The Trouble with Barney (6/9)
Title: The Trouble with Barney
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Author's Notes: Ok this heats up a little here, so just stand warned. Hopefully it's not so awful that you can't stand it...
Disclaimer: Still don't belong to me.
Chapter 6: If you need a volunteer to fill in your gap, I'm willing and able - any day of the week.
Lily frowns and sits on the apartment building’s steps.
“Uh, ok hang on. Start from the beginning,” Lily prompts gently.
Right, Robin thinks, the beginning…
And so she does.
She explains the bet- ignoring Lily’s disapproving grimace - and she explains Molly and Rita and Bambingeryn and she explains her argument with Barney and how he’d criticized her relationship with Ted and how he’d called her pathetic and how much that had for some reason upset her and she explains the way she’d felt angry with him and the way she’d felt irritated by him and the way she’d been completely unable to stop thinking about him for the past week and a half.
She explains all sorts of things without even pausing to breathe… but then she fills her lungs.
Because now she’s gotten to tonight and whatever the hell just happened and she has to find a way to explain it. So she plants her hands on her hips and she looks down at the sidewalk beneath her and she tries.
She really, really tries.
Earlier, approximately 5 PM
She’d decided in the middle of her sleepless night last night to apologize. She’s still a little unclear as to what exactly she’s apologizing for, but she knows for certain an apology is in order. Probably for bringing those girls to his place, and for the poker game yesterday, and maybe even for agreeing to the bet in the first place - although the childish part of her mentally insists that’s his fault, he came up with the bet after all, she just agreed to it.
Anyway, it’s not important. She thinks she should apologize. Bury the hatchet. Shake hands and buy him a beer and move on the way that civilized people do. They can just pretend this never happened.
Please, god, she hopes they can pretend this never happened.
She has no idea what to do with the nagging voice in the back of her mind that tells her this won’t go away that easily, tells her that this is an actual thing she has to deal with, that life isn’t predictable or controllable and these things happen for Teddish reasons like the stars aligning or the planet tipping on its axis. She has no idea what to tell that part of herself to get it to shut the hell up. She has no idea what to do with these feelings she’s apparently developing and the way Barney seems to look at her.
She literally has no idea what to do. Literally.
Marshall calls late in the afternoon and tells her they’re all at MacLaren’s and to come downstairs. It’s almost five o’clock and she could use a beer, so she figures this is as good a time as any to be the bigger man, to tell Barney that she’s sorry, to get this the hell over with.
She dresses for the occasion.
She curls her hair with a curling iron and she puts on a dress that shows a little leg and she pulls on her three hundred dollar boots because she needs whatever security and bravery she can get. But when she looks at herself in the mirror she frowns because she still looks shaken… Confused…Worried that maybe something’s gone horribly wrong.
Maybe Barney has changed.
Maybe everything is her fault because she wasn’t paying any attention.
Maybe a cute dress and heels won’t fix any of that, and maybe an apology won’t fix it either.
She really hates this part. This introspection, guilty conscience part that feels distinctly female and completely foreign and makes her want to take her gun up onto the roof to shoot some cans or pigeons or anything that gets in her way.
But Robin doesn’t go up to the roof, instead she goes downstairs.
Instead she rehearses what she’ll say, how she’ll laugh self-deprecatingly and tell him she knows this was weird and could they just go back to normal? How she’ll say she didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, and he’ll scoff at her and tell her he’s too awesome to have hurt feelings and he’ll wink at her and smile and she’ll…
Well, whatever, she thinks.
It’ll be fine.
She takes a deep breath and she pushes into MacLaren’s and the first person she sees is Ted, leaning against the bar with his wallet out and a half-grin on his face as Carl hands him a shot.
“Jesus,” Robin comments, looking around at the crowd as she steps up beside him, “It’s like Canada day in here.” Ted offers her a blank look that she’d admittedly expected and something in her stomach loosens, feels more comfortable, because no matter what happens she can always count on him to chastise her maple tree roots.
“You mean it’s like the Fourth of July?” he corrects. She rolls her eyes.
“What’s going on?” she wonders and Ted shrugs and nods toward the television in the corner, where stats are being listed and teams are being talked about and it’s clear Robin missed some kind of American sporting event memo. She hums and nods and looks around the bar thoughtfully.
She doesn’t see Barney.
But, really, she’s too afraid of finding him to look very hard.
“Hey,” she asks eventually, instructing herself to man up and grow cojones and act like a person instead of a mouse or an elephant or something else easily frightened, “is Barney here?” Ted shoots her a warning glance that says something like I meant what I said yesterday before he points over her shoulder back toward the door. She turns and looks and that something that had loosened in her stomach tightens up again because Barney’s at the far end of the bar. Making out with another girl.
