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David gets very drunk at a bar one night, and mid-wolf rant, his slurring almost unintelligible, he starts a very long sentence with something about a long ride home and why would I even call it home, geez, Louise, is she home to me now? Obviously, Ian checks out of the conversation, and then.
I wish people were having sex dreams about me too.
And that? That’s really fucking interesting.
“What?” Ian goes for nonchalant but misses spectacularly: his voice is half an octave too high and his whole body’s leaning across the table. If David wasn’t so drunk, if David wasn’t David, he’d call Ian out on it right away. But the man just babbles on.
“Yeah, you know,” and that’s when David looks up from his fourth beer with this open expression across his face. “Yeah, it’s like— people dream about you all the time.”
He returns his gaze to the table, and Ian thinks his eyes are going to pop out of his skull if the suspense goes on any longer. David doesn’t pay him any mind though.
“Why can’t Poppy dream about me, well I guess she did, in a way—”
Right then and there, Ian volunteers to drive David home himself. Fifteen minutes later, after David has gone “to the whiz palace!”, Ian calls them a Lyft and lets David’s unsure fingers type out an address.
And in the car, when he asks him to elaborate, Ian digs in, teeth and meat and wolves. He puts a hand on David’s shoulder, he brushes his arm, and he asks about the dream Poppy supposedly had.
So of course he throws it at her the first chance he gets.
Carol rolls her eyes, and David has no recollection of that car ride last week, but Poppy. Ian watches her take the blow, watches her deflect instantly. He sees her cross and uncross her arms. He hears himself say something about how it’s a goddamn epidemic. It’s a curse, that’s what it is.
Everything about the rest of the night is just unnerving.
And then, it ricochets.
At the next daily meeting he catches sight of Poppy, running across the room with her phone pressed against her ear and a cup of coffee threatening to spill, and it hits him like a brick that for once, he wasn’t dreaming about himself.
It gets really weird really fast after that.
He has failed to consider that their relationship was built on one simple fact: they aren’t— they don’t— But she did. If there’s a line to be crossed, Pop dreaming about them fucking absolutely does count. And now it hangs over and between them like a real breathing thing Ian’s too afraid to touch. But by God does he want to kick it.
And what’s worse: nothing is happening so, really, legally, HR-wise, nothing can stop.
Meanwhile, she’s all knives and unamused glares across the hall. True, the timing isn’t ideal. The other thing he’d said that day was that she’d fail without him and she’s taking it about as well as he thought she would. Just running across the office at an ever-increasing speed with a line across her forehead that seems to live permanently there now.
Anyway, he’s been seeing less of her which does help.
What doesn’t help is the way she goes off every time they cross paths in the hallway or the conference room or, or. It doesn’t seem like she needs a reason, or at least it seems like the bar for an acceptable misstep is extremely low. He swears, at some point, she yelled at him for eating her last ice cream sandwich, and if he wasn't so busy blocking out a pun, he’d tell her that that was completely unreasonable. He hasn't been to the office kitchen in years.
But then she’s upping the ante, starting a new week with these ridiculous attacks on his physique.
Poppy catches him in the hallway, both of them on their way to see David but she stops in her tracks at the sight of him.
“What even is this?!”
At one point Ian has to duck because Poppy’s waving her hands around to accentuate the words.
“Is it a shirt? No, it is not. It’s not even half a T-Shirt at this point!” She takes her sweet time getting around the tee, so it starts to sound like she’s whining. “I can see your stomach, that’s—”
His eyebrows “Yeah, Pop, you’re supposed to. It's a crop top.”
“Oh yeah, well I don’t think I’m supposed to do this—” Poppy goes in for a punch, somewhere in the general area of his stomach, and it’s not that she misses, it’s like she reconsiders mid-air, and her fist doesn’t connect. Her fingers do though, and it’s clumsy and uncharacteristic and it kinda makes him want to ask her out.
She looks, slow and dumbstruck, to her fingers splayed on his stomach. And that pause, now that’s a kind of engineering Ian’s good at. He watches her face as she reconsiders her own gesture, and lets go. Her face a hue of red, Poppy gets her hands off him but the damage is done.
“See, this is just disturbing to me,” Poppy declares, yet her voice is strikingly soft after the collision. It comes out as forced casual at best.
“Poppy,” he squints at her, trying to gauge whether they've built enough here for it not to crumble under the weight of one suggestion.
