"Love Is A Roller Coaster Ride" 1/2 (Lynley/Havers, R)
1. She puts catsup on her steak.
It really is the darndest thing.
Oh, she never does it in public. But when they’re at home having steak for dinner - on the rare occasions dinner isn’t take-away in the car on the way to a crime scene, and one of them has thought ahead enough to buy steak in the first place - she always has to put catsup on it.
“The point of steak,” he informs her one evening as she’s vigorously shaking the bottle, “is to enjoy its flavor. Not to smother it in artificial tomato paste!”
“That ‘artificial tomato paste’,” she retorts, gulping her tea, “is a food group, just like chocolate and take-away, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”
He eventually manages to switch her to an American foodstuff known as A1 - what it stands for will ever be a mystery - but late at night, when she can’t sleep and heads down to the den to watch crappy reruns, he will still occasionally find her curled under her old fleece blanket, eating leftover steak smothered in catsup.
2. Her feet are always freezing.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many pairs of thick wool socks she wears, how many heating pads she sticks under the sheets or how many times she soaks her feet in a tub of hot water.
Her feet remain what Lynley has dubbed “footsicles.”
Eventually she resorts to tucking them between Lynley’s calves at night, because she doesn’t know how else to stop them from trembling with cold in the middle of the night.
He hates it, of course - no sane person would be fond of foot-shaped blocks of ice interrupting the otherwise lovely cocoon of warmth they bury themselves in after a hard case - but he lets her, because he’s seen the shivering and the socks and the heating pads and the hot water, and a little discomfort on his part is a small price to pay if it warms her poor feet up.
When they find out later that her feet are always so cold because of some circulatory something-or-other that was damaged when she was shot, he waits until the doctor leaves the room before he buries his face against her shoulder and holds her as close as he can manage.
She soothes him as best she can, but nothing she says can stem the litany of “I’m so sorry”s and “I should have protected you”s that etch into her skin where he whispers them.
That night when they get home and crawl into bed, he traps her feet between his calves, and when she tries to tug them away, he just grips them tighter.
And if she notices the tears that dampen her hair that night, she never lets on.
3. She refuses to ditch those baggy sweaters.
He had never understood those sweaters. He understood them even less the first time he made love with her, when he discovered the marvelous, tiny waist and trim body she hid under oversized flannel.
“I like my sweaters. They’re comfy,” is all she will say as she wraps herself tighter in her old fleece blanket and continues to browse case files.
“Barbara, you’re a beautiful woman. There’s no reason for you to hide that.”
“No, I’m not. Cute, maybe. And what makes you think you’re objective? You’re in love with me, for God’s sake! Of course you think I’m beautiful. That doesn’t mean I actually am.”
So he waits until Christmas, until the Christmas Ball when she has to wear a dress. They fight about it - she wants to wear some sort of plain, long-sleeved thing that makes her look like a nun, and he absolutely will not have it. So he does the cruelest thing he can think of: he sics Judith and his mother on her.
He regrets it two weeks later when she descends the stairs in a fantasy of deep violet silk that makes her green eyes glow and hugs her tiny waist like a glove.
And really, the laughter that lights up her eyes when the champagne flute slips from his fingers to shatter on the floor is quite uncalled-for.
Needless to say, he lets her keep wearing the sweaters after that - encourages it, in fact - because as far as he’s concerned, what happens in Cornwall stays in Cornwall, and the less people see of how she really looks, the better. It cuts down on the number of people he’d have to kill for looking at her like that.
And besides, he got her to grudgingly admit that maybe she’s not a complete hag, and he’ll take his victories where he can get them, because with Barbara, they come few and far between.
4. She rides like she was born for it.
The first time he takes her riding, she makes a show of bouncing about in the saddle like the rookie he expects her to be. Then, five minutes in, she lets out a ringing laugh, digs her heels down, nudges Dancer in the flank and gallops away, leaving him choking on her dust as she simply floats over the Cornish hillside as though she and the horse were two halves of one whole.
Considering it had taken a year of twice-weekly lessons before he was let off the longe line, let alone allowed to gallop about, he’s a bit dismayed and more than slightly put out.
