Fic: "a little bit of your song" (Peter/Claire) NC-17
Title: a little bit of your song
Author: Steph (andbless_mybaby)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Andy/Claire (Sandra)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings:canon incest, angst, porn
Spoilers: 1x20: Five Years Gone
Summary: Peter and Claire connect again and again, before and during the events of “5YG”
Word Count: 3,800
Author’s Notes: Beta’d by Kathryn (The Amazing), aka kathrynthegr8.
_
On Wednesday morning, Andy was smiling so that Sandra would feel like everything was all right.
It was always the worst day of the week at the Burnt Toast Diner - all you can eat bacon and eggs for $6.99, all day long. There hadn’t been any extra time to make coffee, and the counters were getting greasier by the minute. An ornery septuagenarian at the register was complaining about not getting his senior discount, a gravelly wahwahwah in the background of her mind. And she didn’t remember whether Table 5 wanted their eggs over easy or over hard.
There were always supposed to be at least two servers to deal with the traffic. Her coworker Lynda was two months pregnant, however, and it had become apparent that the odor of breakfast food sent her morning sickness into overdrive. She was heroically attempting to make it through her shift, but Sandra was obliged to keep cutting in like an overspent dance partner while Lynda ran to the back to hurl. More eggs? More bacon. Here’s your ketchup, ma’am. Yessir, that coffee’s coming.
Behind the counter, in the epicenter of the chaos, Andy manned the grill with a serene expression on his face. Twenty strips of bacon were lined up with martial order, and he was cozying up to an omelet with his spatula in such a way as to not disturb its neat shape. A paisley bandanna sopped the sweat from his forehead and the music from his iPod was loud enough to hear clearly through his earbuds when standing close to him. Sandra handed him a fresh ticket, and his fingers caught hers before she pulled away.
Love you, babe he mouthed.
Love you too, she answered with a halfhearted attempt at a grin. He knew she hated Wednesdays.
That day, he was pulling a double and covering the lunch and early dinner shifts. For months he’d been telling her that it was a favor to the manager, so he didn’t have to hire a part-timer to fill in. Now, the tiny diamond winking on her left hand told the truth about his hard work.
When she was -finally- relieved at eleven, she reminded him that she was checking out reception sites, and tried not to choke.
_
At home, she dropped her soiled apron and sweaty socks directly into their apartment-sized washer with more laundry soap than technically needed. And then showered and shampooed her scalp viciously to lift the permeating scent of fryer grease.
Sandra had a tube of BeneFit lip gloss in Corsage, a pretty pink color. An orphaned waitress in Midland couldn’t afford it, but a girl who used to be Claire Bennet had a nice family and a generous allowance once upon a time. It was half-stuck in a forgotten pocket of her bag, and she had already burned through two fresh identities when she found it. Using five year old cosmetics was bad form, she knew, but she’d been nursing what was left of the tube and doling it out sparingly on special occasions. Each of her first shifts of work in a new town. The day nobody knew to be her birthday, sitting in the dark of the second-run movie theater by herself. Her first date with Andy.
That day she brushed it on her lips carefully and rubbed them together. She took the time to blow her long, dark hair out straight.
When she was ready, she twisted her still-unfamiliar ring around and waited.
_
Peter could fly, but he took a plane. At the threshold to her apartment, he ate her up with his eyes and politely kept his hands in his pockets.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Shitty day at work,” she commented. “But fine, mostly. How was your flight?”
“A few minutes early,” he replied. “Nice weather.”
“Yeah.” She gestured vaguely at the living room window, the sill spilling sunlight on the floor. “It’s been this way all week.”
He nodded inscrutably.
“Would you like to go for a ride?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
At the curb, he held the door for her. His rental car was dark, expensive, and meticulously clean. He let her fiddle with the radio dial, and she thought she caught him smiling when she sang along with the songs she knew.
Traffic on I-20 was light at that time of day, and fifty miles quickly passed in what seemed like no time at all.
They checked into a nondescript hotel in Big Spring. There was a panoramic vista of the asphalt outside the windows, but the place was clean. At the desk, Peter paid cash. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the clerk suspiciously asked about his female companion and their lack of baggage. He gave a fake last name, and received the card key to a second-story room. Claire led the way up the steps, and unlocked the door.
Inside, she wanted to say something, but he was already on her lips. Peter kissed her hungrily and for long enough that she felt that she needed to hold onto him to keep the world steady. He propped her up, sucking her tongue until her belly clenched and she thought that any other foreplay might be a moot point. His face was scarred from brow to cheek, a diagonal slash. She felt it under her mouth, ending just above the stubble of his unshaven jaw.
