Primeval Advent Calendar: December 1
Sullivan smiles lightly over the rim of his glass at the pretty girl with auburn hair and long eyelashes. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Always has been. Her clothes are carefully chosen to look flattering but casual enough not to give her away as someone who works too much to have a family to go home to and has turned wearing high heals into an elaborate power game with male colleagues. She’s talking with fake enthusiasm about random topics so that later she can convince herself she had been in control all along. Sullivan enjoys the fucked up normalcy of this enough to play along while trying not to make parallels with Jenny because that just isn’t nice.
“I’m boring you…” she smiles smoothly, putting on the façade of light embarrassment, which Sullivan knows to be a tactical move to guilt-trip him into giving her a reason to believe she’s won. Or maybe he’s over-thinking for no reason whatsoever.
“Did you know your eyes are way too distracting?”
He’s not trying to be funny or witty (that’s the upside of being away from the ARC) but she - Mia, he reminds himself - still laughs at the cheesy remark with ease. She looks at him with a deliberately meaningful expression and pays their drinks. He only protests as much as appropriate and simply watches with amusement the way she firmly clings to the illusion of her own superior strength.
Hard headed feminists are the most fun. Those who almost believe that every cock inside them is a disgrace to their cause but can’t quite give up on it either. The hint of self-loathing ironically makes them quite amazing lovers. Mia only does this for show, though. She will probably end up married with two kids, a dog she never wanted but secretly rather likes and a lover she secretly rather loathes. She’s going to lead a very happy life built out of tiny bricks of misery. Very modern.
“Your place or mine?” she asks before he could.
“You decide.”
His answer brings out her first genuine smile. It makes him proud. He’s not a bastard, after all, though Uncle Philip would certainly disagree, still clinging to morals that were rather outdated even in his own youth, and he’s not damaged either. He might not be happily married, with a little baby to go home to every day like Kermit but he doesn’t have a lunatic ex-wife either, for which he’s pretty damn grateful.
The flat where Mia takes him is just a bit too bare, just a bit too clean. It’s probably a friend’s who is currently working abroad, or heritage from a recently deceased aunt, or maybe she’s just too rich for her own good and has a flat just for these occasions. It’s comforting in a way. It tells him she won’t expect him to call or even ask for her number - he will, anyway, it’s just polite.
Mia rips their clothes off and pushes him on the bed with enough hunger to rival a sabertooth and Sullivan almost grins at the comparison before he remembers Valerie and to chase away the memory of the stale taste of vomit on his tongue he bends down to leave soft, open-mouthed kisses on Mia’s long neck. She smells like roses and tastes like almond, one of those strange mysteries that make women so frighteningly beautiful even when they aren’t. Like Jenny’s impeccable, if slightly I’m going to prove I’m better than all of you together look, or Abby’s vulnerable strength, always on the verge of breaking but somehow always managing to bend a little more. And then there’s Helen, and even if they all agree they’d be better off if she was shot (accidentally, of course) or a T-Rex would do them the favour of choosing her as Christmas dinner, still, Sullivan would bet a week of sex that every member of the staff who has at least the hint of an inclination towards women (and is not an annoyingly stuck up bureaucrat) would do Helen just once because she’s unfathomable and even in her despicable coldness utterly feminine and stronger than any of them could ever imagine and simply stuck in all the shades of fucked up which they all seem to be addicted to anyway. But they don’t because she’s one lethal cutthroat bitch to say the least. They know there’s no such thing as just once with her, they have all heard Cutter’s insane story about Blade being taken off the project because of her in a world that none of them really want to believe ever existed, and then there’s Stephen and they all agree they don’t want to turn into Stephen just for a good shag, thank you very much.
Mia moans under him as Sullivan kisses her small, firm breasts and wraps her legs around his waist, urging him on. Her thighs are just a bit too thin, her voice too shrill, and her hair is dyed, which fills him with undeserved disappointment, but as she closes her eyes in pleasure, probably imagining him to be somebody else, just for a few minutes she is the most attractive woman who ever walked the earth - and for that rather surprising realization Sullivan is vaguely proud of himself. Mia cries out softly as he pushes inside her warm body, which just for tonight gives him the illusion of normalcy, like his life does not depend on the benevolence of creatures that really should look up the meaning of the word extinct in a bloody dictionary.
The moans become louder, their breathing faster, movements less coordinated and it doesn’t take long for both of them to find release and fall into the almost obligatory awkwardness of the afterglow. Sullivan tries to draw it out just a bit because the other option is going back to his empty flat to find about a dozen worried calls from his mum which he will snidely ignore for at least a few days like normal people do.
“That was lovely, Maurice,” Mia smiles awkwardly and for a moment Sullivan can’t help but imagine what Bentley would say if he knew his name had been abused for the greater good tonight and then he faintly wonders if Mia has the same trick of using her friends’ names whenever she picks up a stranger.
“It was,” he brushes his lips against her flushed cheeks. “Maybe we could do it again sometime?”
“I… don’t think that would be a good idea,” she says not looking at him, and Sullivan has to suppress an amused chuckle at her surprising honesty.
“Pity,” he says and when she returns his easy smile he knows she picked up on the lie. It’s nice, almost like a shared secret.
Ok, maybe he is fucked up just a little, Sullivan thinks as he lets himself out of the flat and starts walking home in the dark, but compared to most people he works with his life is fit to be a late summer chick-flick. His closest relationship isn’t with his laptop, or an armada of deadly objects, or prehistoric creatures that are trying to eat him and he still has enough proper human emotions somewhere inside him to throw up seeing the mangled body of a young woman. He’s not plagued by constant nightmares, though, unlike about 90% of the ARC staff and that’s a bit of a miracle in its own right.
He might be a bit dysfunctional when it comes to relationships but he begins to think that that’s almost like a job requirement at the ARC and he makes a mental note to ask Kermit how he managed to trick the system for so long. At least he’s not caught up in the vaguely incestuous crossfuckfest most seem to need to get through the day even if every new conquest just adds another problem to their ever-growing list of unresolved anxieties. Once again he’s grateful Lacey is not assigned to the project and is too bloody smart to fall for him, anyway, and he decides that sleeping with Sam all those years ago simply doesn’t count because Sam is Sam, easy as that.
And on top of all that he has had the honour of having a deadly and rather unattractive Future Predator be named after him, and that is definitely not something anyone else could rival with.