Or making out with a girl. Not another girl. Just a…um…
Goddamnit. She knows this feeling. She’s felt this like three times before and the last time Lily was there to identify it for her right before she’d gone crazy and followed a phantom Ted Mosby around town, only to feel like a total jackass when it turned out to be Barney. She knows this feeling like the back of her hand.
Robin Scherbatsky is jealous.
She shouldn’t be jealous, but she is, and nothing makes sense anymore.
She realizes belatedly that while she’s watching Barney and his whorish make-out partner, Ted is watching Robin, and so she tries to cover the green in her expression with impressed indifference.
“A little early for that, isn’t it?” she mumbles and Ted just stares at her.
“Seriously,” he mumbles, “wake up, Robin,” and that catches her off guard, makes her lick her lips in discomfort and lean forward asking Carl for a scotch straight up to help cool her off a little. Or to help numb her from the neck up. Either way.
While she stands there drinking and drifting along with the mindless conversations between Lily and Marshall and Ted, responding appropriately when she’s addressed, her eyes keep straying to Barney and the redhead he’s molesting, unable to take her mind off it and wondering why the hell she ever thought she should apologize. It seems less and less like the thing to do as the minutes click by and Barney keeps molesting and Robin keeps sneaking glances and mentally having to stop herself from fidgeting and huffing dramatic sighs.
Barney is clearly fine without her apology, she reasons. Barney seems completely unaffected by whatever this thing is that’s flipped her world on end and she can’t help but wonder what the hell she’d been upset about…
Or what the hell she is upset about.
Not that she’s upset.
She’s just…
Her eyes are pulled toward him as the redhead excuses herself and leans over to some chick wearing a baby blue sweater asking if she can bum a cigarette, then heading out the door and leaving Barney alone to order another drink. She waits for him to follow the girl or to grin to himself or to grin over at Ted or Marshall and give somebody a victorious, long-distance high five, but he doesn’t.
He just sits there.
He just sits there looking miles away and unhappy and he drops his face into his hands and sighs, and it seems like his thoughts are too heavy for his shoulders to carry…
It makes Robin forget that she’s angry. He looks genuinely upset. She pushes away from the little spot on the bar she’s been occupying and crosses over to him and she musters up some form of courage, impulsively deciding to bite the bullet and suck the poison from the wound.
When she leans against the bar next to him he looks up, surprised, and then he rolls his eyes and she feels like someone has slapped her.
“Barney,” she says quietly. He plasters on a cocky facial expression and she resents him for it. “I just wanted to say that I’m um…”
“Robin I’m glad you’re here,” he cuts in and she feels something deflate to make room for her anger, again. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you to, uh, to…” he grabs the shoulder of someone who’s just walking in and whips the guy around to face them, “this guy.” He pats the stranger on the back in a falsely-familiar gesture and the guy gives them both an odd look, reaching down to adjust his belt buckle self-consciously. Robin sighs. “Sir,” Barney says brightly, “haaaaaave you met Robin?”
She thinks this is about the bet, or maybe about him keeping her apology at arm's length, and then she thinks... Is he kidding? She thinks he has to be kidding.
“I don’t want to do this, Barney,” she responds, her voice hard-edged and full of unfortunate emotion. Barney clicks his tongue dramatically and sweeps his hand through the air.
“What do you mean? Look at this guy,” he says before turning toward the stranger and talking out of the side of his mouth, “To be honest you could go a little less crazy on the self-tanning lotion, pal, but hey what do I know? The point is this young lady could use a man for the night. Interested?”
With every word Robin feels her muscles tighten and her shock expand and her disbelief that she was actually thinking of apologizing grow to be twice its original size.
“Just stop it,” she requests and Barney squints at her, his false brightness starting to evaporate.
“Excuse me?” he questions. She stands up straight and she cocks her head at him, crossing her arms and being sure not to glance toward the rest of their friends because she does not want to think about whether or not they have an audience.
“Stop. I don’t want to do this,” she repeats, thinking of the slut he was just mauling like five minutes ago. Jealousy rears it's ugly head and she keeps talking. “I don’t pick up guys in bars and I don’t hook up with people and I don’t screw around with people’s feelings just to get my rocks off.” It rolls off her tongue without much thought at all and she recognizes the lie in it. She recognizes the leftover resentment from almost a year ago hiding in between the words, and she had no idea he could turn her into this type of girl. She watches as the insults register on his face, watches as he tries to figure her out and tries to come up with an appropriate response, and she doesn’t really notice when the stranger walks away, understandably confused.
Barney gets up off of his stool without taking his eyes off of her and he takes a step forward, leaning down so his mouth is next to her ear and so that she can feel his breath slide down the side of her neck, tripping along her nerve endings and making her vision hazy and her breath hitch somewhere between her lungs and her throat.
