At long last, Prison Break fic
TITLE: Stumbling Like Alice
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Michael/Sara
SPOILERS: Mostly AU after ‘Riots, Drills, and the Devil’. One or two details do still sneak through, though.
DISCLAIMERS: They ain’t mine.
A very, very (very) late birthday present for foxxcub. *smooches*
“I’m sorry,” Michael says. He looks like he even means it, which makes Sara want to scream. Of course, with Officer Bellick’s gun in Michael’s hand and pointed at her, with Bellick himself lying on the ground behind Michael and bleeding from a wound on his head that’s too obscured by blood for Sara to categorize it as anything other than ‘bad’, with an assembly of the prison’s finest citizens standing behind Michael and watching her with eyes that make her skin want to crawl off…with all of this, there are a lot of things making Sara want to scream right now. All things considered, she should be proud of her ability to prioritize. Sara takes several deep breaths through her nose, struggling to push down a panic that miraculously does not take control.
“I’m sorry,” Michael says again, but he does not put the gun down. Sara does not think that he will shoot her. She does not think at all, letting instinct instead guide her into taking Michael’s outstretched hand so that he can pull her down the rabbit hole.
*
The next several hours pass in a blur in which Sara gets on two planes and then off again almost as quickly, in which sometimes the gun is pointed at her and sometimes it is not, and Bagwell’s eyes follow every move that she makes. It’s not a sexual look, that one, but the look of a boy who used to douse cats in kerosene just to see what would happen. Sara doesn’t waste her breath telling him that after what she went through in the infirmary, ordinary horrors have little power to affect her. She doesn’t think that she has the spit for it, frankly. Michael remains a constant presence between herself and Bagwell, so much that he often forgets to train the gun. Sara has by now seen some of the detail that Michael put into his escape, and she recognizes the signs of high distraction when they are presented to her.
While Bagwell can be provoked enough every now and then to turn and snarl some threat at Michael, Lincoln never once looks away. Sara does not know what he means for her to read into that stare.
Sara sits with her head in her hands until she feels the final car in the lost list roll to a stop and hears gravel crunching beneath the tires. The car is well-made and beyond that small concession has made no sound since she stepped inside; with these resources at his disposal, Sara can see why Abruzzi made a good choice for a co-conspirator. She rubs her hands wearily over her eyes, wondering why she was chosen. Sara looks up at last, for the first time in at least an hour.
If Sara was planning on making a daring escape, now would be the point where her stomach would sink down to her ankles. As she is still too scared and wrapped up in a slow-burning, steadily growing anger, she hasn’t gotten much farther than fantasy. Her stomach only makes it down as far as her kneecaps before it stops and goes no further. Sara takes a few deeps breaths until it slowly begins to climb back up again.
She is in the middle of nowhere. Abruzzi has brought the eerily quiet sedan to a halt in front of a great stone house that looks as if it has seen many decades of people passing through its halls and will see many more before it falls. The windows stare down on the new visitors with a bland and stately indifference. A thick forest of dark pine clusters around the house on all sides, barely leaving room enough for the winding gravel driveway. If there are people in the woods who could come to Sara’s aid with a well-placed scream, they aren’t making themselves known.
You could hide a body in those woods. They’re practically made for it. Sara shivers.
“Well,” Bagwell draws the word out until it becomes an obscenity in his mouth. It’s a special talent with him. “You’re looking a little pale there, Little Miss Sunshine. Thinking about all the bad things that could be happening to Red Riding Hood out there?”
“She’s been riding with the inspiration for Deliverance for hours.” Abruzzi’s tone is only faintly less oily than Bagwell’s, but it doesn’t hurt Sara to look at him as it does with the other. He doesn’t make her think that he has some kind of disease, some kind of rot that she can’t reach, dancing behind his eyes. Abruzzi looks back over his shoulder at Sara as he shuts the car off and pulls the key from the ignition. His stare may be more tolerable than Bagwell’s, but that’s still not saying a lot. “I have no plans on putting you in those woods, Doctor.” Especially if he’s going to make a habit out of saying things like that.
Michael touches Sara’s elbow and gestures with the gun so that she will follow him out of the car. He hasn’t spoken more than monosyllables at a time since they left the prison. Sara wonders if he needs to scream as badly as she does, and if he wants to direct at someone so much as he just needs to scream in general. If it’s the latter, she might even be able to put aside the anger long enough to muster a bit of sympathy.
Bagwell leans his arms over the top of the car and crosses them beneath his chin as soon as he’s standing in the open air. The leer that he directs at Abruzzi is more skin-crawling than anything hat he’s turned onto Sara during all of the hours that they have been forced into contact with each other. Abruzzi takes it with no more than a placid stare and a small curling of his lip. “Don’t go making them promises if you ain’t gonna keep them, paisan,” he says. Bagwell curves his fingers beneath his chin and beams in a manner that would be angelic if it were on anyone else’s face. “This sweet thing knows were we are, and from where I’m standing that makes her quite a heavy risk to this operation of ours.”
The brothers have inherited the same capacity for stillness and ability to fade into the background, only to reappear in swift, calculated bursts of action. Lincoln unfolds his arms and moves forward, transforming himself between one second and the next from a peaceful part of the scenery into a looming and furious force. While he’s moving, Lincoln dwarfs all the men surrounding him. “She wasn’t paying attention,” Lincoln says. Knowing why he has been watching her for the last several hours does little to soothe Sara’s nerves. “Couldn’t help but notice that you were.” Lincoln takes a slow step forward. There is still a car separating him from Bagwell, but Sara gets the feeling that if Lincoln truly decided to do damage then a wall wouldn’t save him.
“Children, children,” Abruzzi says mildly. A light has gone on behind his eyes, belying the cautionary words. Sara glances towards Michael and wonders how it is that he cannot see himself being cast down into the snake pit with this crew, whether he’s the one being willfully blind, or she is.
Michael has not once released his grip upon Bellick’s stolen gun in all the time that they have been traveling. At the moment, at least, he has it pointed at the ground. Sara eyes the trees and feels her fingers twitch. “Let’s not argue outside,” Abruzzi finishes. He looks at Sara, letting her know with a glance that he sees exactly what she is up to, and then stares hard at Michael. “We have many things to discuss.”
Michael stares back, until Sara swears that she can see his eyes darkening even though the rest of his expression does not change. She does not miss the way that his trigger finger curls more firmly around the gun, and neither does Abruzzi. “I haven’t forgotten,” Michael says.
