The Harbor Light and the Listing Ship
Title: The Harbor Light and the Listing Ship
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: hard R
Summary: There is noise from the storm, but the silence is louder.
Warnings: sexuality, implied infidelity, spoilers (in a way) for JJ
Notes: This is a direct follow-up to Against the Wind and won't make any sense without it, probably. That one just didn't feel finished to me, so.... meh. This is what happened.
When Reid comes back inside, he is soaked to the bone.
Outside, nothing has abated. The wind is frenzied, and the rain has grown colder, tangling his hair into a hopeless knot and sticking his mis-buttoned shirt to all of the stark planes of his body. He was right about the car, though. The water damage is confined mostly to the seat, which sops like a sponge all the way through his thin, wrinkled pants. The angle of the door protected the rest.
JJ is on the couch, naked underneath the blanket, her clothes still pooled on the floor. She's got her head down, cheek to her pulled-in knees, facing away from him. She is still, almost frighteningly so. She doesn't react to the squeak of the hinge.
There is noise from the storm - the walls are thin and poorly insulated, the roof old and echoic, the windows drafty - but the silence is louder.
Reid stands like a stranger in his own home, dripping onto the fraying braided rug, and stares at the exposed skin of her right shoulder, where the hem of the blanket doesn't quite reach. The curve there is sweeping and graceful; her body's perfect geometry. It's the size of his palm, he recalls. If he closes his eyes, he can feel it there, the mortar and pestle of the motion as she drew circles upon circles against him and he held on like he was drowning.
And now. Now.
__________
He stands for a long time and doesn't move. JJ listens to his shifting, wet footsteps, the pat pat pat of the rain dripping from his sleeves. She can feel his eyes on her. Years will do that - lend weight to a gaze. At least, that's what their years have done.
She knows that she should lift her head, find the clip for her hair, get back into her clothes. But his eyes are so heavy, they pin her in place. Even her breath is sluggish. Caught. The blanket smells like him. Vaguely, she thinks that she probably does, too. That she should wash before she leaves.
So many shoulds, and no will for any of them.
But there he is, shivering in his own doorway, afraid to come near her, and there are so many things she is capable of doing that she never imagined she was, but allowing him to stay there is not one of them. She opens her mouth, the words ready on her tongue, but they scatter mindlessly when she gives them her voice. The only thing that comes out is a sigh, then his name, then the strange, tremulous beginnings of a sound, I-- I-- I. Then it all just collapses around her like a building imploding and she closes her eyes to brace for the impact.
__________
He's wet, and he's cold, and he doesn't want to drip all over her. He doesn't want to steal her body heat. He feels like he's taken enough.
But she's chilled and chattering already (though he reasons that it's probably not the weather now) and she's asking for the only thing he's really got - his company, his ability to be - and he can't deny her it. Not even if it's in her own best interest. He has never been able to tell her no, he thinks, and maybe that's the problem.
But what's done is done, in so many ways, and there is nothing now that he can fix. Nothing he needs to map out or decode or translate. It's all here, laid out as bare as she is, and somehow, he is all the more lost for it. So many times, she has been the light in the harbor for him, and now she is just another ship listing in the storm.
So he unbuttons his shirt for the second time that night, thinking at least he won't feel as cold this way, at least if she pulls away, that won't be why, and goes to sit beside her.
She doesn't pull away.
__________
The blanket's too small to cover both of them. It looks handmade, she sees now as she uses it to catch a line of water streaking his neck. She pictures his mother, whose hands are the same as his - elegant and clever; JJ noticed this, noticed everything about her because she belonged to him - doing these things for him: making blankets, drying rain or tears or whatever else spilled down his face.
There are things his mother didn't do, too, JJ knows - important things - and he has spent most of his life finding ways to spare her from the guilt of knowing that. It is because of this that she knows how deeply they have sunk into one another, how sturdy this house of cards really is, when she apologizes and he says, "You have nothing to be sorry for."
This is Spencer: raising his arms in surrender, throwing himself in the path of the bullet, shouldering blame that his narrow body isn't built for.
She doesn't contradict him. There is no fight in her, just the heaviness of exhaustion and the desire to be held, and though she has never felt more selfish in her life, she doesn't know how to stop. In one night, all of her identities have shifted irrevocably - she is not the agent she was, not the lover she was, not the mother she was - and she is clinging to the part that's left; the part that is wild with need, shrieking like days-long hunger in her belly. The part that sounds alive.
This is what's left, now. The gutted room after the storm has swept through.
His pants are damp and chill her thighs, so she pushes them to his ankles. He untangles them with his feet and shuffles them aside, and they are skin-to-skin again, face-to-face.
She wraps the blanket around their hips and shoves the corners between the cushions.