“I don’t remember you having rocks, Robin.”
He whispers it into her ear and it should sound ridiculous, but god it doesn’t, and he lets his hand slip down low enough that the other patrons can’t see it, his palm landing on her thigh, his fingers sliding just underneath the hem of her skirt. Her breath gushes out and she leans in toward him, her hips drifting closer to his even though she wishes that they wouldn’t.
“I don’t think what’s her name would like this,” Robin accuses, trying to remind herself of things, trying to ground both of them, “She comes back here and sees this, your chances are blown.”
“I don’t care,” he tells her gruffly and she hears the slice of emotion in it and she feels her chest get warm and tight and she knows this is way more than she’d bargained for because he’s picking her over a stranger and her eyes start to water and her gaze locks on his and it’s like he’s inside of her…
And it’s way too much.
So she pushes him away and she turns and she elbows her way to the women’s bathroom.
She ignores the tears in her eyes until she’s staring at them, the bathroom mirror scratched and appropriately jaded.
She coaches her reflection to cool off. This is no big deal, she tells herself. Barney’s always been inappropriate and crude and that’s all that was so there’s no point in getting upset or affected. Barney, she assures herself, is still Barney. Still crass. Still practically without emotion. Still awesome and suit-clad and cocky and cool. Barney is still definitely Barney and nothing has changed and nothing’s the matter and everything is going to be just fine.
Except she knows a liar when she sees one and she has that certain look on her face.
She stares herself down.
He isn’t the same, she admits finally, exhaling a long uneven breath. He’s changed over the past few months and it’s at least partially her fault and she can’t ignore it when he looks at her and she can’t ignore it when he challenges her and she definitely can’t ignore it when his hand is on her thigh, practically burning right through her skin.
Barney has changed, and the real problem is that she thinks that maybe she likes it.
The door swings open, then, and - as if the thought had conjured him up - Barney Stinson walks through, seeming somehow steady and sure and all of the things that she isn’t as he turns and locks the door behind him.
“This is the ladies room,” she mumbles. He nods and tilts his head at her.
She stares at his reflection in the mirror and she tries to catch her breath and pretend she isn’t freaking out.
“Yeah,” he sighs. “So, which one of us goes first?” he asks and she frowns and furrows her brow at his reflected cool exterior because she doesn’t know what he means. “I assume we’re about to argue,” he expands, “so which one of us goes first?”
She clenches her jaw and thinks about it for a second, thinks about all of the things she’d like to say to him, all the things she’d like to chastise him for… and all of the ways she wants to apologize…
And then she bends down and she washes her hands because she needs something else to do.
“Stop it,” he orders quietly, his voice like granite or steel, and she raises an eyebrow, irritated and unwilling to give in. “Every time we get close to discussing whatever this actually is I act like an ass and you avoid it by doing stupid stuff like this, so just…stop it.”
“Well,” and she shrugs helplessly, trying to think of something to say, “stop…” she grapples for words and he watches her, calm, waiting for her to finish. She shrugs again. “Stop staring at me all the time,” she counters stupidly.
“Stop pretending you don’t like it,” he answers, taking two steps toward her. She turns the water off and leans forward, bracing her hands on the counter.
“Stop acting like this,” she mutters honestly, her voice light on top of her breath and her eyes veering down to stare at the drops of water drying in the sink, “Go back to being awesome and sleeping with a different girl every night.”
“Stop telling me what to do,” he shoots back.
She isn’t looking - jesus, she can’t look - but she knows he hasn’t stopped walking toward her and there’s something predatory in the air and she isn’t sure how to regain control over any of this. She knows if she looked up at him he would be watching her with that hungry heated stare and she would absolutely melt. She’s not sure when that started happening, but it’s pretty much guaranteed by now.
His hands land low, then, against her hips and his voice says her name soft like freshly woven silk against her ears. She exhales, loud, pained like maybe he’s killing her somehow, and she arches her back so her hips are pressed against his because she honestly can’t help herself. His hands feel heavy on her and she reaches for his wrists.
“Stop touching me,” she pleads feebly. He chuckles into her hair.
“Please, Scherbatsky,” he breathes, “I know a lie when I hear one.”
And he pauses, waiting, giving her a chance to tell him he’s wrong, but when she’s quiet instead and the words don’t even start to form on her tongue his mouth settles hot on the space where her neck meets her shoulder and she remembers this, god she remembers the heat of it, the way it burns from the inside out and the way he knows exactly how to take it painfully slow. His tongue brushes light against her before disappearing again.
“Don’t call me Scherbatsky,” she says, and even she doesn’t believe herself because there’s too much air in her voice and too much blood in her veins and too much sizzle on her skin as his hands push down further and drag her hips across his, deliberate, full of intention.
