Firefly Fic: INTERREGNUM Simon/Kaylee, NC-17
Yeah, you read that right. Written for the talkcrazy kinkficathon, for biggrstaffbunch who wanted bondage, and "please don't make Kaylee a stupid hick or some sort of perpetually giggly sex machine"--I hope in this fic she appears as at least somewhat thoughtful and reflective.
ADO ANNIE: Other girls act coy and hard to catch,
But other girls ain't havin' any fun!
Every time I lose a wrestlin' match,
I get a funny feelin' that I won.
(Monday, 2300 hours. All references are to ship time.)
Wash yawned, checked the clock, checked all the monitors and screens, and decided it was time to put the bird on autopilot and head off to bed.
"Anythin' I should know, Husband?" Zoe asked, reaching toward the bedside lamp.
"Well, I did see a flash of white and hear someone who sounded a lot like Simon whisper, 'Wait for me!' and if my finely honed observation skills do not fail me, he had on half his shirt and his socks, but his shoes and, may I point out, his pants, had gone walkabout."
"Uh-huh," Zoe said. "You do anythin'?"
"Well, there didn't seem to be any Breach of the King's Peace going on, and even though Jayne may disagree with me, I have full confidence in Simon's ability to take care of himself. So…no."
Zoe shook her head. "Menfolks! It's like you got a union."
(Monday, 2250 hours)
"I know you like presents," Simon said, unfolding his arm from behind his back and presenting a small soft parcel. "It's…well, I couldn't afford either anything new or anything antique, but I thought you would think this was pretty and if that's even possible it would make you look even prettier, so…."
Kaylee sat down on her bed and carefully teased away the sealing tape so she wouldn't tear the block-printed indigo paper. She planned to save the paper to calligraph her New Year's Cards; it was much nicer than the paper she'd bought the year before for the purpose, and not having to spend three credits a person (and, she reminded herself, for all the new people) meant just that much more money for moon cakes.
Inside the package was a long-sleeved white nightdress. She held it up to her shoulders; it reached down to the floor and beyond, pooling at her feet. It was made of thick fiber. Simon thought it was linen, but River said it was Macrocotyledon bernandensis var. ecclesii, actually it was a sort of water-rush similar to the kind used for ancient Earthly papyrus, which reminded Simon of Egyptian beer, which brought back such a flood of unpleasant memories that he besought River to stop informing him.
The fabric looked like it might once have been stiff, but it had grown soft with frequent washing. A faint aroma of lavender sachet darted around the smell of Serenity's disinfectant detergent. A band of lace was inset at the yoke. Another marked the beginning of the ruffle at the bottom.
"Oh!" Kaylee said. "One thing I didn't think I'd need would be nightclothes."
Simon half-turned, a shoe in his hand, the other on the mat next to Kaylee's bed. "Well," he said, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper, "I stood there in the marketplace, feeling the sun beat down on my head and realizing I should have worn a hat, and thinking of you tied to the bedposts, as I bent to nibble at your tender helpless toes, and then inched the hem up…" He set down the shoe, unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and folded them on top of Kaylee's second-best toolchest. "But, of course, you see there isn't…aren't…any bedposts."
In a flash (whose brevity Simon regretted) Kaylee had shucked out of her coveralls, shimmied away the camisole beneath, and dropped the nightgown over her head. She bent forward to unlace her boots, and he pulled her toward him, his hands bracketing her hips. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and stretched out, expecting Kaylee to join him once her boots were off, but she darted toward the door. "A set of bedposts wouldn't take but four meters of stock, and I got lots more than that left over from cross-bracing the angelwings on T-19," she said.
"Well, it doesn't have to be right away…I mean, it can wait…"
"No time like the present!" she said, over her shoulder.
Simon thought that Kaylee looked very fetching, in the workroom, with her gauntlets and goggles and shining new nightgown, although he harbored some anxiety about the proximity of the chainsaw to the piece of two-by-four he held steady for her to trim. And it was the work of just a few minutes, once the posts were cut and the edges sanded down, to bolt them to the legs of her bed with mending plates.
A few minutes more (and a couple of stops for deliverables, although this time Simon put his pants back on) Kaylee was stretched out on the bed, tethered by Simon's black tie, his Osiran College of Physicians and Surgeons tie, Kaylee's dress-up scarf, and a length of canvas webbing, Simon had a hand nestled in her pubic hair and was licking his way up from her knee.
"Hey!" Kaylee said. "Don't you put your foot through my dress! Uh…sir?"
"Kaylee," Simon said, clambering from where he knelt between her legs to the side of the bed, "Either that dress goes or I go. Well, I don't mean 'go" in the sense of 'get rid of it,' just 'go" in the sense that I can make love to you without swimming through organza…Or get thee behind me, satin. As the case might be."
(Two Weeks Earlier)
"Hey, Simon, look at the medslog," Kaylee said. Simon punched up the entries. A week earlier, Zoe had signed for her regular three-month contraceptive shot, and the latest entry was Kaylee doing the same.
"Ah," Simon said noncommittally.
"I just don't get it," Kaylee said. "I mean, I practically wire up a neon sign sayin' 'Hi, I'm here, let's have some fun'. And you can see right by the log, that I'm careful, you don't gotta worry 'bout no windfall."
Simon turned around and clasped both of Kaylee's hands. Her heart jumped with hope. "What you have to understand is that I'm trying to be a gentleman even if it's killing me… You know, the way I was brought up, and then working in the hospital…everyone told me, I mean, they didn't tell me in words as such, but the attitude was…that first the girls who worked in our house, and then the townie girls, and then the nurses…that they were just the koi pond for us to fish in. And maybe some of that thinking affected me, in terms of how I think, but I don't want to act that out in practical terms. And my situation is so unstable that I can't even think about getting involved, seriously involved, with anyone. Especially when I have so little to offer, compared to what's…to what was…normal. For me. But you're, that is, and you're, not somebody I would ever want to just use as a convenience and throw away. I mean, it's not as though it would be comfortable to be in a shoebox like this with someone you've parted with on bad terms…"
"So all that's to say you ain't got honorable intentions."
