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“Hold on…” Nile magic slides her way over to the closet, kicks the boys’ boots to the side to get to her sneakers underneath. The sun is only half risen. It takes her a moment to differentiate her own from Andy’s. Not that it really matters in the end, but Nile likes a bit of neon in her athletic wear, and Andy won’t be pleased if she wants to go out before Nile’s back and the only comfortable option she has are bright purple Nike’s. “I’m comin’…”
With her fingers hooked into the backs, she brings her hands up to her face to mime the horn riff. There is not a thing better than some Sam and Dave to get into the mood for a morning run. Winter is finally cracking and thawing, making way for spring. The birds are singing, the current job only really requires Nicky’s services in the sniper’s nest, she spotted a record player in the closet that she intends to investigate the second she’s sure everybody is awake, and she has a course from an online degree in art history waiting for her on her laptop to get cracking on.
In short, Nile is in a fantastic mood.
To warm up she stretches on the porch, lunges and swings, dance moves peppered in liberally. And then she’s off to enjoy the beautiful April sunrise, the fresh, crisp countryside air in her lungs.
She starts heading back the way she came from after an album and a half. The morning is bright and warm.
Back at the house, she meets Nicky at the porch. He looks exactly like somebody who has spent the past fourteen hours behind the scope.
“Good morning, Nile.”
He holds up a hand for a high five. A peculiarity of their friendship. Nile flinched away from him the first time he tried to hug her. In her defence, he’d been spattered with the blood of the dozen men he’d just sliced through to fight his way to the side of the room where Nile and Andy were stationed, hacking through a small army of their own. It was the first job after Merrick. Nicky had hugged Andy first, murmuring questions, making sure she wasn’t hurt. Nile was prepared for that part. She’d been doing it herself all day. Andy had accepted ten seconds of it from Nicky before she playfully mimed kneeing him in the balls to lighten the mood, and after he laughed, he had turned to Nile. And Nile, still with a hand on her gun, had flinched away from the big, deadly man advancing on her before she remembered they’re on the same team.
Nicky, a fantastic sport, had smiled. There was blood on his teeth that shone under the fluorescents. He took a half step back. Nile recalled a picture book her Nana used to read to her and her brother, a take on Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf in that book concealed itself in a black cloak, and tried to lure you in with its green eyes that glittered like jewels. “Alright, Nile?”
“Yessir.”
Nile almost cringed. The army had ingrained some things into her that it would take time to shake off. She determined the best course of action would be to do something that she would not have done in the marines. Something to belatedly show some of the care for Nicky he’d been trying to show for her.
So she held her hand up for a high five.
Nicky slapped his hand against hers with no hesitation, bloody smile growing, and Joe, who was halfway across the room on his way to check Andy over for himself, jumped out of his skin at the sudden sound, shrieking like a child.
Surrounded by dead bodies, the four of them had cracked up laughing. Andy wrapped her arm around Nile’s shoulders, and somehow, contrary to all the objective facts of it, the deaths, the blood, the gaping hole that Booker used to fill, the injuries that still drained them all even after they had healed, it was a good night.
And Nicky still gives Nile a high five in greeting, or in situations where he would hug Joe or Andy. Nile went to initiate a hug with him only a few months after the incident, and he, with no trace of curved lips but his smile showing in his eyes, took a half step back and raised his hand for a high five. Then he pulled Nile into what perhaps might have been the warmest, sweetest hug of her life, sparing those from her mother.
Often they grasp hands on impact now and go for a modified bro hug, but Nile is drenched in sweat, and Nicky looks so tired he might fall over if Nile pushes him too hard.
“All done?” This is the fourth shift he’s pulled over the past six days waiting for the target. Andy grumbled about the buyer’s non-negotiable requirement that the job be carried out with utmost stealth, but even she’s been enjoying the time to relax, to catch up with Booker.
“All done. Are you hungry?”