“Pop, don’t you think, it would be easier if—” It’s ridiculous but he does find himself a lot closer to praying than he has been in a while. “Don’t you want to do something,” he waves a finger between the two of them, “about this?”
“I would like to murder you one day,” she interjects, and all he can see are her teeth.
“No, I meant— Do you think it would help if we had sex?”
It’s like she jumps away from him but it’s at a speed a human eye couldn’t have caught, so he just finds himself standing four steps away from her.
“What? No!” Poppy looks up at him, an unnerving quality to her, like she’s seeing right through him. Like she could possibly know Ian’s not talking about her feeling out of her depth with the new expansion or all that pent-up anger that pushes her to hit people in the hallway. But then she shakes her head, and that look goes away.
“Okay, then.” Ian tilts his head, a knowing smile across his face. It’s a goddamn epidemic. “Thought I’d offer.”
On a Thursday, he catches her in a meeting, checked out completely, studying his hands. Poppy looks a little worse for wear, and the curt “Yeap” she sometimes provides as an answer to David’s open-ended questions are very on-brand with the unwashed hair and fingers pulling at the sleeves of her hoodie. In a word, a mess.
He tries to catch the moment her thoughts shift from the deadline next week to him. Because she still looks puzzled but in a way that’s more about his hands, which— Flattering. He’s seen her looking at him weird across the room since Monday, and having been on the receiving end of that idea— a real fucking virus of an idea— he gives it until Friday tops.
Because maybe it really would be easier to get over it if they just had sex. Which, knowing Poppy, probably wouldn't leave him wanting more. It’s just that the fastest way to get his mind off something was always to go through with it. And this one shouldn’t be too hard because they are so often on the same page about the best solution, and workshopping this seems like fun, and if there’s a problem here they could so easily fix— And because he can’t stop dreaming about her and it’s getting really weird in his head, all these raunchy scenarios in direct contrast with how little they’ve interacted over the past few weeks.
By the end of the meeting, he watches her reach the same improbable conclusion, slowly lifting her head in disbelief, locking eyes.
That was fast, he thinks over David’s mumbling about how Hera seems to be behind schedule, and Ian has to cover his mouth with the back of his hand to stop laughing.
Poppy’s eyes cut to him, and she’s holding back a smile too.
After the meeting, she follows him to his office.
“Okay, yes.” She slumps down on the chair and immediately crosses her arms.
He glances up at her. “Really?”
“I have a lot of feelings towards you right now.” She starts swinging in the chair, side to side, one foot on the floor, the other one in the air. “None of them good. Not all of them sexual.” She looks up, and he can see the corner of her mouth go up, like she’s really fucking happy with how clever she’s being.
“But I’m ready to at least work through those.” There’s something in her eyes again, that eerie confidence, that I-can-see-through-you bullshit.
There’s something here they both want, except she keeps one eye on the door the entire time and she keeps talking about power and dominance and Ian can’t get behind that.
“Okay, Pop, cool it. We need a plan.”
They meet up Friday evening in the office gym. When he first suggested it she went at the word with such disbelief. “Gym? Gym?” until “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”
Unsurprisingly, Poppy’s Friday night was free.
When Poppy walks in, she starts speaking immediately: about the inefficiency of Scrum in a newly created team, and the way Anthony wanted to get home earlier today so he left at six, six, could you believe it.
Not that Ian’s been waiting, but he had spent the last hour right here, going from station to station, wiping them down relentlessly and washing his hands after each use. Nice to see she’s nervous too.
She puts down her bag on the floor and unzips her hoodie, so he crosses the room to be able to help her with the rest of it.
She talks and she talks, and then she doesn’t talk, but she giggles as he pulls at the hem on her pale blue tee. However funny it was to watch her squirm as she tried to put into words the scope of permitted action, it’s nice to know they have a shared vision when it comes to this. But then she smiles at herself as Ian gets his shirt off, and he would very much like to be in on the joke.
As discussed, he crowds her into a wall (“I do like that you're tall,” she’d said, and at his raised eyebrow she added “Do with that knowledge what you will.”) and plants a hand near her shoulder. She’s looking straight at him for two seconds before she turns her head. A small nod, then, more to herself than to him.
His other hand goes between her legs as she undoes the button on her jeans, fingers brushing over his. Together they pull the fabric down, and that’s something. Cooperation. Synchronicity. Shared goals.