"Precisely."
"Well, have you got any dishonorable ones?"
"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it, and I see you know in what sense."
"Simon," she said, "I know you and River ain't gonna be here forever, but that don't mean you an' me can't have some fun long's you're still here. And in case you're worried 'bout whether River'd be upset, I asked her first and she ain't. Also, since I was talkin' to her already and she was havin' one of her times of sensibleness, I told her that I'm gonna marry Mal once he gets this foolishness with 'Nara outta his head. Thing is, that he thinks it'd be robbin' the cradle 'fore I turn twenty-one, and I ain't but nineteen now. And I asked her-River, not 'Nara--to, you know, Read, and tell if I was right 'bout that bein' what's gonna happen and she said Yeah. Well, once I'm Mrs. Malcolm Reynolds, there will be no steppin' around, he'd see to that and I wouldn't want to anyway. But it's a long damn time 'twixt then and now and now's bound to happen and the future might not even if River agrees with me."
Simon was certain that the surest route to popularity as a clairvoyant was to tell the customers what they wanted to hear, so he was not awed by this display of shared psychic powers. He took a deep breath and nodded at Kaylee.
Simon took a sample of his own blood, ran an STD panel, and tore the printout in his eagerness to show Kaylee the results. She wasn't worried about her own results, given that since her second day onboard the only venereal disease of concern would have been an allergy to plastics. "Well, that's one concern out of the way. Or two, bearing contraception in mind. Would you be more comfortable if I used condoms?" Simon asked. "I mean, in terms of neatness…"
"Nah!" Kaylee said. "Stuff's fun to play with, spread it around, lick it off, you know. Might take you up on that if the time comes when we got rubbers but we ain't got wash water, though." Simon pushed the thought of that possibility out of his mind.
(A Week After That)
"Word of advice, Doc," Zoe said. "If you got somethin' that you probably don't want to hear called 'little' but that you want to keep attached to your body, best not refer to a woman's breasts as 'little', dong ma?"
"But I said 'adorable little crab-apples,'" Simon said, while thinking {{Jesus, was it on the Cortex, or what?}}
{Wednesday, 1100 Hours Ship's Time)
Simon held Kaylee spooned against his body. His left hand, reaching beneath her arm, cupped her breast. His right hand reached over her waist, and between her legs. {{This is my favorite origami}} he thought. {{Everything's so neatly finished.}}
He had his head down on her neck, burrowing into her hair. At the back of his mind, there was a sickly glow from a malign beacon, but other than that, he wasn't worrying about anything at all.
"I'm plenty ready," Kaylee said. "Case you want to move on and, well, do it." She turned to face Simon and caressed down from his shoulder to his elbow. She looked down. "And looks like you're ready too."
"If you're sure…" he said, lifting her thigh over his own. "Because, even setting aside the issue of refractory period, after I climax, there's a period of…at least ten minutes, maybe more, when you would swear I was hit on the head with a very large rock." Simon fell silent, and tried to summon up a better metaphor, given that time on St. Alban's when he really was hit on the head with a very large rock. While it did produce lassitude, it wasn't blissful at all. "So I want to make sure that I give you a pleasurable and fulfilling experience. When I'm still in control enough to do much of anything."
"You've been real polite, the times we fooled around," Kaylee said. "Except…you ever feel like doin' anything any wilder than what we did? I mean, nobody ever looks back to brag on themselves 'bout all the tame oats they sowed."
"Did you ever have a really mean teacher?" Simon asked, looking up from her cleavage, his eyes blazing like snapdragons at Christmas. Kaylee tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. That was the kind of non sequitur she would have expected from River, but not from other members of the family. "You know, one who gave you quizzes the last day before vacation and sent a note home to your father just because you were chewing gum?"
"Mrs. Pariginer!" Kaylee said, memories flooding back.
"Okay," he said. "Some of the things I like to do…I hope you'll like them too. Sometimes they depend on an element of surprise. And sometimes one can misjudge what someone else will enjoy. So, if I ever do something that you don't like, or that goes too far, just say 'Mrs. Pariginer,' and I'll stop."
"Why don't I just say, 'Hey, Simon, quit it'?"
"Well, you know, sometimes someone gets into a whole 'Help, help, don't ravish me' fantasy, without wanting you to actually stop. And sometimes I find myself saying 'No' precisely because the feeling is so good, that I'm about to, well, close the show out of town."
That all sounded to Kaylee like Simon had done a lot more stuff before than she would have predicted, but it didn't seem polite to ask and she suspected she didn't want to hear the answer anyway. By the time she had time to think this, Kaylee found herself spun around, bouncing off the bed with her wrists pinned to the pillow above her head, her legs at first sprawled wide, then trapped by Simon's. He shifted, so he held both her wrists with one hand, and pushed the extra pillows underneath Kaylee with his other hand.
He was all the way inside her, groaning with pleasure and so she was too. Her body wanted to move and there was nowhere to move but a narrow space of rocking her hips toward his. The extra pillows made her feel like she was up on a pedestal. All the energy in her body moved down and inwards, concentrated like the powder in a pipe bomb. Not that she'd know, and the schoolhouse needed a new privy anyway that time.
The comm burped into life. "Kaylee, only thing I pay you to diddle with is made outta metal," Mal's voice said. "You wanna tell me his thing is, go ahead but then I expect you to roll it into the control room and rivet it."
