful, like lightning, and he loves how strong she is with everything in him.
And more than that, he’s never actually sure if he hates that; he’s never truly sure what he loves about her and what he hates, what of her he loves to hate and what he loves but has to pretend to hate because admitting he loves those bits of her saps the fun for both of them; he doesn’t know what he loves or hates to love, or should hate to love but doesn’t at all, or should hate point-blank but loves entirely.
And when she’s bent over him, when he’s on his knees, when she’s got her silk around his wrists - then he knows he’s saying no so she’ll ignore it, because (he’s a sick twisted bastard) he loves the helplessness and danger. Then he’s sure. But sometimes he’ll stop her, with a scam or in the hallway, and he doesn’t know whether or not he wants her to listen, doesn’t know if he wants the game to go on hold.
(And it’s a game he doesn’t want to win, or where winning is enjoying her victory, or - whatever. He’s learning the rules, the language of this school, as Kara must have, and the undercurrent of it all is victory and triumph and power for yourself.)
The fight happens two months into sophomore year, with chafe-marks hidden under Brendan’s sleeves, a bruise openly blackening his cheek, and whispers bouncing around the crowded hallway as he leans against her locker and demands, “A bet?”
Kara closes her eyes, opens them. Sighs. “Let’s not do this here, Brendan.”
“You bet on the fight last night.”
She slams her locker shut, meets his eyes. “I said, we’re not going to do this here, Brendan.” It’s the voice that sends him to his knees with a whimper ready at his throat, every time, but tweaked off the balance between promise and threat. He swallows hard.
“You told me the fight was the only way to square the deal with Clark and his girls,” Brendan says, quiet and calm and channeling danger into his voice exactly as he’s seen her do. “You told me we’d been maneuvered into it and then you bet the take from the last three jobs on the outcome.”
“I knew you’d win it for me.”
“How long does it take to find someone who’ll make a bet that big, Kara?”
It’s the one and only time he’s ever seen her shaken.
“You set me up.”
Her fingers tighten on her purse; she straightens. “It settled the deal and it turned us a profit - which I was going to split like we always do.”
“And you lied to me.” He shrugs, almost casual, almost like it’s nothing, but he keeps his gaze drilling into hers. “You lied to me and you played me like your trash.”
“And what would you have done if I’d told you all of it, straight-up?” She’s testing him, and he decides to give the truth a go.
“Fought him.”
Her fingers clench, relax. She smiles - he isn’t sure whether it’s real. “Next time I’ll tell you, then. Come on.”
He doesn’t move. “This time I trusted you.”
She touches his shoulder, sighs. “Brendan. I kept you safe, didn’t I? And in your depth. If you need to know the details, next time we’ll work it out and I’ll let you know it all.” She leans in to whisper, low and enough of a purr to make him swallow, “I bet it’ll be a lot of fun.”
He looks past her at the hallway, at the groups of silent people who’ve somehow paused to watch them.
“So,” he says, low but making sure it carries, “is there anything you don’t think you’ll get away with?”
It all falls apart in what feels like seconds after that.
She tells him not to move. He walks away.
Someone whistles. “Guess you grew some real balls after all.”
Brendan sucker-punches him and continues on, ignoring the grunt and the shout of protest, keeping his eyes on the dirt-stained floor. He knows that Kara’s keeping her head high behind him. No one says a word until the bell calls them all to class.