Peter’s hands were kneading her waist, outlining the curves of her torso. Claire opened the front of his shirt and helped him shrug it off. Barefoot, she had to reach up to feel how the large muscles of his shoulders worked. It distracted her irrationally and long enough for him to start subtly thrusting against her stomach, humming low in his throat.
She slipped inside the zipper of his slacks and stroked him. Peter made a strangled sound when she twisted two fingers past the fly of his underwear and touched skin to skin. He was already hard, tenting the front of his pants. His skin was soft, though. Soft and receptive, and Claire loved being appreciated. When she rubbed a spot she knew was sensitive, he cupped his hands roughly around her jaw and kissed her roughly.
Her eyelashes drifted closed, and by feel she undid the button of his waistband and pushed the pants down his hips, along with his shorts underneath. Her hands traced the structure of sinew and bone, and she broke the kiss to let her lips move down his chest. Peter sat down on the bed, and Claire sank to her knees without missing a beat.
His belly was hairy the lower down she went, trailing from his navel to the curls over his impatient cock. Claire pressed her fingertips into his thighs and inhaled his scent of clean sweat. She gripped him with one fist, so that the smooth skin of his erection stretched, and the head flushed red and swollen. Under her tongue, his flesh felt chamfered and silky. She opened her mouth and took him in, listening for and being gratified when he caught his breath.
“Claire,” he groaned. Something about hearing her name that way, his voice hoarse with arousal, made her want to grind her hips against the carpet. Instead she twisted her hand and jerked him several times, roughly enough that it should have been painful. It made him moan, and bodily haul her to her feet.
He undressed her quickly, skimming her denim skirt and thin-strapped camisole to the floor. She stepped out of her panties while he unhooked her bra. When she was nude, he bent to her chest. Peter’s hands palmed the weight of her breasts. He smoothed his calloused thumbs over her nipples, and kissed and sucked her aureoles until she cried out a little and arched into his face. With a low murmur of encouragement, she dragged his hand lower.
She was so turned on that it ached, and she bumped impatiently against his exploring fingers. Peter walked her backwards to the bed, and pushed her down to lie on the pillows.
His weight on her was wonderful, and she pressed against him needfully. Between their bodies, the length of his cock pressed against her thigh. She shifted deliberately to move it between her legs, and pushed up to run the shaft between her swollen lips. By the second time, he obliged her and did it purposefully, gliding over her clit with her abundant slickness.
“Now,” she breathed. “Please.”
He stroked himself once for the pleasure of it, and pushed just the topmost part inside. Claire lifted her hips, and felt the wet, sliding friction of him filling her completely. It was almost too much, having him inside and all around her. Peter’s neck was damp with the sweat of sex and Indian summer, salt against her teeth when she bit down lightly. Gathering the hot mass of her hair in his hand, he dragged her face up and French kissed her until they both felt like they’d burned through all the room’s oxygen.
Slowly, he moved. His first thrust felt wondrous, and she hitched a calf up to his side. Peter’s hand steadied her shaking knee and his hair fell in front of his face. They moved slowly at first, an adagio exploration of each others’ rhythm. Endless seconds passed with the ebb and flow of their bodies meeting, until they fell into a pulse that worked. The air conditioner whirred and cars obliviously zoomed from one destination to the next on the highway outside, but it all fell away for Claire. There was nothing but his breath painting her face, the demonstrative stream of nonsense and endearments against her ear.
With no warning, he pulled out. His cock was shiny with her natural lubrication, hard and stiff against the leaf’s pattern of hair on his pelvis. She moaned in complaint, but he was quick to urge her up on her knees at the end of the bed, leaning forward on her wrists. He entered her from behind with one thrust, making her inner walls burn and contract around him. The pleasure-pain made her whimper and arch back against the solid mass of his chest.
Claire’s shoulders rolled on his clavicles, back to his front. Her hips canted, and her ass grinded his crotch. He could fuck her deeply in this position, each push sending a radiant ache up to her womb. He pulled her hair aside, mouthing her neck with a hint of teeth, and his other hand stroked its way down her breasts and belly.
It took her a few moments to realize that Peter was unfocused, staring over her shoulder. Claire looked up, and saw their image replicated in the vanity mirror. His dark hair against hers, his larger hands roaming her pale skin, her body flushed with tension. He made deliberate eye contact with her reflection, and spread her knees apart slightly so they could both see his cock moving inside her.
That’s all she needed to come, twisting like paper against a match. Peter’s orgasm picked up where hers left off, while he held his breath and buried his face in her neck.