"There's no need to be crude, Captain," Simon said crisply. He let go of Kaylee's wrists. Kaylee reached over and turned off the comm. "I think it can wait a minute, if you can finish that fast," she told Simon.
(Friday, 1400 Hours Ship's Time)
"It's temporary surgical adhesive," Simon said, rolling up his sleeve and dispensing a drop onto his forearm. After giving it a second to dry, he lifted it away. "See? It peels right off."
"Aww, Simon!" Kaylee said. "I wouldn't be havin' even regular sex with you if I didn't trust you." They were in the engine room, and being in her domain made her more inclined to feel comfortable anyway.
"I just thought I'd better check. There's an old joke," Simon said. "A boy asks his father, ummm, I didn't say, his father owns a tailor shop. And the boy asks, 'Dad, what's ethics?' And his father says, 'You know I own this shop with your Uncle Dave, right? So let's say that a customer comes in to the shop, and he buys something for fifty platinum, but instead he gives me a five hundred platinum note! So, ethics is…do I tell your Uncle Dave?' Well, ethics is, not throwing people against the wall unless you have some reason to think they like being thrown against the wall. So, okay," he said, and ripped down the zipper on her coverall.
He trailed his fingernails along the thin artificial silk knit of her t-shirt, circled her nipples with the pad of his finger until they rose to meet him, and breathed and then bit with the fabric still in place. He held Kaylee's body still with his hands cupped under her ass. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation. Then she opened her eyes in surprise when he moved his hands in front of her, rolled the hem of her t-shirt, and pushed it over her neck. The collar of her coveralls caught it and held it in place. It still surprised her how fast he could move, when he really wanted to. The surprise felt good, like a lightning flash of sensation.
Simon used the adhesive to paste a half-moon of soft, translucent blue plastic beneath each of her nipples, and to attach a beaded chain (the kind that was used as pull-cords on the lamps; there was a card threaded with yards of the stuff in the stockroom) to the plastic. "There," he said. "The cold metal against your soft, warm skin. I'll enjoy thinking about the secret we share."
"You know," she said, her breath catching a little, "You learn a lot of stuff about people when you're havin' intimacies with them that you wouldn't otherwise."
He gave her a boost up into the hammock. "I'm not going to kneel to you, when we're playing," he said. He unwrapped a bright blue silk scarf and took out two padded leather bands, linked with a foot of fine chain. Simon pushed up Kaylee's pants legs and snapped one band around each of her ankles. Then he put his hands around her waist; she put her hands on his shoulders and he lifted her down.
"Huh!" she said. "Where'd you get these?"
"I went through the Findings bin in the stockroom," Simon said. "You're not the only person around here who can use a hot glue gun, you know."
Kaylee took a cautious step, testing how far she could go before the chain snapped to. "These are real sexy, but I have to work," she said.
"Oh, I think you'll find that you can work, if you're careful." Kaylee dipped her head, acknowledging the truth of the statement. "And I'll think about you moving cautiously, restrained…"
Heat rose to her face. "Except that I'd be embarrassed if folk could see, and I had to explain, or didn't 'cause they figured it out."
"You can take the cuffs off…ummm, dinner's at six…at five o'clock. Not before. If you do, I'll know."
His voice made Kaylee shiver a little, even though she knew he knew that she'd have the silly things off way before five, because she'd want to know what was going to happen in the or-else part.
"And when you wash up and change for dinner, wear something with a skirt. How about that blue dress with the stripes? It looks really nice on you, and it's got a full skirt."
(Friday, 1800 Hours)
Wash dried his hands, made sure the faucet wasn't dripping and the soap dispenser was closed, and sniffed the air. It's true that a formal chore roster was posted, but it was so often altered, both by captainly ukase and by the turn of the cards, that it was only a remote stepping-off point for the chores as actually performed. Wash smelled star anise, which meant it must be Simon cooking tonight. Rosemary, of course, signaled the Shepherd's presence in the kitchen. Bay leaves implied Kaylee; stick cinnamon, River. (Simon's most recent bazaar visit resulted in a splurge on spices that could be rinsed off and re-used.)
Wash began to draft a few quips about Simon's culinary ineptitude when he realized, with a start, that actually Simon wasn't a terrible cook anymore. How could he, Wash, function as the abstract and brief chronicle of Serenity if he didn't update his material?
"Not so bad, Doc," Zoe said. "You're improving under our tender care."
There was a faint rattle of thin metal when Kaylee started stacking the dishes to clear the table.
"Something new?" River asked sweetly.
"Uhhh…necklace," Kaylee said, pinkening. "New necklace."
"Can I see?" Wash said.
"No!" Kaylee said. One of Jayne's eyebrows rose, bookending one of Wash's eyebrows. River shot Simon a look. He couldn't meet her eyes, and started braiding the fringe on his placemat.
When Kaylee finished the dishes, refusing repeated hints from Wash that a sympathetic ear was available (given her obvious agitation, especially when he complimented her on her dress), she raced to her cabin.
Simon slid the stylus into his pocket encyclopedia, closed its cover, and glided it into his vest pocket. "Now, Kaylee, you didn't do what I told you, did you?"
"No, Simon," she said, surprised that she felt a little nervous, and even a little guilty at letting him down.
"I didn't think so," he said. "All right. There's a price to be paid, you know. Get on your hands and knees. No, in the center of the bed. About two inches to the right. Uhhh, your right."
He reached up underneath her skirt and pulled down her panties. Not off-her knees on the bed would have been in the way anyway-but bunching around her thighs, white cotton showing light against her skin, like whitecaps on a gray sea.