__________
She doesn't ever mention leaving, and he doesn't ask her to go.
They talk, though, in stilted, quiet sentences, like the space around them is sacred. They name all of their ghosts, and the litany is like a lullaby.
She falls asleep with her chin in the dip of his collarbone. He counts her breaths, finds the pattern in the strike of rain on glass and the movement of air through her lungs, creates a logarithmic equation from it, solves it, sleeps.
__________
Sometime in the night, a chill shoots up her spine, and JJ wakes. They have made their way flat, and her neck is angled oddly and aches. The clock blinks sideways at her, red as a gun-sight.
The time doesn't matter. It's simply too late.
She hoists herself onto him, unpinning her leg, and he blinks awake in time to feel her tracing the lines of his face. He licks his lips and catches her finger, and she doesn't pull away.
"How many teeth do humans have?" she murmurs, running her fingertip along the edges of his.
He works his mouth and moves her to the side, and says, "You know that."
"Mmmhmm," she responds. "But I want you to tell me."
"Thirty-two, including the wisdom teeth, though there have been rare cases involving fourth or even fifth molars."
"Thank you," she says, like he's cracked the case wide open, and then she shakes her head in a slow, sad awe and kisses him.
__________
The rain slows to an uneven staccato half an hour later, when he has two fingers crooked inside of her and the soft weight of her breast in his palm, when she is panting roughly into his ear, when he is telling her that she is beautiful because he just can't help himself, beautiful even like this, unshowered and gritty-eyed and still sticky-slippery from the last time.
When the rain stops, she is kneeling with legs wide and her gaze turned up, and he is watching her with a pained sort of reverence as she swallows, the sound of blood rushing in his ears like he is about to go under.
And when the sun finally breaks through, they are both there to see it.
It rises to make a metal-gray morning, and they bend low over the steam from their coffee - hers is black now, strong and hard like medicine - to hide from it.
It finds them anyway. It always does. It always will.
"I'll drive you in," JJ says quietly.
Reid wraps his fingers around his mug tighter and rests his lips in thought against the rim. "Do you think..." The sentence falters, and he takes a sip instead of finishing it.
JJ shrugs. "Does it matter? What are they going to do -- kick me out?"
Their eyes meet, and slowlyslowlyslowly, like the way the sun will sneak up on you when you have just made peace with the dark, a smile spreads across her face. It's the same timbre as her coffee: complicated and fierce and bitterly perfect.
Pairing: Reid/JJ
Rating: hard R
Summary: There is noise from the storm, but the silence is louder.
Warnings: sexuality, implied infidelity, spoilers (in a way) for JJ
Notes: This is a direct follow-up to Against the Wind and won't make any sense without it, probably. That one just didn't feel finished to me, so.... meh. This is what happened.
When Reid comes back inside, he is soaked to the bone.
Outside, nothing has abated. The wind is frenzied, and the rain has grown colder, tangling his hair into a hopeless knot and sticking his mis-buttoned shirt to all of the stark planes of his body. He was right about the car, though. The water damage is confined mostly to the seat, which sops like a sponge all the way through his thin, wrinkled pants. The angle of the door protected the rest.
JJ is on the couch, naked underneath the blanket, her clothes still pooled on the floor. She's got her head down, cheek to her pulled-in knees, facing away from him. She is still, almost frighteningly so. She doesn't react to the squeak of the hinge.
There is noise from the storm - the walls are thin and poorly insulated, the roof old and echoic, the windows drafty - but the silence is louder.
Reid stands like a stranger in his own home, dripping onto the fraying braided rug, and stares at the exposed skin of her right shoulder, where the hem of the blanket doesn't quite reach. The curve there is sweeping and graceful; her body's perfect geometry. It's the size of his palm, he recalls. If he closes his eyes, he can feel it there, the mortar and pestle of the motion as she drew circles upon circles against him and he held on like he was drowning.
And now. Now.
__________
He stands for a long time and doesn't move. JJ listens to his shifting, wet footsteps, the pat pat pat of the rain dripping from his sleeves. She can feel his eyes on her. Years will do that - lend weight to a gaze. At least, that's what their years have done.
She knows that she should lift her head, find the clip for her hair, get back into her clothes. But his eyes are so heavy, they pin her in place. Even her breath is sluggish. Caught. The blanket smells like him. Vaguely, she thinks that she probably does, too. That she should wash before she leaves.
So many shoulds, and no will for any of them.
But there he is, shivering in his own doorway, afraid to come near her, and there are so many things she is capable of doing that she never imagined she was, but allowing him to stay there is not one of them. She opens her mouth, the words ready on her tongue, but they scatter mindlessly when she gives them her voice. The only thing that comes out is a sigh, then his name, then the strange, tremulous beginnings of a sound, I-- I-- I. Then it all just collapses around her like a building imploding and she closes her eyes to brace for the impact.
