New fic: Grin and Bear It
Author: everagaby
Title: Grin and Bear It (Woodlake: An Interlude)
Series: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairing: Derek/Sarah
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Through the end of Season 1
Notes: I would like to thank my beta, who would prefer to remain anonymous, but does actually exist, and not in an invisible rabbit sort of way.
Summary: Kitten sweaters, town gardens, and Parent Teacher Conferences: Derek Reese’s own personal hell.
They don’t talk about it. At all. Not a word. Derek can still feel the scratched skin and bruised muscles from where Sarah shoved him against the brick of the gymnasium wall next to their parked car and hissed, “Say nothing.” So he stays quiet as he opens the door for her, goes to get her a glass of punch, honey, and generally pretends to be the happy father of their insular little family unit, just plain s-t-oked to be at Parent-Teacher Conference Night.
But if he could say something, Derek would be protesting the entire situation. He gets the need for a relocation. Their position has been beyond compromised, smoking ruins of Metal staggering out of a blown-up Jeep frightening the neighbors into calling the cops. John hadn’t wanted to move, but Sarah had been right in throwing what they could into a couple of duffle bags, hot wiring the nearest car, and bolting.
No, that all made sense. What didn’t, what really, really didn’t, was Sarah pulling out a map of California and putting down her finger on Woodlake, three whole hours North of Los Angeles, over four with traffic. Sarah said it was the only way to be sure Sarkissian wouldn’t trail them. Derek thought it was an all around poor tactical choice. There was no way they could do anything in terms of recon that far away. The conversation had devolved from there, with Sarah screaming at him about keeping them alive today being the primary objective, Derek getting a black eye and a bruised jaw for saying she was compromising the mission, and John saying nothing while helping regraft skin onto the Metal’s face with eerie calm.
In the end Sarah won, they moved North, and Derek couldn’t walk normally for a week. They had found an out of the way place with plenty of rooms, closet space for their arsenal, and enough grass in the half acre backyard for him to lie down in. Three days after they settled in it rained, clean rain, that turned the backyard to mud and Derek with it. In that moment, soaked and chilled to the bone, earthworm sliding its way past his bare feet, smelling ozone and relatively clean air, Derek thought that maybe a three hour commute to LA to save the world wouldn’t be too bad after all.
Then Metal had mended, face patched together well enough that the difference in skin color on the sides of its face only seemed like a trick of light. After that John got restless for school and Sarah agreed to get them new paperwork. It wasn’t until Sarah cracked open the manila envelope and poured its contents onto the kitchen counter that Derek realized he should have, maybe, insisted on being there to make the call on ID.
“What the fuck is this?” Derek said, picking up the heavy, bordered paper.
“Marriage certificate,” Sarah said, giving him the patented Mom Look that always resulted from cursing in front of the “kids.”
“Yeah, no shit,” he said, thumbing the embossed lettering that stated, happily, that Mr. and Mrs. Derek Riley had been married on June 20, 1987.
“What I want to know is why the hell we have one.”
Sarah pried the marriage certificate from his hands, smoothing out the wrinkles from where his hands had crumpled up the edges. Task done, she pinned him with a glare that promised something dislocated in the near future if the cursing or the belligerence didn’t let up soon.
“They won’t be expecting a nuclear family. Not Sarkissian, not Cromartie, not the FBI.”
She was right. Sarkissian had watched one of them blow up, and the FBI and Cromartie were still looking for the just Connors. It was tactically sound. He still thought it was bullshit. He also liked the way his nose was shaped, so he didn’t bring it up further.
Instead he walked the half mile from their cozy little house to Pomegranate St. (really, mother fucking Pomegranate Street) and stopped in the corner store to grab a six pack.
When the friendly neighborhood store clerk asked for his ID, “young man,” Derek realized he’d left it at home, sitting next to the other pieces of paper like birth certificates and passports stamped from a honeymoon in Barbados he didn’t want to talk about. He’d also left his gun at home, so at least he didn’t have to worry about telling Sarah they needed to relocate because he held up the old man at the corner store for a six pack of Miller.