Nicky is the kind of insane where he’ll make the time to cook something satisfying to eat before he’ll crash no matter how exhausted he is. Luckily, Nile spied Andy in the kitchen through the window.
“Sure. But you ain’t cooking this morning, man. Get your ass to the table and park it.”
Mealtimes are sort of sacred to the team. It’s nice. At least once a day everybody eats together. Except, Joe and Booker are nowhere to be found, and Andy only went to the effort of making a pot of coffee and heating up one bowl of leftovers from last night’s supper for Nicky.
He offers it to Nile, because he’s Nicky.
“Not a chance, dumbass.”
She turns to the cupboard to rummage for cereal before the warmth of his tired smile can really soak in.
Andy slurps her coffee, staring over the rim at Nicky only once she pulls her eyes from Nile’s ass, shown off as it is in skin tight Adidas. “I carried that all the way from the fridge to the microwave for you, and now you try to give it away?”
Nicky garbles through a mouthful of lasagne, not even looking up from his bowl, “love you, boss.” He puckers his mouth as if to blow a kiss, lips orange with sauce.
Andy blinks slowly, smiles into her mug before she turns her eyes on Nile again.
Nile doesn’t quite pretend not to notice, but she keeps her mouth shut.
*
It took two months for Nile to sleep with Andy. Maybe it would have happened sooner, if it weren’t for the bullet wound, for the downer that was everybody getting adjusted to Booker’s absence.
The first time Andy asked if Nile wanted to was only a month after Merrick.
“Bullshit you’re straight. Everyone wants to fuck everyone. Sexuality as a preference rather than a fact of humanity’s innate, insatiable, all encompassing hornyness is a farce as childish as believing in God.”
Some time had passed by then for Nile to adjust to Andy’s worldview, its utterly un-fucking-paralleled insanity. Still, sometimes the things she said made Nile feel so off balance and infuriated she wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Adding to the confusion was Andy’s love for bearing down on whatever philosophy is most going to rile up the person to whom she’s speaking, regardless of whether not she actually believes it. Going off of her self satisfied smirk, her posture, she seemed to be under the impression that she might be able to provoke Nile into a frustration-fuck. Nile half wanted to give in, curious despite herself, and half wanted to slap Andy in the face with the statement that she was not and will never be another Booker.
There were a dozen different things Nile could have said off the top of her head, not the least of which being that Andy can bitch and moan all she wants, but it’s never going to make Nile stop believing in God, and it’s never going to make her anything but straight. Probably. She settled on, “I don’t think that’s politically correct.”
Andy had grinned, all teeth. The fire that always burns behind her eyes flared up wilder, sparking. And Nile realised she was going to have sex with Andy. Only, she refused to do it like that, spiteful. When it finally happened, it was in the middle of the night, after they woke up tangled together on the sofa. Nile was already half there, still half drenched in the dregs of a dream, something hazy and confused, the warmth of Andy’s body beside her, her thigh between Nile’s legs, the way they’d started lazily, subtly rubbing against each other in their sleep, random memories of Joe grunting, his torso bare and shimmering with sweat, his muscles flexing as he got to work clearing a tree that had fallen into one of the safe house windows in the decades since the team had last stopped there. The content of the dream itself had a hell of a lot less to do with Joe as a person, she thought. It had a hell of a lot more to do with his unfortunate physical resemblance to her ex-boyfriend, the fact that she hadn’t had sex in almost a year, and she was sleeping in a shirt that smelled like Joe due to the laundry still being damp on the clothesline when she'd been ready to call it a day.
Andy was a great kisser, and even better with her fingers. She got soft afterwards in a way she rarely gives herself wholly over to, affectionate and shockingly snark free for the entirety of the hour before she fell asleep again. The gentle sound of her laughter was as gratifying to Nile as the sex itself. On the whole it was good. Still, Nile was pretty sure she remained straight. She liked Andy’s strong arms around her waist as she got ready to go back to sleep herself, liked the gun oil musky soapy scent of her, liked that she was there, liked that she cared and that it was easy, that it didn’t really mean anything more than they were both horny and willing. But the thing she thought she liked the most was that in the dark, it was easy to drift back off into the sleepy paradise of low grade arousal, of thinking about a man (Joe appeared in her mind's eye initially, but she brushed that image off somewhat successfully) finding her this wet and ready and fucking her well.
