The Trouble with Barney (9/9)
Title: The trouble with Barney
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Author's Notes: Stand warned, this section is both dirty and mushy, so if those two things aren't your cup of tea, skip it. Pretend chapter 8 was the last chapter. If those two things ARE your cup of tea, enjoy it! The final dose!
Disclaimer: Nope. Still not mine in any way shape or form.
Chapter 1: That girl over there just took her top off and you're asking me about breakfast cereal?
Chapter 2: My telepathy is rusty, but I feel like you just asked me to take off my pants.
Chapter 3: There's a dirty joke in here somewhere, but for the life of me I just can't nail it.
Chapter 4: Holding is a foul, so why don't you just let this go?
Chapter 4 (Part II)
Chapter 5: I've got a straight, you look flushed, and these jacks are definitely wild.
Chapter 6: If you need a volunteer to fill in your gap, I'm willing and able - any day of the week
Chapter 7: When I asked if you were kidding me, I literally meant...are you KIDDING me?
Chapter 8: Lucky for you, this thing isn't cocked.
Chapter 9: I'm either having Deja Vu or I knew this was going to happen.
At first it’s frantic and hot.
Like he pushes her onto the bed and pushes himself into her fast while they’re both still half dressed because neither of them can wait. His body is long and lean and delicious, and she knows some things about his gift-of-god anatomy already, but this is better than last time because this time she knows she won’t regret it if she thoroughly enjoys herself.
So, her fingers play against his skin and her lips pull profanity out of him and she moves until she’s perched on top of him because she likes the look in his eye when he’s overwhelmed.
She pulls off her dress and his hands are immediately against her skin, sprawling up her torso and turning the tables until she’s the one overwhelmed and she’s the one breathing his name because he’s sitting up and flipping them over and he’s taking control and she likes it a little bit too much. He uses his teeth, which she appreciates, and he leaves behind a mark on her collarbone so the rest of the planet will know he owns something here. She doesn’t mind. She scratches at his back in response - so maybe she can own something too - and he groans into her ear while she says things like harder and faster and oh god Barney. Once it’s over it doesn’t take long before they’ve started all over again.
He mentions that Lily made him promise to keep it in his pants and Robin scoffs because clearly Lily has no idea how much this is mostly what they’ve been waiting for all along and mostly what they’ll be doing 24/7 until one of them breaks something. Lily and Marshall are like the preschool version of Robin and Barney, who are most definitely rated NC17. She tells him so. He appreciates the joke and she thinks that’s why he’s what she wants to forever be rubbing up against. She tells him that, too, and he chuckles and gives her a well-deserved high five.
It is a constant battle of the wills between them that just keeps pushing them closer to the perfect mating ritual, which they were pretty damn close to achieving in the first place simply because they’d both had so much practice. She mentally congratulates herself on driving him to a point where he’s out of clichés and all he can say is her name, Jesus Christ, and yes over and over and over again. But then she’s out of clever commentary as well because he knows exactly what strings to play to make her go absolutely crazy and she finds her vocabulary dwindling down from half phrases to half words.
Eventually she can’t even see straight so probably, in the end, he wins.
His fingers trip over her breasts, teasing, and wander down past her stomach into dangerous territory and she watches him while he grins and strikes gold, getting her to tip her head and close her eyes and thank the man-maker or whoever else taught him how exactly to do this.
He definitely, definitely wins, she thinks, spent, grinning up at him as he nods at her and says yeah I did in that charming Barney kind of way.
They slow down.
Eventually, like two hours later, they slow down enough that she’s glad, because she’s never imagined him slow like this and one thing she will always love besides Barney Stinson is a pleasant surprise.
She’s warm, and she’s sure of herself, and she’s beneath him, and he’s leaning on his elbows above her. She vividly remembers them being here once before, but she doesn’t remember it like this. She doesn’t remember it feeling like this.
She reaches up and presses a hand to the side of his face, thinking, feeling the way that he’s looking at her. His eyes are on her, roaming across her expression and her skin, slow and soft, looking her over, filling up and spilling out all sorts of things that tell her more about who he is than she realized even yesterday. It’s not her style - lingering touches and meaningful glances - but it’s how she feels at the moment so she lets her palm drift from his cheek down to his ribs and she feels him breathing and she’s warm and she’s grateful, and she closes her eyes and she kisses his shoulder - feather light. He exhales and he bends down to press his lips against hers, soft, quiet, resting against her, and he uses his fingers to push hair out of her eyes.
“So this is what it’s like,” he says quietly and she smiles at him. Taking a deep breath of the air around them, all rich with new things and heavy emotions, she thinks it’s being in love with the right person. She thinks it’s lying like this instead of getting up and going home. She thinks it’s wanting to make plans and wanting to leave marks and wanting to promise something that leaves this feeling inside of her that she’s never had before.
She thinks it must be like this.
So she kisses him again, she lets herself taste him and wrap herself around him, and she looks him in the eye.
