FIC: "Drive" (3/?) - Iron Man (movieverse), Tony/Pepper, R
"Drive"
Written for the Valentine's challenge at its_always_been . See master page for prompts, author's notes, and previous/subsequent chapters.
3. Stretched Out
Pepper rises from the bed, switching on the bedside lamp before disappearing down the stairs.
Tony hears the pipes working as she washes up, and then the sounds of her moving around in the living room-presumably restoring the books to their rightful places. Pepper abhors disorder in her life, which is undoubtedly why even her friends-with-benefits arrangements come with a strict set of rules.
He sits up, taking in his surroundings for the first time. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom is bright, spacious, and tidy. The walls are painted a sunny yellow, and there are some prints hanging: impressionist stuff, water lilies, reflections of clouds in lakes. Either Monet or Manet-Tony can never be bothered to remember which is which. More bookshelves: paperbacks, more well-travelled than the ones downstairs, including a surprising number of trashy romance novels. The comforter he’s sitting on is soft and plush, dark green with gold accents.
He shifts, peels back the covers, and drapes the sheet modestly around him-in spite of the circumstances, it feels somehow inappropriate to be casually nude in what is clearly Pepper’s private sanctum.
A few minutes later, she returns. She’s wearing the blue yoga pants again, and has Tony’s jeans tucked under her arm. She’s also carrying a tray: two tall glasses of ice and amber liquid, each garnished with a slice of lemon. She hands one to Tony, and sets the other on the bedside table. She looks quizzically at the sheet in his lap, but doesn’t comment, merely drapes his jeans over the trunk at the end of her bed. The message seems clear: any time you want to leave…
The iced tea is cold, and just slightly sweet; he drains the glass in three long, delicious swallows. Pepper sits beside him on the bed, facing the headboard, drawing her knees up to her chest.
He settles back on the pillows, sighs, and stretches languorously. He can’t remember the last time he felt this good without some sort of chemical enhancement. It’s similar to the kind of buzz he gets when he’s able to carry an exciting idea to a successful conclusion-like when he created the new element.
As if she’s somehow managed to follow his train of thought, Pepper reaches over and traces the flat surface of the new RT with a fingernail, then a fingertip. “What did you do with the old one?” she asks.
“Melted it for scrap.” Catching sight of her look, he adds, “It was poisoning me. Come on.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. You made the face.”
“What face?”
“The face you make when you think I’ve made a bad decision.”
“That’s my default expression,” she deadpans, taking a sip of her drink.
He senses he’s treading on thin ice, and decides to change the subject. “So, nice pictures,” he remarks. “Manet?”
“Monet.”
“Right. Which one do I like?”
“You like Monet.”
He squints at the prints on the wall, but finds himself unable to muster much feeling about them either way. “Which one did the naked girls?”
She sighs. “Manet.”
“Then I think I like Manet.”
He trails a finger lightly over her foot and up the front of her leg. She ignores him.
“Imagine them both sketching in a train station.” Her head is cocked to one side, her tone slightly pedantic-as it always is whenever she relays Important Facts About Art. “Monet paints the trains; Manet paints the passengers. You like machines, you like movement and colour and perspective, and you don’t always like people. And you hate cats.”
He concedes defeat, and casts about for a topic about which he is somewhat more knowledgeable. “So, engineered bioluminescence: cool, or creepy?”
“Ask me on Monday.”
Swing and a miss.
“So, that sex we just had.”
“Yes?”
“On a scale of one to ten, ten being the best you’ve ever had-”
“If you need to ask, you weren’t paying attention.”
“Maybe I’m just heavily invested in personal development.”
Pepper says nothing, but he sees her lips curve ever so slightly.
“So-”
She sighs. “Tony, don’t feel that you have to stick around and make small talk-or whatever it is you’re trying to do. You got what you came here for. It’s okay if you want to go.”
He watches her, and waits.
When he doesn’t move, she shifts and stretches out, facing away from him but with her back resting against his side, her head tucked into the hollow where his arm meets his shoulder. Her arms are crossed awkwardly over her chest; her shoulders are stiff, unyielding. It’s a bit like lying next to a board, and he isn’t quite sure what-if anything-he’s supposed to do.