By the time he got back to the house he’s catalogued the following things about Woodlake: those clichés about being a small town stranger that he thought only existed in books actually are true, that no one, no one but him has tattoos, and that he is allergic to what the cheery town sign denotes as the Woodlake PRIDE Community Garden.
By the time he got back to the house he’d also missed some important part of the decision making process, because he had been saddled with the duty of faux-dad at Meet the Parents night next Tuesday. Because of their cover, and because he wasn’t sure he could take Sarah in a fight, he didn’t say anything. He only gets a limited number of shots and disobeying orders, and he’s not wasting any of them on this.
Next Tuesday found him putting on a long sleeve button down.
“To fit in,” she said in a voice that brokered zero argument. She said it while tugging on a pink cardigan and putting on pearl earrings, so Derek had figured it might be an argument that ended in severe disfigurement, and chose to pursue it no further.
All in all, chafed skin, bruised muscles, and a beerless fridge amounted to him not being chipper to be here, standing on linoleum flooring, surrounded by happy parents and the smell of what high school must have been like, might have been if the world survived.
He brushes that thought aside and goes to the refreshment table. The punch looks exactly like the color of radioactive sunrise, so he only pours Sarah a cup. Could be worse, he thinks, taking the cheap plastic cup of punch back to Sarah. He’s been chained, starving, to a floor, surrounded by the dead and the dying. He’s played human volley ball to overgrown toasters. Hell, he drank fallout shelter gin shot-for-shot with the savior-apparent of mankind. Pretending to be happy Dad to Kyle’s kid and a machine should be a cake walk after that.
With that in mind he walks back to where Sarah is standing, talking to a woman wearing a sweater that is covered in kittens. As soon as he gets within three feet Sarah reaches for the glass of punch, smiling through clenched teeth and nodding at Kitten Sweater.
“Anyway the sunflowers should be ready for harvest soon, and it would be just lovely if you could - oh, this must be the husband!”
Kitten Sweater smiles at him. He knows that smile. It’s a manic crusader of a smile that signals death to whoever gets in the way of its goal. He’s seen it on both of the Connors in various incarnations, but combining it with embroidered animal life and a green thumb is pretty off putting. Before Derek has a chance to back away gently and beat a strategic retreat Sarah grabs his hand in hers, pulling him firmly into the conversation.
“Derek, this is… Tami?”
“That’s right!” Tami nods, manic smile cracking wider as she extends her hand towards Derek. “Tami Taumbauer. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
At that Sarah pushes her thumb, hard, into the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger, pinching down until he grits out a smile and shakes Tami’s hand.
“Yeah, hi,” he says after Tami (dear God, he can practically hear the “i” at the end with every giddy chirp) grabs his hand and shakes it and then doesn’t let go.
“Well, aren’t you just gorgeous. Sarah, if you ever feel like loaning him out we do a Date Night Auction every October to raise money our Horticultural Committee, and I’m sure he’d help with the donations.”
Tami still has his hand, and Derek is prepared to take extreme measures, but Sarah’s thumb is pressing in even harder, and so he finds himself trapped.
Tami laughs, before finally letting go of Derek’s hand and redirecting all of that bubbling energy onto him. “Anyway, Derek, I was just telling Sarah that we would love for her to help out in the community gardens. They’re a great source of citizen pride, and a wonderful way for you both to get to know the community better.”
Derek’s lost all the feeling in the web between thumb and forefinger, so he figures he doesn’t have much to lose. “Well, I’m allergic to most of what’s out there, but Sarah here is great with plants. I’m sure she would love to help out.”
Even as it exits his mouth he knows them’s fighting words, but he’s about to be put up to auction for the sake of plants. Desperate times, he thinks, and hopes Sarah won’t aim to hard for the soft bits.