_
Andy was already settled in when she came home, face lit by the glow of the computer screen in the dark living room. From the sound of the keys rapidly clicking and the muttered, one-sided conversation he was having with his headset, she guessed that he was playing that game he liked with the elves and monsters.
“Hey, you.” He saluted her, and gestured over his shoulder. “Your dinner is in the oven. There’s some baked ziti, if you haven’t sampled every wedding cake in town.”
“I think I actually did,” she lied. “But that was so sweet of you. Thank you.”
“Anything for my darlin’,” he grinned. Within a moment he was back to his raid, cussing another player for what sounded like a breach in battle strategy. Andy’s friends all thought Sandra was some kind of goddess for her good-natured tolerance of his gaming.
In their tiny kitchen, she packed up her intended dinner for leftovers and put the casserole dish in the sink to clean. She turned on just the hot water, and gritted her teeth at the blisters that rose and fell on her hands as she scrubbed. Long after it was clean she left her hands under the scalding faucet, rubbing them back and forth obsessively as if she could wash her guilt down the drain.
_
He had a girlfriend in Las Vegas, she knew. Peter wouldn’t tell Claire anything about her. Like any man, however, he easily gave away secrets he thought he was keeping. The collar of his shirt gave a hint of cigarette smoke, perfume, and dark, busy places. He kept late hours. Every few weeks, her phone rang once at two or three in the morning and hung up. Andy thought that it was a persistent wrong number, and sleepily told her that she should ask the phone company about getting it changed.
“I miss you,” he said a month later.
In late September, it was cool in the silent hours before dawn. She huddled on the front porch steps of their apartment building, cradling the phone close to her ear.
“I miss you, too.”
There was muffled noise on the other end, muted like he was one room away from a lot of people.
“I have some time free at the end of next month,” Peter said. “A weekend.”
“Oh?” This was how it worked. Nothing assumed, nothing stated. (She was getting good at this, she thought.)
“I’d like to see you,” he said, much more bluntly than usual.
“I- I always want to see you,” she admitted.
“I think about you all the time.” The ambient echoes had faded; he’d either gone somewhere else or maybe teleported. It was hard to tell with Peter.
“How?”
It’s too forthright, and she thought he might act as if he didn’t know what she meant. He wasn’t acting himself at all, though, and his breath audibly caught in his throat without pretense.
“Want you,” he rasped. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have called. Claire. I’m-”
“Say that again.”
“What?”
“My name.” Hesitation stopped her words, while her veins pumped blood that felt too warm for her body. She exhaled, slowing her pounding heart fractionally. “Say it again.”
“Claire.” He was hesitant, but it didn’t matter. She closed her eyes, and just listened to the wholly gratifying sound of his voice saying her name. “Claire. Claire.”
_
Back when they started seeing each other, Andy told her that he wanted a bunch of kids. At least three. Lately, he had been talking about taking a few classes in the spring at the junior college and working towards his EMT certification. In bed, he was telling her about the informational material he’d requested, and how it might take a couple of years to do it part-time but that he could look for a better job and still work forty hours.
“And one wouldn’t be too bad, sometime next summer,” he said.
Sandra had her head on his shoulder. She had really been listening, but he lost her at the end.
“One?” she repeated, confused. “Huh?”
“One baby, honey.” Andy grinned, and rubbed a circle around her navel. “This place is big enough for a family of three, and we’d do fine on my income until I graduated and we could buy a house.”
“A baby.” Sandra pressed her face into the sleep-scented pillow, and yawned. “Oh, my.”
“I know.” He propped his other arm behind his head, and just beyond his line of sight she swore he was imagining drooly kisses and watching their first son play t-ball on Saturday mornings. “My momma would help out a lot, I bet. You know she loves you. And she’s crazy about babies, let me tell you.”
“I like kids,” Sandra said. It seemed crucially important.
“Sure you do,” he replied encouragingly. “You’re gonna be a great mom.”
“You really think so?”
“Oh, yeah.” His hand on her tummy turned mischievous, dropping below the hem of his oversized t-shirt that she was wearing as a nightie and then up underneath. “In fact, I think we should practice.”
“Hmmmm,” she hummed. She wasn’t wearing any panties, and his crawling fingers had started rubbing her slowly and firmly. When she dropped her knees to the sides and started to breathe hard, Andy grabbed her with the strong, sturdy arms of a rancher’s son and swung her up on top of him.
“C’mere, beautiful.”
_
“I need a wedding dress,” she told him abruptly.
Peter was half-asleep, curled on his side on another hotel bed. Claire hugged her knees, contemplating the ends of her dark hair and absently ticking off the weeks since she’d colored it.
“A wedding dress,” he repeated slowly.