*
Joe and Nicky aren’t shameless, necessarily. They prefer privacy, but it can be hard to come by. A room to themselves with a door that closes seems to be the best they ever hope for while working, but given the nature of what the team does everybody generally feels safer sleeping in the same room. When Joe and Nicky do have their own room, Nile generally tries to avoid the immediate vicinity when she isn't sure where they are or what they're up to.
Andy’s off doing some mysterious errand or other tonight. They’re staying in another fucking cave. This one has less clutter in it, and actual mattresses, which Nile tries to tell herself is a win.
Joe and Nicky spent much of the day in a nearby lake. They caught some fish, made a fire to cook them, and then went swimming. Being under the baking sun all day, Nile didn’t find it strange or even suspicious that they went to lay down before the sun had even set. She and Andy were sitting in front of the fire outside, talked for a few hours more.
Andy split to go wherever it is she wanted to go after dark. When Nile returned to the cave, she found Joe and Nicky fast asleep, maybe sprawled out a bit more than they usually are, wrapped up in a blanket. She wonders if maybe they really overdid it, maybe started to succumb to something like heat stroke, if maybe that's why they called it so early. Maybe they had chills. They’ve claimed the mattress shoved into a corner, the one that has what one used to sleeping in a room with two to three other adults might call the most privacy. Nile can’t see them when she lays down, at least, and they can’t see her. If she wanted to twist fully around she might be able to see their feet sticking out from the little alcove, but that’s it.
It doesn’t occur to Nile until quite a long while later, when she's almost asleep, when she hears a low, breathy moan that this is the most relative privacy Joe and Nicky have had in three months or so.
It was a soft sound, garbled in the way of half asleep noises. Nile almost wonders if she imagined it.
Then, minutes later, there’s another soft mewl, and then another, the sound of breathing quickening. Soon after that she hears shuffling sheets, a soft gasp. Then the unmistakable smack of kisses, barely there.
“Hey, habibi.”
Nile's eyes fly open, and she squirms. A man's sleep-rough, just-woke-up morning voice is something she hasn't experienced in a very long time.
There are more snicking sounds. Nile pictures wet, knee-wobbling kisses. “There you are. Good dreams, hm?”
More shuffling sounds. “Yes, it seems.”
“Mm.”
Nile lays there for long minutes, listening to them kiss.
“You should sleep naked more often.”
Ah. That explains the blanket.
“An excellent suggestion-"
"Shh, shh. Oh- mm. We are not at home, habibi."
Nile blinks, sympathy panging in her chest. When Nicky says home, he means Malta.
Joe seems to muffle his giggle somewhere, voice dropping lower. "Sorry. You’ll have to play with me until I pass out more often to ensure I don’t get a chance to cover up. A treat for me, but poor you.”
“Poor me.” Then, softer, a bit more quiet, stated as calmly and plainly as if talking about the weather, “I think I fell asleep touching myself.”
“You didn't-?" There's a moment of silence, maybe the sheets shifting a little. Then, "oh, I'm horrible and selfish. Though, falling asleep like that does tend to inspire one’s dreams.”
“Mm. Oh, fuck.”
It goes from mildly arousing in an aw-they’re-so-cute kind of way to oh-fuck-this-is-happening all at once, Nicky panting as Joe- as Joe does something to him. Nile's traitorous mind conjures up his beard.
There is really only one option here. There is not a chance in hell Nile can ignore this and go back to sleep. She also doesn't want to get up to leave them to it, because if they hear her they'll feel bad for waking her, for driving her out into the cold. They'll insist she stay anyway, probably get up and busy themselves with books and drawings and whatever else, and then everybody will just be awkward and horny and tired tomorrow.