“Scherbatsky,” he exhales, grinning, and her fingers go white against his wrists, gripping tight as his teeth scrape lazy against her ear, his breath still painting invisible hot red lines against her and making her lungs work double time in response. His fingers pull her dress into his fists and she can feel it hike up. She can feel the smooth fabric of his suit against the backs of her thighs and she can feel his uneven breathing in the core of her.
She can feel this in the core of her.
“Barney,” she sighs, some warning flooding into the consonants and vowels. “Please don’t. If…” she swallows, “If you don’t mean it, just don’t…” she forces out, and she’s not sure where it comes from, how she knows that it’s the right thing to say but she can tell by the way he slumps forward against her, the way some of the tension leaves his muscles and the way he doesn’t back up but doesn’t push her, either, that he knows what she means even though she maybe doesn’t, yet.
He exhales.
His lips dip forward and press against her jaw, soft, easy, simple.
Her arm has a mind of its own, snaking up so her hand wraps around the back of his neck, holding him to her, dancing with the collar of his shirt. She leans back against him and she waits. He kisses her cheek like maybe they’re behind the locker room of the hockey rink and she holds her breath.
“I always…” he sniffs and he licks his lips, “I always mean it, Robin,” he tells her and her eyes leak the water they’ve been holding in and she can’t do anything about it. “Do you get that? I always mean it with you.”
She turns and presses her mouth against his and she swallows the last of the sentence.
God, why does she care? Why does she even bother caring if Barney Stinson, Joe One Night Stand, means it when he touches her? How did she end up caring so much?
But she does care and she thinks he can tell when she lets her mouth fall open against him and when her arms slide down beneath his suit coat to wrap around his back, sighing when his hands reach up and smooth against her face. She thinks he can tell when she settles back against the counter and pushes her fingers through his hair. She thinks, certainly, he has to be able to tell when she sighs his name as his hands slip under her skirt and up past her hip bones.
He has to be able to tell.
She’s feverish because of him and she’s sure she isn’t the first woman to want to beg him for mercy, but she likes to think she’s the first woman who’s pulled this particular look onto his face…this worshipping look, this look like any second he might drop down onto his knees.
She kisses him.
He pushes into her and she kisses him and this wasn’t ever what she was expecting because life isn’t supposed to happen like this, all unplanned and unpredictable and Armani-clad and confusing.
This isn’t how her life is supposed to happen.
But it’s happening this way, and she’s leaning into it and wrapping her arms around it and grabbing on to fists full of it and calling it by name. This has a name, she thinks. It’s something with a name.
“Robin,” Barney says against her skin, and she’s pulled under and down and, god, she’s definitely, definitely begging him for mercy.
He drops down onto his knees.
Once they’re both breathless and brainless and coming down from some high, like once she’s got both feet on the ground, she looks at him and she feels herself shake her head, dazed, because…
She still wants to beg him for mercy…
Still.
He’s stopped touching her and she’s still begging him for mercy.
Her breath starts to come in panicked pants and she steps back away from him and turns to the sink and she smoothes out her dress and she washes her hands because she needs something else to do. The silence hangs in the air.
“Robin, hey come on,” he pleads, readjusting his suit and looking at her in the mirror. “We should…”
And she nods at him because she doesn’t want to talk about it.
She nods and then she shakes her head, dazed and shocked and almost unwilling to believe that this is happening.
“Oh my god,” she mutters. He sighs, and she meets his stare in the reflection, giving him a pointed and stunned kind of look because she knows this feeling…she’s had this feeling before…she knows the tugging and the tightening in her stomach and her chest and - she’s not sure why it’s taken her this long - but she knows it has a name. “Oh my god.”
And she pushes past him and she fumbles with the lock on the door and she shoves her way out into the bar and she hopes and prays nobody can tell that it feels like he said jump and she did, from ten thousand fucking feet.
There’s some big game playing on television that Robin doesn’t care about and it’s turned the bar rowdy and loud, crammed full of neighborhood sports fans.
Robin has to push her way back from the bathroom, but she can’t hear any of the noise.
The blood is rushing in her ears and her eyes are full of water and she keeps coming back to this.
This Stinson-induced insanity.
She grabs Lily’s arm, hard, and drags her outside onto the sidewalk, which is blessedly cool and blessedly empty and noticeably quiet compared to inside. Lily wrenches her arm free, annoyed, and rubs at her elbow.
“Jeez, what is the matter with you?” she asks.
Robin shakes her head and tries to blink away the mist in her vision, shifting on her feet in discomfort until Lily’s irritation vanishes because she’s perceptive enough to notice that nothing is the same.
Nothing is the same.
“I just had sex with Barney,” Robin declares. “And I think I…”
She covers her face with her hands.
“Oh my god,” she breathes, “I just had sex with Barney.”