“Yeah,” she says, quiet, warm, finally happy, “yeah I guess it is.”
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The fall goes by fast and in December - somehow or another - he ends up swearing to god that there’s no way she can convince the Salvation Army Santa Claus she was Mrs. Claus in a past life, no matter how naked she gets.
When she’s eventually wrapping her fully clothed arms around the faux Saint Nick's red-suit-covered shoulders outside Macy’s in a long-lost past-life-love embrace (involving fake tears and forced rapture) she watches Barney out of the corner of her eye and smiles, victorious.
He pays her, begrudgingly, in traveler’s cheques.
***
There’s a bet in January involving The Tricycle and Rita.
Technically he beats her, but with that one, really, everybody wins.
***
By February the two of them have a reputation in the group and everybody is usually either annoyed or amused by them, having long ago accepted that Barney and Robin share a crass and immoral kind of bond that refuses to be broken.
“Come on, man! Strippers, booze, candy…it’s gonna be crazy,” Barney promises and Robin watches Ted’s face melt into skeptical disbelief.
“You guys are going to a strip club for Valentine’s Day,” he states flatly and Robin wags her eyebrows.
“Legendary,” she assesses and Ted chuckles and rolls his eyes.
“If by legendary you mean weird, I agree, and I am not coming with you. I have a date,” he says. Robin offers a pssh in disgust because she knows the girl Ted’s dating - she set them up - and this girl is not worth a Valentine’s day outing. She’s not even worth a Saturday night, really, but Robin was tired of hearing Ted complain like an eight year old boy with no toys in his toy box. She takes a sip of her beer and points at him.
“By legendary I mean legendary, and you should cancel your date. Annie McHale is not ‘the one’ and she won’t hook up with you, she’s too intelligent and filled with common sense,” Robin assesses. “Besides, you can’t ditch us again. This is like the seventh time in a row. Literally.”
Barney’s hand hits the table.
Robin freezes.
“Ha!” Barney spits, putting his scotch down with an overzealous thump, “HA!” he points at her victoriously and she rolls her eyes. Damnit, she thinks angrily. Goddamnit. “I knew it, I knew you couldn’t do it, you LOSE, Scherbatsky.”
“Yeah yeah, ok whatever,” she mumbles. He’s laughing and clapping and Ted looks between them, annoyed, and heaves a huge sigh.
“This is why I keep ditching you,” he mutters. “You guys are like some twisted club, I never have any idea what the hell is going on.”
Robin’s having a hard time keeping the grin off her face despite the fact that she’s just lost a bet. She really does enjoy watching Barney gloat.
“What’s going on, Ted, is that Robin Scherbatsky could not go one month without saying the word literally and she now owes me…something I haven’t decided on yet,” he says, squinting at her thoughtfully before tossing a wink at her and picking his scotch back up to swallow a good sized gulp of it. “Parental discretion advised, though,” he adds.
“You two are unhealthy, you realize that, right?” Ted wonders and Robin shrugs her indifference.
“If by unhealthy you mean awesome, then…yeah,” Barney counters, and Robin smiles.
They go to the strip club and he buys her a lap dance and she can’t take her eyes off him the entire time because she knows he’s memorizing this for future reference, and she likes the honey-glazed hot look on his face. The stripper’s name is Ginger and she’s going to community college for nursing, which Robin thinks is poetic -Ginger is very skilled with the sexual healing…Robin thoroughly enjoys herself. Barney gives Ginger a ridiculous tip and Robin falls a little bit more in love with him when he tells the girl good luck and hands her the bills rolled up and fastened with a rubber band. She falls a little more in love with him even though Ginger kisses him in exchange for the cash and Robin feels a little pang of that jealousy he brings out in her.
In the cab ride home she kisses him where Ginger had and he grins while she does it because he isn’t stupid and he knows exactly what Robin’s doing. She can’t decide whether or not she likes that.
When they get back to his place the door is unlocked.
“That’s weird,” Robin comments, wishing she’d brought her gun, but Barney just shrugs and follows her as far as the first floorboard which is where she stops cold and feels her heart start pumping hard.
The place is covered in the flicker of candlelight and she hadn’t expected this at all: tea-lights scattering every flat surface and then emerging in a little path to the bedroom so that his whole apartment looks like some kind of wonderland, some kind of escape from reality that reminds her of exactly what it’s like to be with him. She feels her eyes fill up with water and she looks at him, shocked.
“Barney how did you…” and he just shrugs at her.
“I know a guy,” he says, off the cuff.
Robin wraps her arms around him and she kisses him, and just as she’s starting to figure that Ted probably didn’t have a date with Annie at all, the fire alarm goes off and the sprinklers shower water down onto them until the place is covered in darkness and the smell of extinguished candles.
They don’t evacuate the building.
***
At Ted’s wedding to Annie McHale (now happily Annie Mosby) Robin and Barney are standing together as Marshall gives the speech, and she tries really hard to avoid wiping at her eyes, struggling to see what’s happening beyond the veil of mist covering her vision. A tear slips out and she catches it with one finger, fast, hoping Barney didn’t notice.
