Looking After Rodney by nishatalitha
Title: Looking After Rodney
Author: nishatalitha
Rating: R
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Summary: Canadian Dr. Rodney McKay is a highly successful physicist who works for the US Government. Accustomed to danger from his work, the threat from super-secret organisation WRAITH exceeds any he has ever known. Now he has to trust his life and his work to Major John Sheppard, a man he has just met. However, Rodney knows that his heart is in the most danger…
Successfully guarding Canadian Dr. Rodney McKay from the super-secret organisation WRAITH is the only way for Air Force Major John Sheppard to ever be allowed to fly again. Expecting a week of boredom and an absent-minded professor, John is surprised to have his attention - and his heart - caught by the genius.
Notes: Loosely based off the blue Silhouette M&B, although none in particular. I only joined this community a few days ago, and realised there was a story wanting to be written yesterday, so I wrote until I got bored. I haven't seen Atlantis, but I have read a lot of Harlequin. I found out about this challenge a couple of days ago, got the story idea yesterday, and worked out the deadline and time difference about two hours ago.
John strode through the halls of the military facility with comfortable ease. It had been a while since he was last here, but his feet remembered the way as well as ever. Concentrating on what he knew of his team to be, he bumped into a man overloaded with books, papers, and a laptop.
“Watch where you’re going,” the man snarled as John bent to help him pick up his stuff. “I’ll have you know that I’m a very important person and not in that order, you idiot! Honestly, do I have to do this all myself?”
“I’m sorry,” John apologised, standing back and handing him the gathered papers. The man’s eyes met his, and he felt a spark of electricity go though him. He dismissed it as much as he could, because, hey, important meeting to go to, but it had been a long time since he’d felt anything but wariness and impatience at casual meetings with strangers.
The man scowled at him and walked off. John went to his meeting.
Colonel Carter looked up as John entered. “Thank you for coming, Major,” she said.
“It’s good to be here,” John agreed.
“I believe you know your team mates,” she continued.
He looked at the other people in the room. Lieutenant Aidan Ford was a capable young man with potential. John knew what he was capable of, and was happy to have the chance to work with him again. And while he had never worked directly with the mysterious Teyla Emmegan, a highly respected civilian security consultant, he had had the opportunity to work on some of her plans. “Yes, ma’am. Lieutenant. Miss Emmegan.”
“Major.”
“Teyla will be fine,” the woman said with a smile. He smiled back. Ford’s eyes flashed.
“Now I just want to reiterate how important this mission is. WRAITH are extremely insidious, and you are our last resort for guarding Dr. McKay. Do I need to emphasise how necessary McKay is for our entire programme?”
John shook his head.
“Have you had a chance to go over Teyla’s plan?”
“Yes. It should work well, assuming that Dr. McKay cooperates.”
“He’ll be here in a moment,” Carter said. “If he has any problems with it, he’ll let you know of them himself.”
The door opened, and in rushed a man with dark hair and focused blue eyes.
“Ah,” she said brightly. “And here he is. So good you could be here on time.”
“I would have been here earlier, but some idiot bumped into me before, and I had to put my notes back in order, and then I realised that I’d forgotten one of the CDs I needed and had to go back for it, and.”
“Hi,” said John. “Sorry about that before.”
Rodney glared.
John smiled at him, feeling that electric contact lance up and down his spine again.
“Good,” said Colonel Carter, “You’ve met. Dr. McKay, this is Major Sheppard, who is assigned directly to your person, Teyla Emmegan, you already know, who is directing the plan of your safety, and Lieutenant Ford, who will be trading off with the Major and assisting Teyla. Any questions?”
They took two cars back to Rodney’s apartment. For all that he was required to be organised, he’d forgotten a remarkable amount of gear. John thought that Rodney should’ve felt guiltier over this, but apparently, he’d had a brilliant idea to do with increasing the output of something that was classified, and so he had to go in straight away to test it out.
“Besides,” McKay finished, “It was all benefiting the military anyway, so they couldn’t really complain.”
“Not even to save your life,” John murmured, and the doctor appeared not to have heard him.