(Chapter 7)
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Author's Notes: Ok this heats up a little here, so just stand warned. Hopefully it's not so awful that you can't stand it...
Disclaimer: Still don't belong to me.
Chapter 6: If you need a volunteer to fill in your gap, I'm willing and able - any day of the week.
Lily frowns and sits on the apartment building’s steps.
“Uh, ok hang on. Start from the beginning,” Lily prompts gently.
Right, Robin thinks, the beginning…
And so she does.
She explains the bet- ignoring Lily’s disapproving grimace - and she explains Molly and Rita and Bambingeryn and she explains her argument with Barney and how he’d criticized her relationship with Ted and how he’d called her pathetic and how much that had for some reason upset her and she explains the way she’d felt angry with him and the way she’d felt irritated by him and the way she’d been completely unable to stop thinking about him for the past week and a half.
She explains all sorts of things without even pausing to breathe… but then she fills her lungs.
Because now she’s gotten to tonight and whatever the hell just happened and she has to find a way to explain it. So she plants her hands on her hips and she looks down at the sidewalk beneath her and she tries.
She really, really tries.
Earlier, approximately 5 PM
She’d decided in the middle of her sleepless night last night to apologize. She’s still a little unclear as to what exactly she’s apologizing for, but she knows for certain an apology is in order. Probably for bringing those girls to his place, and for the poker game yesterday, and maybe even for agreeing to the bet in the first place - although the childish part of her mentally insists that’s his fault, he came up with the bet after all, she just agreed to it.
Anyway, it’s not important. She thinks she should apologize. Bury the hatchet. Shake hands and buy him a beer and move on the way that civilized people do. They can just pretend this never happened.
Please, god, she hopes they can pretend this never happened.
She has no idea what to do with the nagging voice in the back of her mind that tells her this won’t go away that easily, tells her that this is an actual thing she has to deal with, that life isn’t predictable or controllable and these things happen for Teddish reasons like the stars aligning or the planet tipping on its axis. She has no idea what to tell that part of herself to get it to shut the hell up. She has no idea what to do with these feelings she’s apparently developing and the way Barney seems to look at her.
She literally has no idea what to do. Literally.
Marshall calls late in the afternoon and tells her they’re all at MacLaren’s and to come downstairs. It’s almost five o’clock and she could use a beer, so she figures this is as good a time as any to be the bigger man, to tell Barney that she’s sorry, to get this the hell over with.
She dresses for the occasion.
She curls her hair with a curling iron and she puts on a dress that shows a little leg and she pulls on her three hundred dollar boots because she needs whatever security and bravery she can get. But when she looks at herself in the mirror she frowns because she still looks shaken… Confused…Worried that maybe something’s gone horribly wrong.
Maybe Barney has changed.
Maybe everything is her fault because she wasn’t paying any attention.
Maybe a cute dress and heels won’t fix any of that, and maybe an apology won’t fix it either.
She really hates this part. This introspection, guilty conscience part that feels distinctly female and completely foreign and makes her want to take her gun up onto the roof to shoot some cans or pigeons or anything that gets in her way.
But Robin doesn’t go up to the roof, instead she goes downstairs.
Instead she rehearses what she’ll say, how she’ll laugh self-deprecatingly and tell him she knows this was weird and could they just go back to normal? How she’ll say she didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, and he’ll scoff at her and tell her he’s too awesome to have hurt feelings and he’ll wink at her and smile and she’ll…
Well, whatever, she thinks.
It’ll be fine.
She takes a deep breath and she pushes into MacLaren’s and the first person she sees is Ted, leaning against the bar with his wallet out and a half-grin on his face as Carl hands him a shot.
“Jesus,” Robin comments, looking around at the crowd as she steps up beside him, “It’s like Canada day in here.” Ted offers her a blank look that she’d admittedly expected and something in her stomach loosens, feels more comfortable, because no matter what happens she can always count on him to chastise her maple tree roots.
“You mean it’s like the Fourth of July?” he corrects. She rolls her eyes.
“What’s going on?” she wonders and Ted shrugs and nods toward the television in the corner, where stats are being listed and teams are being talked about and it’s clear Robin missed some kind of American sporting event memo. She hums and nods and looks around the bar thoughtfully.
She doesn’t see Barney.
But, really, she’s too afraid of finding him to look very hard.
“Hey,” she asks eventually, instructing herself to man up and grow cojones and act like a person instead of a mouse or an elephant or something else easily frightened, “is Barney here?” Ted shoots her a warning glance that says something like I meant what I said yesterday before he points over her shoulder back toward the door. She turns and looks and that something that had loosened in her stomach tightens up again because Barney’s at the far end of the bar. Making out with another girl.