He clears his throat beside her and holds out his hand.
Grimacing she passes him a twenty dollar bill.
***
He lasts two months with her calling him Swarley before he cracks and pays up, and she apologizes for a full twenty four hours in the best kind of way.
She lasts four months as Roland and he admits it’s inspiring, so he spends seventy two hours showing her how impressed he actually is.
***
They go 50/50 when Lily gets in on the action and bets them both that they could never convince Marshall they’d seen Sasquatch in New York City.
It’s the video evidence that finally convinces him, and the pancakes they receive as payment are admittedly their most romantic, and only official brunch yet.
***
Ted bets Barney he could never nail Robin as the Quaker Oatmeal guy, and honestly it’s not even a contest because she takes one look at him in the ridiculous costume and, laughing, takes him straight upstairs and nails him, just for the humor and nostalgia of it.
Barney doesn’t accept his winnings because Robin convinces him he didn’t play fair.
***
In a stroke of luck, Marshall and Lily decide they don’t want to know the sex of their first kid.
Robin makes five thousand dollars when it’s a girl.
***
“Mommy,” Penelope calls (Penelope? Robin had asked when they named her, like the girl with the pig face from that movie? And Lily hadn’t spoken to her for days after that until Barney convinced her Robin had simply misspoke.) Robin looks down, forlorn, at the boring list they’ve been making of people to invite to Penelope’s fourth birthday party. Lucky for her, Lily and Marshall allow alcohol at any and all family gatherings…otherwise Robin would never survive.
“Yeah, honey, what’s up?” she responds, crossing her arms as her daughter trounces into the kitchen. Robin glances over her shoulder and sees Barney lingering in the doorway, pretending to look innocent, and she knows something fishy is going on.
“Want to hear a joke?” Penelope asks… Robin feels her cheeks get warm.
“No!” she interrupts quickly, hoping it was surreptitious. It wasn’t.
Lily gives her an odd look before admonishing her telepathically.
“Sure, go ahead,” Lily eventually says, and Penelope takes a large gulping inhale before she begins.
“What’s the difference between peanut butter and jam?” she asks and Robin watches Lily’s face turn a thousand shades of angry red, and then Robin turns to watch Barney try and stifle his laughter - unsuccessfully. She tries to give him a discouraging frown, but she's pretty sure her own amusement keeps it from happening.
“YES!” he calls, clapping his hands together. “Scherbatsky loses another one! I’ll take my payment in cash or check, Robin, whatever is most convenient for you.”
“You’re an asshole,” Robin says, laughing, and Barney chuckles, his eyes warm as he winks at her from his spot at the threshold, and Lily glares at both of them as Penelope sticks her hand into Robin’s face, waiting.
Robin owes her a dollar for swearing, but it was totally worth it.
The sex Barney accepts as payment later that night is also worth it, and they laugh all the way through it because she still can’t get over the look on Lily’s face and he still can’t believe he’d actually gotten Penelope to do it.
“For a girl named after a pig, she is not half bad,” Barney says when they’re lying between the sheets, sated and happy.
Robin takes a sip of Johnny Walker and shakes her head.
“The girl in that movie is not actually a pig,” she corrects and Barney leans back away from her, frowning, furrowing his brow and she sees it coming before he even opens his mouth.
“I bet you one thousand dollars that she’s actually a pig.”
And that, she thinks happily, pressing a kiss against his lips which tastes like Cubans, scotch, and endless possibility, is one of the many parts of him that always makes her feel smitten and nostalgic, in love with him, warm, aggravated and anxious and alive - all at the same time. That twinkle in his eye and that challenge in his voice and that desire of his to keep her constantly on her toes, proving her right and wrong and right over and over and over again. That competitive streak is the thing she thinks of first whenever she wonders how they got here, that is the thing she silently thanks for waking her up and making her realize what exactly she wanted and who it was that would give it to her. That’s the thing that has her bank account constantly in flux and has her sex life totally unpredictable and has her heart always pounding, excited, in her chest.
She kisses him one more time and she offers him the last of her scotch, which he downs before wrapping his arms around her.
Running a hand down his side she traces mindless patterns on his skin, watching his eyes cloud over with lust and watching his mouth tip into a crooked, delicious smirk, she lifts her eyebrows at him and she smiles and she thinks about threesomes, poker, and candlelight when she opens her mouth and says:
“Ok, Barney, you’re on.”
Because that’s the charm of him, and that’s the draw of him, and that’s the thing she fell in love with in the first place.
That he asks her to take a chance. That he asks her to trust him and to go along for the ride. That he asks her to jump, just dying for her to answer From how many thousand feet?
That’s the trouble with Barney Stinson, and she would never trade it for anything else in the entire boring and less-awesome world, and now when people ask her how the two of them met she always says We met because we both have a gambling problem.
And it always makes him laugh.
[end]