Five things... : McKay/Sheppard, PG-13
Five things Rodney McKay won't do (and one thing he will)
1
Rodney pulled away, surprise warring with arousal on his flushed face. He looked at John, who somehow managed to look simultaneously completely wrecked and still quite the most attractive thing Rodney had ever laid eyes on. It was really quite infuriating, how he did that.
“You’re okay with -” John gestured vaguely.
“I - yes. Yes,” he said emphatically, leaning in to recapture John’s mouth for a moment before pulling away again.
“Rodney -”
“No, no, I am. I really, really am. Just.” he held up a finger. “For the record? I don’t do feet. At all. If feet are your thing, much as I hate having to say this to you because do you have any idea how long I’ve - yes. Well. I’m afraid feet are right out, regardless.”
John’s eyebrows were laughing at him.
“I don’t have a thing for feet, Rodney.”
“You have no idea,” Rodney said, leaning forward to press a quick kiss against John’s lips, quite unable to resist, “how relieved I am at that. It’s been a deal breaker before.”
And he was pretty much okay with the disrespect displayed by John’s eyebrows, so long as his tongue remained occupied elsewhere.
2
He couldn’t keep his eyes on the clear sky in front of the jumper, trusting that Rodney would panic if anything got even close to being in their way. Instead he kept glancing sideways at the scientist, the slashes of mud across his cheeks, the bruise that was starting to form on his jaw, the way his dust-filled hair was standing out around his head.
John flicked a quick look into the back of the jumper - where Teyla and Ronon seemed pretty involved in a quiet discussion about whose fault it’d been that the natives had got the drop on them - and then reached out a hand that was absolutely not in any way shaking slightly. There was only so much they could get away with when there were people that could be watching, but he gently smoothed Rodney’s soft hair down. Startled blue eyes turned his way and he grinned, a little lopsided.
“You looked like a muppet.”
“Yes, well, you laugh like one.” Rodney shot a look of his own at the rear compartment, far less subtly than John’s, then leaned forward a little and hissed. “Are you serious?”
“…about what?”
Rodney leaned forward far enough to almost tip himself off his chair, lowering his voice even further.
“I would have thought it would have come to your attention by now, Sheppard, that I have an extremely wide streak of self-preservation as a part of my genetic makeup - something, I might add, that you appear entirely to lack. Whatever you thrill-seeking types might think about these things, sex in a moving puddle jumper is far more likely to end in our messy and painful death than anything of the orgasm variety, so I suggest you rethink your kinks quite drastically.”
John stared at him, open mouthed, for a good thirty seconds.
Rodney shifted uncomfortably, disrupting his already precarious balance and having to catch himself on the side of John’s chair. The resulting confusion was enough to cover the quick sweep of John’s thumb across his cheek, and when Rodney was settled again he pitched his voice low enough that he was pretty sure no one else would hear.
“Actually, Rodney, I was just thinking that I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Oh,” said Rodney. “…really?”
He grinned again, went back to watching the HUD. “Sure.”
“Oh.”
Silence, for a moment.
“You don’t really laugh like a muppet.”
3
“…do you even know what E. Coli is, Sheppard?”
4
“Sixth grade.”
“…what?”
“Jeannie would persist on using the phrase ‘gag me with a spoon’, which seemed both grotesque and faintly ridiculous. I was trying to prove her wrong - I was quite an unbearable child, always having to be right, you really have no idea - and ended up throwing up all over the dining table. Hair-trigger reflex, apparently.”
John always felt kind of bad, laughing when Rodney was wearing his earnest face, but sometimes there was really no helping it.
“I’m pretty sure,” he eventually managed, “we can find something else to do.”
5
“Oh, please, tell me you’re kidding.”
John didn’t move, didn’t straighten up from the obviously calculated slouch against the door of the lab; the only part of him still inclined toward movement, it would appear, was one of his ridiculously hyperactive eyebrows, which arched in a way that Rodney wished didn’t have quite such an effect on his higher brain functions.
“No.” He said it decisively. “Absolutely no way. Not a chance. Completely out of the question.”
John’s other eyebrow rose to join the first. “I haven’t said a word.”
“No. You don’t need to, Colonel. You’re doing your sex face.” He huffed an impatient breath and crossed his arms. “Don’t attempt to look innocent now - I believe I have enough evidence that I can reliably identify it by now, and that was without question your sex face, which brings me right back around to an unequivocal no.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.” John was practically prowling, stalking him across the lab, which was an unutterably dirty trick that he would have to pay for later if Rodney had anything to say about it.
“Of course I’ve thought about it!” The last word slid up into an involuntary squeak as John proved, once again, that his idea of personal space was drastically different to Rodney’s. Which made sense, given the circumstances, but really made it difficult to maintain any sort of an argument. “We’re in a lab, surrounded by Ancient technology - add in some sort of chocolate dessert and you have just about everything I could ever wish for -” he slapped at John’s hand, which was making inroads towards highly inappropriate territory - “which doesn’t change the fact that I’m saying no.”
John let out a frustrated breath, leaning forward enough that he could rest his forehead on Rodney’s shoulder.
“Gonna tell me why?” His voice was a little muffled.
“Because while I can understand how you might have no reservations about being caught out in compromising positions, being that you’re quite ridiculously hot -” he’d have waved an illustrative hand, but it was far too busy stroking up and down the length of John’s back - “mine isn’t the sort of physique that ought to be inflicted on the world at large. I hope I can traumatise my minions enough through superior brain power without subjecting them to the sight of my unattractively pale buttocks frantically -”
“Okay, Rodney, I get the idea.” John turned his face, stubble rasping across the sensitive skin of his neck and making him shiver. “But you’re wrong.”
“How am I wrong? I’m never wrong.”
Gentle nip of teeth. “Not unattractive.”
And then John dragged him back to his quarters and proceeded to prove, thoroughly and at length, that in some things he might be misguided, at least.
And one he will
He used to be impatient.
It wasn’t that Rodney was a bad kisser - pretty much as emphatic an opposite as it was possible to imagine, actually. It just hadn’t really been a part of his experience to date. It hadn’t all been quick hand jobs to give another guy a hand, blow jobs in darkness, in closets (ironic) and secret corners; lately, sure, what with the military and all, but his college years had been experimental and pretty instructive. It was just that - in John’s experience - guys tended to have things to do, places to be.
Girls, there was always a certain level of uncertainty. Like every moment was one in which she could sit up, put her foot back down on the floor, tug her shirt into something approaching respectable and let you know that maybe next time you’d be getting some. Guys, you were gonna get some. That was never in question. Location was sometimes varied but timing was always pretty much ‘now.’ That was how guys worked.
Except then there was Rodney.
Rodney kissed John as though he didn’t have anything that could possibly be a better use of his time. Slow, shallow, teasing kisses interspersed with heavier, deeper, long strokes of his tongue into John’s mouth until it was pretty hard to think about anything except for the impossibility of predicting the kiss that would be coming next. Rodney kissed John with his whole body, gentle rocking motion that never turned into anything more until he was ready for it to, one broad hand sweeping up and down the length of his back while the other cupped the nape of his neck, fingers threading just a little way into his hair. Rodney kissed John like he didn’t have anyplace better to be.
He’d always thought he was one of the guys who was all about the places to be, was the thing. Only when Rodney lifted his head, looked at him a little uncertainly, he always just grinned, swept a thumb across the soft line of his jaw, pulled him back down for another kiss.
He was in this for the long haul. They had all the time in the world.