Or making out with a girl. Not another girl. Just a…um…
Goddamnit. She knows this feeling. She’s felt this like three times before and the last time Lily was there to identify it for her right before she’d gone crazy and followed a phantom Ted Mosby around town, only to feel like a total jackass when it turned out to be Barney. She knows this feeling like the back of her hand.
Robin Scherbatsky is jealous.
She shouldn’t be jealous, but she is, and nothing makes sense anymore.
She realizes belatedly that while she’s watching Barney and his whorish make-out partner, Ted is watching Robin, and so she tries to cover the green in her expression with impressed indifference.
“A little early for that, isn’t it?” she mumbles and Ted just stares at her.
“Seriously,” he mumbles, “wake up, Robin,” and that catches her off guard, makes her lick her lips in discomfort and lean forward asking Carl for a scotch straight up to help cool her off a little. Or to help numb her from the neck up. Either way.
While she stands there drinking and drifting along with the mindless conversations between Lily and Marshall and Ted, responding appropriately when she’s addressed, her eyes keep straying to Barney and the redhead he’s molesting, unable to take her mind off it and wondering why the hell she ever thought she should apologize. It seems less and less like the thing to do as the minutes click by and Barney keeps molesting and Robin keeps sneaking glances and mentally having to stop herself from fidgeting and huffing dramatic sighs.
Barney is clearly fine without her apology, she reasons. Barney seems completely unaffected by whatever this thing is that’s flipped her world on end and she can’t help but wonder what the hell she’d been upset about…
Or what the hell she is upset about.
Not that she’s upset.
She’s just…
Her eyes are pulled toward him as the redhead excuses herself and leans over to some chick wearing a baby blue sweater asking if she can bum a cigarette, then heading out the door and leaving Barney alone to order another drink. She waits for him to follow the girl or to grin to himself or to grin over at Ted or Marshall and give somebody a victorious, long-distance high five, but he doesn’t.
He just sits there.
He just sits there looking miles away and unhappy and he drops his face into his hands and sighs, and it seems like his thoughts are too heavy for his shoulders to carry…
It makes Robin forget that she’s angry. He looks genuinely upset. She pushes away from the little spot on the bar she’s been occupying and crosses over to him and she musters up some form of courage, impulsively deciding to bite the bullet and suck the poison from the wound.
When she leans against the bar next to him he looks up, surprised, and then he rolls his eyes and she feels like someone has slapped her.
“Barney,” she says quietly. He plasters on a cocky facial expression and she resents him for it. “I just wanted to say that I’m um…”
“Robin I’m glad you’re here,” he cuts in and she feels something deflate to make room for her anger, again. “I’ve been meaning to introduce you to, uh, to…” he grabs the shoulder of someone who’s just walking in and whips the guy around to face them, “this guy.” He pats the stranger on the back in a falsely-familiar gesture and the guy gives them both an odd look, reaching down to adjust his belt buckle self-consciously. Robin sighs. “Sir,” Barney says brightly, “haaaaaave you met Robin?”
She thinks this is about the bet, or maybe about him keeping her apology at arm's length, and then she thinks... Is he kidding? She thinks he has to be kidding.
“I don’t want to do this, Barney,” she responds, her voice hard-edged and full of unfortunate emotion. Barney clicks his tongue dramatically and sweeps his hand through the air.
“What do you mean? Look at this guy,” he says before turning toward the stranger and talking out of the side of his mouth, “To be honest you could go a little less crazy on the self-tanning lotion, pal, but hey what do I know? The point is this young lady could use a man for the night. Interested?”
With every word Robin feels her muscles tighten and her shock expand and her disbelief that she was actually thinking of apologizing grow to be twice its original size.
“Just stop it,” she requests and Barney squints at her, his false brightness starting to evaporate.
“Excuse me?” he questions. She stands up straight and she cocks her head at him, crossing her arms and being sure not to glance toward the rest of their friends because she does not want to think about whether or not they have an audience.
“Stop. I don’t want to do this,” she repeats, thinking of the slut he was just mauling like five minutes ago. Jealousy rears it's ugly head and she keeps talking. “I don’t pick up guys in bars and I don’t hook up with people and I don’t screw around with people’s feelings just to get my rocks off.” It rolls off her tongue without much thought at all and she recognizes the lie in it. She recognizes the leftover resentment from almost a year ago hiding in between the words, and she had no idea he could turn her into this type of girl. She watches as the insults register on his face, watches as he tries to figure her out and tries to come up with an appropriate response, and she doesn’t really notice when the stranger walks away, understandably confused.
Barney gets up off of his stool without taking his eyes off of her and he takes a step forward, leaning down so his mouth is next to her ear and so that she can feel his breath slide down the side of her neck, tripping along her nerve endings and making her vision hazy and her breath hitch somewhere between her lungs and her throat.