Before Tami can glom on to that offer Sarah smiles and says, “Well, we should probably go and meet some of the teachers. Tami, it was wonderful talking to you.” The she changes tactics and grabs his thumb and twists it, promising dislocation if he doesn’t follow her immediately.
Sarah waves her free hand back at Tami’s, “See you at the garden!” before twisting Derek’s hand just a little more and saying, “What was that?”
Derek shrugs and says something about tactical camouflage. It’s pretty much worth the slight pop he feels as she tugs his hand a little harder, guiding him towards the math teacher for just one reason. In that moment before she grabbed the punch cup out of his hand he saw a look on her face that he’s never seen before. This is a woman who has spent years in an asylum, pulled bullets out of her own abdomen, and tracked and been tracked by the most advanced technology created on Earth that had been sent back in time to kill her, and the first time Derek sees her freaked out is because of an overenthusiastic Community Member. He knows that of all things she’s seen, this is the one that she’s perhaps the least prepared for. Bullets and metal she can deal with. This is an entirely different arsenal. That’s scary in its own right, but it’s also pretty damn amusing, and for the first time since he buttoned up the damn shirt he’s wearing Derek thinks maybe tonight won’t be an entire wash.
Sarah being concerned about these people’s opinions is comical. In the long run, these people are expendable currency. Worse case scenario, they’ll be out of here in a month or two. So Derek smiles, shifts his grip out of Sarah’s, wraps his arm around her shoulders, and cheerfully introduces them as the Rileys to the tenth grade algebra teacher. It doesn’t take long before Sarah catches on, and not long after that before she starts showing him just how unamused she is. It becomes a kind of game: when he squeezes her shoulders he gets an elbow in the ribs, a hand at the small of her back leads to a torqued wrist, and a hand running down her forearm makes her tense before wrapping her arm around his waist and finding and prodding that same bruised rib with deadly accuracy.
As the night stretches on he gets more daring, palm against the back of her neck as he talks about their honeymoon in Barbados, thumb tracing the nape of her neck as he smiles and talks about their boy, John. Derek thinks maybe he’s taken it too far when someone asks how they met and he says, “Through my brother.” Sarah gets a distant look in her eyes that Derek recognizes as Kyle related. Moments like this he almost wants to prod her to let her know that he knows, that it’s an open secret that made sense the second Derek found out they could go back in time. Then the moment’s gone and she’s stepping on instep with fervor, so he figures they’re okay, and talks to the gym teacher about baseball.
Playing with a loaded gun like this is fun, more fun than it should be, but even he knows he’s going to get his ass kicked when he skims his hand down her side and rests it against the waistband of her skirt and she just freezes.
She doesn’t disappoint him, waiting until people trickle out to the last of the group, walking him to the secluded part of the parking lot, and slamming him against the brick wall he’s starting to get awfully fond of. She leans in, says, “What the fuck was that about?”
She’s angry, no doubt, but something else in her voice that makes him stop, makes him notice her dialated pupils, her too-flushed skin, and then he gets it. Holy fuck does he get it. Every hesitation, every time her muscles tensed for a moment before relaxing again.
He doesn’t think, he has to, has to wrap his hand around the back of her neck and pull her in, mouth against his. There’s a moment where he’s positive he’s going to get gutted and then they’re kissing, mouths crushing together brutally. His fingers tangle in her hair, softer than he expected it to be, and he pulls her in, off balance, enough to justify crowding her against rough brick. They stop kissing just long enough for her startled exhalation as she hits the wall, and then she’s on him again, hands in his hair, tongue in his mouth. He takes that as permission and lets his hands wander, down her neck, across her shoulders, down her sides, mapping muscle and bone that fleeting touches this evening gave him a glimpse at. His thumbs ruck up the edges of her pink cardigan and she pulls back, gasping, hips stuttering against his.