At first he smoothed the fabric of her dress over her skin (and she felt both the crinkly cloth and how slick her skin felt against it), and traced the valley of her back muscles and the line of her spine. Then he smacked her, the sound ringing even through the cloth. The feeling burned, but it was a pretty burn, a white flash with blue edges. When her body moved, absorbing the energy and arcing to feel more, the length of chain between her breasts shivered and chimed. "You'd better hold still," Simon said. The second blow, deliberately, hit her thigh, hard enough to almost hurt.
Simon slowly lifted Kaylee's skirt, making her feel much nakeder, exposed between the upside-down bell of the dress and her vestigial panties, than she would have felt tumbled on the sheets with no clothes at all. His fingertips glided over the few streaks of first-hint-of-dawn pink. Then for a little while nothing happened, as the waiting made Kaylee's breathing catch. She wanted to look over her shoulder to see what was happening behind her back, but she knew not to. Kaylee guessed that what was happening was Simon taking off his clothes very quietly, followed by taking off his belt very loudly.
Kaylee felt luxuriously a little scared (it wasn't a mechanic or a cattle broker or a scrap metal dealer who brewed the potion that popped out Mr. Hyde). It was an agreeable fright, like listening to a ghost story (but one told by PopPop) on a cold night (when Kaylee had seen for herself that Daddy had stacked plenty of wood in the box next to the furnace).
Simon put his head down on her back, and caressed her thighs for a while, he couldn't help it, the smooth warm glide of skin beneath his fingers, just a hint of muscle under the softness. Then he leaned back, and hit her a few light, rapid strokes. He snapped his belt taut between his hands, and ran the edge down her back.
Kaylee wondered if it was time to bring Mrs. Pariginer into the dialogue, but he only brought the belt down once, and the sting was like a string of Christmas lights, blazing up one by one. Then he looped the belt around her legs, not far above her knees, and pulled it tight. He was all the way inside her in one hard stroke, they would have toppled over without his arm strong around her waist. "Oh, Jesus, Kaylee, fuck," he groaned, "You're so tight and so hot, you're so wet, it feels great…" and she sort of wished he'd quiet down and let her concentrate, but somebody was making little mouse-squeaks so she deduced it probably was her although it didn't seem to be bad for his concentration.
(Saturday, 1100 Hours)
"People aren't always like what you'd think they'd be," Kaylee said. "I mean, not that that's bad, but you like to think you understand folks. Makes you doubt your judgment. And, also, if you're girlfolks you sometimes encourage your menfolks to, you know, not keep everything all bottled up inside 'em all the time. But which might could be a mistake. Or, not a mistake, but not as interesting as you thought it was gonna be before you went ahead and opened up the pressure relief valve."
River grinned at her.
Book finished shelling the peas, put up his palm, and said, "I suspect that this conversation is about to become unsuitable for my ears." He put the peas in the chiller and the pods in the stock bag and headed out of the kitchen.
"Chicken or egg?" River asked Kaylee, who didn't have an answer. "Surgeons order people around all the time."
"Oh!" Kaylee said, because it made sense if you put the two pieces of the sentence together. "River, does it seem funny to you, listenin' to people talk out loud stead'a in their heads?"
River nodded. "The colonial powers!" she said. "Unsure of the indigenous language, and having only one of their own, which they exercise louder and louder inversely proportional to the comprehension received."
Kaylee changed colors on the sweater-vest she was knitting for Simon, and wove in the end of the yarn. (She suspected that the relationship would be over, and she'd be frogging the sweater, long before she finished.) "I don't even like to knit, but I can't just sit still," she said. "Mama said, the devil finds work for idle hands to do." Kaylee tilted her head to one side, considering.
"I didn't know your mother, of course," River said. "But maybe she didn't hate the idea of your having fun. Maybe she just thinks of it as one more chore that she didn't want you to rush in and take on too early. I mean, look how you begged her for sylkspun stockings to wear to church, and then how much you hated the garter belt and how sticky your legs got in the summer, but you couldn't stop wearing them because they cost two months of her pin money."
"Yeah! I had to start shavin' my legs, so I wouldn't have gorilla-fur pokin' out through the stockings. But if Mama…that don't say much for my Daddy, does it?"
"Don't think about that!" River said. "You were hatched! I was hatched! We all were!"
Kaylee laughed. "Simon was definitely hatched." Kaylee let down the knitting into her lap, and leaned on the table, her chin in one hand. "That was glorious, cookie," Simon had said, just before crashing out on her shoulder. "Do you have any special requests, for next time?"
{{Do I?}} she wondered. {{Always thought that sexin' was fun. Fun to see that look of admiration in their eyes, fun to pick the prettiest one and let him sign your dance card. The way the good Lord made bodies, feels good to touch 'em. But there's always complications.}} She had a fair-to-middling idea of what Inara did with her fancy lady that time, and judging by sheer numbers, Kaylee was her own most frequent lover. And she was already married to one girl-Serenity-so perhaps trifling with another might be an option.
"Were your parents happy together?" Kaylee asked River.
River shrugged. "It was like two gigantic conglomerates mating. With no antitrust laws."
"Zoe and Wash are good together, aren't they? I mean, after all that bad stuff she saw in the War, I think it's a balm for her, the way he looks after her and just worships the ground she walks on. Mind you, he ain't the dishrag that Jayne'd call him behind his back-they ain't had a real set-to since you've been here, but sometimes when they have a ruckus, I worry that he'll pack his traps and leave."
"I don't foresee that ever happening, at all," River said knowingly.
"All I got is first sight, not second," Kaylee said. "Not that I'd want it, doesn't seem to be any pleasure to you. And I thought I had it all set up in my head, what I want and the steps from here to there. But how's a body to know, if she made the right choice when she set her cap? Maybe there were other things to do 'fore she settled down and bricked 'em in."