They spend the rest of the day riding around the estate, sometimes racing, sometimes just walking quietly. On horseback she looks relaxed, at ease, like this is one thing she knows how to do. He notices, once, that as they fly across the fields she ditches her stirrups completely, crossing them up in front of her pommel and all but gluing her calves to Dancer’s side. The mare responds immediately; when Barbara gives her her head she takes five swift strides and jumps the three-foot wall in front of her with absurd ease. And Barbara - far from looking frightened or out of control, she bends low over Dancer’s neck, her red hair blending perfectly into the horse’s shining chestnut mane, as she releases over the crest and gallops away from the fence, laughing with glee. He thinks, suddenly, how good it must feel, for her to find one part of his life that she apparently understands; he’s drug her into a world she’s disdained all her life, a world that, more often than not, makes her nervous and uncomfortable, and he can’t help but marvel, yet again, that she’d put up with all of that just for him.
“You said you’d never ridden before!” he accuses her as they put away their tack after their ride.
“You mean I forgot to mention the scrubby little ponies on my uncle’s farm? The ones I’d throw a halter and pair of reins on before I galloped off to jump whatever logs and streams I could find - bareback, since we didn’t have saddles or bridles? I didn’t get to go often, but when I did… Well you wouldn’t think that was proper riding, would you, since we didn’t have your fancy tack or training?”
He stares at her for a long moment, growls and tackles her into the nearest haystack.
They don’t come out for over an hour.
5. She not only watches soap operas, she loves them.
He comes bolting down the stairs when he hears her screaming.
“Oh my God!”
What he finds when he enters the den is Barbara intently focused on the telly, the shattered remains of a beer bottle lying against the baseboard.
“Ah, Barbara?”
“Stacey killed Archie! Stacey!”
What he manages to divine, after an hour of listening to Barbara rant, is that this Stacey person is a character on the television show EastEnders, and that she had killed another character, one Archie Mitchell, who by all accounts was a piece of scum. He could not divine how she felt about it, as her opinion seemed to change with every breath she took.
The only consistent opinion he managed to get out of her was an outraged, “And detectives do not work that way!”
He tries to avoid her on “soap nights” after that, eliminating anything breakable from the den and leaving her to her shows in peace.
It’s not until the “trolley crash” storyline on Coronation Street (or, as she calls it, Corrie) that he finds himself watching the episodes with her, and though he still can’t make hide nor hair of the storylines, he finds himself increasingly mesmerized by the way she reacts to the characters, sharing their joys and sorrows with the same fervor and passion she does everything in her life.
And okay, so maybe “soap nights” aren’t so bad anymore, what with her curling against him, tucked under his arm, and squeezing his hand in fear when some impossibly melodramatic revelation is made as though it’s of earth-shattering importance.
But he still clears everything breakable out of the den.
+1. She always tucks herself against his side when she sleeps, as though saying, “You’ll protect me. I trust you.”
Thomas Lynley has seen Barbara Lynley (née Havers) in every conceivable state. He’s seen her in a blind rage, he’s seen her so giddy she’s bouncing, he’s seen her intent on a case and coolly logical and fiercely protective and lost in the throes of desire.
But she’s never so beautiful, he thinks, as when she sleeps.
He knows she has trust issues. Everyone up to this point in her life has hurt her; why should he be any different? She’s always insistent on standing on her own two feet. He can think of maybe a handful of times she’s allowed him to comfort her in the presence of others, and even fewer when she’s allowed him to carry her. And although she trusts him completely, both on the job and off, most of the time he gets the sense that while she trusts him to have her back the way she has his, she doesn’t yet trust him to carry her.
Except when she sleeps.
When she sleeps, she tucks her head into the curve of his shoulder, slides her feet between his calves, and curls into his side beneath his encircling arm, as though burying herself in her own cocoon of safety. In his arms, she trusts him with the most vulnerable parts of her - the night terrors, the cold feet, the inevitable amplification of emotions that occurs at night.
“I trust you,” she says when she slips her poor, cold feet between his calves.
“You’ll protect me,” she says when she drops all her defensive walls as soon as his arms come around her.
“I need you,” she says when she grabs for his free hand after she wakes, sweaty and shaking, from the throes of yet another nightmare.
So really, it’s no wonder that when he looks at her sleeping, peaceful face, he thinks about all the little quirks that drive him batty - the catsup, the baggy sweaters, the cold feet, her little stunt with the horses, the soap operas - and thinks, no, I didn’t fall in love with her in spite of all that. I fell in love with her because of all that.
And even if her quirks still occasionally make him crazy, when he looks at her, a sleeping angel in the moonlight, he doesn’t even have to think about whether or not it’s all worth it, because he already knows.