Bagwell is not the sort of person who deals well with being ignored for any length of time, though Sara imagines that his tantrums are far more dangerous than those of the average toddler. She has not looked at the psych reports, but Bellick’s marginal scruples do not stop him from telling tales. A cloud takes over Bagwell’s face and alters it, making a slow series of transformations over the features until without a single distinctive change being made Bagwell seems to be less, less human and less alive. Sara blinks rapidly several times in succession. The changes do not float away.
The Mad Hatter has yet to appear on this adventure. A few more good nudges, Sara thinks in an unguarded moment, and he might find himself in sympathetic company whenever he does finally arrive. She takes a series of deep breaths through her nose until the thought slinks away. No one notices except for Michael and, as always, Lincoln.
Still resting with his arms braced on top of the car and that flat look in his eyes, Bagwell makes a clicking noise at Lincoln from between his teeth. Without quite being able to say why, Sara decides that it’s one of the most obscene sounds that she has ever heard. Bagwell’s bright and gleaming grin belongs on a junkyard dog. “Oh, don’t you go worrying about me, now,” he addresses Lincoln. “I’m not going to cause your business any trouble. In fact, I’m thinking about repenting of all my sins and reforming.” Bagwell’s grin manages to take in both the house and Abruzzi at the same time. “With incentives like that to grease the way, I’m thinking that a nice dose of redemption could go down just fine.”
Abruzzi has been scanning both the sky and the desolate road with the look of the predator the Bagwell wishes he could be rather than just a hunter of the weak and the young. “We’ve been outside long enough,” he says. Abruzzi flicks the keys over the top of the car at Sucre, who catches them so quickly that Sara barely sees his hand move. He’s been the quietest of them all on the trip, and the twitchiest. Sara thinks that he’ll be the first to break out on his own from this hidden sanctuary, guided towards whatever goal is keeping his eyes dark and shuttered.
Abruzzi points first to Lincoln, then to Sucre, and finally to a faint track in the woods, so slight that Sara has to squint in order to see it. It’s barely wide enough to admit a single car without doing damage to the paint job. “The garage is full of…other resources. There’s a shack about a quarter of a mile that way. Impossible to see from the road and from the air.” Abruzzi’s next gestures are for Sara and then for Michael. “I don’t trust her to behave herself if he leaves.”
“And I don’t get to drive the pretty toy?” Bagwell asks.
Abruzzi grins at him. “You,” he says in that strange and almost lilting way he has, “I don’t trust at all.”
Bagwell scowls, but the similarities between him and a junkyard dog are still enough so that he backs down quickly in the face of real teeth. As Lincoln and Sucre get into the car, Abruzzi jerks his head for the rest of them to follow him into the house.
“And you’re certain that this place is safe?” Michael asks as they walk up the porch. His hand is on Sara’s elbow again, the gun pointed at the ground. Sara casts another longing look at the woods. With Bagwell behind her and the gun so close, even the illusion of opportunity is gone.
They step inside. Sara is so overtaken with the décor that she almost misses Abruzzi’s response. Everything is several years old and covered in a heavy layer of dust; all the same, Sara can tell at a glance that a single piece probably costs more than all of the furniture in her apartment. Money went into this. Time went into this. It’s not a fly-by-night hole. Her chances of making a lucky break are growing slimmer by the second.
“I was sent away because of a stupid mistake,” Abruzzi drawls as he leads them deeper into the entrance hall. He drags his finger across an end table and then stares at the line left behind in the dust as if it personally offends him. “I have many accounts that have not been traced.” Sara cannot help but think of those woods again. The association does not go away when he smiles at her. “There are guest rooms where you can freshen up. Don’t worry about looking for phones.”
“I’ll take her.” Michael’s voice is still low and calm. Sara wishes that it wasn’t. Going into hysterics at long last is going to be lonely if she has to do it alone. Sara doesn’t try to twitch away from the hand that he still has on her elbow, but it feels heavy.
“We still have many things to discuss, Scofield, you and I,” Abruzzi calls to Michael’s back.
“We will,” Michael throws back in grim response. His fingers twitch around Sara’s arm, once, and the action is ambiguous enough that she does not know whether to read it as a caress or a threat. She wonders if his other hand moves around the trigger in the same way.
Michael doesn’t seem to know where he’s going as he leads Sara down the hallway, having to pause and open several separate doors before he finds the guest room with no phones inside, no avenues of escape. Sara would prefer not to think about what that implies about this house’s past uses, focusing instead on the fact that he’s finally rattled by something, small and stupid as it is.
She spins on Michael as soon as the appropriate room is found, able to look at Michael, really look at him, for the first time in hours. Bellick’s gun has taken up all of her attention until that point; even now, it pulls her eye like a star. “Is there any part of this that hasn’t been some part of your plan?” Sara asks, flinging her arms out to indicate the room, the gun, and the whole mess of the last month, as if she can make it make sense by willing it hard enough. Her voice cracks on ‘this’ and Sara hates it, hates that even terror is fast downgrading into fear she can’t entirely shed that stupid part of herself that still wants this to be a romance novel, when instead she’s being held hostage in the home of a mobster and Michael has a gun.
If Sara flinches on ‘this’, then Michael flinches on ‘plan’, his eyes becoming dark and flat. The rest of his face does not move; it’s a neat trick. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
That’s not the same thing as saying that he’s sorry for doing it, and Sara makes note of the difference. She is shaking with something that wants to be fear and wants to be anger and, lacking the alchemy to transform itself into either, hovers in an eerie place somewhere in-between. “Was it about my father?” she asks instead, choosing to ignore Michael’s last statement for the moment so that she can prevent herself from flying into one thousand pieces, each too small to pick up again. “Because he could pardon you?” The past month is cast into a whole new light, harsh and ugly. Sara rubs absently at her arm, where Michael dropped his hand when she mentioned her father. That she feels odd in its absence is only proof to Sara that Stockholm Syndrome sets in swiftly.
Where another man would have twitched, Michael becomes colder in some way that Sara has never seen on anyone else before, so that he may as well be wearing a mask for all the animation that is still welcome there. Sara wonders how many other masks that he has worn since she has met him, whether she would even know when she was looking at the real thing. She finds herself taking a small step closer to him as the world threatens to flip over and the forces of alchemy start to dance. Sara does not realize that she has even moved until several seconds afterwards; she does not think that Michael notices at all. Though his face remains calm, the rest of his body is threaded through with a low, vibrating tension, as if he is barely holding himself back from some kind of cataclysmic action. Must be a hell of a good mask, then.