“I’m supposed to be shopping.” She kept her eyes fixed on the sheets. “Right now.”
“Do you want me to go shopping with you?” His voice was colder than she had heard from him before, and his emphasis was acidic. “Help you find a pretty white dress to marry your boyfriend in?”
“That’s not fair,” she replied quietly. “Peter. Come on.”
“Do you really think that’s wise?” Peter really raised his voice then, and his anger made her cringe. “Gonna settle down in Hicktown, U.S.A. with your sweetheart? What ever happened to taking care of yourself?”
“Don’t act like that’s what this is about.”
“It is. It’s about you being stupid.”
Her face burned
“You don’t know what I am,” she whispered.
“Does he know anything about you? Who you are? What you are really like?”
“He loves me.” Tears stung her eyes.
“It’s a lie, Claire.”
“Lies?” She laughed bitterly. “You want to talk about lies?”
“Every time he touches me, I’m thinking of you.” Claire couldn’t believe that she said that, but her words were a dam bursting and there was no one around to stop it up. “Every time. And it’s wrong. I’m so happy just to have this, and it’s so fucked up. He asked me to marry him. That’s what normal people do, Peter. What was I supposed to do?”
“Leave him,” he said quietly. His hands were fists on the blankets.
“And go where?”
“Anywhere.” Peter touched her arm, and Claire hated herself a little for the shiver she felt. “It doesn’t matter.”
“With you?” she challenged.
For a moment, it hung heavy in the air between them.
“You know that can’t happen right now, Claire.”
“Of course,” she said sarcastically. “You certainly can’t be expected to abandon your obligations, whatever they are. Well, neither can I.”
“You aren’t safe here,” he told her. “And you don’t know the full extent of what’s going on.”
“So, tell me.” Her hands were spread in front of her. “I’m a big girl, which you obviously know. Fill me in, Peter.”
“I just need you to be patient,” he said, and she knew that he was begging. “Go somewhere. Change your name, change your number. I’ll find you. Please.”
“I don’t need to be safe.” In the instant she said it, she realized that it was true. “I need this.”
“You’re a fool.” Peter stood up and faced her.
“Maybe.”
He got dressed quickly in the late afternoon light, and she didn’t watch. If she did, she was going to throw her arms around him and refuse to let go. She shrank away from the shadow buttoning his shirt and faced the wall with a sheet yanked up over her chest.
“I won’t be back,” he told her at the door.
“I won’t be waiting,” she replied.
With a sob stuck in her throat, she waited until his footsteps receded down the hall to start crying.
_
The first time Claire kissed Peter, her heart was pounding so aggressively that she worried he would feel it with his body against hers. Her stomach clenched, and an overwhelming sense of dizziness locked her knees. Time slowed to a standstill, and she was aware of a thought inside her head, loud enough to hear distinctly: this is so wrong. can’t - don’t stop. Don’t stop.
She was useless for a week afterwards. Slow and inaccurate at work, and then aimlessly wandering the aisles of the supermarket on her days off not remembering what items she needed to make dinner. There was nothing but Peter in her head, nothing but the memory replaying on loop again and again through her cluttered mind.
Three months into her latest life in Midland, she broke a rule and called him using the old number that she prayed he still had. In what had to be one of the last pay phone booths left anywhere in the country, she tightly closed her eyes and held her breath as one ring faded into the next. When he actually picked up and said Hello?, something secret rooted inside her chest. He drove out from Vegas that night and seventeen hours of waiting made the sensation bloom wide and expansive as a lenticular cloud, strong enough to sweep up a sailplane. She didn’t think, didn’t rationalize, didn’t come back to herself until their lips met. Years of hiding had eroded the sin in the gravity between them.
The next time he came for her she waited until he had stepped out of the room and met him with all her clothes off.
Tell me, Claire. His voice was strained and raw, his body feverish under her hands. You have to tell me you want it.
And there should have been something stronger than yes, she thought as she pulled him inside her. Some word that was yes and please and now and I love you, I’ll die if you stop. He made love with her like he planned to be doing it for the rest of their lives. In their case, that was a very long time.
_
“There was a call for you, babe.” Andy looped his finger in her long hair and tugged gently. She had been staring in a daze at a dry-erase board in the kitchen that has 86: GREEN BEANS, CHEESE GRITS scrawled across it. “Some guy. He said he’d call later.”
Later that day, Noah Bennet walked into the diner, and everything fell apart.
_
On her way to New York City with Matt Parkman, Claire looked out the window of the airplane and pressed her finger to the pressurized glass, traced the landscape rolling by and away as clouds overtook her view.
She would see Peter again someday, she thought. Claire knew that she had a lot of somedays, and the knowing was enough.
end.