Next
It really is the darndest thing.
Oh, she never does it in public. But when they’re at home having steak for dinner - on the rare occasions dinner isn’t take-away in the car on the way to a crime scene, and one of them has thought ahead enough to buy steak in the first place - she always has to put catsup on it.
“The point of steak,” he informs her one evening as she’s vigorously shaking the bottle, “is to enjoy its flavor. Not to smother it in artificial tomato paste!”
“That ‘artificial tomato paste’,” she retorts, gulping her tea, “is a food group, just like chocolate and take-away, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.”
He eventually manages to switch her to an American foodstuff known as A1 - what it stands for will ever be a mystery - but late at night, when she can’t sleep and heads down to the den to watch crappy reruns, he will still occasionally find her curled under her old fleece blanket, eating leftover steak smothered in catsup.
2. Her feet are always freezing.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many pairs of thick wool socks she wears, how many heating pads she sticks under the sheets or how many times she soaks her feet in a tub of hot water.
Her feet remain what Lynley has dubbed “footsicles.”
Eventually she resorts to tucking them between Lynley’s calves at night, because she doesn’t know how else to stop them from trembling with cold in the middle of the night.
He hates it, of course - no sane person would be fond of foot-shaped blocks of ice interrupting the otherwise lovely cocoon of warmth they bury themselves in after a hard case - but he lets her, because he’s seen the shivering and the socks and the heating pads and the hot water, and a little discomfort on his part is a small price to pay if it warms her poor feet up.
When they find out later that her feet are always so cold because of some circulatory something-or-other that was damaged when she was shot, he waits until the doctor leaves the room before he buries his face against her shoulder and holds her as close as he can manage.
She soothes him as best she can, but nothing she says can stem the litany of “I’m so sorry”s and “I should have protected you”s that etch into her skin where he whispers them.
That night when they get home and crawl into bed, he traps her feet between his calves, and when she tries to tug them away, he just grips them tighter.
And if she notices the tears that dampen her hair that night, she never lets on.
3. She refuses to ditch those baggy sweaters.
He had never understood those sweaters. He understood them even less the first time he made love with her, when he discovered the marvelous, tiny waist and trim body she hid under oversized flannel.
“I like my sweaters. They’re comfy,” is all she will say as she wraps herself tighter in her old fleece blanket and continues to browse case files.
“Barbara, you’re a beautiful woman. There’s no reason for you to hide that.”
“No, I’m not. Cute, maybe. And what makes you think you’re objective? You’re in love with me, for God’s sake! Of course you think I’m beautiful. That doesn’t mean I actually am.”
So he waits until Christmas, until the Christmas Ball when she has to wear a dress. They fight about it - she wants to wear some sort of plain, long-sleeved thing that makes her look like a nun, and he absolutely will not have it. So he does the cruelest thing he can think of: he sics Judith and his mother on her.
He regrets it two weeks later when she descends the stairs in a fantasy of deep violet silk that makes her green eyes glow and hugs her tiny waist like a glove.
And really, the laughter that lights up her eyes when the champagne flute slips from his fingers to shatter on the floor is quite uncalled-for.
Needless to say, he lets her keep wearing the sweaters after that - encourages it, in fact - because as far as he’s concerned, what happens in Cornwall stays in Cornwall, and the less people see of how she really looks, the better. It cuts down on the number of people he’d have to kill for looking at her like that.
And besides, he got her to grudgingly admit that maybe she’s not a complete hag, and he’ll take his victories where he can get them, because with Barbara, they come few and far between.
4. She rides like she was born for it.
The first time he takes her riding, she makes a show of bouncing about in the saddle like the rookie he expects her to be. Then, five minutes in, she lets out a ringing laugh, digs her heels down, nudges Dancer in the flank and gallops away, leaving him choking on her dust as she simply floats over the Cornish hillside as though she and the horse were two halves of one whole.
Considering it had taken a year of twice-weekly lessons before he was let off the longe line, let alone allowed to gallop about, he’s a bit dismayed and more than slightly put out.
