2 Jubilee/Chamber ficlets and a shippy drawing.
Be forewarned, though--here there be suggestiveness.
Insidious
She smelled like old leather and secondhand smoke.
She smelled, Jono noted with equal parts alarm and a nagging, grudging pride he refused to legitimately acknowledge, like him.
That wasn’t right. It didn’t fit her. It wasn’t the Jubilation Lee he was used to. The girl he knew wore vanilla-flowery body spray on days she felt like making an effort, and radiated that godawful sugary-bubblegum smell on days she felt lazy, which was most of the time. Jubilee shouldn’t smell like the back rooms of bars or the shit-hole he’d used to practice in with his band.
Considering he’s been sleeping with her for months, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to him. He’d complained enough in the past few weeks when some of his clothes had taken on a fluffy-girl smell-probably because she had a penchant for filching his band t-shirts to sleep in. He should’ve figured it would go both ways. But no. In his stubborn, change-resistant brain, she was the one seeping little by little into places she shouldn’t be. Jono and all the fragments of his physical persona stayed exactly where they should’ve: on him, decidedly separate from the girl weaseling her way in where she didn’t belong.
Bleedin’ hell, take a shower, his voice rumbled none-too-gently through her head, and Jubilee stirred and rolled over to face him, tangling the blankets around her legs.
“‘S four in the morning, you twatwaffle,” she groaned, and mustered enough energy to swat at him and yank the covers back around her neck. “Hit me up again at, like, noon.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled his arm across her back. “Go back t’ sleep.”
Only half-wanting to reclaim his arm, Jono grumbled to himself as Jubilee settled against him, her face buried in the pillow tucked beneath his chin. He tried not to notice the scent of his shampoo on her hair.
Gravity Cannot Be Held Responsible for Two Bodies or How They Collide
The one thing she hadn’t expected was they way he took his time.
Jubilation Lee was not easily rendered self-conscious. Olympic-level training regimes and almost twenty years of dressing like a neon lunatic had taken care of whatever sense of shame had tried to hang onto her slight body. But his mouth lingered everywhere he touched ((God, it was still so strange, thinking of Jono having a mouth, even while feeling the proof against her skin)) and when someone she was this close to was paying such minutely particular attention to every last inch of her body…there were a lot of reasons for her to be nervous.
She arched into his touch in the half-dark, drawing in long, measuredly even breaths as she felt him kissing at the faint ridges of her ribs. Light, lengthy brushes of his lips that varied in pressure and heat as he re-learned what it felt like to give a girl physical attention.
It seemed counter-intuitive, almost laughable that someone she knew so well would be the one to make her want to push him across the room and cover herself before he could find something he wouldn’t like. Something that started as a joke between friends ((Dude, you don’t even remember what a girl feels like, you haven’t gotten any since you were, like, sixteen)) had turned into something much more heated very quickly. So quick, it’d been really startling. She certainly didn’t love Jonothon Starsmore, not like that, and he definintely was still too hung-up on Paige Guthrie to consider loving anyone at all. She knew. She’d been sure for almost as long as she’d known him. Without the romantic attachment that she’d always assumed was what led to slow, leisurely sex, Jubilee had expected this to be a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am sort of deal. She’d laughed and lorded it over him at first like she’d be doing him some great, cosmic favor at great personal expense ((It’s a charity screw, Jono, that’s what it is. You’re all mouthed-up and chested again and jesus fuck, man, you need to get laid. I’d be like the Salvation Army dispensing poon to less-fortunate British ex-mutants)) but the longer she laid in his arms…the less it felt like anything they’d agreed it would be.
The whole damn thing had started as a what-if, nothing more. Jubilee hadn’t been paying enough attention to tell when the what-if turned into why-would-you, and then again into why-not. She couldn’t remember much of the process that’d gotten them from point A to the point of no return, or when gravity shifted and landed her on her back, for that matter, but for the first time in her life, the ‘one thing led to another’ explanation seemed like a perfectly acceptable prelude to sex. In his bed. Being kissed like this. Which didn’t feel much like a charity screw at all, anymore.
He was careful, and deliberate. Like she’d break apart and disappear if he held her too close; the sense of risk in closeness hadn’t left Jono in the slightest, though his body was finally whole. Every time she’d laid her hands on him, tried to return the slow, feather-light touches he’d paid her with, Jono would slide his hands down her shoulders and thread his fingers with hers, holding her arms up above her head while he worked his way over her with kisses.
Stop it, she said, a breathless sigh in his ear as he nudged her face to the side with his nose, paying very close attention to her pulse point. Stop making this feel like something it shouldn’t be.
Shouldn’t be? his rough, unused voice rasped against her and sent shivers that shouldn’t be there down her spine. Jono licked dark blue-gray lips too wide for his sharply-edged face, and bent his head back to Jubilee’s throat. There’re better things for makin’ love to feel like?
No, but-
She felt his sigh, and almost wished she’d heard it washing through her mind instead, like before. It would’ve felt less real than the rise and fall of his chest pressed to hers, the way he propped himself up on one elbow and drew back. Say the word, luv, and I’ll let y’ go.
She freed one hand from his, and twined her fingers through the fine hair at his nape. That’s not what I meant. It feels like-more, and that’s not what you wanted-
He took the rest of her words and swallowed them. Jubilee didn’t know why she’d expected his lips to taste cold; he’d already kissed her damn near everywhere else. Maybe it was the color of his mouth.
Don’t try an’ tell me what I wanted from this, gel. ‘Fink I’ve got that all worked out.
Jono kissed her again. His lips still tasted warm.
And now for a sketch of Jono teaching Jujubaby the right way to hold a guitar.
"No, luv, that's not how you play 'Smoke on the Water.'"
"No, luv, fingers like this."
"No, luv, the hip-shakin' like...Elvis is not needed."
"Except it is, Jono. ....Because reasons."