John drove to the apartment, valiantly resisting going over the speed limit in McKay’s gorgeous car. He kept his eyes on the road, concentrating on where they were going, and listening with half an ear to McKay talk about his health and medical issues, evidently trying to fill up the silence without any assistance from John. What was really impressive was that McKay managed to keep up the prattle for the remainder of the trip, the rest of the packing, and only trailed off into silence as they stood in the doorway to his bedroom.
John leaned towards him, and Rodney took a step backwards into the wall. He placed one hand on the wall beside him and saw his eyes dilate, and his breath start to come come faster. From this distance, he could see all the colours in Rodney’s eyes, and they weren’t just electric blue after all. There were shifting colours and darting glances and, oh yeah, he was pressing McKay into a wall, and getting on the bad side of the scientist you were guarding probably wasn’t the brightest idea.
“Dr. McKay,” he said slowly.
“Yes?” gasped Rodney.
“It will be fine. We have made all the arrangements.”
Rodney nodded convulsively, and John stepped back. He smiled, a little, infuriating smile, and picked up one of the bags and walked out. Rodney grabbed the remaining bag and followed him.
The flight was uneventful. John handled most of the interaction between Rodney (it seemed ridiculous to keep calling him Dr. Mckay all the time) and the general public, and Teyla and Ford did the rest of the work. John’s main function seemed to be to keep Rodney calm, and prevent him from either killing anyone, or decimating their character. It was a good thing he found McKay’s little diatribes amusing, anyway. He imagined they were why McKay have driven off most of his previous babysitters.
John was under no delusions of his suitability for this job. They’d chosen him because he liked math, and he wanted to fly again, and would do anything to get back into the air. Nothing could compare with flying, and he certainly wasn’t going to let some physicist prevent him from being a pilot again.
The commercial airline pilot was acceptable. John wished he was in the cockpit, because even flying a clunker like this would be better than not being able to fly again. But he was well aware that flying commercial routes would drive him insane after flying the fastest planes in the world.
He sighed wistfully. He missed flying.
“So,” began Rodney again. John wondered if he was incapable of being quiet for long stretches at a time. “What did you do to get saddled with me?”
John blinked, drawn back from the sight outside their window. Air and clouds mostly, but enough to tell him that he was in the air, not in some closed in bus or another. “What?”
“What did you do to get saddled with me?”
“What makes you think I did anything?”
“Because I’ve driven off every other protector they’ve loaded on me, and there’s a 87.23% chance that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by now. I’m really not a very nice person, you know. I yell at my scientists a lot, and at anyone who’s stupider than I am, and since I’m a genius, that’s a lot of people, and all the other people they’ve assigned to guard me have left within a few days.
“Also, you’re Air Force. They’ve gone through the other services first, since they’re more used to working on the ground, unless you’re a mechanic, in which case they wouldn’t trust me with you.”
“Even pilots are required to be combat capable on the ground,” John said calmly, deflecting him.
“Well, of course they have to be,” Rodney said irritably. “They can’t be in the air all the time, can they?”
John flashed him a grin. “Most of them would if they could.”
“Oh,” said Rodney.
John wondered if he’d given away something that he didn’t mean to. He changed the topic with the first thing that came into his head. “Besides, I like math.”
Rodney snorted.
John shrugged. “They thought that might help.”
The place where Teyla had arranged for them to stay was remote, at the end of another long drive. In winter, this place would be packed with skiers and other winter tourists, but for now, in late summer that wasn’t quite autumn, they had it to themselves. There was only one road into the camp, and they’d taken over the most remote pair of cabins for the stay.
John surveyed the area. A nice clear space of nearly a hundred metres surrounded the cabins, before leading onto the next one, even further away. He looked at Teyla. “They should be good.”
She nodded. “I stayed here when I was first acclimatising to America. In summer, this is a family resort, catering to multiple family groups, and in winter, large groups come and stay here regardless. There isn’t anyone in the adjoining cabin, and I thought that Ford and I would stay there, to make sure no one actually comes in.” She gestured at the nearest cabins to theirs. “Also, those ones there aren’t actually rented to anyone at this stage, and the owner has promised to inform me as soon as someone does. It’ll be easy enough to patrol around here, and anyone new will be noticed.”
John nodded as Ford came up to join them. “I’m still unsure about being so far from civilisation,” he said. “More people, bigger crowds, easier to blend in.”
“Like Dr. McKay could ever blend in,” said Ford, and Teyla nodded.