He leans in, grazing his teeth against the tendons of her neck as she digs half moon welts into the back of his neck and lets out a soft, high noise. It spurns Derek on, sucking a bruise onto her collarbone, rucking up her cardigan with one hand as he slides the other hand down her ass. Licking a line up the other side of her neck he tastes clean skin, sweat and want, and lifts her leg and settles into the cradle of her hips. She rolls her hips against his once, instinctually, before she pushes at his shoulder, with one hand, pulls back his head with the other.
“Derek.”
He lets her push him back, but that doesn’t stop him from sliding his hand up her thigh, rucking up her skirt, stopping at the rough canvas of a knife holster. It figures she’s carrying an arsenal, even here; facing down tweed suits and bake sales with as much weaponry as she can conceal. He meets her eyes, thumbing the line where holster meets upper thigh, back and forth.
Each time he makes a pass, Sarah shudders. On the fourth pass Sarah grits her teeth and says, “Son of a bitch,” before pulling him back in, teeth latching on to his upper lip, wrapping her leg around his waist, and trapping his hand against her upper thigh.
It’s like a switch is flipped and suddenly she’s not distant, but demanding, fitting her body against his and telling him in bitten off words to do it, “dammit, Reese, do it, just touch me.”
The knuckles of his right hand graze her underwear and she gasps, curses, and rocks against his hand. The cotton of her underwear is damp, and he toys with the elastic before sliding two fingers past the fabric. She’s warm and wet, and he swears he can smell her. He has to pause, forehead pressed against the brick next to her face, feeling a breath of hot air each time she breathes out, fast and shallow.
He finds her clit, the pad of his middle finger rubbing it forward and back. She keens, no other word for it, before burying her face against his neck, gripping his neck hard enough that he might be drawing blood.
He knows anyone who comes out of the double doors of the gym right now will see them, will know what they’re doing, but he doesn’t care, not when his fingers slide down, slide in and find her hot, tight, wet. He crooks his fingers inside her, pushes up against soft and tight. She throws her head back against the brick with a thunk that he knows has to daze her a little. From the way her hips move he can tell she doesn’t care. She moans and Derek shoves his thumb up against her clit as she rocks against his fingers harder.
He won’t say he’s never thought about this, but it’s definitely hotter than he might have expected, the way her thigh tightens, her heel hooking against the back of his thigh as she fucks herself against his fingers. It’s been a while since he’s done this with anyone, but he can tell from the way her hips start working faster, the way the small of her back is arching farther off the brick wall, that she’s getting close. Derek leans in, takes her mouth again, rolls his hand against her pelvis, shifting her weight harder onto his hand and hips, and she bucks and shudders and starts to convulse.
He draws it out as Sarah turns her head and muffles dirty noises against his neck, open mouthed and the sexiest thing he’s ever heard. Her hands fly from his head and shoulder to grip at his shirt, his arms, one steadying her against him as the other flies out to scrabble at the wall as she comes and comes and comes down.
It takes a while before her shudders stop clenching tightsweet against his fingers, before they subside into aftershocks and she starts to whimper, although if he ever called her on that, he’d probably lose something vital.
He pulls out, fingers trailing wet and sticky against her sweaty thigh as he adjusts her underwear back into place. She sighs, leg dropped back to the ground, regaining her balance with hands gripping his arms, forehead resting on his shoulder.
He knows that when they finally pull themselves together and get back in the car Sarah will tell him that that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, can’t happen again, not with John and the Metal to worry about, and Sarkissian on their tail, and the FBI not far behind. The fate of the world is in their hands, no time to stop for orgasms, yadda yadda. Right now, thought, Derek is figuring that Woodlake was a smart tactical move. Hell, they can deal with the commute to LA, and they do need to lie low for a while, at least a couple more months. And from what Derek heard, Woodlake High School is big on parent involvement. They probably have some sort of Parent Teacher night at least once a month. And maybe next time Sarah will let him fuck her against the wall.