Nile stays right where she is. Her hand slips down from her stomach, her fingertips tracing over her hips.
“Unng.” There’s more shuffling, Joe groaning low and satisfied in a way that goes straight to Nile’s clit. “Meant to- to do this earlier. Fuck.”
“Not- not yet- ooh.” Nicky mewls following a slick sound, like a hand on a cock. “I’ll cum. Yusuf.”
“Mm, fuck.” More kissing, more shuffling. “I want to. You feel so good when you cum.”
Nile arches into her own touch, finds herself already wet.
“We haven’t- unng, so long. I want- ah-“
The kissing sounds rushed, messy, slick.
Nile has a hazy memory of waking to her ex-boyfriend humping her in his sleep playing behind her eyelids. He’d finished almost immediately after she woke him, hadn’t even gotten to fuck her. She finds it easy under the circumstances to imagine the night ending a bit differently.
Something changes, grows more urgent. Nicky begins to whisper something- not English, low and syrupy, the vowels short and rough, Joe gasping softly.
“Nico- fuck. Oh-“
The slick sound starts up again, and Nile thinks she cums the same moment Nicky does, him mewling Joe’s name, her sighing into her pillow. She’s still stroking herself, lazy, warm, delicious when Joe grunts softly, panting out little sighs and whimpers of 'Nico' as he cums.
*
Nile misunderstands the first time Andy invites her to an orgy. In Nile’s defence, she’s never been invited to one before. She hasn’t ever really thought about it, but she supposes she assumed the invite would be more explicit.
“I’m having some people over tonight. They should be here around nine. We might be kind of loud. You want to join?”
Nile, thinking Andy was planning to party, or at the wildest, maybe to do drugs, had been a little bit annoyed. She’d been shot, set on fire, and blown up this week, the latter most in the past twelve hours. She was hoping for some peace and quiet. A good night’s sleep.
“I don’t know. Did you ask Joe and Nicky?”
Something about that question made Andy’s eyebrows shoot up, her grin grow slow and wide.
“Uh- they know these things are open invite, but no. It’s not their scene, for the record. Save yourself the effort. They’re staying in town tonight anyway to follow the barbershop lead.”
“Right.” Nile shrugged, a bit confused, because Joe and Nicky both like dancing and getting a bit sloshed, to her knowledge, but whatever. “Just try not to be too loud, please?”
Now Nile is laying in bed, listening to what sounds like two different men getting pegged by at least four women. There is at least one vibrator involved.
She considers strolling into the room, fairly certain she would still be welcome, but in the end the fatigue wins out. She’s never met an obstacle, whether a panic attack or an unfolding orgy in the room next to hers, that Frank Ocean couldn’t drown out.
*
Nile hadn't really intended to sleep with Andy again. It just sort of happened. She hasn't had sex since the last time she slept with Andy. It's easy to focus her general hornyness into anticipation for the skills she knows Andy has.
They're alone in a tiny hut on the side of a mountain, just passing the time. Tomorrow they will ambush a war criminal, but tonight there's nothing to do but try and stay warm.
Andy has just stripped her shirt off and climbed on top of Nile when she deems it a good moment to say, "you want to fuck Joe."
Nile flushes so hot so fast she gets dizzy. "I don't-"
"You do. You wanted him to come to my orgy, and you want to fuck him."
Nile moves to shove Andy away, but somehow switches course halfway and ends up pulling her closer, rubbing herself against her thigh, squirming into the way their breasts brush together. "That's- a stretch. You know I thought you were having a normal party, and I asked if you told them because I thought that they would be on my side about wanting a quiet night. And it's not- fuck, he's just, like, a whole ass man, okay? It's not about him being Joe. It's about-"
"His slim artist hands, and his body, and his beard, and his Joe-ness. I know."