__________
He's wet, and he's cold, and he doesn't want to drip all over her. He doesn't want to steal her body heat. He feels like he's taken enough.
But she's chilled and chattering already (though he reasons that it's probably not the weather now) and she's asking for the only thing he's really got - his company, his ability to be - and he can't deny her it. Not even if it's in her own best interest. He has never been able to tell her no, he thinks, and maybe that's the problem.
But what's done is done, in so many ways, and there is nothing now that he can fix. Nothing he needs to map out or decode or translate. It's all here, laid out as bare as she is, and somehow, he is all the more lost for it. So many times, she has been the light in the harbor for him, and now she is just another ship listing in the storm.
So he unbuttons his shirt for the second time that night, thinking at least he won't feel as cold this way, at least if she pulls away, that won't be why, and goes to sit beside her.
She doesn't pull away.
__________
The blanket's too small to cover both of them. It looks handmade, she sees now as she uses it to catch a line of water streaking his neck. She pictures his mother, whose hands are the same as his - elegant and clever; JJ noticed this, noticed everything about her because she belonged to him - doing these things for him: making blankets, drying rain or tears or whatever else spilled down his face.
There are things his mother didn't do, too, JJ knows - important things - and he has spent most of his life finding ways to spare her from the guilt of knowing that. It is because of this that she knows how deeply they have sunk into one another, how sturdy this house of cards really is, when she apologizes and he says, "You have nothing to be sorry for."
This is Spencer: raising his arms in surrender, throwing himself in the path of the bullet, shouldering blame that his narrow body isn't built for.
She doesn't contradict him. There is no fight in her, just the heaviness of exhaustion and the desire to be held, and though she has never felt more selfish in her life, she doesn't know how to stop. In one night, all of her identities have shifted irrevocably - she is not the agent she was, not the lover she was, not the mother she was - and she is clinging to the part that's left; the part that is wild with need, shrieking like days-long hunger in her belly. The part that sounds alive.
This is what's left, now. The gutted room after the storm has swept through.
His pants are damp and chill her thighs, so she pushes them to his ankles. He untangles them with his feet and shuffles them aside, and they are skin-to-skin again, face-to-face.
She wraps the blanket around their hips and shoves the corners between the cushions.
__________
She doesn't ever mention leaving, and he doesn't ask her to go.
They talk, though, in stilted, quiet sentences, like the space around them is sacred. They name all of their ghosts, and the litany is like a lullaby.
She falls asleep with her chin in the dip of his collarbone. He counts her breaths, finds the pattern in the strike of rain on glass and the movement of air through her lungs, creates a logarithmic equation from it, solves it, sleeps.
__________
Sometime in the night, a chill shoots up her spine, and JJ wakes. They have made their way flat, and her neck is angled oddly and aches. The clock blinks sideways at her, red as a gun-sight.
The time doesn't matter. It's simply too late.
She hoists herself onto him, unpinning her leg, and he blinks awake in time to feel her tracing the lines of his face. He licks his lips and catches her finger, and she doesn't pull away.
"How many teeth do humans have?" she murmurs, running her fingertip along the edges of his.
He works his mouth and moves her to the side, and says, "You know that."
"Mmmhmm," she responds. "But I want you to tell me."
"Thirty-two, including the wisdom teeth, though there have been rare cases involving fourth or even fifth molars."
"Thank you," she says, like he's cracked the case wide open, and then she shakes her head in a slow, sad awe and kisses him.
__________
The rain slows to an uneven staccato half an hour later, when he has two fingers crooked inside of her and the soft weight of her breast in his palm, when she is panting roughly into his ear, when he is telling her that she is beautiful because he just can't help himself, beautiful even like this, unshowered and gritty-eyed and still sticky-slippery from the last time.
When the rain stops, she is kneeling with legs wide and her gaze turned up, and he is watching her with a pained sort of reverence as she swallows, the sound of blood rushing in his ears like he is about to go under.
And when the sun finally breaks through, they are both there to see it.
It rises to make a metal-gray morning, and they bend low over the steam from their coffee - hers is black now, strong and hard like medicine - to hide from it.
It finds them anyway. It always does. It always will.
"I'll drive you in," JJ says quietly.
Reid wraps his fingers around his mug tighter and rests his lips in thought against the rim. "Do you think..." The sentence falters, and he takes a sip instead of finishing it.
JJ shrugs. "Does it matter? What are they going to do -- kick me out?"
Their eyes meet, and slowlyslowlyslowly, like the way the sun will sneak up on you when you have just made peace with the dark, a smile spreads across her face. It's the same timbre as her coffee: complicated and fierce and bitterly perfect.