“Lincoln is innocent,” Michael says instead of whatever it was that he was thinking a few seconds before. Sara can see it still fluttering just beneath the surface. He sounds mechanical and rehearsed in the way that he gets sometimes when she’s pushed farther than he likes into territory that he likes even less, and she hates it. Sara realizes that being this familiar with the psychological quirks of one of her inmates is probably not a good thing. She isn’t even familiar with the bodies of most of her inmates.
Which is another one of those road signs that she perhaps should have paid more attention to as they told her that the situation was spiraling completely out of her control, but it is too late now. Sara remembers thinking about Michael’s body in distinctly less than angry or fearful terms. Anger is good, though. Being pushed around like a chess piece has never been something that Sara is good at, though having a politician for a father means that she has had more experience with it than most. Even the suggestion of an unseen hand guiding her at her back makes her bristle now, more so at the suggestion that it’s been there so long without her notice.
Sara swallows back her urge to snort and tell Michael that he’s the only inmate at Fox River who isn’t innocent and framed for a crime that he didn’t commit. Even now she cannot quite bring herself to want to wound, and Michael looks more than if he only wants to believe what he is saying. He looks as if on some level so deep that it goes beyond personality alone he needs to believe it, or risk shattering like glass into one million pieces. One million calm, levelheaded, incredibly calculating pieces.
Oh, she’s calmed down enough for her sense of humor to come back. That’s nice.
Sara takes another step closer to him. While she can’t take her eyes away from the gun for more than a few seconds, Michael seems to have forgotten that he’s even holding it, watching her. Sara thinks of the time in the vents when she somehow thought that she had stumbled across a hero in prison blue, and she swears at herself. He points a gun at her, he drags her God only knows where, he puts her in the company of killers and thieves, and she still can’t stop the inner voice that tells her she’s safe, here, with him.
“Innocent or not, kidnapping the governor’s daughter is not going to put you in line for a lot of special consideration,” Sara says, her voice low. She doesn’t need to raise it any higher to be heard, and the urge to yell and scream has fled. Sara tilts her head up so that she can look Michael in his eyes, which are crystalline-sharp. If he’s experiencing any strain from being in a house in the middle of nowhere with a series of people whose crimes are so much worse than his own, he’s not telling.
“You weren’t supposed to be there,” Michael says, his voice low. It might be the first time that he’s told her the truth since meeting her. Like his admission about Lincoln, it has the ring of something that he does not only believe but outright needs to believe, and Sara finds that she needs to believe it, too.
He couldn’t have known that she was going to be there in the middle of the night, Sara thinks as she raises her mouth to meet his. She can still feel safe here.
Sara has no idea what she’s doing or what she expects Michael to do in return, except to know that the man who wriggled through vents and risked getting shot to save her from gang rape and murder cannot possibly be the same man who would willingly shoot her if she makes a wrong move around him. One of them has to be false. Sara doesn’t know if she’s picking the right one, except for one tiny, niggling feeling. She might be a hopeless idealist, but her instincts are seldom wrong. She doesn’t think that she’s been wrong about Michael in any way that matters since he came in for his first injection.
Michael freezes for a moment, and then there is a very soft sound, the hint of a sigh so small that it can barely even find air enough to carry it. Sara does not know which one of them issued it; that she would even pause to wonder might be proof that she is still over-thinking this. That is not a sin that lasts for long. Michael’s mouth on hers feels good, feels so damned good, and the second soft sound is all Sara. The world many have spun around and reversed its polarity a few times on them both, but if this is another of those instances then Sara thinks that they can withstand it.
Michael hesitates for a moment before making a soft noise that is almost a growl and might be the single hottest thing that Sara has ever heard. He kisses her back, powerful and hard, while one of his hands comes up to tangle in her hair and free it from the sad remains of the ponytail that she put it in over twenty-four hours previously. Michael twines his fingers through it as if he’s going to be tested on the texture later, massaging her scalp. Though she has never understood the male fascination with a woman’s hair, Sara thinks that she will be doing just fine if he never stops again.
There is a brief touch of steel against the back of her neck. Sara freezes. “Sorry,” Michael mutters as he sets the gun to the side; she hears it as metal against wood on one of the end tables. Sara is not the only one who has managed to forget that it was there. She pulls away for a moment, panting and thinking that if even this could not stop making her think of the vents, then the point of no return was so far behind her that it wasn’t even a dot on the horizon.
“Wasn’t this supposed to be Bali?” Sara asks, her breath coming short. Michael’s hand is still tangled in her hair, cradling her head as if he thinks that she will fall or run from him the moment that he lets her go. Her own hand has found its way into the crook of his neck at the place where it curves into his shoulder. Sara’s thumb rests against the intricate blue ink of his tattoo where it emerges from his shirt. Beneath that, she can feel the rushing of his pulse.
Michael’s mouth quirks. Sara would like to kiss it again as, unencumbered by the gun, his free hand trails up her back to rest suggestively against the place where her bra clasps. Through the fabric, his hand is very warm, making Sara wish that she wasn’t wearing it. “No,” he confesses. “But I was going to take you to Thailand.”
Right. He’ll be wanting to get overseas now. Sara needs to stop thinking, but she can’t quite manage it. She moves her thumb in a slow circle over the face of an angel and feels Michael’s pulse quicken beneath her hand.
“I wanted to show you the beaches,” Michael finishes, leaning down to kiss her again.
Would he have shot her if she hadn’t cooperated in the infirmary, if that’s what it would have taken to save his brother? Sara doesn’t think so, but she also doesn’t think that she’s been asking the right questions. He was going to take her to Thailand.
Without letting her mouth break from Michael’s, Sara slides her hands beneath that hideous prison-issue gray shirt and feels him jump when her palms warm against his chest. By touch alone, the tattooed portions of Michael’s skin are indistinguishable from the rest of him. His thumb is tracing tiny circles over the clasp of her bra through her shirt, as if he’s restraining himself from action. Sara doesn’t feel like restraint, here of all places, where the old rules are ghosts if even that much.
“Hold on,” Sara breaks away for a moment and whispers as she tugs at the hem of Michael’s shirt. He’s wearing that smirk that he gets sometimes-that he gets a lot of the time-as he raises his arms over his head so that Sara can help him pull his shirt off. The tattoos are even more intricate up close, a miniature city, and Sara has to pause for a moment so that she can run her fingers over them, memorizing the pattern. She can’t convince herself that she’ll get many opportunities. Lowering her head, Sara kisses the angel that she was tracing only a moment before.