“I don’t remember you having rocks, Robin.”
He whispers it into her ear and it should sound ridiculous, but god it doesn’t, and he lets his hand slip down low enough that the other patrons can’t see it, his palm landing on her thigh, his fingers sliding just underneath the hem of her skirt. Her breath gushes out and she leans in toward him, her hips drifting closer to his even though she wishes that they wouldn’t.
“I don’t think what’s her name would like this,” Robin accuses, trying to remind herself of things, trying to ground both of them, “She comes back here and sees this, your chances are blown.”
“I don’t care,” he tells her gruffly and she hears the slice of emotion in it and she feels her chest get warm and tight and she knows this is way more than she’d bargained for because he’s picking her over a stranger and her eyes start to water and her gaze locks on his and it’s like he’s inside of her…
And it’s way too much.
So she pushes him away and she turns and she elbows her way to the women’s bathroom.
She ignores the tears in her eyes until she’s staring at them, the bathroom mirror scratched and appropriately jaded.
She coaches her reflection to cool off. This is no big deal, she tells herself. Barney’s always been inappropriate and crude and that’s all that was so there’s no point in getting upset or affected. Barney, she assures herself, is still Barney. Still crass. Still practically without emotion. Still awesome and suit-clad and cocky and cool. Barney is still definitely Barney and nothing has changed and nothing’s the matter and everything is going to be just fine.
Except she knows a liar when she sees one and she has that certain look on her face.
She stares herself down.
He isn’t the same, she admits finally, exhaling a long uneven breath. He’s changed over the past few months and it’s at least partially her fault and she can’t ignore it when he looks at her and she can’t ignore it when he challenges her and she definitely can’t ignore it when his hand is on her thigh, practically burning right through her skin.
Barney has changed, and the real problem is that she thinks that maybe she likes it.
The door swings open, then, and - as if the thought had conjured him up - Barney Stinson walks through, seeming somehow steady and sure and all of the things that she isn’t as he turns and locks the door behind him.
“This is the ladies room,” she mumbles. He nods and tilts his head at her.
She stares at his reflection in the mirror and she tries to catch her breath and pretend she isn’t freaking out.
“Yeah,” he sighs. “So, which one of us goes first?” he asks and she frowns and furrows her brow at his reflected cool exterior because she doesn’t know what he means. “I assume we’re about to argue,” he expands, “so which one of us goes first?”
She clenches her jaw and thinks about it for a second, thinks about all of the things she’d like to say to him, all the things she’d like to chastise him for… and all of the ways she wants to apologize…
And then she bends down and she washes her hands because she needs something else to do.
“Stop it,” he orders quietly, his voice like granite or steel, and she raises an eyebrow, irritated and unwilling to give in. “Every time we get close to discussing whatever this actually is I act like an ass and you avoid it by doing stupid stuff like this, so just…stop it.”
“Well,” and she shrugs helplessly, trying to think of something to say, “stop…” she grapples for words and he watches her, calm, waiting for her to finish. She shrugs again. “Stop staring at me all the time,” she counters stupidly.
“Stop pretending you don’t like it,” he answers, taking two steps toward her. She turns the water off and leans forward, bracing her hands on the counter.
“Stop acting like this,” she mutters honestly, her voice light on top of her breath and her eyes veering down to stare at the drops of water drying in the sink, “Go back to being awesome and sleeping with a different girl every night.”
“Stop telling me what to do,” he shoots back.
She isn’t looking - jesus, she can’t look - but she knows he hasn’t stopped walking toward her and there’s something predatory in the air and she isn’t sure how to regain control over any of this. She knows if she looked up at him he would be watching her with that hungry heated stare and she would absolutely melt. She’s not sure when that started happening, but it’s pretty much guaranteed by now.
His hands land low, then, against her hips and his voice says her name soft like freshly woven silk against her ears. She exhales, loud, pained like maybe he’s killing her somehow, and she arches her back so her hips are pressed against his because she honestly can’t help herself. His hands feel heavy on her and she reaches for his wrists.
“Stop touching me,” she pleads feebly. He chuckles into her hair.
“Please, Scherbatsky,” he breathes, “I know a lie when I hear one.”
And he pauses, waiting, giving her a chance to tell him he’s wrong, but when she’s quiet instead and the words don’t even start to form on her tongue his mouth settles hot on the space where her neck meets her shoulder and she remembers this, god she remembers the heat of it, the way it burns from the inside out and the way he knows exactly how to take it painfully slow. His tongue brushes light against her before disappearing again.
“Don’t call me Scherbatsky,” she says, and even she doesn’t believe herself because there’s too much air in her voice and too much blood in her veins and too much sizzle on her skin as his hands push down further and drag her hips across his, deliberate, full of intention.