Tony has never really understood the appeal of cuddling. Despite the prodigious amount of sex he’s had, he is not someone to whom intimacy comes naturally. His experience of communal sleeping is limited to his days as a tomcat, and his general impression has always been an unpleasant one: he can vividly recall many instances of waking up in the night, still drunk and slightly claustrophobic, with a naked, sweaty stranger draped over him. No matter how he tried to rearrange the tangle of limbs, no matter how small an area of the bed he occupied, somehow, even in sleep, he was never quite able to escape. He remembers the agonizing slowness of the breaking dawn, his increasing frustration with the fact that this woman (whose name he usually couldn’t recall) had the nerve to still be in his house, in his bed, while he was trying to sleep.
He remembers, too, the day it finally occurred to him that he could just disappear into another part of the house until the girl (or girls) eventually left. He had a whole house full of rooms, many of them containing empty beds, and if he didn’t feel like sleeping there was always the workshop. Happy and JARVIS, and eventually Pepper, handled the details; the three of them somehow managed to work out a sort of assembly-line process, and the boss never had to get his hands dirty. It was one of the many, many ways in which it was good to be Tony Stark.
Now, with her nestled against him, he can tell when Pepper finally relaxes, her long, lean body melting into his. She’s warm, even through the thin cotton of her clothes and the sheet that’s still tucked around his hips, but not unpleasantly so.
He rolls onto his side and skates the fingers of his free hand lightly along the swell of her ass, the slight ridge of her hipbone. His hand slides over her belly and up under her shirt, cupping her breast in his palm in a move that’s more possessive than sexual.
“Comfortable?” she asks dryly.
He gives her a squeeze. “You definitely know how to make a guest feel welcome, Potts.” He dips his face into her hair and inhales deeply. The weight of her on his arm and against his chest is strangely satisfying.
“Well, don’t expect this level of hospitality every time you visit.”
“I like your place,” he says, mostly because he feels as though he ought to say something. The longer he’s quiet, the more opportunity she has to suggest that it’s time for him to leave. “What is it, 1524 square feet?”
“It’s exactly that. Have you and JARVIS been stalking me?”
“I did the math downstairs. Although JARVIS does have a little crush on you.” He slides his foot over, resting it between her ankles. She shifts, and pushes against his instep with her toes-it’s an enjoyable sort of tension.
“Well, if the superhero business ever dries up, you two could always go into real estate.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
“Sometimes I wonder what it must be like, being inside your head.”
“Likewise.” It comes out sounding flip, but the truth is that he is envious of Pepper’s ability to converse easily with most people. He knows enough to grasp the concept that the world is made up of hundreds of subtle social dialects, and he is aware that he doesn’t speak any of them fluently-but Pepper does. He loves that about her.
He loves a lot of things about her.
She remarks, “I’m not a radio, Tony. Please stop trying to tune me.”
He realizes he’s been fiddling absently with her nipple, worrying it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry.”
She pats his hand, and yawns. “Don’t go to sleep.”
“I won’t,” he says, closing his eyes.
*
The next thing he knows, he’s being nudged awake. “Tony.”
“Mm?” The room is dark and he’s groggy, disoriented-he doesn’t usually sleep so deeply unless he’s been up for days. And certainly not in a strange bed.
“Get up.” The nudge becomes something more akin to a shove. He rolls over, and now everything is awash in blue light. Pepper is propped up on her elbow, looking down at him, squinting a little in the sudden brightness.
“Pepper? What-?” It takes him a second to realize where he is, and what’s going on.
“You have to go home.”
He peers past her shoulder at the clock radio. “It’s 2 a.m. I have a meeting at nine.”
“Those are the rules,” she insists, turning away from him and burrowing deeper into the covers in a vastly unsympathetic manner.
He’s awake now-some parts of him more so than others. He slides his arm around her waist. “Rules were made to be broken.”
“Not these ones.” She reaches behind her, presumably to give him another shove, and her hand accidentally brushes his burgeoning erection. “You’re going to put someone’s eye out with that,” she deadpans. But she doesn’t pull away.