They spend the rest of the day riding around the estate, sometimes racing, sometimes just walking quietly. On horseback she looks relaxed, at ease, like this is one thing she knows how to do. He notices, once, that as they fly across the fields she ditches her stirrups completely, crossing them up in front of her pommel and all but gluing her calves to Dancer’s side. The mare responds immediately; when Barbara gives her her head she takes five swift strides and jumps the three-foot wall in front of her with absurd ease. And Barbara - far from looking frightened or out of control, she bends low over Dancer’s neck, her red hair blending perfectly into the horse’s shining chestnut mane, as she releases over the crest and gallops away from the fence, laughing with glee. He thinks, suddenly, how good it must feel, for her to find one part of his life that she apparently understands; he’s drug her into a world she’s disdained all her life, a world that, more often than not, makes her nervous and uncomfortable, and he can’t help but marvel, yet again, that she’d put up with all of that just for him.
“You said you’d never ridden before!” he accuses her as they put away their tack after their ride.
“You mean I forgot to mention the scrubby little ponies on my uncle’s farm? The ones I’d throw a halter and pair of reins on before I galloped off to jump whatever logs and streams I could find - bareback, since we didn’t have saddles or bridles? I didn’t get to go often, but when I did… Well you wouldn’t think that was proper riding, would you, since we didn’t have your fancy tack or training?”
He stares at her for a long moment, growls and tackles her into the nearest haystack.
They don’t come out for over an hour.
5. She not only watches soap operas, she loves them.
He comes bolting down the stairs when he hears her screaming.
“Oh my God!”
What he finds when he enters the den is Barbara intently focused on the telly, the shattered remains of a beer bottle lying against the baseboard.
“Ah, Barbara?”
“Stacey killed Archie! Stacey!”
What he manages to divine, after an hour of listening to Barbara rant, is that this Stacey person is a character on the television show EastEnders, and that she had killed another character, one Archie Mitchell, who by all accounts was a piece of scum. He could not divine how she felt about it, as her opinion seemed to change with every breath she took.
The only consistent opinion he managed to get out of her was an outraged, “And detectives do not work that way!”
He tries to avoid her on “soap nights” after that, eliminating anything breakable from the den and leaving her to her shows in peace.
It’s not until the “trolley crash” storyline on Coronation Street (or, as she calls it, Corrie) that he finds himself watching the episodes with her, and though he still can’t make hide nor hair of the storylines, he finds himself increasingly mesmerized by the way she reacts to the characters, sharing their joys and sorrows with the same fervor and passion she does everything in her life.
And okay, so maybe “soap nights” aren’t so bad anymore, what with her curling against him, tucked under his arm, and squeezing his hand in fear when some impossibly melodramatic revelation is made as though it’s of earth-shattering importance.
But he still clears everything breakable out of the den.
+1. She always tucks herself against his side when she sleeps, as though saying, “You’ll protect me. I trust you.”
Thomas Lynley has seen Barbara Lynley (née Havers) in every conceivable state. He’s seen her in a blind rage, he’s seen her so giddy she’s bouncing, he’s seen her intent on a case and coolly logical and fiercely protective and lost in the throes of desire.
But she’s never so beautiful, he thinks, as when she sleeps.
He knows she has trust issues. Everyone up to this point in her life has hurt her; why should he be any different? She’s always insistent on standing on her own two feet. He can think of maybe a handful of times she’s allowed him to comfort her in the presence of others, and even fewer when she’s allowed him to carry her. And although she trusts him completely, both on the job and off, most of the time he gets the sense that while she trusts him to have her back the way she has his, she doesn’t yet trust him to carry her.
Except when she sleeps.
When she sleeps, she tucks her head into the curve of his shoulder, slides her feet between his calves, and curls into his side beneath his encircling arm, as though burying herself in her own cocoon of safety. In his arms, she trusts him with the most vulnerable parts of her - the night terrors, the cold feet, the inevitable amplification of emotions that occurs at night.
“I trust you,” she says when she slips her poor, cold feet between his calves.
“You’ll protect me,” she says when she drops all her defensive walls as soon as his arms come around her.
“I need you,” she says when she grabs for his free hand after she wakes, sweaty and shaking, from the throes of yet another nightmare.
So really, it’s no wonder that when he looks at her sleeping, peaceful face, he thinks about all the little quirks that drive him batty - the catsup, the baggy sweaters, the cold feet, her little stunt with the horses, the soap operas - and thinks, no, I didn’t fall in love with her in spite of all that. I fell in love with her because of all that.
And even if her quirks still occasionally make him crazy, when he looks at her, a sleeping angel in the moonlight, he doesn’t even have to think about whether or not it’s all worth it, because he already knows.
Next