River patted Kaylee's wrist comfortingly. "The hedgehog knows many things, but the fox knows one big thing."
ADO ANNIE: Other girls act coy and hard to catch,
But other girls ain't havin' any fun!
Every time I lose a wrestlin' match,
I get a funny feelin' that I won.
(Monday, 2300 hours. All references are to ship time.)
Wash yawned, checked the clock, checked all the monitors and screens, and decided it was time to put the bird on autopilot and head off to bed.
"Anythin' I should know, Husband?" Zoe asked, reaching toward the bedside lamp.
"Well, I did see a flash of white and hear someone who sounded a lot like Simon whisper, 'Wait for me!' and if my finely honed observation skills do not fail me, he had on half his shirt and his socks, but his shoes and, may I point out, his pants, had gone walkabout."
"Uh-huh," Zoe said. "You do anythin'?"
"Well, there didn't seem to be any Breach of the King's Peace going on, and even though Jayne may disagree with me, I have full confidence in Simon's ability to take care of himself. So…no."
Zoe shook her head. "Menfolks! It's like you got a union."
(Monday, 2250 hours)
"I know you like presents," Simon said, unfolding his arm from behind his back and presenting a small soft parcel. "It's…well, I couldn't afford either anything new or anything antique, but I thought you would think this was pretty and if that's even possible it would make you look even prettier, so…."
Kaylee sat down on her bed and carefully teased away the sealing tape so she wouldn't tear the block-printed indigo paper. She planned to save the paper to calligraph her New Year's Cards; it was much nicer than the paper she'd bought the year before for the purpose, and not having to spend three credits a person (and, she reminded herself, for all the new people) meant just that much more money for moon cakes.
Inside the package was a long-sleeved white nightdress. She held it up to her shoulders; it reached down to the floor and beyond, pooling at her feet. It was made of thick fiber. Simon thought it was linen, but River said it was Macrocotyledon bernandensis var. ecclesii, actually it was a sort of water-rush similar to the kind used for ancient Earthly papyrus, which reminded Simon of Egyptian beer, which brought back such a flood of unpleasant memories that he besought River to stop informing him.
The fabric looked like it might once have been stiff, but it had grown soft with frequent washing. A faint aroma of lavender sachet darted around the smell of Serenity's disinfectant detergent. A band of lace was inset at the yoke. Another marked the beginning of the ruffle at the bottom.
"Oh!" Kaylee said. "One thing I didn't think I'd need would be nightclothes."
Simon half-turned, a shoe in his hand, the other on the mat next to Kaylee's bed. "Well," he said, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper, "I stood there in the marketplace, feeling the sun beat down on my head and realizing I should have worn a hat, and thinking of you tied to the bedposts, as I bent to nibble at your tender helpless toes, and then inched the hem up…" He set down the shoe, unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and folded them on top of Kaylee's second-best toolchest. "But, of course, you see there isn't…aren't…any bedposts."
In a flash (whose brevity Simon regretted) Kaylee had shucked out of her coveralls, shimmied away the camisole beneath, and dropped the nightgown over her head. She bent forward to unlace her boots, and he pulled her toward him, his hands bracketing her hips. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and stretched out, expecting Kaylee to join him once her boots were off, but she darted toward the door. "A set of bedposts wouldn't take but four meters of stock, and I got lots more than that left over from cross-bracing the angelwings on T-19," she said.
"Well, it doesn't have to be right away…I mean, it can wait…"
"No time like the present!" she said, over her shoulder.
Simon thought that Kaylee looked very fetching, in the workroom, with her gauntlets and goggles and shining new nightgown, although he harbored some anxiety about the proximity of the chainsaw to the piece of two-by-four he held steady for her to trim. And it was the work of just a few minutes, once the posts were cut and the edges sanded down, to bolt them to the legs of her bed with mending plates.
A few minutes more (and a couple of stops for deliverables, although this time Simon put his pants back on) Kaylee was stretched out on the bed, tethered by Simon's black tie, his Osiran College of Physicians and Surgeons tie, Kaylee's dress-up scarf, and a length of canvas webbing, Simon had a hand nestled in her pubic hair and was licking his way up from her knee.
"Hey!" Kaylee said. "Don't you put your foot through my dress! Uh…sir?"
"Kaylee," Simon said, clambering from where he knelt between her legs to the side of the bed, "Either that dress goes or I go. Well, I don't mean 'go" in the sense of 'get rid of it,' just 'go" in the sense that I can make love to you without swimming through organza…Or get thee behind me, satin. As the case might be."
(Two Weeks Earlier)
"Hey, Simon, look at the medslog," Kaylee said. Simon punched up the entries. A week earlier, Zoe had signed for her regular three-month contraceptive shot, and the latest entry was Kaylee doing the same.
"Ah," Simon said noncommittally.
"I just don't get it," Kaylee said. "I mean, I practically wire up a neon sign sayin' 'Hi, I'm here, let's have some fun'. And you can see right by the log, that I'm careful, you don't gotta worry 'bout no windfall."
Simon turned around and clasped both of Kaylee's hands. Her heart jumped with hope. "What you have to understand is that I'm trying to be a gentleman even if it's killing me… You know, the way I was brought up, and then working in the hospital…everyone told me, I mean, they didn't tell me in words as such, but the attitude was…that first the girls who worked in our house, and then the townie girls, and then the nurses…that they were just the koi pond for us to fish in. And maybe some of that thinking affected me, in terms of how I think, but I don't want to act that out in practical terms. And my situation is so unstable that I can't even think about getting involved, seriously involved, with anyone. Especially when I have so little to offer, compared to what's…to what was…normal. For me. But you're, that is, and you're, not somebody I would ever want to just use as a convenience and throw away. I mean, it's not as though it would be comfortable to be in a shoebox like this with someone you've parted with on bad terms…"
"So all that's to say you ain't got honorable intentions."