“Since we’re both already up…” He lightly caresses her shoulder and down the length of her arm, and is rewarded with a soft hum. “I thought we could…” Pepper tips her head, exposing the long line of her neck; he nuzzles it obligingly. The hum becomes an open-mouthed moan, her fingers tightening on his thigh. “Yeah?”
“…okay.”
Compared to the first time, their coupling is positively leisurely. Tony is more determined than ever to take his time and show her exactly what she’s been missing, and Pepper seems content to have him in the driver’s seat. Her breathing is quick and shallow as he kisses his way down her throat and along her collarbone, paying lavish tribute to each of her breasts in turn before pausing to lightly scratch the sensitive skin of her sternum with his chin. She hisses her approval, tiny fingers flexing against his ribs.
He runs his hands and his mouth over every inch of her skin until she’s trembling beneath him, breathless with want. He finds two more of her sensitive spots: the area just above her hip, and the hollow at the small of her back.
Now that he knows she likes to hear him talk, he keeps up a steady stream of chatter: narrating what he’s doing, expounding at length on what he’s going to be doing. He kisses and coaxes her to climax once before he enters her.
There are certain advantages to having his own built-in night-light, the major one being that he gets to watch her face-the gradual escalation of her need, the exact moment when she gives in and loses control. The second time she comes, he’s so excited that it doesn’t take him long to follow.
Afterwards, he finds he can’t stop looking at her. Even at her most relaxed, there’s still something closed about her-lying on her stomach with her long arms folded and tucked against her sides, like a bird’s wings. Her bare skin is dewy with perspiration, shimmering in the soft light. He lightly traces designs on her back with a fingertip, over and over, until her eyes flutter closed and her breathing gradually slows and deepens.
When he sneaks down to use the bathroom, he thinks he’s avoided waking her. However, he emerges to find Pepper standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a bathrobe, holding a neatly folded pile of his clothes.
Once he’s dressed, she politely but firmly escorts him to the front door. It’s hard to get a read on her in the dim light, but she doesn’t seem upset or angry. In fact, apart from the casual attire and bed-head, she looks exactly the same as she always does.
“See you tomorrow,” she says pleasantly, and closes the door in his face.
Written for the Valentine's challenge at its_always_been . See master page for prompts, author's notes, and previous/subsequent chapters.
3. Stretched Out
Pepper rises from the bed, switching on the bedside lamp before disappearing down the stairs.
Tony hears the pipes working as she washes up, and then the sounds of her moving around in the living room-presumably restoring the books to their rightful places. Pepper abhors disorder in her life, which is undoubtedly why even her friends-with-benefits arrangements come with a strict set of rules.
He sits up, taking in his surroundings for the first time. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom is bright, spacious, and tidy. The walls are painted a sunny yellow, and there are some prints hanging: impressionist stuff, water lilies, reflections of clouds in lakes. Either Monet or Manet-Tony can never be bothered to remember which is which. More bookshelves: paperbacks, more well-travelled than the ones downstairs, including a surprising number of trashy romance novels. The comforter he’s sitting on is soft and plush, dark green with gold accents.
He shifts, peels back the covers, and drapes the sheet modestly around him-in spite of the circumstances, it feels somehow inappropriate to be casually nude in what is clearly Pepper’s private sanctum.
A few minutes later, she returns. She’s wearing the blue yoga pants again, and has Tony’s jeans tucked under her arm. She’s also carrying a tray: two tall glasses of ice and amber liquid, each garnished with a slice of lemon. She hands one to Tony, and sets the other on the bedside table. She looks quizzically at the sheet in his lap, but doesn’t comment, merely drapes his jeans over the trunk at the end of her bed. The message seems clear: any time you want to leave…
The iced tea is cold, and just slightly sweet; he drains the glass in three long, delicious swallows. Pepper sits beside him on the bed, facing the headboard, drawing her knees up to her chest.
He settles back on the pillows, sighs, and stretches languorously. He can’t remember the last time he felt this good without some sort of chemical enhancement. It’s similar to the kind of buzz he gets when he’s able to carry an exciting idea to a successful conclusion-like when he created the new element.
As if she’s somehow managed to follow his train of thought, Pepper reaches over and traces the flat surface of the new RT with a fingernail, then a fingertip. “What did you do with the old one?” she asks.