She reaches out, a hand to his stomach, a pantomime of passion, tentative and, frankly, bizarre because he can’t get over the fact that it’s Poppy, under him. It’s Poppy who’s making that noise between a word and a grunt, it’s her ankle around his shin, and it’s real, and it’s happening. All so it doesn’t have to happen again.
And maybe he would like to bury his face in her but he also wants to see her expression as it shifts, as Poppy rocks against his hand, as the line across her forehead softens considerably. He swallows, hard, curling his fingers into the edge of her underwear and pulling it to the side. When he pushes a finger inside, there’s a flash of teeth from her and nothing else.
He stares. He can’t quite connect the image of her from the years before this and this. It doesn’t quite register with him, how she closes her eyes and opens her mouth, and how everything about her relaxes except for her cunt around his fingers; it’s like she had forgotten he’s here at all. She's never this unguarded with him. She’s never this selfish, either.
He’s not sure he can go back from this. He hasn’t even pulled out his dick yet, and what did he think that would help solve?
She opens her eyes and nods again.
“Yeah?” His voice comes out softer than intended, so he scales it back with a dramatic gesture, an outstretched hand pointing to the mats on the floor.
Poppy’s still leaning on the wall, bending down to get out of her vans, stepping out of her jeans. He’s already gotten himself down to his underwear, pulling a condom out of the discarded pants lying on the floor.
She steps onto the mats, still in her tee and underwear, and socks with a loud whale pattern. In a move resembling what is usually done on these mats, she swings an arm around his neck and tumbles them both to the floor. Her limbs tangle with his, and from there, it’s almost easy. Poppy hooks a finger in her underwear, tugs it down in one uncharacteristically smooth motion. “Congrats,” he hears himself say, and she laughs at that. It’s so loud and bright and her, that he almost misses it when she starts pulling at his underwear.
He kicks it off as she brings a hand up to adjust her bra under her T-shirt, and somehow it doesn’t occur to him to get her out of it.
He fumbles for the condom on the mat and gets it open in one tear.
“Congrats,” she whispers at him, and suddenly he doesn’t think he’s going to die from a heart attack at the peak of his career, no, she’s going to kill him tonight.
“Ian,” and his eyes cut to her again. “Let’s get to it.” Her legs fall open.
He pushes into her and she does a thing with her face, like she’s thinking way too hard about something, but her legs open wider, and her hand lands on his ass, and everything about this is becoming a lot less rehearsed.
Poppy opens her mouth, and for a second it really seems like she’s going to say something dirty, something about the size of his dick or how she’s breaking a sweat in a gym for the first time in years. Or maybe he should say something, something terrible like bringing up the fact that they’re living the dream, but he can’t formulate a sentence without it being her name, and Ian Grimm doesn’t do that.
Instead, he grabs her at the hip with one hand, the other one still supporting his weight. He presses his forehead to hers, and her eyes fly open, so he has to shut his, because seeing her up close like this would be ridiculous. It’s enough that he can hear the noises she makes, or that she's soft all over, or that he can’t seem to catch his breath. Must be the position, been a while since he’s done missionary.
So he switches it up so that she’s sitting on top of him. His fingers dig into the flesh of her thighs, and Poppy doesn’t even notice. She keeps rocking herself against him, and—
“Oh yeah, this is better,” and her voice is breathless, like this is about something real now. Like, maybe, if she opens her eyes and sees him she won’t try and school her expression into less.
“Poppy,” he blurts out, “I’m gonna come.”
And just like that, she brings her hand to where he’s pushing into her and starts rubbing at her clit, double the speed of his hips. And that’s really fucking hot that she’s—
She’s just really fucking hot. It strikes him while he’s inside of her that she is, she absolutely is, and that’s not helping fix anything either. He never undid her bra, and maybe he should have, maybe it was a choice he should have made. Somehow it feels like that was a turning point where he stopped trying to get over it and started getting into it.
Just before she comes Poppy presses her open mouth to his shoulder, and he can feel the edge of her teeth. Ian wants her to leave a mark, just so that he’d be able to show it to her, later. See, this is what you have done to me. What have I done to you?
After, he has a pained expression across his face, and to his horror, Ian finds himself unable to school it into anything even remotely usable. He has to untangle himself from her really fast, standing up awkwardly on wobbly legs, collecting his clothes over the floor. All so that she won’t see his stupid stupid face.
“Ian,” she calls out and he has no choice. He looks down to where Poppy’s sitting, knees bent.
“So yeah, thanks, that helped.”