She’s reaching her hands back beneath her shirt to liberate herself of the bra that Michael is so fascinated with, and he stops her with a whispered, “Wait.” Sara pauses, quirking a puzzled eyebrow. Michael reaches over to the end table (strange that when Sara finally manages to forget the gun, Michael can’t tear his eyes away), and places it into the drawer. The wood slamming against itself carries a sound of finality.
Still holding the awkward position with her shirt hiked up and her hands on the clasp of her bra, Sara smiles for the first time in hours. Smiles, and it feels good. “Not a part of the Thailand plan?”
“I like plans,” Michael says mock-defensively, his entire face loosening by half a turn. Sara likes this glimpse of the man Michael was before he went to Fox River. She wishes that she could have met him before he became comfortable in this new skin.
The gun out of sight, Michael steps up close to her, pulls her hands away from her bra. He finishes the task of pulling up her shirt for her, slowly, and in a way that maximizes the contact of his hands against her skin. Sara takes a peek at his face as the shirt is pulled over her head and the hands move around to her bra, their warmth in the sudden chill making her shiver. Michael’s face is intent, and he studies her the way that she imagines he used to study his blueprints. Like he sees beauty in the lines, in the structure.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you with it,” Michael murmurs as he unfastens Sara’s bra and lets it fall to the ground between them. Her breasts are against his chest, her hair falling loose and tickling her shoulders. Sara’s nipples have risen into small, pink points as Michael reaches up to palm one of them, but all thoughts of the room’s temperature have fled far away.
‘I wouldn’t have hurt you,’ is a little different and not outright stated, but it’s still one of the strongest implications that Sara has ever heard. Michael says it in the voice that makes her want to believe, his mouth right up against her ear and the words curling in a warm fan against her cheek. That low, sweet ache started some minutes before.
“I know,” Sara whispers back. Her hands move across Michael’s back of their own volition, tracing patterns. She has no idea if she’s following the real ones or not. “So what are you going to do, then? Hold me hostage? Take me off to Thailand thrown over your shoulder?”
Michael stills for a moment before he asks in a low voice, “How do you feel about Panama?”
Panama. There are still beaches there. “Sounds nice.” The angel on Michael’s shoulder seems to be looking at her as Sara returns to tracing it with the tip of her finger. There is no devil on the other one. Oh, now that’s just too good to be true.
Michael uses his other hand to tilt Sara’s chin up so that he may kiss her again, slow and deep as if he’s trying to drink her. Sara’s head is swimming by the time they part to breathe, and as good as the kissing is, they are wasting way too much time on it.
Sara tugs at Michael’s belt loops as Michael apparently gets the same idea and walks her backwards until her knees hit the bed. Sara lets her knees buckle and herself tumble backwards, hanging onto Michael’s belt loops so that he is pulled down on top of her with a yelp of surprise. It would be very romantic if not for the small dust cloud that rises around them as their bodies strike the covers, making them both sneeze. Sara bites her lip hard to avoid the most ill-timed fit of giggles that she believes she has ever experienced.
“You owe me Thailand,” she accuses when they can breathe again.
“Yeah,” Michael says, and grins at her. Sara has never seen that look on him before. She wants him to do it again. “I do.” Leaning in, he murmurs, “I’m going to do this to you there, on the beaches.”
Sara shivers and watches, still feeling only a fraction of the room’s chill, as Michael slowly pulls off her shoes for her and then leans up to ease her jeans and panties down her legs until she’s fully nude, sprawled out across the bed. His own erection is begging for attention through his pants. Sara palms it and applies an experimental pressure as Michael comes up to kiss her on the mouth one more time. He gasps and makes a soft sound that Sara likes when he’s kissing her and she can swallow it into her mouth, so she does it again.
“Not yet,” Michael says, pulling away and briefly out of her reach. A soft rasp of strain, of want, has colored his voice and put it into the hazy, in-between place of belonging to him and to another man entirely.
Sara leans back on her elbows, flicks a few stray strands of hair and a wandering dust kitty out of her eyes. There’s a tightness between her legs and a warmth that’s spreading quickly, and now is really, really not a good time for Michael to be hanging on to whatever plans he has constructed in his head. “I don’t get to be the only naked one,” she points out.
Again that grin. Sara wonders if the entire situation is just so surreal that it’s rising to infect him, too. “Suppose it’s too much to hope for condoms in those drawers.”
“I’m on the pill,” Sara says. It’s becoming harder by the moment to keep her voice level. “And you’re…”
“Clean,” Michael assures her.
“Then we don’t have that big of a problem, after all.” Sara unbuttons Michael’s pants, takes him in her hand. She squeezes lightly and he closes his eyes, making that sound again. Sara thinks that he’s reached the end of arguments about who is going to be naked and when.
Michael sheds his shoes and pants quickly. Sara takes his cock in her hand again, rubbing her thumb against its tip as she guides him to the junction between her thighs. Though all of the lines and angles on his tattoos are standing out in sharp relief with the tension, Michael braces his arms on either sides of Sara’s head and stares down at her for a long moment first. Sara no longer thinks that he looks at buildings the same way that he looks at her.
She hisses when Michael enters her and that sweet ache suddenly becomes fiercer, wrapping her legs about his waist and her arms around his neck so that he cannot pull away. Michael pauses for a moment, his forehead resting against hers and his face filled with the loose strands of her hair. Sara thinks that his eyes are closed; she tilts her face upwards slightly and kisses the corner of his mouth lightly. Michael raises himself back onto his elbows, moves against and further into her.
Right there, and Sara arches to meet him, feeling sweat beginning to prickle all across her body and a whole different type of heat spreading inside her, sharp and fine and throbbing when it reaches its height. She wraps her arms even more tightly about Michael’s neck when she reaches her eventual climax, her vision going wobbly around the edges and her entire body trying to leap out of itself. “Michael, Michael, Michael,” she whispers over and over again into his neck. Michael comes a few moments a later and collapses down against her, his head on her chest, his breath fanning out over her breasts.
Sara pauses for several minutes to catch her breath gain and runs her hand over Michael’s short, bristly hair.
“Thailand,” Michael says. Sara huffs a laugh. “And Panama,” Michael continues. “Bali, too.”
“Guess money’s not an issue,” Sara says ruefully, looking up at the ceiling. The dust is tickling her nose so that she may need to sneeze again.
“Nope,” Michael says, craning his head to look up at her. His eyes are clear and sharp. He runs his palm over her breast as he speaks, making the nipple peak again. “You can still leave, if you want to.”
Sara puts her hand against the back of Michael’s neck, and he arches into the contact. “Why?” she asks. “I already went down the rabbit hole, remember?”