“I took that all into account, Major. Dr. McKay is… noticeable, and pattern of attack used by WRAITH shows that they have a higher concentration of attacks in crowded areas.” She paused before adding the clincher. “Dr. McKay ran the numbers for me, and is quite happy with this.”
John nodded. “Okay then. You two take the second cabin, and I’ll go make sure that McKay is settling in.”
“Better you than me, sir,” said Ford.
John stepped right up into the young Lieutenant’s face, as Teyla placed a gentle arm on his shoulders. “When you’re guarding someone, Lieutenant, you don’t think about them in a derogatory manner. Otherwise you start not caring, and you have to care in order for them to survive. They are under your protection, and you do whatever you have to to keep them safe. Is that understood?”
Ford saluted. “Yes, sir!”
Teyla dropped her hand from John’s shoulder.
“Dismissed!”
Ford marched off, Teyla following more slowly.
John cooked dinner without any citrus, and half way through, Rodney wandered in, drawn by his nose.
“You can cook?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes,” said John stiffly. “I can not, if you’d rather. If I’m disturbing you.”
“No, no,” said Rodney hastily. “I forget to eat sometimes, did I mention that? And if someone’s cooking and making me eat, then things are going to go better. Besides, I’ve found a temporary blockage, and having something to eat before going back to work might help me overcome it.”
“That can help sometimes,” John said agreeably.
Dinner was surprisingly companionable, Rodney lessening off on the sarcastic remarks slightly, and John and Ford trading stories about previous times they’d worked together.
Since he’d cooked, he delegated Ford to the dishes and followed Rodney upstairs to watch him work, pretending to read War and Peace.
The days rapidly settled into a pattern. He would wake up, move around, and the smell of coffee would wake Rodney. Rodney would then work, John would bring him lunch, and there would be more working in the afternoon. He found himself growing more and more fascinated by Rodney’s brilliance, his tendency to talk when he was nervous, and yell at some chap called Zelenka over the phone. John felt quite sorry for Zelenka sometimes, but not after Rodney had it on speakerphone once, and he heard Zelenka giving as good as he got.
It was comfortable, and then Teyla reported some strangers in the woods who didn’t appear to be deer hunters, and weren’t booked into their lodge, so John found himself sleeping in Rodney’s rooms, on the theory that two people might confuse them and give them both a vital extra second of response time, and that was another kind of torture completely.
“I can’t sleep with you sitting there staring at me,” Rodney had snapped the first night he’d slept in there, and they’d ended up sharing the bed. It was a king size, so they weren’t about to bump into each other, but there was an art to sleeping with someone you weren’t actually sleeping with, and it was clear that Rodney had never quite mastered this.
John woke up every morning with Rodney wrapped around him, and had to wait for Rodney to wake up, because extricating himself the first morning had been really difficult, and he was only human after all. It was too hard to tear himself away from the small patches of skin brought into contact by their pyjamas shifting around, too hard to leave the warm body beside his that seemed to really want him to stay.
John hadn’t felt wanted like this since Chaya, and that had all gone bad, which was why he was here now. But it wasn’t until the day that he woke up with Rodney drooling over his chest, and found it kind of cute, actually, that he realised he was falling in love with Rodney. That morning, he didn’t linger in bed, but left as soon as possible.
He entered into a cycle of flirting with Rodney, and being depressed because clearly Rodney was a genius and would want to hook up with someone who was at least as smart as he was, and not in the military.
It had been a cool day, and bored, John decided that it was a cool enough day to light the fire. Rodney had come downstairs, drawn by the warmth and the flames, and John had sat on the couch next to him, and watched him work. At length, Rodney put the stuff down.
“You shouldn’t do this, you know,” he said, yawning and stretching, arms way above his head. John appreciated the view.
“Why not?” he asked, lazily, stretching his feet out.
“Because it’s nice, and I get distracted.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being distracted by a wood fire,” John objected. “You work too hard, Rodney.”
“I didn’t say it was the fire that distracted me,” said Rodney.
John’s gaze flicked over to him. “Really?” he asked.
“You will persist in roaming around in bare feet, and your hair is remarkably messy, which I should find disturbing that I find it appealing, but I don’t, and you give the most remarkably backrubs, and there’s your skin and warmth in the morning.”
“Rodney,” said John, and leaned in to kiss him.