Nile gasps, which is mostly due to Andy biting her nipple, but also serves for dramatic effect. "You know?"
"Nile, you don't spend a thousand years with two men as thoroughly good as those two- you don't spend a thousand years with anyone, I would wager, without being a little bit in love with them."
Nile thinks that statement is a bit too conversation sparking for Andy to then cut it off with a kiss, but fuck. Nile is too hungry for it to push her away.
Once Andy's started to kiss her way down, Nile asks, "have you slept with them?"
Andy bites at the soft skin of Nile's waist. Nile immediately clocks the gleam in her eyes as shit-eating, but the thing she's doing with her fingers is making it a bit difficult to focus. "Yes. Do you want me to describe the way Joe's beard feels on your thighs?"
Nile gasps, arching up, and Andy grins. "Would you also like me to tell you about Nicky's twelve inch penis, or Joe's ability to stay hard for hours at a time no matter how many times you make him-"
Nile thwaps Andy on the side of the head. "Shut the fuck up, asshole. So you haven't slept with them."
Andy kisses her stomach, gentler, one eyebrow arched. "Of course I haven't. Have you met them?"
"I met them a damn long time after you did. Given how quickly you came onto me, I wouldn't have been surprised. Sheesh."
"Yeah, well. You're hot, kid. Nicky looked, acted, and smelled like a feral antelope when I met him, and Joe had eyes for nobody but him." Her voice goes softer, her face more thoughtful. "I have a lot of doubt about a lot of things, and a lot of opinions that I know you don't think are politically correct, or what the fuck ever, but they're still what I believe. Joe and Nicky are some kind of anomaly. Quynh and I had endless sex that was better than any sex you will ever have in your life, if you were wondering. Frequently with each other, but with others, too, which is part of what makes Joe and Nicky so fucking strange. And I have slept with Booker plenty, if you want to know about that, straight girl."
Nile is hit with a gust of sadness that cools her off enough to suggest switching places. While Andy is getting settled on the straw mattress, she ventures, "do I want to know about that? I know you guys care for each other, but it doesn't seem like it was- uh-"
"Healthy? Yeah, well. We had to figure things out for ourselves for a long while before therapy came around."
Nile starts working her way up to eating Andy out, and wonders if she might be able to convince herself she enjoys it as much as she enjoys sucking cock this time. Sure, it's fun, but doing this for a woman doesn't have her squirming for what comes after quite the same way.
"Don't get me wrong," Andy adds, staring up at the ceiling. "He's a good man. I'll always believe that. He's just been struggling for a very long time. He just wanted to feel better. He wanted me to feel better, too. That's what our sleeping together was about."
"Mhm." Nile accepts Andy's fingers tracing her lips, slipping into her mouth. Sucks. Watches Andy waggle her eyebrows, and wonders if Andy and Booker had this playfulness too, or if Andy was different with him. What he was like with her in return.
Andy breathes, soft and pleased, "I can talk about getting head from a man with a beard and you can picture Joe if that will get you off."
Nile blushes again, and when Andy feels it under her hand she seems to take it as the go ahead.
While Nile cums, Andy is thinking about Joe in an abstract, amused sort of way as she tries to come up with more combinations of words to describe the scratch-tickle of a good beard, but Nile is picturing Booker's scruffy jaw, thinking about feeling better and feeling better and feeling better.
*
Booker’s come back was a strange thing.
He was only gone six months. Given his proven loyalty through the torture Quynh inflicted on him, Nicky and Joe seem to have found the maturity to put the worst of the angst of the betrayal behind them. Andy was never going to hold it against him. Or maybe they’re all just good at hiding it. Sometimes even Nile can’t shake the pit in her stomach, because though his hair is longer, when the light hits him a certain way Booker looks just as exhausted and beaten down now as he did in the cave in Paris, or when he was strapped to Kozac’s table. The unfolding drama between Andy and Quynh is overshadowing Booker's role in all this somewhat, but Nile's thoughts always come around to him now that he's back, present in all the spaces that have been gaping with his absence all these months.