End
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: Ficangel@yahoo.com
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Michael/Sara
SPOILERS: Mostly AU after ‘Riots, Drills, and the Devil’. One or two details do still sneak through, though.
DISCLAIMERS: They ain’t mine.
A very, very (very) late birthday present for foxxcub. *smooches*
“I’m sorry,” Michael says. He looks like he even means it, which makes Sara want to scream. Of course, with Officer Bellick’s gun in Michael’s hand and pointed at her, with Bellick himself lying on the ground behind Michael and bleeding from a wound on his head that’s too obscured by blood for Sara to categorize it as anything other than ‘bad’, with an assembly of the prison’s finest citizens standing behind Michael and watching her with eyes that make her skin want to crawl off…with all of this, there are a lot of things making Sara want to scream right now. All things considered, she should be proud of her ability to prioritize. Sara takes several deep breaths through her nose, struggling to push down a panic that miraculously does not take control.
“I’m sorry,” Michael says again, but he does not put the gun down. Sara does not think that he will shoot her. She does not think at all, letting instinct instead guide her into taking Michael’s outstretched hand so that he can pull her down the rabbit hole.
*
The next several hours pass in a blur in which Sara gets on two planes and then off again almost as quickly, in which sometimes the gun is pointed at her and sometimes it is not, and Bagwell’s eyes follow every move that she makes. It’s not a sexual look, that one, but the look of a boy who used to douse cats in kerosene just to see what would happen. Sara doesn’t waste her breath telling him that after what she went through in the infirmary, ordinary horrors have little power to affect her. She doesn’t think that she has the spit for it, frankly. Michael remains a constant presence between herself and Bagwell, so much that he often forgets to train the gun. Sara has by now seen some of the detail that Michael put into his escape, and she recognizes the signs of high distraction when they are presented to her.
While Bagwell can be provoked enough every now and then to turn and snarl some threat at Michael, Lincoln never once looks away. Sara does not know what he means for her to read into that stare.
Sara sits with her head in her hands until she feels the final car in the lost list roll to a stop and hears gravel crunching beneath the tires. The car is well-made and beyond that small concession has made no sound since she stepped inside; with these resources at his disposal, Sara can see why Abruzzi made a good choice for a co-conspirator. She rubs her hands wearily over her eyes, wondering why she was chosen. Sara looks up at last, for the first time in at least an hour.
If Sara was planning on making a daring escape, now would be the point where her stomach would sink down to her ankles. As she is still too scared and wrapped up in a slow-burning, steadily growing anger, she hasn’t gotten much farther than fantasy. Her stomach only makes it down as far as her kneecaps before it stops and goes no further. Sara takes a few deeps breaths until it slowly begins to climb back up again.
She is in the middle of nowhere. Abruzzi has brought the eerily quiet sedan to a halt in front of a great stone house that looks as if it has seen many decades of people passing through its halls and will see many more before it falls. The windows stare down on the new visitors with a bland and stately indifference. A thick forest of dark pine clusters around the house on all sides, barely leaving room enough for the winding gravel driveway. If there are people in the woods who could come to Sara’s aid with a well-placed scream, they aren’t making themselves known.
You could hide a body in those woods. They’re practically made for it. Sara shivers.
“Well,” Bagwell draws the word out until it becomes an obscenity in his mouth. It’s a special talent with him. “You’re looking a little pale there, Little Miss Sunshine. Thinking about all the bad things that could be happening to Red Riding Hood out there?”
“She’s been riding with the inspiration for Deliverance for hours.” Abruzzi’s tone is only faintly less oily than Bagwell’s, but it doesn’t hurt Sara to look at him as it does with the other. He doesn’t make her think that he has some kind of disease, some kind of rot that she can’t reach, dancing behind his eyes. Abruzzi looks back over his shoulder at Sara as he shuts the car off and pulls the key from the ignition. His stare may be more tolerable than Bagwell’s, but that’s still not saying a lot. “I have no plans on putting you in those woods, Doctor.” Especially if he’s going to make a habit out of saying things like that.
Michael touches Sara’s elbow and gestures with the gun so that she will follow him out of the car. He hasn’t spoken more than monosyllables at a time since they left the prison. Sara wonders if he needs to scream as badly as she does, and if he wants to direct at someone so much as he just needs to scream in general. If it’s the latter, she might even be able to put aside the anger long enough to muster a bit of sympathy.
Bagwell leans his arms over the top of the car and crosses them beneath his chin as soon as he’s standing in the open air. The leer that he directs at Abruzzi is more skin-crawling than anything hat he’s turned onto Sara during all of the hours that they have been forced into contact with each other. Abruzzi takes it with no more than a placid stare and a small curling of his lip. “Don’t go making them promises if you ain’t gonna keep them, paisan,” he says. Bagwell curves his fingers beneath his chin and beams in a manner that would be angelic if it were on anyone else’s face. “This sweet thing knows were we are, and from where I’m standing that makes her quite a heavy risk to this operation of ours.”
The brothers have inherited the same capacity for stillness and ability to fade into the background, only to reappear in swift, calculated bursts of action. Lincoln unfolds his arms and moves forward, transforming himself between one second and the next from a peaceful part of the scenery into a looming and furious force. While he’s moving, Lincoln dwarfs all the men surrounding him. “She wasn’t paying attention,” Lincoln says. Knowing why he has been watching her for the last several hours does little to soothe Sara’s nerves. “Couldn’t help but notice that you were.” Lincoln takes a slow step forward. There is still a car separating him from Bagwell, but Sara gets the feeling that if Lincoln truly decided to do damage then a wall wouldn’t save him.
“Children, children,” Abruzzi says mildly. A light has gone on behind his eyes, belying the cautionary words. Sara glances towards Michael and wonders how it is that he cannot see himself being cast down into the snake pit with this crew, whether he’s the one being willfully blind, or she is.
Michael has not once released his grip upon Bellick’s stolen gun in all the time that they have been traveling. At the moment, at least, he has it pointed at the ground. Sara eyes the trees and feels her fingers twitch. “Let’s not argue outside,” Abruzzi finishes. He looks at Sara, letting her know with a glance that he sees exactly what she is up to, and then stares hard at Michael. “We have many things to discuss.”
Michael stares back, until Sara swears that she can see his eyes darkening even though the rest of his expression does not change. She does not miss the way that his trigger finger curls more firmly around the gun, and neither does Abruzzi. “I haven’t forgotten,” Michael says.