Woodlake’s not shaping up so badly.
Title: Grin and Bear It (Woodlake: An Interlude)
Series: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Pairing: Derek/Sarah
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Through the end of Season 1
Notes: I would like to thank my beta, who would prefer to remain anonymous, but does actually exist, and not in an invisible rabbit sort of way.
Summary: Kitten sweaters, town gardens, and Parent Teacher Conferences: Derek Reese’s own personal hell.
They don’t talk about it. At all. Not a word. Derek can still feel the scratched skin and bruised muscles from where Sarah shoved him against the brick of the gymnasium wall next to their parked car and hissed, “Say nothing.” So he stays quiet as he opens the door for her, goes to get her a glass of punch, honey, and generally pretends to be the happy father of their insular little family unit, just plain s-t-oked to be at Parent-Teacher Conference Night.
But if he could say something, Derek would be protesting the entire situation. He gets the need for a relocation. Their position has been beyond compromised, smoking ruins of Metal staggering out of a blown-up Jeep frightening the neighbors into calling the cops. John hadn’t wanted to move, but Sarah had been right in throwing what they could into a couple of duffle bags, hot wiring the nearest car, and bolting.
No, that all made sense. What didn’t, what really, really didn’t, was Sarah pulling out a map of California and putting down her finger on Woodlake, three whole hours North of Los Angeles, over four with traffic. Sarah said it was the only way to be sure Sarkissian wouldn’t trail them. Derek thought it was an all around poor tactical choice. There was no way they could do anything in terms of recon that far away. The conversation had devolved from there, with Sarah screaming at him about keeping them alive today being the primary objective, Derek getting a black eye and a bruised jaw for saying she was compromising the mission, and John saying nothing while helping regraft skin onto the Metal’s face with eerie calm.
In the end Sarah won, they moved North, and Derek couldn’t walk normally for a week. They had found an out of the way place with plenty of rooms, closet space for their arsenal, and enough grass in the half acre backyard for him to lie down in. Three days after they settled in it rained, clean rain, that turned the backyard to mud and Derek with it. In that moment, soaked and chilled to the bone, earthworm sliding its way past his bare feet, smelling ozone and relatively clean air, Derek thought that maybe a three hour commute to LA to save the world wouldn’t be too bad after all.
Then Metal had mended, face patched together well enough that the difference in skin color on the sides of its face only seemed like a trick of light. After that John got restless for school and Sarah agreed to get them new paperwork. It wasn’t until Sarah cracked open the manila envelope and poured its contents onto the kitchen counter that Derek realized he should have, maybe, insisted on being there to make the call on ID.
“What the fuck is this?” Derek said, picking up the heavy, bordered paper.
“Marriage certificate,” Sarah said, giving him the patented Mom Look that always resulted from cursing in front of the “kids.”
“Yeah, no shit,” he said, thumbing the embossed lettering that stated, happily, that Mr. and Mrs. Derek Riley had been married on June 20, 1987.
“What I want to know is why the hell we have one.”
Sarah pried the marriage certificate from his hands, smoothing out the wrinkles from where his hands had crumpled up the edges. Task done, she pinned him with a glare that promised something dislocated in the near future if the cursing or the belligerence didn’t let up soon.
“They won’t be expecting a nuclear family. Not Sarkissian, not Cromartie, not the FBI.”
She was right. Sarkissian had watched one of them blow up, and the FBI and Cromartie were still looking for the just Connors. It was tactically sound. He still thought it was bullshit. He also liked the way his nose was shaped, so he didn’t bring it up further.
Instead he walked the half mile from their cozy little house to Pomegranate St. (really, mother fucking Pomegranate Street) and stopped in the corner store to grab a six pack.
When the friendly neighborhood store clerk asked for his ID, “young man,” Derek realized he’d left it at home, sitting next to the other pieces of paper like birth certificates and passports stamped from a honeymoon in Barbados he didn’t want to talk about. He’d also left his gun at home, so at least he didn’t have to worry about telling Sarah they needed to relocate because he held up the old man at the corner store for a six pack of Miller.