Joe and Nicky are in their room, door closed, none of the noises they’re making audible through the rest of the house, which Nile takes to mean they’re having a conversation of world quaking depth. Andy slams the door behind her to go meet up with Quynh. Booker and Nile are left sitting at the kitchen table to pass the golden, sleepy afternoon.
“Strange,” he mutters, sudden and unprompted. He’s in the middle of re-binding a stack of books, a stupid little pair of magnifying glasses on his face, brow creased with concentration. Nile knows that the books are near worthless, both in monetary value and in the literary esteem of both Nicky and Booker. But when he’s finished with them they’ll look good enough for a collector to think they’re worth an astonishing amount of cash.
Nile waits for context, for clarification. She’s begun sketching his glass of water out of a desire to be in the company of another person, to have an excuse to still be sitting with him if he questions her, and because she has a bunch of observational sketchbook drawings due for one of her online college classes. He doesn’t seem to have any intention of saying more, nor any awareness that Nile is confused.
Eventually she turns the page, ready for a new angle. He suddenly reaches for the glass and drinks it down, prompt but not harried. She pretends to be busy sharpening her pencil as he stands to refill the glass from the tap before carefully placing it back down just about in the same place it had been before.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, just as soft.
Nile kicks him in the shin, gently enough, but clearly intentional. “No. Thanks for filling it again.”
He exhales the way Nile does when she’s absorbed in scrolling through memes on her phone, lips pulled up just barely, the crinkles by his eyes deepening just the slightest amount. Nile is reminded of that night in the mountains with Andy.
He just wanted to feel better.
It’s not a bad way to pass an afternoon.
*
Booker doesn’t finish the initial thought out loud until the next time he and Nile are left alone, this time driving to the nearest grocery store while Andy, Joe, Nicky and Quynh are busy fucking screaming at each other. Joe actually went yesterday, but he forgot to get ginger.
Soon after the voices started to raise Nile had stalked out to the back yard to try and collect herself, furious with Nicky somehow. (She knows he’s hurt by this, knows he’s struggling as much as Andy and Joe and Quynh, but this is the first time she’s seen the beginnings of him show through who he is now, the savage kind of anger it would have taken for him to play the part he apparently did in he and Joe’s beginning as he shouted at Andy, turning his vitriol on Nile in turn rather than calming down when she tried to step in. Quynh had a puzzling role in the argument. Andy seemed to be defending her, but Quynh was egging on whoever the most hateful voice was, and in that moment, it was Nicky. Joe, just as frustrated but at least seemingly aware that it was going too far, had stepped between them and physically pushed Nicky back, grabbing his face and saying something to him, something Nile didn't understand, something that made Andy put her face in her hands and Quynh laugh like something insane, something furious. Nile didn't even wait to hear another word, another bone chilling peal of laughter, just walked out of the room and found herself in the backyard.) And Booker had emerged from whatever secret corner of the house he’d been hiding in to inform her with something halfway between faux and grave seriousness written all over his face he had a crucial errand that he needed her help to run.
And so here they are, halfway through the two hour drive just to get to civilisation. So that they can buy a single ginger root. Johnny Cash is the most mutually meaningful place their music tastes intersect, and they've both just made asses of themselves trying to do a better accent along with the greatest hits CD Booker drags around from car to car. Nile now knows that Folsom Prison Blues is his all time favourite song, and she's learned that his laughter, when it's with his full body, when it reaches his eyes, when he means it, is absolutely beautiful.
“I always kind of dreaded the idea of her coming back,” he begins now, interrupting the flowing quiet, as though that exclamation of ‘strange’ was mere moments ago rather than weeks behind them. “No more nightmares of her, whatever. There will always be other nightmares." Nile wants to argue with this, but it wouldn't be truthful. She dreams of bleeding out, of her mother and her brother, of the violence the team deals with on a daily basis almost every night. She knows Booker sees much the same in his, swap a blade for a noose and Nile's family for his. "I could take it or leave it. This part I saw coming. All of them getting stuck in the past. You are the only part I didn't see coming.”