Author: nishatalitha
Rating: R
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Summary: Canadian Dr. Rodney McKay is a highly successful physicist who works for the US Government. Accustomed to danger from his work, the threat from super-secret organisation WRAITH exceeds any he has ever known. Now he has to trust his life and his work to Major John Sheppard, a man he has just met. However, Rodney knows that his heart is in the most danger…
Successfully guarding Canadian Dr. Rodney McKay from the super-secret organisation WRAITH is the only way for Air Force Major John Sheppard to ever be allowed to fly again. Expecting a week of boredom and an absent-minded professor, John is surprised to have his attention - and his heart - caught by the genius.
Notes: Loosely based off the blue Silhouette M&B, although none in particular. I only joined this community a few days ago, and realised there was a story wanting to be written yesterday, so I wrote until I got bored. I haven't seen Atlantis, but I have read a lot of Harlequin. I found out about this challenge a couple of days ago, got the story idea yesterday, and worked out the deadline and time difference about two hours ago.
John strode through the halls of the military facility with comfortable ease. It had been a while since he was last here, but his feet remembered the way as well as ever. Concentrating on what he knew of his team to be, he bumped into a man overloaded with books, papers, and a laptop.
“Watch where you’re going,” the man snarled as John bent to help him pick up his stuff. “I’ll have you know that I’m a very important person and not in that order, you idiot! Honestly, do I have to do this all myself?”
“I’m sorry,” John apologised, standing back and handing him the gathered papers. The man’s eyes met his, and he felt a spark of electricity go though him. He dismissed it as much as he could, because, hey, important meeting to go to, but it had been a long time since he’d felt anything but wariness and impatience at casual meetings with strangers.
The man scowled at him and walked off. John went to his meeting.
Colonel Carter looked up as John entered. “Thank you for coming, Major,” she said.
“It’s good to be here,” John agreed.
“I believe you know your team mates,” she continued.
He looked at the other people in the room. Lieutenant Aidan Ford was a capable young man with potential. John knew what he was capable of, and was happy to have the chance to work with him again. And while he had never worked directly with the mysterious Teyla Emmegan, a highly respected civilian security consultant, he had had the opportunity to work on some of her plans. “Yes, ma’am. Lieutenant. Miss Emmegan.”
“Major.”
“Teyla will be fine,” the woman said with a smile. He smiled back. Ford’s eyes flashed.
“Now I just want to reiterate how important this mission is. WRAITH are extremely insidious, and you are our last resort for guarding Dr. McKay. Do I need to emphasise how necessary McKay is for our entire programme?”
John shook his head.
“Have you had a chance to go over Teyla’s plan?”
“Yes. It should work well, assuming that Dr. McKay cooperates.”
“He’ll be here in a moment,” Carter said. “If he has any problems with it, he’ll let you know of them himself.”
The door opened, and in rushed a man with dark hair and focused blue eyes.
“Ah,” she said brightly. “And here he is. So good you could be here on time.”
“I would have been here earlier, but some idiot bumped into me before, and I had to put my notes back in order, and then I realised that I’d forgotten one of the CDs I needed and had to go back for it, and.”
“Hi,” said John. “Sorry about that before.”
Rodney glared.
John smiled at him, feeling that electric contact lance up and down his spine again.
“Good,” said Colonel Carter, “You’ve met. Dr. McKay, this is Major Sheppard, who is assigned directly to your person, Teyla Emmegan, you already know, who is directing the plan of your safety, and Lieutenant Ford, who will be trading off with the Major and assisting Teyla. Any questions?”
They took two cars back to Rodney’s apartment. For all that he was required to be organised, he’d forgotten a remarkable amount of gear. John thought that Rodney should’ve felt guiltier over this, but apparently, he’d had a brilliant idea to do with increasing the output of something that was classified, and so he had to go in straight away to test it out.
“Besides,” McKay finished, “It was all benefiting the military anyway, so they couldn’t really complain.”
“Not even to save your life,” John murmured, and the doctor appeared not to have heard him.
John drove to the apartment, valiantly resisting going over the speed limit in McKay’s gorgeous car. He kept his eyes on the road, concentrating on where they were going, and listening with half an ear to McKay talk about his health and medical issues, evidently trying to fill up the silence without any assistance from John. What was really impressive was that McKay managed to keep up the prattle for the remainder of the trip, the rest of the packing, and only trailed off into silence as they stood in the doorway to his bedroom.