Author: Steph (andbless_mybaby)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Andy/Claire (Sandra)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings:canon incest, angst, porn
Spoilers: 1x20: Five Years Gone
Summary: Peter and Claire connect again and again, before and during the events of “5YG”
Word Count: 3,800
Author’s Notes: Beta’d by Kathryn (The Amazing), aka kathrynthegr8.
_
On Wednesday morning, Andy was smiling so that Sandra would feel like everything was all right.
It was always the worst day of the week at the Burnt Toast Diner - all you can eat bacon and eggs for $6.99, all day long. There hadn’t been any extra time to make coffee, and the counters were getting greasier by the minute. An ornery septuagenarian at the register was complaining about not getting his senior discount, a gravelly wahwahwah in the background of her mind. And she didn’t remember whether Table 5 wanted their eggs over easy or over hard.
There were always supposed to be at least two servers to deal with the traffic. Her coworker Lynda was two months pregnant, however, and it had become apparent that the odor of breakfast food sent her morning sickness into overdrive. She was heroically attempting to make it through her shift, but Sandra was obliged to keep cutting in like an overspent dance partner while Lynda ran to the back to hurl. More eggs? More bacon. Here’s your ketchup, ma’am. Yessir, that coffee’s coming.
Behind the counter, in the epicenter of the chaos, Andy manned the grill with a serene expression on his face. Twenty strips of bacon were lined up with martial order, and he was cozying up to an omelet with his spatula in such a way as to not disturb its neat shape. A paisley bandanna sopped the sweat from his forehead and the music from his iPod was loud enough to hear clearly through his earbuds when standing close to him. Sandra handed him a fresh ticket, and his fingers caught hers before she pulled away.
Love you, babe he mouthed.
Love you too, she answered with a halfhearted attempt at a grin. He knew she hated Wednesdays.
That day, he was pulling a double and covering the lunch and early dinner shifts. For months he’d been telling her that it was a favor to the manager, so he didn’t have to hire a part-timer to fill in. Now, the tiny diamond winking on her left hand told the truth about his hard work.
When she was -finally- relieved at eleven, she reminded him that she was checking out reception sites, and tried not to choke.
_
At home, she dropped her soiled apron and sweaty socks directly into their apartment-sized washer with more laundry soap than technically needed. And then showered and shampooed her scalp viciously to lift the permeating scent of fryer grease.
Sandra had a tube of BeneFit lip gloss in Corsage, a pretty pink color. An orphaned waitress in Midland couldn’t afford it, but a girl who used to be Claire Bennet had a nice family and a generous allowance once upon a time. It was half-stuck in a forgotten pocket of her bag, and she had already burned through two fresh identities when she found it. Using five year old cosmetics was bad form, she knew, but she’d been nursing what was left of the tube and doling it out sparingly on special occasions. Each of her first shifts of work in a new town. The day nobody knew to be her birthday, sitting in the dark of the second-run movie theater by herself. Her first date with Andy.
That day she brushed it on her lips carefully and rubbed them together. She took the time to blow her long, dark hair out straight.
When she was ready, she twisted her still-unfamiliar ring around and waited.
_
Peter could fly, but he took a plane. At the threshold to her apartment, he ate her up with his eyes and politely kept his hands in his pockets.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“Shitty day at work,” she commented. “But fine, mostly. How was your flight?”
“A few minutes early,” he replied. “Nice weather.”
“Yeah.” She gestured vaguely at the living room window, the sill spilling sunlight on the floor. “It’s been this way all week.”
He nodded inscrutably.
“Would you like to go for a ride?”
“Yes. Yes, I would.”
At the curb, he held the door for her. His rental car was dark, expensive, and meticulously clean. He let her fiddle with the radio dial, and she thought she caught him smiling when she sang along with the songs she knew.
Traffic on I-20 was light at that time of day, and fifty miles quickly passed in what seemed like no time at all.
They checked into a nondescript hotel in Big Spring. There was a panoramic vista of the asphalt outside the windows, but the place was clean. At the desk, Peter paid cash. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the clerk suspiciously asked about his female companion and their lack of baggage. He gave a fake last name, and received the card key to a second-story room. Claire led the way up the steps, and unlocked the door.
Inside, she wanted to say something, but he was already on her lips. Peter kissed her hungrily and for long enough that she felt that she needed to hold onto him to keep the world steady. He propped her up, sucking her tongue until her belly clenched and she thought that any other foreplay might be a moot point. His face was scarred from brow to cheek, a diagonal slash. She felt it under her mouth, ending just above the stubble of his unshaven jaw.