By the time he got back to the house he’s catalogued the following things about Woodlake: those clichés about being a small town stranger that he thought only existed in books actually are true, that no one, no one but him has tattoos, and that he is allergic to what the cheery town sign denotes as the Woodlake PRIDE Community Garden.
By the time he got back to the house he’d also missed some important part of the decision making process, because he had been saddled with the duty of faux-dad at Meet the Parents night next Tuesday. Because of their cover, and because he wasn’t sure he could take Sarah in a fight, he didn’t say anything. He only gets a limited number of shots and disobeying orders, and he’s not wasting any of them on this.
Next Tuesday found him putting on a long sleeve button down.
“To fit in,” she said in a voice that brokered zero argument. She said it while tugging on a pink cardigan and putting on pearl earrings, so Derek had figured it might be an argument that ended in severe disfigurement, and chose to pursue it no further.
All in all, chafed skin, bruised muscles, and a beerless fridge amounted to him not being chipper to be here, standing on linoleum flooring, surrounded by happy parents and the smell of what high school must have been like, might have been if the world survived.
He brushes that thought aside and goes to the refreshment table. The punch looks exactly like the color of radioactive sunrise, so he only pours Sarah a cup. Could be worse, he thinks, taking the cheap plastic cup of punch back to Sarah. He’s been chained, starving, to a floor, surrounded by the dead and the dying. He’s played human volley ball to overgrown toasters. Hell, he drank fallout shelter gin shot-for-shot with the savior-apparent of mankind. Pretending to be happy Dad to Kyle’s kid and a machine should be a cake walk after that.
With that in mind he walks back to where Sarah is standing, talking to a woman wearing a sweater that is covered in kittens. As soon as he gets within three feet Sarah reaches for the glass of punch, smiling through clenched teeth and nodding at Kitten Sweater.
“Anyway the sunflowers should be ready for harvest soon, and it would be just lovely if you could - oh, this must be the husband!”
Kitten Sweater smiles at him. He knows that smile. It’s a manic crusader of a smile that signals death to whoever gets in the way of its goal. He’s seen it on both of the Connors in various incarnations, but combining it with embroidered animal life and a green thumb is pretty off putting. Before Derek has a chance to back away gently and beat a strategic retreat Sarah grabs his hand in hers, pulling him firmly into the conversation.
“Derek, this is… Tami?”
“That’s right!” Tami nods, manic smile cracking wider as she extends her hand towards Derek. “Tami Taumbauer. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
At that Sarah pushes her thumb, hard, into the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger, pinching down until he grits out a smile and shakes Tami’s hand.
“Yeah, hi,” he says after Tami (dear God, he can practically hear the “i” at the end with every giddy chirp) grabs his hand and shakes it and then doesn’t let go.
“Well, aren’t you just gorgeous. Sarah, if you ever feel like loaning him out we do a Date Night Auction every October to raise money our Horticultural Committee, and I’m sure he’d help with the donations.”
Tami still has his hand, and Derek is prepared to take extreme measures, but Sarah’s thumb is pressing in even harder, and so he finds himself trapped.
Tami laughs, before finally letting go of Derek’s hand and redirecting all of that bubbling energy onto him. “Anyway, Derek, I was just telling Sarah that we would love for her to help out in the community gardens. They’re a great source of citizen pride, and a wonderful way for you both to get to know the community better.”
Derek’s lost all the feeling in the web between thumb and forefinger, so he figures he doesn’t have much to lose. “Well, I’m allergic to most of what’s out there, but Sarah here is great with plants. I’m sure she would love to help out.”
Even as it exits his mouth he knows them’s fighting words, but he’s about to be put up to auction for the sake of plants. Desperate times, he thinks, and hopes Sarah won’t aim to hard for the soft bits.