“Scherbatsky,” he exhales, grinning, and her fingers go white against his wrists, gripping tight as his teeth scrape lazy against her ear, his breath still painting invisible hot red lines against her and making her lungs work double time in response. His fingers pull her dress into his fists and she can feel it hike up. She can feel the smooth fabric of his suit against the backs of her thighs and she can feel his uneven breathing in the core of her.
She can feel this in the core of her.
“Barney,” she sighs, some warning flooding into the consonants and vowels. “Please don’t. If…” she swallows, “If you don’t mean it, just don’t…” she forces out, and she’s not sure where it comes from, how she knows that it’s the right thing to say but she can tell by the way he slumps forward against her, the way some of the tension leaves his muscles and the way he doesn’t back up but doesn’t push her, either, that he knows what she means even though she maybe doesn’t, yet.
He exhales.
His lips dip forward and press against her jaw, soft, easy, simple.
Her arm has a mind of its own, snaking up so her hand wraps around the back of his neck, holding him to her, dancing with the collar of his shirt. She leans back against him and she waits. He kisses her cheek like maybe they’re behind the locker room of the hockey rink and she holds her breath.
“I always…” he sniffs and he licks his lips, “I always mean it, Robin,” he tells her and her eyes leak the water they’ve been holding in and she can’t do anything about it. “Do you get that? I always mean it with you.”
She turns and presses her mouth against his and she swallows the last of the sentence.
God, why does she care? Why does she even bother caring if Barney Stinson, Joe One Night Stand, means it when he touches her? How did she end up caring so much?
But she does care and she thinks he can tell when she lets her mouth fall open against him and when her arms slide down beneath his suit coat to wrap around his back, sighing when his hands reach up and smooth against her face. She thinks he can tell when she settles back against the counter and pushes her fingers through his hair. She thinks, certainly, he has to be able to tell when she sighs his name as his hands slip under her skirt and up past her hip bones.
He has to be able to tell.
She’s feverish because of him and she’s sure she isn’t the first woman to want to beg him for mercy, but she likes to think she’s the first woman who’s pulled this particular look onto his face…this worshipping look, this look like any second he might drop down onto his knees.
She kisses him.
He pushes into her and she kisses him and this wasn’t ever what she was expecting because life isn’t supposed to happen like this, all unplanned and unpredictable and Armani-clad and confusing.
This isn’t how her life is supposed to happen.
But it’s happening this way, and she’s leaning into it and wrapping her arms around it and grabbing on to fists full of it and calling it by name. This has a name, she thinks. It’s something with a name.
“Robin,” Barney says against her skin, and she’s pulled under and down and, god, she’s definitely, definitely begging him for mercy.
He drops down onto his knees.
Once they’re both breathless and brainless and coming down from some high, like once she’s got both feet on the ground, she looks at him and she feels herself shake her head, dazed, because…
She still wants to beg him for mercy…
Still.
He’s stopped touching her and she’s still begging him for mercy.
Her breath starts to come in panicked pants and she steps back away from him and turns to the sink and she smoothes out her dress and she washes her hands because she needs something else to do. The silence hangs in the air.
“Robin, hey come on,” he pleads, readjusting his suit and looking at her in the mirror. “We should…”
And she nods at him because she doesn’t want to talk about it.
She nods and then she shakes her head, dazed and shocked and almost unwilling to believe that this is happening.
“Oh my god,” she mutters. He sighs, and she meets his stare in the reflection, giving him a pointed and stunned kind of look because she knows this feeling…she’s had this feeling before…she knows the tugging and the tightening in her stomach and her chest and - she’s not sure why it’s taken her this long - but she knows it has a name. “Oh my god.”
And she pushes past him and she fumbles with the lock on the door and she shoves her way out into the bar and she hopes and prays nobody can tell that it feels like he said jump and she did, from ten thousand fucking feet.
There’s some big game playing on television that Robin doesn’t care about and it’s turned the bar rowdy and loud, crammed full of neighborhood sports fans.
Robin has to push her way back from the bathroom, but she can’t hear any of the noise.
The blood is rushing in her ears and her eyes are full of water and she keeps coming back to this.
This Stinson-induced insanity.
She grabs Lily’s arm, hard, and drags her outside onto the sidewalk, which is blessedly cool and blessedly empty and noticeably quiet compared to inside. Lily wrenches her arm free, annoyed, and rubs at her elbow.
“Jeez, what is the matter with you?” she asks.
Robin shakes her head and tries to blink away the mist in her vision, shifting on her feet in discomfort until Lily’s irritation vanishes because she’s perceptive enough to notice that nothing is the same.
Nothing is the same.
“I just had sex with Barney,” Robin declares. “And I think I…”
She covers her face with her hands.
“Oh my god,” she breathes, “I just had sex with Barney.”
(Chapter 7)