Bagwell is not the sort of person who deals well with being ignored for any length of time, though Sara imagines that his tantrums are far more dangerous than those of the average toddler. She has not looked at the psych reports, but Bellick’s marginal scruples do not stop him from telling tales. A cloud takes over Bagwell’s face and alters it, making a slow series of transformations over the features until without a single distinctive change being made Bagwell seems to be less, less human and less alive. Sara blinks rapidly several times in succession. The changes do not float away.
The Mad Hatter has yet to appear on this adventure. A few more good nudges, Sara thinks in an unguarded moment, and he might find himself in sympathetic company whenever he does finally arrive. She takes a series of deep breaths through her nose until the thought slinks away. No one notices except for Michael and, as always, Lincoln.
Still resting with his arms braced on top of the car and that flat look in his eyes, Bagwell makes a clicking noise at Lincoln from between his teeth. Without quite being able to say why, Sara decides that it’s one of the most obscene sounds that she has ever heard. Bagwell’s bright and gleaming grin belongs on a junkyard dog. “Oh, don’t you go worrying about me, now,” he addresses Lincoln. “I’m not going to cause your business any trouble. In fact, I’m thinking about repenting of all my sins and reforming.” Bagwell’s grin manages to take in both the house and Abruzzi at the same time. “With incentives like that to grease the way, I’m thinking that a nice dose of redemption could go down just fine.”
Abruzzi has been scanning both the sky and the desolate road with the look of the predator the Bagwell wishes he could be rather than just a hunter of the weak and the young. “We’ve been outside long enough,” he says. Abruzzi flicks the keys over the top of the car at Sucre, who catches them so quickly that Sara barely sees his hand move. He’s been the quietest of them all on the trip, and the twitchiest. Sara thinks that he’ll be the first to break out on his own from this hidden sanctuary, guided towards whatever goal is keeping his eyes dark and shuttered.
Abruzzi points first to Lincoln, then to Sucre, and finally to a faint track in the woods, so slight that Sara has to squint in order to see it. It’s barely wide enough to admit a single car without doing damage to the paint job. “The garage is full of…other resources. There’s a shack about a quarter of a mile that way. Impossible to see from the road and from the air.” Abruzzi’s next gestures are for Sara and then for Michael. “I don’t trust her to behave herself if he leaves.”
“And I don’t get to drive the pretty toy?” Bagwell asks.
Abruzzi grins at him. “You,” he says in that strange and almost lilting way he has, “I don’t trust at all.”
Bagwell scowls, but the similarities between him and a junkyard dog are still enough so that he backs down quickly in the face of real teeth. As Lincoln and Sucre get into the car, Abruzzi jerks his head for the rest of them to follow him into the house.
“And you’re certain that this place is safe?” Michael asks as they walk up the porch. His hand is on Sara’s elbow again, the gun pointed at the ground. Sara casts another longing look at the woods. With Bagwell behind her and the gun so close, even the illusion of opportunity is gone.
They step inside. Sara is so overtaken with the décor that she almost misses Abruzzi’s response. Everything is several years old and covered in a heavy layer of dust; all the same, Sara can tell at a glance that a single piece probably costs more than all of the furniture in her apartment. Money went into this. Time went into this. It’s not a fly-by-night hole. Her chances of making a lucky break are growing slimmer by the second.
“I was sent away because of a stupid mistake,” Abruzzi drawls as he leads them deeper into the entrance hall. He drags his finger across an end table and then stares at the line left behind in the dust as if it personally offends him. “I have many accounts that have not been traced.” Sara cannot help but think of those woods again. The association does not go away when he smiles at her. “There are guest rooms where you can freshen up. Don’t worry about looking for phones.”
“I’ll take her.” Michael’s voice is still low and calm. Sara wishes that it wasn’t. Going into hysterics at long last is going to be lonely if she has to do it alone. Sara doesn’t try to twitch away from the hand that he still has on her elbow, but it feels heavy.
“We still have many things to discuss, Scofield, you and I,” Abruzzi calls to Michael’s back.
“We will,” Michael throws back in grim response. His fingers twitch around Sara’s arm, once, and the action is ambiguous enough that she does not know whether to read it as a caress or a threat. She wonders if his other hand moves around the trigger in the same way.
Michael doesn’t seem to know where he’s going as he leads Sara down the hallway, having to pause and open several separate doors before he finds the guest room with no phones inside, no avenues of escape. Sara would prefer not to think about what that implies about this house’s past uses, focusing instead on the fact that he’s finally rattled by something, small and stupid as it is.
She spins on Michael as soon as the appropriate room is found, able to look at Michael, really look at him, for the first time in hours. Bellick’s gun has taken up all of her attention until that point; even now, it pulls her eye like a star. “Is there any part of this that hasn’t been some part of your plan?” Sara asks, flinging her arms out to indicate the room, the gun, and the whole mess of the last month, as if she can make it make sense by willing it hard enough. Her voice cracks on ‘this’ and Sara hates it, hates that even terror is fast downgrading into fear she can’t entirely shed that stupid part of herself that still wants this to be a romance novel, when instead she’s being held hostage in the home of a mobster and Michael has a gun.
If Sara flinches on ‘this’, then Michael flinches on ‘plan’, his eyes becoming dark and flat. The rest of his face does not move; it’s a neat trick. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
That’s not the same thing as saying that he’s sorry for doing it, and Sara makes note of the difference. She is shaking with something that wants to be fear and wants to be anger and, lacking the alchemy to transform itself into either, hovers in an eerie place somewhere in-between. “Was it about my father?” she asks instead, choosing to ignore Michael’s last statement for the moment so that she can prevent herself from flying into one thousand pieces, each too small to pick up again. “Because he could pardon you?” The past month is cast into a whole new light, harsh and ugly. Sara rubs absently at her arm, where Michael dropped his hand when she mentioned her father. That she feels odd in its absence is only proof to Sara that Stockholm Syndrome sets in swiftly.
Where another man would have twitched, Michael becomes colder in some way that Sara has never seen on anyone else before, so that he may as well be wearing a mask for all the animation that is still welcome there. Sara wonders how many other masks that he has worn since she has met him, whether she would even know when she was looking at the real thing. She finds herself taking a small step closer to him as the world threatens to flip over and the forces of alchemy start to dance. Sara does not realize that she has even moved until several seconds afterwards; she does not think that Michael notices at all. Though his face remains calm, the rest of his body is threaded through with a low, vibrating tension, as if he is barely holding himself back from some kind of cataclysmic action. Must be a hell of a good mask, then.