Peter’s hands were kneading her waist, outlining the curves of her torso. Claire opened the front of his shirt and helped him shrug it off. Barefoot, she had to reach up to feel how the large muscles of his shoulders worked. It distracted her irrationally and long enough for him to start subtly thrusting against her stomach, humming low in his throat.
She slipped inside the zipper of his slacks and stroked him. Peter made a strangled sound when she twisted two fingers past the fly of his underwear and touched skin to skin. He was already hard, tenting the front of his pants. His skin was soft, though. Soft and receptive, and Claire loved being appreciated. When she rubbed a spot she knew was sensitive, he cupped his hands roughly around her jaw and kissed her roughly.
Her eyelashes drifted closed, and by feel she undid the button of his waistband and pushed the pants down his hips, along with his shorts underneath. Her hands traced the structure of sinew and bone, and she broke the kiss to let her lips move down his chest. Peter sat down on the bed, and Claire sank to her knees without missing a beat.
His belly was hairy the lower down she went, trailing from his navel to the curls over his impatient cock. Claire pressed her fingertips into his thighs and inhaled his scent of clean sweat. She gripped him with one fist, so that the smooth skin of his erection stretched, and the head flushed red and swollen. Under her tongue, his flesh felt chamfered and silky. She opened her mouth and took him in, listening for and being gratified when he caught his breath.
“Claire,” he groaned. Something about hearing her name that way, his voice hoarse with arousal, made her want to grind her hips against the carpet. Instead she twisted her hand and jerked him several times, roughly enough that it should have been painful. It made him moan, and bodily haul her to her feet.
He undressed her quickly, skimming her denim skirt and thin-strapped camisole to the floor. She stepped out of her panties while he unhooked her bra. When she was nude, he bent to her chest. Peter’s hands palmed the weight of her breasts. He smoothed his calloused thumbs over her nipples, and kissed and sucked her aureoles until she cried out a little and arched into his face. With a low murmur of encouragement, she dragged his hand lower.
She was so turned on that it ached, and she bumped impatiently against his exploring fingers. Peter walked her backwards to the bed, and pushed her down to lie on the pillows.
His weight on her was wonderful, and she pressed against him needfully. Between their bodies, the length of his cock pressed against her thigh. She shifted deliberately to move it between her legs, and pushed up to run the shaft between her swollen lips. By the second time, he obliged her and did it purposefully, gliding over her clit with her abundant slickness.
“Now,” she breathed. “Please.”
He stroked himself once for the pleasure of it, and pushed just the topmost part inside. Claire lifted her hips, and felt the wet, sliding friction of him filling her completely. It was almost too much, having him inside and all around her. Peter’s neck was damp with the sweat of sex and Indian summer, salt against her teeth when she bit down lightly. Gathering the hot mass of her hair in his hand, he dragged her face up and French kissed her until they both felt like they’d burned through all the room’s oxygen.
Slowly, he moved. His first thrust felt wondrous, and she hitched a calf up to his side. Peter’s hand steadied her shaking knee and his hair fell in front of his face. They moved slowly at first, an adagio exploration of each others’ rhythm. Endless seconds passed with the ebb and flow of their bodies meeting, until they fell into a pulse that worked. The air conditioner whirred and cars obliviously zoomed from one destination to the next on the highway outside, but it all fell away for Claire. There was nothing but his breath painting her face, the demonstrative stream of nonsense and endearments against her ear.
With no warning, he pulled out. His cock was shiny with her natural lubrication, hard and stiff against the leaf’s pattern of hair on his pelvis. She moaned in complaint, but he was quick to urge her up on her knees at the end of the bed, leaning forward on her wrists. He entered her from behind with one thrust, making her inner walls burn and contract around him. The pleasure-pain made her whimper and arch back against the solid mass of his chest.
Claire’s shoulders rolled on his clavicles, back to his front. Her hips canted, and her ass grinded his crotch. He could fuck her deeply in this position, each push sending a radiant ache up to her womb. He pulled her hair aside, mouthing her neck with a hint of teeth, and his other hand stroked its way down her breasts and belly.
It took her a few moments to realize that Peter was unfocused, staring over her shoulder. Claire looked up, and saw their image replicated in the vanity mirror. His dark hair against hers, his larger hands roaming her pale skin, her body flushed with tension. He made deliberate eye contact with her reflection, and spread her knees apart slightly so they could both see his cock moving inside her.
That’s all she needed to come, twisting like paper against a match. Peter’s orgasm picked up where hers left off, while he held his breath and buried his face in her neck.
_
Andy was already settled in when she came home, face lit by the glow of the computer screen in the dark living room. From the sound of the keys rapidly clicking and the muttered, one-sided conversation he was having with his headset, she guessed that he was playing that game he liked with the elves and monsters.