"Precisely."
"Well, have you got any dishonorable ones?"
"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it, and I see you know in what sense."
"Simon," she said, "I know you and River ain't gonna be here forever, but that don't mean you an' me can't have some fun long's you're still here. And in case you're worried 'bout whether River'd be upset, I asked her first and she ain't. Also, since I was talkin' to her already and she was havin' one of her times of sensibleness, I told her that I'm gonna marry Mal once he gets this foolishness with 'Nara outta his head. Thing is, that he thinks it'd be robbin' the cradle 'fore I turn twenty-one, and I ain't but nineteen now. And I asked her-River, not 'Nara--to, you know, Read, and tell if I was right 'bout that bein' what's gonna happen and she said Yeah. Well, once I'm Mrs. Malcolm Reynolds, there will be no steppin' around, he'd see to that and I wouldn't want to anyway. But it's a long damn time 'twixt then and now and now's bound to happen and the future might not even if River agrees with me."
Simon was certain that the surest route to popularity as a clairvoyant was to tell the customers what they wanted to hear, so he was not awed by this display of shared psychic powers. He took a deep breath and nodded at Kaylee.
Simon took a sample of his own blood, ran an STD panel, and tore the printout in his eagerness to show Kaylee the results. She wasn't worried about her own results, given that since her second day onboard the only venereal disease of concern would have been an allergy to plastics. "Well, that's one concern out of the way. Or two, bearing contraception in mind. Would you be more comfortable if I used condoms?" Simon asked. "I mean, in terms of neatness…"
"Nah!" Kaylee said. "Stuff's fun to play with, spread it around, lick it off, you know. Might take you up on that if the time comes when we got rubbers but we ain't got wash water, though." Simon pushed the thought of that possibility out of his mind.
(A Week After That)
"Word of advice, Doc," Zoe said. "If you got somethin' that you probably don't want to hear called 'little' but that you want to keep attached to your body, best not refer to a woman's breasts as 'little', dong ma?"
"But I said 'adorable little crab-apples,'" Simon said, while thinking {{Jesus, was it on the Cortex, or what?}}
{Wednesday, 1100 Hours Ship's Time)
Simon held Kaylee spooned against his body. His left hand, reaching beneath her arm, cupped her breast. His right hand reached over her waist, and between her legs. {{This is my favorite origami}} he thought. {{Everything's so neatly finished.}}
He had his head down on her neck, burrowing into her hair. At the back of his mind, there was a sickly glow from a malign beacon, but other than that, he wasn't worrying about anything at all.
"I'm plenty ready," Kaylee said. "Case you want to move on and, well, do it." She turned to face Simon and caressed down from his shoulder to his elbow. She looked down. "And looks like you're ready too."
"If you're sure…" he said, lifting her thigh over his own. "Because, even setting aside the issue of refractory period, after I climax, there's a period of…at least ten minutes, maybe more, when you would swear I was hit on the head with a very large rock." Simon fell silent, and tried to summon up a better metaphor, given that time on St. Alban's when he really was hit on the head with a very large rock. While it did produce lassitude, it wasn't blissful at all. "So I want to make sure that I give you a pleasurable and fulfilling experience. When I'm still in control enough to do much of anything."
"You've been real polite, the times we fooled around," Kaylee said. "Except…you ever feel like doin' anything any wilder than what we did? I mean, nobody ever looks back to brag on themselves 'bout all the tame oats they sowed."
"Did you ever have a really mean teacher?" Simon asked, looking up from her cleavage, his eyes blazing like snapdragons at Christmas. Kaylee tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. That was the kind of non sequitur she would have expected from River, but not from other members of the family. "You know, one who gave you quizzes the last day before vacation and sent a note home to your father just because you were chewing gum?"
"Mrs. Pariginer!" Kaylee said, memories flooding back.
"Okay," he said. "Some of the things I like to do…I hope you'll like them too. Sometimes they depend on an element of surprise. And sometimes one can misjudge what someone else will enjoy. So, if I ever do something that you don't like, or that goes too far, just say 'Mrs. Pariginer,' and I'll stop."
"Why don't I just say, 'Hey, Simon, quit it'?"
"Well, you know, sometimes someone gets into a whole 'Help, help, don't ravish me' fantasy, without wanting you to actually stop. And sometimes I find myself saying 'No' precisely because the feeling is so good, that I'm about to, well, close the show out of town."
That all sounded to Kaylee like Simon had done a lot more stuff before than she would have predicted, but it didn't seem polite to ask and she suspected she didn't want to hear the answer anyway. By the time she had time to think this, Kaylee found herself spun around, bouncing off the bed with her wrists pinned to the pillow above her head, her legs at first sprawled wide, then trapped by Simon's. He shifted, so he held both her wrists with one hand, and pushed the extra pillows underneath Kaylee with his other hand.
He was all the way inside her, groaning with pleasure and so she was too. Her body wanted to move and there was nowhere to move but a narrow space of rocking her hips toward his. The extra pillows made her feel like she was up on a pedestal. All the energy in her body moved down and inwards, concentrated like the powder in a pipe bomb. Not that she'd know, and the schoolhouse needed a new privy anyway that time.
The comm burped into life. "Kaylee, only thing I pay you to diddle with is made outta metal," Mal's voice said. "You wanna tell me his thing is, go ahead but then I expect you to roll it into the control room and rivet it."
"There's no need to be crude, Captain," Simon said crisply. He let go of Kaylee's wrists. Kaylee reached over and turned off the comm. "I think it can wait a minute, if you can finish that fast," she told Simon.