John leaned towards him, and Rodney took a step backwards into the wall. He placed one hand on the wall beside him and saw his eyes dilate, and his breath start to come come faster. From this distance, he could see all the colours in Rodney’s eyes, and they weren’t just electric blue after all. There were shifting colours and darting glances and, oh yeah, he was pressing McKay into a wall, and getting on the bad side of the scientist you were guarding probably wasn’t the brightest idea.
“Dr. McKay,” he said slowly.
“Yes?” gasped Rodney.
“It will be fine. We have made all the arrangements.”
Rodney nodded convulsively, and John stepped back. He smiled, a little, infuriating smile, and picked up one of the bags and walked out. Rodney grabbed the remaining bag and followed him.
The flight was uneventful. John handled most of the interaction between Rodney (it seemed ridiculous to keep calling him Dr. Mckay all the time) and the general public, and Teyla and Ford did the rest of the work. John’s main function seemed to be to keep Rodney calm, and prevent him from either killing anyone, or decimating their character. It was a good thing he found McKay’s little diatribes amusing, anyway. He imagined they were why McKay have driven off most of his previous babysitters.
John was under no delusions of his suitability for this job. They’d chosen him because he liked math, and he wanted to fly again, and would do anything to get back into the air. Nothing could compare with flying, and he certainly wasn’t going to let some physicist prevent him from being a pilot again.
The commercial airline pilot was acceptable. John wished he was in the cockpit, because even flying a clunker like this would be better than not being able to fly again. But he was well aware that flying commercial routes would drive him insane after flying the fastest planes in the world.
He sighed wistfully. He missed flying.
“So,” began Rodney again. John wondered if he was incapable of being quiet for long stretches at a time. “What did you do to get saddled with me?”
John blinked, drawn back from the sight outside their window. Air and clouds mostly, but enough to tell him that he was in the air, not in some closed in bus or another. “What?”
“What did you do to get saddled with me?”
“What makes you think I did anything?”
“Because I’ve driven off every other protector they’ve loaded on me, and there’s a 87.23% chance that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by now. I’m really not a very nice person, you know. I yell at my scientists a lot, and at anyone who’s stupider than I am, and since I’m a genius, that’s a lot of people, and all the other people they’ve assigned to guard me have left within a few days.
“Also, you’re Air Force. They’ve gone through the other services first, since they’re more used to working on the ground, unless you’re a mechanic, in which case they wouldn’t trust me with you.”
“Even pilots are required to be combat capable on the ground,” John said calmly, deflecting him.
“Well, of course they have to be,” Rodney said irritably. “They can’t be in the air all the time, can they?”
John flashed him a grin. “Most of them would if they could.”
“Oh,” said Rodney.
John wondered if he’d given away something that he didn’t mean to. He changed the topic with the first thing that came into his head. “Besides, I like math.”
Rodney snorted.
John shrugged. “They thought that might help.”
The place where Teyla had arranged for them to stay was remote, at the end of another long drive. In winter, this place would be packed with skiers and other winter tourists, but for now, in late summer that wasn’t quite autumn, they had it to themselves. There was only one road into the camp, and they’d taken over the most remote pair of cabins for the stay.
John surveyed the area. A nice clear space of nearly a hundred metres surrounded the cabins, before leading onto the next one, even further away. He looked at Teyla. “They should be good.”
She nodded. “I stayed here when I was first acclimatising to America. In summer, this is a family resort, catering to multiple family groups, and in winter, large groups come and stay here regardless. There isn’t anyone in the adjoining cabin, and I thought that Ford and I would stay there, to make sure no one actually comes in.” She gestured at the nearest cabins to theirs. “Also, those ones there aren’t actually rented to anyone at this stage, and the owner has promised to inform me as soon as someone does. It’ll be easy enough to patrol around here, and anyone new will be noticed.”
John nodded as Ford came up to join them. “I’m still unsure about being so far from civilisation,” he said. “More people, bigger crowds, easier to blend in.”
“Like Dr. McKay could ever blend in,” said Ford, and Teyla nodded.