“Hey, you.” He saluted her, and gestured over his shoulder. “Your dinner is in the oven. There’s some baked ziti, if you haven’t sampled every wedding cake in town.”
“I think I actually did,” she lied. “But that was so sweet of you. Thank you.”
“Anything for my darlin’,” he grinned. Within a moment he was back to his raid, cussing another player for what sounded like a breach in battle strategy. Andy’s friends all thought Sandra was some kind of goddess for her good-natured tolerance of his gaming.
In their tiny kitchen, she packed up her intended dinner for leftovers and put the casserole dish in the sink to clean. She turned on just the hot water, and gritted her teeth at the blisters that rose and fell on her hands as she scrubbed. Long after it was clean she left her hands under the scalding faucet, rubbing them back and forth obsessively as if she could wash her guilt down the drain.
_
He had a girlfriend in Las Vegas, she knew. Peter wouldn’t tell Claire anything about her. Like any man, however, he easily gave away secrets he thought he was keeping. The collar of his shirt gave a hint of cigarette smoke, perfume, and dark, busy places. He kept late hours. Every few weeks, her phone rang once at two or three in the morning and hung up. Andy thought that it was a persistent wrong number, and sleepily told her that she should ask the phone company about getting it changed.
“I miss you,” he said a month later.
In late September, it was cool in the silent hours before dawn. She huddled on the front porch steps of their apartment building, cradling the phone close to her ear.
“I miss you, too.”
There was muffled noise on the other end, muted like he was one room away from a lot of people.
“I have some time free at the end of next month,” Peter said. “A weekend.”
“Oh?” This was how it worked. Nothing assumed, nothing stated. (She was getting good at this, she thought.)
“I’d like to see you,” he said, much more bluntly than usual.
“I- I always want to see you,” she admitted.
“I think about you all the time.” The ambient echoes had faded; he’d either gone somewhere else or maybe teleported. It was hard to tell with Peter.
“How?”
It’s too forthright, and she thought he might act as if he didn’t know what she meant. He wasn’t acting himself at all, though, and his breath audibly caught in his throat without pretense.
“Want you,” he rasped. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“I shouldn’t have called. Claire. I’m-”
“Say that again.”
“What?”
“My name.” Hesitation stopped her words, while her veins pumped blood that felt too warm for her body. She exhaled, slowing her pounding heart fractionally. “Say it again.”
“Claire.” He was hesitant, but it didn’t matter. She closed her eyes, and just listened to the wholly gratifying sound of his voice saying her name. “Claire. Claire.”
_
Back when they started seeing each other, Andy told her that he wanted a bunch of kids. At least three. Lately, he had been talking about taking a few classes in the spring at the junior college and working towards his EMT certification. In bed, he was telling her about the informational material he’d requested, and how it might take a couple of years to do it part-time but that he could look for a better job and still work forty hours.
“And one wouldn’t be too bad, sometime next summer,” he said.
Sandra had her head on his shoulder. She had really been listening, but he lost her at the end.
“One?” she repeated, confused. “Huh?”
“One baby, honey.” Andy grinned, and rubbed a circle around her navel. “This place is big enough for a family of three, and we’d do fine on my income until I graduated and we could buy a house.”
“A baby.” Sandra pressed her face into the sleep-scented pillow, and yawned. “Oh, my.”
“I know.” He propped his other arm behind his head, and just beyond his line of sight she swore he was imagining drooly kisses and watching their first son play t-ball on Saturday mornings. “My momma would help out a lot, I bet. You know she loves you. And she’s crazy about babies, let me tell you.”
“I like kids,” Sandra said. It seemed crucially important.
“Sure you do,” he replied encouragingly. “You’re gonna be a great mom.”
“You really think so?”
“Oh, yeah.” His hand on her tummy turned mischievous, dropping below the hem of his oversized t-shirt that she was wearing as a nightie and then up underneath. “In fact, I think we should practice.”
“Hmmmm,” she hummed. She wasn’t wearing any panties, and his crawling fingers had started rubbing her slowly and firmly. When she dropped her knees to the sides and started to breathe hard, Andy grabbed her with the strong, sturdy arms of a rancher’s son and swung her up on top of him.
“C’mere, beautiful.”
_
“I need a wedding dress,” she told him abruptly.
Peter was half-asleep, curled on his side on another hotel bed. Claire hugged her knees, contemplating the ends of her dark hair and absently ticking off the weeks since she’d colored it.
“A wedding dress,” he repeated slowly.
“I’m supposed to be shopping.” She kept her eyes fixed on the sheets. “Right now.”