Before Tami can glom on to that offer Sarah smiles and says, “Well, we should probably go and meet some of the teachers. Tami, it was wonderful talking to you.” The she changes tactics and grabs his thumb and twists it, promising dislocation if he doesn’t follow her immediately.
Sarah waves her free hand back at Tami’s, “See you at the garden!” before twisting Derek’s hand just a little more and saying, “What was that?”
Derek shrugs and says something about tactical camouflage. It’s pretty much worth the slight pop he feels as she tugs his hand a little harder, guiding him towards the math teacher for just one reason. In that moment before she grabbed the punch cup out of his hand he saw a look on her face that he’s never seen before. This is a woman who has spent years in an asylum, pulled bullets out of her own abdomen, and tracked and been tracked by the most advanced technology created on Earth that had been sent back in time to kill her, and the first time Derek sees her freaked out is because of an overenthusiastic Community Member. He knows that of all things she’s seen, this is the one that she’s perhaps the least prepared for. Bullets and metal she can deal with. This is an entirely different arsenal. That’s scary in its own right, but it’s also pretty damn amusing, and for the first time since he buttoned up the damn shirt he’s wearing Derek thinks maybe tonight won’t be an entire wash.
Sarah being concerned about these people’s opinions is comical. In the long run, these people are expendable currency. Worse case scenario, they’ll be out of here in a month or two. So Derek smiles, shifts his grip out of Sarah’s, wraps his arm around her shoulders, and cheerfully introduces them as the Rileys to the tenth grade algebra teacher. It doesn’t take long before Sarah catches on, and not long after that before she starts showing him just how unamused she is. It becomes a kind of game: when he squeezes her shoulders he gets an elbow in the ribs, a hand at the small of her back leads to a torqued wrist, and a hand running down her forearm makes her tense before wrapping her arm around his waist and finding and prodding that same bruised rib with deadly accuracy.
As the night stretches on he gets more daring, palm against the back of her neck as he talks about their honeymoon in Barbados, thumb tracing the nape of her neck as he smiles and talks about their boy, John. Derek thinks maybe he’s taken it too far when someone asks how they met and he says, “Through my brother.” Sarah gets a distant look in her eyes that Derek recognizes as Kyle related. Moments like this he almost wants to prod her to let her know that he knows, that it’s an open secret that made sense the second Derek found out they could go back in time. Then the moment’s gone and she’s stepping on instep with fervor, so he figures they’re okay, and talks to the gym teacher about baseball.
Playing with a loaded gun like this is fun, more fun than it should be, but even he knows he’s going to get his ass kicked when he skims his hand down her side and rests it against the waistband of her skirt and she just freezes.
She doesn’t disappoint him, waiting until people trickle out to the last of the group, walking him to the secluded part of the parking lot, and slamming him against the brick wall he’s starting to get awfully fond of. She leans in, says, “What the fuck was that about?”
She’s angry, no doubt, but something else in her voice that makes him stop, makes him notice her dialated pupils, her too-flushed skin, and then he gets it. Holy fuck does he get it. Every hesitation, every time her muscles tensed for a moment before relaxing again.
He doesn’t think, he has to, has to wrap his hand around the back of her neck and pull her in, mouth against his. There’s a moment where he’s positive he’s going to get gutted and then they’re kissing, mouths crushing together brutally. His fingers tangle in her hair, softer than he expected it to be, and he pulls her in, off balance, enough to justify crowding her against rough brick. They stop kissing just long enough for her startled exhalation as she hits the wall, and then she’s on him again, hands in his hair, tongue in his mouth. He takes that as permission and lets his hands wander, down her neck, across her shoulders, down her sides, mapping muscle and bone that fleeting touches this evening gave him a glimpse at. His thumbs ruck up the edges of her pink cardigan and she pulls back, gasping, hips stuttering against his.