“Lincoln is innocent,” Michael says instead of whatever it was that he was thinking a few seconds before. Sara can see it still fluttering just beneath the surface. He sounds mechanical and rehearsed in the way that he gets sometimes when she’s pushed farther than he likes into territory that he likes even less, and she hates it. Sara realizes that being this familiar with the psychological quirks of one of her inmates is probably not a good thing. She isn’t even familiar with the bodies of most of her inmates.
Which is another one of those road signs that she perhaps should have paid more attention to as they told her that the situation was spiraling completely out of her control, but it is too late now. Sara remembers thinking about Michael’s body in distinctly less than angry or fearful terms. Anger is good, though. Being pushed around like a chess piece has never been something that Sara is good at, though having a politician for a father means that she has had more experience with it than most. Even the suggestion of an unseen hand guiding her at her back makes her bristle now, more so at the suggestion that it’s been there so long without her notice.
Sara swallows back her urge to snort and tell Michael that he’s the only inmate at Fox River who isn’t innocent and framed for a crime that he didn’t commit. Even now she cannot quite bring herself to want to wound, and Michael looks more than if he only wants to believe what he is saying. He looks as if on some level so deep that it goes beyond personality alone he needs to believe it, or risk shattering like glass into one million pieces. One million calm, levelheaded, incredibly calculating pieces.
Oh, she’s calmed down enough for her sense of humor to come back. That’s nice.
Sara takes another step closer to him. While she can’t take her eyes away from the gun for more than a few seconds, Michael seems to have forgotten that he’s even holding it, watching her. Sara thinks of the time in the vents when she somehow thought that she had stumbled across a hero in prison blue, and she swears at herself. He points a gun at her, he drags her God only knows where, he puts her in the company of killers and thieves, and she still can’t stop the inner voice that tells her she’s safe, here, with him.
“Innocent or not, kidnapping the governor’s daughter is not going to put you in line for a lot of special consideration,” Sara says, her voice low. She doesn’t need to raise it any higher to be heard, and the urge to yell and scream has fled. Sara tilts her head up so that she can look Michael in his eyes, which are crystalline-sharp. If he’s experiencing any strain from being in a house in the middle of nowhere with a series of people whose crimes are so much worse than his own, he’s not telling.
“You weren’t supposed to be there,” Michael says, his voice low. It might be the first time that he’s told her the truth since meeting her. Like his admission about Lincoln, it has the ring of something that he does not only believe but outright needs to believe, and Sara finds that she needs to believe it, too.
He couldn’t have known that she was going to be there in the middle of the night, Sara thinks as she raises her mouth to meet his. She can still feel safe here.
Sara has no idea what she’s doing or what she expects Michael to do in return, except to know that the man who wriggled through vents and risked getting shot to save her from gang rape and murder cannot possibly be the same man who would willingly shoot her if she makes a wrong move around him. One of them has to be false. Sara doesn’t know if she’s picking the right one, except for one tiny, niggling feeling. She might be a hopeless idealist, but her instincts are seldom wrong. She doesn’t think that she’s been wrong about Michael in any way that matters since he came in for his first injection.
Michael freezes for a moment, and then there is a very soft sound, the hint of a sigh so small that it can barely even find air enough to carry it. Sara does not know which one of them issued it; that she would even pause to wonder might be proof that she is still over-thinking this. That is not a sin that lasts for long. Michael’s mouth on hers feels good, feels so damned good, and the second soft sound is all Sara. The world many have spun around and reversed its polarity a few times on them both, but if this is another of those instances then Sara thinks that they can withstand it.
Michael hesitates for a moment before making a soft noise that is almost a growl and might be the single hottest thing that Sara has ever heard. He kisses her back, powerful and hard, while one of his hands comes up to tangle in her hair and free it from the sad remains of the ponytail that she put it in over twenty-four hours previously. Michael twines his fingers through it as if he’s going to be tested on the texture later, massaging her scalp. Though she has never understood the male fascination with a woman’s hair, Sara thinks that she will be doing just fine if he never stops again.
There is a brief touch of steel against the back of her neck. Sara freezes. “Sorry,” Michael mutters as he sets the gun to the side; she hears it as metal against wood on one of the end tables. Sara is not the only one who has managed to forget that it was there. She pulls away for a moment, panting and thinking that if even this could not stop making her think of the vents, then the point of no return was so far behind her that it wasn’t even a dot on the horizon.
“Wasn’t this supposed to be Bali?” Sara asks, her breath coming short. Michael’s hand is still tangled in her hair, cradling her head as if he thinks that she will fall or run from him the moment that he lets her go. Her own hand has found its way into the crook of his neck at the place where it curves into his shoulder. Sara’s thumb rests against the intricate blue ink of his tattoo where it emerges from his shirt. Beneath that, she can feel the rushing of his pulse.
Michael’s mouth quirks. Sara would like to kiss it again as, unencumbered by the gun, his free hand trails up her back to rest suggestively against the place where her bra clasps. Through the fabric, his hand is very warm, making Sara wish that she wasn’t wearing it. “No,” he confesses. “But I was going to take you to Thailand.”
Right. He’ll be wanting to get overseas now. Sara needs to stop thinking, but she can’t quite manage it. She moves her thumb in a slow circle over the face of an angel and feels Michael’s pulse quicken beneath her hand.
“I wanted to show you the beaches,” Michael finishes, leaning down to kiss her again.
Would he have shot her if she hadn’t cooperated in the infirmary, if that’s what it would have taken to save his brother? Sara doesn’t think so, but she also doesn’t think that she’s been asking the right questions. He was going to take her to Thailand.
Without letting her mouth break from Michael’s, Sara slides her hands beneath that hideous prison-issue gray shirt and feels him jump when her palms warm against his chest. By touch alone, the tattooed portions of Michael’s skin are indistinguishable from the rest of him. His thumb is tracing tiny circles over the clasp of her bra through her shirt, as if he’s restraining himself from action. Sara doesn’t feel like restraint, here of all places, where the old rules are ghosts if even that much.
“Hold on,” Sara breaks away for a moment and whispers as she tugs at the hem of Michael’s shirt. He’s wearing that smirk that he gets sometimes-that he gets a lot of the time-as he raises his arms over his head so that Sara can help him pull his shirt off. The tattoos are even more intricate up close, a miniature city, and Sara has to pause for a moment so that she can run her fingers over them, memorizing the pattern. She can’t convince herself that she’ll get many opportunities. Lowering her head, Sara kisses the angel that she was tracing only a moment before.