“Do you want me to go shopping with you?” His voice was colder than she had heard from him before, and his emphasis was acidic. “Help you find a pretty white dress to marry your boyfriend in?”
“That’s not fair,” she replied quietly. “Peter. Come on.”
“Do you really think that’s wise?” Peter really raised his voice then, and his anger made her cringe. “Gonna settle down in Hicktown, U.S.A. with your sweetheart? What ever happened to taking care of yourself?”
“Don’t act like that’s what this is about.”
“It is. It’s about you being stupid.”
Her face burned
“You don’t know what I am,” she whispered.
“Does he know anything about you? Who you are? What you are really like?”
“He loves me.” Tears stung her eyes.
“It’s a lie, Claire.”
“Lies?” She laughed bitterly. “You want to talk about lies?”
“Every time he touches me, I’m thinking of you.” Claire couldn’t believe that she said that, but her words were a dam bursting and there was no one around to stop it up. “Every time. And it’s wrong. I’m so happy just to have this, and it’s so fucked up. He asked me to marry him. That’s what normal people do, Peter. What was I supposed to do?”
“Leave him,” he said quietly. His hands were fists on the blankets.
“And go where?”
“Anywhere.” Peter touched her arm, and Claire hated herself a little for the shiver she felt. “It doesn’t matter.”
“With you?” she challenged.
For a moment, it hung heavy in the air between them.
“You know that can’t happen right now, Claire.”
“Of course,” she said sarcastically. “You certainly can’t be expected to abandon your obligations, whatever they are. Well, neither can I.”
“You aren’t safe here,” he told her. “And you don’t know the full extent of what’s going on.”
“So, tell me.” Her hands were spread in front of her. “I’m a big girl, which you obviously know. Fill me in, Peter.”
“I just need you to be patient,” he said, and she knew that he was begging. “Go somewhere. Change your name, change your number. I’ll find you. Please.”
“I don’t need to be safe.” In the instant she said it, she realized that it was true. “I need this.”
“You’re a fool.” Peter stood up and faced her.
“Maybe.”
He got dressed quickly in the late afternoon light, and she didn’t watch. If she did, she was going to throw her arms around him and refuse to let go. She shrank away from the shadow buttoning his shirt and faced the wall with a sheet yanked up over her chest.
“I won’t be back,” he told her at the door.
“I won’t be waiting,” she replied.
With a sob stuck in her throat, she waited until his footsteps receded down the hall to start crying.
_
The first time Claire kissed Peter, her heart was pounding so aggressively that she worried he would feel it with his body against hers. Her stomach clenched, and an overwhelming sense of dizziness locked her knees. Time slowed to a standstill, and she was aware of a thought inside her head, loud enough to hear distinctly: this is so wrong. can’t - don’t stop. Don’t stop.
She was useless for a week afterwards. Slow and inaccurate at work, and then aimlessly wandering the aisles of the supermarket on her days off not remembering what items she needed to make dinner. There was nothing but Peter in her head, nothing but the memory replaying on loop again and again through her cluttered mind.
Three months into her latest life in Midland, she broke a rule and called him using the old number that she prayed he still had. In what had to be one of the last pay phone booths left anywhere in the country, she tightly closed her eyes and held her breath as one ring faded into the next. When he actually picked up and said Hello?, something secret rooted inside her chest. He drove out from Vegas that night and seventeen hours of waiting made the sensation bloom wide and expansive as a lenticular cloud, strong enough to sweep up a sailplane. She didn’t think, didn’t rationalize, didn’t come back to herself until their lips met. Years of hiding had eroded the sin in the gravity between them.
The next time he came for her she waited until he had stepped out of the room and met him with all her clothes off.
Tell me, Claire. His voice was strained and raw, his body feverish under her hands. You have to tell me you want it.
And there should have been something stronger than yes, she thought as she pulled him inside her. Some word that was yes and please and now and I love you, I’ll die if you stop. He made love with her like he planned to be doing it for the rest of their lives. In their case, that was a very long time.
_
“There was a call for you, babe.” Andy looped his finger in her long hair and tugged gently. She had been staring in a daze at a dry-erase board in the kitchen that has 86: GREEN BEANS, CHEESE GRITS scrawled across it. “Some guy. He said he’d call later.”
Later that day, Noah Bennet walked into the diner, and everything fell apart.
_
On her way to New York City with Matt Parkman, Claire looked out the window of the airplane and pressed her finger to the pressurized glass, traced the landscape rolling by and away as clouds overtook her view.
She would see Peter again someday, she thought. Claire knew that she had a lot of somedays, and the knowing was enough.
end.