(Friday, 1400 Hours Ship's Time)
"It's temporary surgical adhesive," Simon said, rolling up his sleeve and dispensing a drop onto his forearm. After giving it a second to dry, he lifted it away. "See? It peels right off."
"Aww, Simon!" Kaylee said. "I wouldn't be havin' even regular sex with you if I didn't trust you." They were in the engine room, and being in her domain made her more inclined to feel comfortable anyway.
"I just thought I'd better check. There's an old joke," Simon said. "A boy asks his father, ummm, I didn't say, his father owns a tailor shop. And the boy asks, 'Dad, what's ethics?' And his father says, 'You know I own this shop with your Uncle Dave, right? So let's say that a customer comes in to the shop, and he buys something for fifty platinum, but instead he gives me a five hundred platinum note! So, ethics is…do I tell your Uncle Dave?' Well, ethics is, not throwing people against the wall unless you have some reason to think they like being thrown against the wall. So, okay," he said, and ripped down the zipper on her coverall.
He trailed his fingernails along the thin artificial silk knit of her t-shirt, circled her nipples with the pad of his finger until they rose to meet him, and breathed and then bit with the fabric still in place. He held Kaylee's body still with his hands cupped under her ass. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sensation. Then she opened her eyes in surprise when he moved his hands in front of her, rolled the hem of her t-shirt, and pushed it over her neck. The collar of her coveralls caught it and held it in place. It still surprised her how fast he could move, when he really wanted to. The surprise felt good, like a lightning flash of sensation.
Simon used the adhesive to paste a half-moon of soft, translucent blue plastic beneath each of her nipples, and to attach a beaded chain (the kind that was used as pull-cords on the lamps; there was a card threaded with yards of the stuff in the stockroom) to the plastic. "There," he said. "The cold metal against your soft, warm skin. I'll enjoy thinking about the secret we share."
"You know," she said, her breath catching a little, "You learn a lot of stuff about people when you're havin' intimacies with them that you wouldn't otherwise."
He gave her a boost up into the hammock. "I'm not going to kneel to you, when we're playing," he said. He unwrapped a bright blue silk scarf and took out two padded leather bands, linked with a foot of fine chain. Simon pushed up Kaylee's pants legs and snapped one band around each of her ankles. Then he put his hands around her waist; she put her hands on his shoulders and he lifted her down.
"Huh!" she said. "Where'd you get these?"
"I went through the Findings bin in the stockroom," Simon said. "You're not the only person around here who can use a hot glue gun, you know."
Kaylee took a cautious step, testing how far she could go before the chain snapped to. "These are real sexy, but I have to work," she said.
"Oh, I think you'll find that you can work, if you're careful." Kaylee dipped her head, acknowledging the truth of the statement. "And I'll think about you moving cautiously, restrained…"
Heat rose to her face. "Except that I'd be embarrassed if folk could see, and I had to explain, or didn't 'cause they figured it out."
"You can take the cuffs off…ummm, dinner's at six…at five o'clock. Not before. If you do, I'll know."
His voice made Kaylee shiver a little, even though she knew he knew that she'd have the silly things off way before five, because she'd want to know what was going to happen in the or-else part.
"And when you wash up and change for dinner, wear something with a skirt. How about that blue dress with the stripes? It looks really nice on you, and it's got a full skirt."
(Friday, 1800 Hours)
Wash dried his hands, made sure the faucet wasn't dripping and the soap dispenser was closed, and sniffed the air. It's true that a formal chore roster was posted, but it was so often altered, both by captainly ukase and by the turn of the cards, that it was only a remote stepping-off point for the chores as actually performed. Wash smelled star anise, which meant it must be Simon cooking tonight. Rosemary, of course, signaled the Shepherd's presence in the kitchen. Bay leaves implied Kaylee; stick cinnamon, River. (Simon's most recent bazaar visit resulted in a splurge on spices that could be rinsed off and re-used.)
Wash began to draft a few quips about Simon's culinary ineptitude when he realized, with a start, that actually Simon wasn't a terrible cook anymore. How could he, Wash, function as the abstract and brief chronicle of Serenity if he didn't update his material?
"Not so bad, Doc," Zoe said. "You're improving under our tender care."
There was a faint rattle of thin metal when Kaylee started stacking the dishes to clear the table.
"Something new?" River asked sweetly.
"Uhhh…necklace," Kaylee said, pinkening. "New necklace."
"Can I see?" Wash said.
"No!" Kaylee said. One of Jayne's eyebrows rose, bookending one of Wash's eyebrows. River shot Simon a look. He couldn't meet her eyes, and started braiding the fringe on his placemat.
When Kaylee finished the dishes, refusing repeated hints from Wash that a sympathetic ear was available (given her obvious agitation, especially when he complimented her on her dress), she raced to her cabin.
Simon slid the stylus into his pocket encyclopedia, closed its cover, and glided it into his vest pocket. "Now, Kaylee, you didn't do what I told you, did you?"
"No, Simon," she said, surprised that she felt a little nervous, and even a little guilty at letting him down.
"I didn't think so," he said. "All right. There's a price to be paid, you know. Get on your hands and knees. No, in the center of the bed. About two inches to the right. Uhhh, your right."
He reached up underneath her skirt and pulled down her panties. Not off-her knees on the bed would have been in the way anyway-but bunching around her thighs, white cotton showing light against her skin, like whitecaps on a gray sea.