“I took that all into account, Major. Dr. McKay is… noticeable, and pattern of attack used by WRAITH shows that they have a higher concentration of attacks in crowded areas.” She paused before adding the clincher. “Dr. McKay ran the numbers for me, and is quite happy with this.”
John nodded. “Okay then. You two take the second cabin, and I’ll go make sure that McKay is settling in.”
“Better you than me, sir,” said Ford.
John stepped right up into the young Lieutenant’s face, as Teyla placed a gentle arm on his shoulders. “When you’re guarding someone, Lieutenant, you don’t think about them in a derogatory manner. Otherwise you start not caring, and you have to care in order for them to survive. They are under your protection, and you do whatever you have to to keep them safe. Is that understood?”
Ford saluted. “Yes, sir!”
Teyla dropped her hand from John’s shoulder.
“Dismissed!”
Ford marched off, Teyla following more slowly.
John cooked dinner without any citrus, and half way through, Rodney wandered in, drawn by his nose.
“You can cook?” he asked in surprise.
“Yes,” said John stiffly. “I can not, if you’d rather. If I’m disturbing you.”
“No, no,” said Rodney hastily. “I forget to eat sometimes, did I mention that? And if someone’s cooking and making me eat, then things are going to go better. Besides, I’ve found a temporary blockage, and having something to eat before going back to work might help me overcome it.”
“That can help sometimes,” John said agreeably.
Dinner was surprisingly companionable, Rodney lessening off on the sarcastic remarks slightly, and John and Ford trading stories about previous times they’d worked together.
Since he’d cooked, he delegated Ford to the dishes and followed Rodney upstairs to watch him work, pretending to read War and Peace.
The days rapidly settled into a pattern. He would wake up, move around, and the smell of coffee would wake Rodney. Rodney would then work, John would bring him lunch, and there would be more working in the afternoon. He found himself growing more and more fascinated by Rodney’s brilliance, his tendency to talk when he was nervous, and yell at some chap called Zelenka over the phone. John felt quite sorry for Zelenka sometimes, but not after Rodney had it on speakerphone once, and he heard Zelenka giving as good as he got.
It was comfortable, and then Teyla reported some strangers in the woods who didn’t appear to be deer hunters, and weren’t booked into their lodge, so John found himself sleeping in Rodney’s rooms, on the theory that two people might confuse them and give them both a vital extra second of response time, and that was another kind of torture completely.
“I can’t sleep with you sitting there staring at me,” Rodney had snapped the first night he’d slept in there, and they’d ended up sharing the bed. It was a king size, so they weren’t about to bump into each other, but there was an art to sleeping with someone you weren’t actually sleeping with, and it was clear that Rodney had never quite mastered this.
John woke up every morning with Rodney wrapped around him, and had to wait for Rodney to wake up, because extricating himself the first morning had been really difficult, and he was only human after all. It was too hard to tear himself away from the small patches of skin brought into contact by their pyjamas shifting around, too hard to leave the warm body beside his that seemed to really want him to stay.
John hadn’t felt wanted like this since Chaya, and that had all gone bad, which was why he was here now. But it wasn’t until the day that he woke up with Rodney drooling over his chest, and found it kind of cute, actually, that he realised he was falling in love with Rodney. That morning, he didn’t linger in bed, but left as soon as possible.
He entered into a cycle of flirting with Rodney, and being depressed because clearly Rodney was a genius and would want to hook up with someone who was at least as smart as he was, and not in the military.
It had been a cool day, and bored, John decided that it was a cool enough day to light the fire. Rodney had come downstairs, drawn by the warmth and the flames, and John had sat on the couch next to him, and watched him work. At length, Rodney put the stuff down.
“You shouldn’t do this, you know,” he said, yawning and stretching, arms way above his head. John appreciated the view.
“Why not?” he asked, lazily, stretching his feet out.
“Because it’s nice, and I get distracted.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being distracted by a wood fire,” John objected. “You work too hard, Rodney.”
“I didn’t say it was the fire that distracted me,” said Rodney.
John’s gaze flicked over to him. “Really?” he asked.
“You will persist in roaming around in bare feet, and your hair is remarkably messy, which I should find disturbing that I find it appealing, but I don’t, and you give the most remarkably backrubs, and there’s your skin and warmth in the morning.”
“Rodney,” said John, and leaned in to kiss him.