“Melted it for scrap.” Catching sight of her look, he adds, “It was poisoning me. Come on.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to. You made the face.”
“What face?”
“The face you make when you think I’ve made a bad decision.”
“That’s my default expression,” she deadpans, taking a sip of her drink.
He senses he’s treading on thin ice, and decides to change the subject. “So, nice pictures,” he remarks. “Manet?”
“Monet.”
“Right. Which one do I like?”
“You like Monet.”
He squints at the prints on the wall, but finds himself unable to muster much feeling about them either way. “Which one did the naked girls?”
She sighs. “Manet.”
“Then I think I like Manet.”
He trails a finger lightly over her foot and up the front of her leg. She ignores him.
“Imagine them both sketching in a train station.” Her head is cocked to one side, her tone slightly pedantic-as it always is whenever she relays Important Facts About Art. “Monet paints the trains; Manet paints the passengers. You like machines, you like movement and colour and perspective, and you don’t always like people. And you hate cats.”
He concedes defeat, and casts about for a topic about which he is somewhat more knowledgeable. “So, engineered bioluminescence: cool, or creepy?”
“Ask me on Monday.”
Swing and a miss.
“So, that sex we just had.”
“Yes?”
“On a scale of one to ten, ten being the best you’ve ever had-”
“If you need to ask, you weren’t paying attention.”
“Maybe I’m just heavily invested in personal development.”
Pepper says nothing, but he sees her lips curve ever so slightly.
“So-”
She sighs. “Tony, don’t feel that you have to stick around and make small talk-or whatever it is you’re trying to do. You got what you came here for. It’s okay if you want to go.”
He watches her, and waits.
When he doesn’t move, she shifts and stretches out, facing away from him but with her back resting against his side, her head tucked into the hollow where his arm meets his shoulder. Her arms are crossed awkwardly over her chest; her shoulders are stiff, unyielding. It’s a bit like lying next to a board, and he isn’t quite sure what-if anything-he’s supposed to do.
Tony has never really understood the appeal of cuddling. Despite the prodigious amount of sex he’s had, he is not someone to whom intimacy comes naturally. His experience of communal sleeping is limited to his days as a tomcat, and his general impression has always been an unpleasant one: he can vividly recall many instances of waking up in the night, still drunk and slightly claustrophobic, with a naked, sweaty stranger draped over him. No matter how he tried to rearrange the tangle of limbs, no matter how small an area of the bed he occupied, somehow, even in sleep, he was never quite able to escape. He remembers the agonizing slowness of the breaking dawn, his increasing frustration with the fact that this woman (whose name he usually couldn’t recall) had the nerve to still be in his house, in his bed, while he was trying to sleep.
He remembers, too, the day it finally occurred to him that he could just disappear into another part of the house until the girl (or girls) eventually left. He had a whole house full of rooms, many of them containing empty beds, and if he didn’t feel like sleeping there was always the workshop. Happy and JARVIS, and eventually Pepper, handled the details; the three of them somehow managed to work out a sort of assembly-line process, and the boss never had to get his hands dirty. It was one of the many, many ways in which it was good to be Tony Stark.
Now, with her nestled against him, he can tell when Pepper finally relaxes, her long, lean body melting into his. She’s warm, even through the thin cotton of her clothes and the sheet that’s still tucked around his hips, but not unpleasantly so.
He rolls onto his side and skates the fingers of his free hand lightly along the swell of her ass, the slight ridge of her hipbone. His hand slides over her belly and up under her shirt, cupping her breast in his palm in a move that’s more possessive than sexual.
“Comfortable?” she asks dryly.
He gives her a squeeze. “You definitely know how to make a guest feel welcome, Potts.” He dips his face into her hair and inhales deeply. The weight of her on his arm and against his chest is strangely satisfying.
“Well, don’t expect this level of hospitality every time you visit.”
“I like your place,” he says, mostly because he feels as though he ought to say something. The longer he’s quiet, the more opportunity she has to suggest that it’s time for him to leave. “What is it, 1524 square feet?”
“It’s exactly that. Have you and JARVIS been stalking me?”