At first he smoothed the fabric of her dress over her skin (and she felt both the crinkly cloth and how slick her skin felt against it), and traced the valley of her back muscles and the line of her spine. Then he smacked her, the sound ringing even through the cloth. The feeling burned, but it was a pretty burn, a white flash with blue edges. When her body moved, absorbing the energy and arcing to feel more, the length of chain between her breasts shivered and chimed. "You'd better hold still," Simon said. The second blow, deliberately, hit her thigh, hard enough to almost hurt.
Simon slowly lifted Kaylee's skirt, making her feel much nakeder, exposed between the upside-down bell of the dress and her vestigial panties, than she would have felt tumbled on the sheets with no clothes at all. His fingertips glided over the few streaks of first-hint-of-dawn pink. Then for a little while nothing happened, as the waiting made Kaylee's breathing catch. She wanted to look over her shoulder to see what was happening behind her back, but she knew not to. Kaylee guessed that what was happening was Simon taking off his clothes very quietly, followed by taking off his belt very loudly.
Kaylee felt luxuriously a little scared (it wasn't a mechanic or a cattle broker or a scrap metal dealer who brewed the potion that popped out Mr. Hyde). It was an agreeable fright, like listening to a ghost story (but one told by PopPop) on a cold night (when Kaylee had seen for herself that Daddy had stacked plenty of wood in the box next to the furnace).
Simon put his head down on her back, and caressed her thighs for a while, he couldn't help it, the smooth warm glide of skin beneath his fingers, just a hint of muscle under the softness. Then he leaned back, and hit her a few light, rapid strokes. He snapped his belt taut between his hands, and ran the edge down her back.
Kaylee wondered if it was time to bring Mrs. Pariginer into the dialogue, but he only brought the belt down once, and the sting was like a string of Christmas lights, blazing up one by one. Then he looped the belt around her legs, not far above her knees, and pulled it tight. He was all the way inside her in one hard stroke, they would have toppled over without his arm strong around her waist. "Oh, Jesus, Kaylee, fuck," he groaned, "You're so tight and so hot, you're so wet, it feels great…" and she sort of wished he'd quiet down and let her concentrate, but somebody was making little mouse-squeaks so she deduced it probably was her although it didn't seem to be bad for his concentration.
(Saturday, 1100 Hours)
"People aren't always like what you'd think they'd be," Kaylee said. "I mean, not that that's bad, but you like to think you understand folks. Makes you doubt your judgment. And, also, if you're girlfolks you sometimes encourage your menfolks to, you know, not keep everything all bottled up inside 'em all the time. But which might could be a mistake. Or, not a mistake, but not as interesting as you thought it was gonna be before you went ahead and opened up the pressure relief valve."
River grinned at her.
Book finished shelling the peas, put up his palm, and said, "I suspect that this conversation is about to become unsuitable for my ears." He put the peas in the chiller and the pods in the stock bag and headed out of the kitchen.
"Chicken or egg?" River asked Kaylee, who didn't have an answer. "Surgeons order people around all the time."
"Oh!" Kaylee said, because it made sense if you put the two pieces of the sentence together. "River, does it seem funny to you, listenin' to people talk out loud stead'a in their heads?"
River nodded. "The colonial powers!" she said. "Unsure of the indigenous language, and having only one of their own, which they exercise louder and louder inversely proportional to the comprehension received."
Kaylee changed colors on the sweater-vest she was knitting for Simon, and wove in the end of the yarn. (She suspected that the relationship would be over, and she'd be frogging the sweater, long before she finished.) "I don't even like to knit, but I can't just sit still," she said. "Mama said, the devil finds work for idle hands to do." Kaylee tilted her head to one side, considering.
"I didn't know your mother, of course," River said. "But maybe she didn't hate the idea of your having fun. Maybe she just thinks of it as one more chore that she didn't want you to rush in and take on too early. I mean, look how you begged her for sylkspun stockings to wear to church, and then how much you hated the garter belt and how sticky your legs got in the summer, but you couldn't stop wearing them because they cost two months of her pin money."
"Yeah! I had to start shavin' my legs, so I wouldn't have gorilla-fur pokin' out through the stockings. But if Mama…that don't say much for my Daddy, does it?"
"Don't think about that!" River said. "You were hatched! I was hatched! We all were!"
Kaylee laughed. "Simon was definitely hatched." Kaylee let down the knitting into her lap, and leaned on the table, her chin in one hand. "That was glorious, cookie," Simon had said, just before crashing out on her shoulder. "Do you have any special requests, for next time?"
{{Do I?}} she wondered. {{Always thought that sexin' was fun. Fun to see that look of admiration in their eyes, fun to pick the prettiest one and let him sign your dance card. The way the good Lord made bodies, feels good to touch 'em. But there's always complications.}} She had a fair-to-middling idea of what Inara did with her fancy lady that time, and judging by sheer numbers, Kaylee was her own most frequent lover. And she was already married to one girl-Serenity-so perhaps trifling with another might be an option.
"Were your parents happy together?" Kaylee asked River.
River shrugged. "It was like two gigantic conglomerates mating. With no antitrust laws."
"Zoe and Wash are good together, aren't they? I mean, after all that bad stuff she saw in the War, I think it's a balm for her, the way he looks after her and just worships the ground she walks on. Mind you, he ain't the dishrag that Jayne'd call him behind his back-they ain't had a real set-to since you've been here, but sometimes when they have a ruckus, I worry that he'll pack his traps and leave."
"I don't foresee that ever happening, at all," River said knowingly.
"All I got is first sight, not second," Kaylee said. "Not that I'd want it, doesn't seem to be any pleasure to you. And I thought I had it all set up in my head, what I want and the steps from here to there. But how's a body to know, if she made the right choice when she set her cap? Maybe there were other things to do 'fore she settled down and bricked 'em in."
River patted Kaylee's wrist comfortingly. "The hedgehog knows many things, but the fox knows one big thing."