He leans in, grazing his teeth against the tendons of her neck as she digs half moon welts into the back of his neck and lets out a soft, high noise. It spurns Derek on, sucking a bruise onto her collarbone, rucking up her cardigan with one hand as he slides the other hand down her ass. Licking a line up the other side of her neck he tastes clean skin, sweat and want, and lifts her leg and settles into the cradle of her hips. She rolls her hips against his once, instinctually, before she pushes at his shoulder, with one hand, pulls back his head with the other.
“Derek.”
He lets her push him back, but that doesn’t stop him from sliding his hand up her thigh, rucking up her skirt, stopping at the rough canvas of a knife holster. It figures she’s carrying an arsenal, even here; facing down tweed suits and bake sales with as much weaponry as she can conceal. He meets her eyes, thumbing the line where holster meets upper thigh, back and forth.
Each time he makes a pass, Sarah shudders. On the fourth pass Sarah grits her teeth and says, “Son of a bitch,” before pulling him back in, teeth latching on to his upper lip, wrapping her leg around his waist, and trapping his hand against her upper thigh.
It’s like a switch is flipped and suddenly she’s not distant, but demanding, fitting her body against his and telling him in bitten off words to do it, “dammit, Reese, do it, just touch me.”
The knuckles of his right hand graze her underwear and she gasps, curses, and rocks against his hand. The cotton of her underwear is damp, and he toys with the elastic before sliding two fingers past the fabric. She’s warm and wet, and he swears he can smell her. He has to pause, forehead pressed against the brick next to her face, feeling a breath of hot air each time she breathes out, fast and shallow.
He finds her clit, the pad of his middle finger rubbing it forward and back. She keens, no other word for it, before burying her face against his neck, gripping his neck hard enough that he might be drawing blood.
He knows anyone who comes out of the double doors of the gym right now will see them, will know what they’re doing, but he doesn’t care, not when his fingers slide down, slide in and find her hot, tight, wet. He crooks his fingers inside her, pushes up against soft and tight. She throws her head back against the brick with a thunk that he knows has to daze her a little. From the way her hips move he can tell she doesn’t care. She moans and Derek shoves his thumb up against her clit as she rocks against his fingers harder.
He won’t say he’s never thought about this, but it’s definitely hotter than he might have expected, the way her thigh tightens, her heel hooking against the back of his thigh as she fucks herself against his fingers. It’s been a while since he’s done this with anyone, but he can tell from the way her hips start working faster, the way the small of her back is arching farther off the brick wall, that she’s getting close. Derek leans in, takes her mouth again, rolls his hand against her pelvis, shifting her weight harder onto his hand and hips, and she bucks and shudders and starts to convulse.
He draws it out as Sarah turns her head and muffles dirty noises against his neck, open mouthed and the sexiest thing he’s ever heard. Her hands fly from his head and shoulder to grip at his shirt, his arms, one steadying her against him as the other flies out to scrabble at the wall as she comes and comes and comes down.
It takes a while before her shudders stop clenching tightsweet against his fingers, before they subside into aftershocks and she starts to whimper, although if he ever called her on that, he’d probably lose something vital.
He pulls out, fingers trailing wet and sticky against her sweaty thigh as he adjusts her underwear back into place. She sighs, leg dropped back to the ground, regaining her balance with hands gripping his arms, forehead resting on his shoulder.
He knows that when they finally pull themselves together and get back in the car Sarah will tell him that that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, can’t happen again, not with John and the Metal to worry about, and Sarkissian on their tail, and the FBI not far behind. The fate of the world is in their hands, no time to stop for orgasms, yadda yadda. Right now, thought, Derek is figuring that Woodlake was a smart tactical move. Hell, they can deal with the commute to LA, and they do need to lie low for a while, at least a couple more months. And from what Derek heard, Woodlake High School is big on parent involvement. They probably have some sort of Parent Teacher night at least once a month. And maybe next time Sarah will let him fuck her against the wall.
Woodlake’s not shaping up so badly.