She’s reaching her hands back beneath her shirt to liberate herself of the bra that Michael is so fascinated with, and he stops her with a whispered, “Wait.” Sara pauses, quirking a puzzled eyebrow. Michael reaches over to the end table (strange that when Sara finally manages to forget the gun, Michael can’t tear his eyes away), and places it into the drawer. The wood slamming against itself carries a sound of finality.
Still holding the awkward position with her shirt hiked up and her hands on the clasp of her bra, Sara smiles for the first time in hours. Smiles, and it feels good. “Not a part of the Thailand plan?”
“I like plans,” Michael says mock-defensively, his entire face loosening by half a turn. Sara likes this glimpse of the man Michael was before he went to Fox River. She wishes that she could have met him before he became comfortable in this new skin.
The gun out of sight, Michael steps up close to her, pulls her hands away from her bra. He finishes the task of pulling up her shirt for her, slowly, and in a way that maximizes the contact of his hands against her skin. Sara takes a peek at his face as the shirt is pulled over her head and the hands move around to her bra, their warmth in the sudden chill making her shiver. Michael’s face is intent, and he studies her the way that she imagines he used to study his blueprints. Like he sees beauty in the lines, in the structure.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you with it,” Michael murmurs as he unfastens Sara’s bra and lets it fall to the ground between them. Her breasts are against his chest, her hair falling loose and tickling her shoulders. Sara’s nipples have risen into small, pink points as Michael reaches up to palm one of them, but all thoughts of the room’s temperature have fled far away.
‘I wouldn’t have hurt you,’ is a little different and not outright stated, but it’s still one of the strongest implications that Sara has ever heard. Michael says it in the voice that makes her want to believe, his mouth right up against her ear and the words curling in a warm fan against her cheek. That low, sweet ache started some minutes before.
“I know,” Sara whispers back. Her hands move across Michael’s back of their own volition, tracing patterns. She has no idea if she’s following the real ones or not. “So what are you going to do, then? Hold me hostage? Take me off to Thailand thrown over your shoulder?”
Michael stills for a moment before he asks in a low voice, “How do you feel about Panama?”
Panama. There are still beaches there. “Sounds nice.” The angel on Michael’s shoulder seems to be looking at her as Sara returns to tracing it with the tip of her finger. There is no devil on the other one. Oh, now that’s just too good to be true.
Michael uses his other hand to tilt Sara’s chin up so that he may kiss her again, slow and deep as if he’s trying to drink her. Sara’s head is swimming by the time they part to breathe, and as good as the kissing is, they are wasting way too much time on it.
Sara tugs at Michael’s belt loops as Michael apparently gets the same idea and walks her backwards until her knees hit the bed. Sara lets her knees buckle and herself tumble backwards, hanging onto Michael’s belt loops so that he is pulled down on top of her with a yelp of surprise. It would be very romantic if not for the small dust cloud that rises around them as their bodies strike the covers, making them both sneeze. Sara bites her lip hard to avoid the most ill-timed fit of giggles that she believes she has ever experienced.
“You owe me Thailand,” she accuses when they can breathe again.
“Yeah,” Michael says, and grins at her. Sara has never seen that look on him before. She wants him to do it again. “I do.” Leaning in, he murmurs, “I’m going to do this to you there, on the beaches.”
Sara shivers and watches, still feeling only a fraction of the room’s chill, as Michael slowly pulls off her shoes for her and then leans up to ease her jeans and panties down her legs until she’s fully nude, sprawled out across the bed. His own erection is begging for attention through his pants. Sara palms it and applies an experimental pressure as Michael comes up to kiss her on the mouth one more time. He gasps and makes a soft sound that Sara likes when he’s kissing her and she can swallow it into her mouth, so she does it again.
“Not yet,” Michael says, pulling away and briefly out of her reach. A soft rasp of strain, of want, has colored his voice and put it into the hazy, in-between place of belonging to him and to another man entirely.
Sara leans back on her elbows, flicks a few stray strands of hair and a wandering dust kitty out of her eyes. There’s a tightness between her legs and a warmth that’s spreading quickly, and now is really, really not a good time for Michael to be hanging on to whatever plans he has constructed in his head. “I don’t get to be the only naked one,” she points out.
Again that grin. Sara wonders if the entire situation is just so surreal that it’s rising to infect him, too. “Suppose it’s too much to hope for condoms in those drawers.”
“I’m on the pill,” Sara says. It’s becoming harder by the moment to keep her voice level. “And you’re…”
“Clean,” Michael assures her.
“Then we don’t have that big of a problem, after all.” Sara unbuttons Michael’s pants, takes him in her hand. She squeezes lightly and he closes his eyes, making that sound again. Sara thinks that he’s reached the end of arguments about who is going to be naked and when.
Michael sheds his shoes and pants quickly. Sara takes his cock in her hand again, rubbing her thumb against its tip as she guides him to the junction between her thighs. Though all of the lines and angles on his tattoos are standing out in sharp relief with the tension, Michael braces his arms on either sides of Sara’s head and stares down at her for a long moment first. Sara no longer thinks that he looks at buildings the same way that he looks at her.
She hisses when Michael enters her and that sweet ache suddenly becomes fiercer, wrapping her legs about his waist and her arms around his neck so that he cannot pull away. Michael pauses for a moment, his forehead resting against hers and his face filled with the loose strands of her hair. Sara thinks that his eyes are closed; she tilts her face upwards slightly and kisses the corner of his mouth lightly. Michael raises himself back onto his elbows, moves against and further into her.
Right there, and Sara arches to meet him, feeling sweat beginning to prickle all across her body and a whole different type of heat spreading inside her, sharp and fine and throbbing when it reaches its height. She wraps her arms even more tightly about Michael’s neck when she reaches her eventual climax, her vision going wobbly around the edges and her entire body trying to leap out of itself. “Michael, Michael, Michael,” she whispers over and over again into his neck. Michael comes a few moments a later and collapses down against her, his head on her chest, his breath fanning out over her breasts.
Sara pauses for several minutes to catch her breath gain and runs her hand over Michael’s short, bristly hair.
“Thailand,” Michael says. Sara huffs a laugh. “And Panama,” Michael continues. “Bali, too.”
“Guess money’s not an issue,” Sara says ruefully, looking up at the ceiling. The dust is tickling her nose so that she may need to sneeze again.
“Nope,” Michael says, craning his head to look up at her. His eyes are clear and sharp. He runs his palm over her breast as he speaks, making the nipple peak again. “You can still leave, if you want to.”
Sara puts her hand against the back of Michael’s neck, and he arches into the contact. “Why?” she asks. “I already went down the rabbit hole, remember?”
End