“I did the math downstairs. Although JARVIS does have a little crush on you.” He slides his foot over, resting it between her ankles. She shifts, and pushes against his instep with her toes-it’s an enjoyable sort of tension.
“Well, if the superhero business ever dries up, you two could always go into real estate.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
“Sometimes I wonder what it must be like, being inside your head.”
“Likewise.” It comes out sounding flip, but the truth is that he is envious of Pepper’s ability to converse easily with most people. He knows enough to grasp the concept that the world is made up of hundreds of subtle social dialects, and he is aware that he doesn’t speak any of them fluently-but Pepper does. He loves that about her.
He loves a lot of things about her.
She remarks, “I’m not a radio, Tony. Please stop trying to tune me.”
He realizes he’s been fiddling absently with her nipple, worrying it between his thumb and forefinger. “Sorry.”
She pats his hand, and yawns. “Don’t go to sleep.”
“I won’t,” he says, closing his eyes.
*
The next thing he knows, he’s being nudged awake. “Tony.”
“Mm?” The room is dark and he’s groggy, disoriented-he doesn’t usually sleep so deeply unless he’s been up for days. And certainly not in a strange bed.
“Get up.” The nudge becomes something more akin to a shove. He rolls over, and now everything is awash in blue light. Pepper is propped up on her elbow, looking down at him, squinting a little in the sudden brightness.
“Pepper? What-?” It takes him a second to realize where he is, and what’s going on.
“You have to go home.”
He peers past her shoulder at the clock radio. “It’s 2 a.m. I have a meeting at nine.”
“Those are the rules,” she insists, turning away from him and burrowing deeper into the covers in a vastly unsympathetic manner.
He’s awake now-some parts of him more so than others. He slides his arm around her waist. “Rules were made to be broken.”
“Not these ones.” She reaches behind her, presumably to give him another shove, and her hand accidentally brushes his burgeoning erection. “You’re going to put someone’s eye out with that,” she deadpans. But she doesn’t pull away.
“Since we’re both already up…” He lightly caresses her shoulder and down the length of her arm, and is rewarded with a soft hum. “I thought we could…” Pepper tips her head, exposing the long line of her neck; he nuzzles it obligingly. The hum becomes an open-mouthed moan, her fingers tightening on his thigh. “Yeah?”
“…okay.”
Compared to the first time, their coupling is positively leisurely. Tony is more determined than ever to take his time and show her exactly what she’s been missing, and Pepper seems content to have him in the driver’s seat. Her breathing is quick and shallow as he kisses his way down her throat and along her collarbone, paying lavish tribute to each of her breasts in turn before pausing to lightly scratch the sensitive skin of her sternum with his chin. She hisses her approval, tiny fingers flexing against his ribs.
He runs his hands and his mouth over every inch of her skin until she’s trembling beneath him, breathless with want. He finds two more of her sensitive spots: the area just above her hip, and the hollow at the small of her back.
Now that he knows she likes to hear him talk, he keeps up a steady stream of chatter: narrating what he’s doing, expounding at length on what he’s going to be doing. He kisses and coaxes her to climax once before he enters her.
There are certain advantages to having his own built-in night-light, the major one being that he gets to watch her face-the gradual escalation of her need, the exact moment when she gives in and loses control. The second time she comes, he’s so excited that it doesn’t take him long to follow.
Afterwards, he finds he can’t stop looking at her. Even at her most relaxed, there’s still something closed about her-lying on her stomach with her long arms folded and tucked against her sides, like a bird’s wings. Her bare skin is dewy with perspiration, shimmering in the soft light. He lightly traces designs on her back with a fingertip, over and over, until her eyes flutter closed and her breathing gradually slows and deepens.
When he sneaks down to use the bathroom, he thinks he’s avoided waking her. However, he emerges to find Pepper standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a bathrobe, holding a neatly folded pile of his clothes.
Once he’s dressed, she politely but firmly escorts him to the front door. It’s hard to get a read on her in the dim light, but she doesn’t seem upset or angry. In fact, apart from the casual attire and bed-head, she looks exactly the same as she always does.
“See you tomorrow,” she says pleasantly, and closes the door in his face.