She looks to his face, trying to read the intricacies of his expression behind his sunglasses. “Yeah, well. Can’t say it occurred to me, either.” She eyes him, intent. “Am I making things better or worse?”
He smiles, just a little. “Stupid question.”
*
Nile gets one night to herself in the city, a welcome break from the fighting. It should be her respite, but she can't stop thinking about it. About Andy looking so defeated, so disappointed, about Joe's hand on Nicky's jaw, about the fact that they haven't all eaten a meal together since Quynh came back.
Quynh is not well. Everyone can see it, even Andy. But she won't let the others send her away. Booker whispers to Nile one night, his eyes locked on the fire, that he doesn't understand how so soon after what he did, Andy won't accept the crystal clear truth that she needs to cut Quynh off, to stop letting her in before she hurts somebody. That he doesn't want to see Quynh become an enemy, but if it happens, it will be better for everyone if her four bargaining chips with Andy aren't sleeping under the same roof as her, or even worse, that Andy isn't sleeping beside her if she decides Andy is something to be used to get what she wants.
Before she hurts somebody else, Nile had wanted to correct him. It was then that she allowed herself to wonder for the first time just how long Booker had been tied to that chair on the yacht. How many times he suffered through death, through coming back again, finding himself still tied to the chair.
The motel is cheap, but clean. Once again, she knows come morning she will have to kill somebody. But tonight, all there is to do is pass the time.
She finds the man in a bar that's a bit too heavy on the house music for her taste. He's tall, broad, handsome. His voice is sweet, and his eyes are kind. He has a beard that is not dissimilar to Joe's. Nile tells herself this is somehow to spite Andy, and not because she had a dream two days ago about riding Joe's face. She didn't wake up when she came, just kept dreaming. It ended somewhere back home, on a deserted road outside Chicago, familiar laughter beside her in the passenger seat, the glint of sunlight off of sunglasses, Johnny Cash on the radio as she put the pedal to the medal.
He's a good fuck, and god, she has needed it. She cums while he fucks her from behind, and then again after he flips her over, just before he buries himself in her and finishes himself. He leaves his number after they go again, after he gives her beard burn on her thighs, after she positions him against the headboard and rides him like a toy. She lets herself think about it for just a little while after he leaves, about saving his number, maybe texting him someday if she ever finds herself around here again. He'd be worth seeking out, she thinks, even just for another fuck.
She doesn't save his number. Just texts Booker before she goes to sleep, asks how things are holding up back at the safe house.
He doesn't answer the question, not really. Just sends her a picture of the book he's reading, and says she'd better be having enough fun for both of them.
Nile wonders if he still feels like he's tied to the chair.
*
Andy comments not too long later that Booker has come back boring.
Nile is in the middle of trying to hack Nicky's email. He and Joe packed up and went somewhere else to deal with their emotional shit a week ago, now. Nile can't find them. Can't get a hold of them. This is a long shot, but she doesn't know what else to do. Andy doesn’t seem worried about them, insanely, but she’s preoccupied. Quynh is trying to pull her in ten different directions, none of them good for her. She’s currently in the backyard with one of Nicky's bows. Nile wants to rip it out of her hands.
Booker looks up from his book with a frown. Not necessarily offended, but confused. Usually when people insult him it’s because he’s brought it upon himself, but he’s been quite unobtrusively reading in the armchair all afternoon.
Nile says, “We all literally got shot to death last night by a coked up sex trafficker.” She turns to Booker. “I like your boring, man.”
Andy tips her head back against the sofa, smiling up at the ceiling. It's not like it was on the mountain. She looks tired, and it doesn't reach her eyes. “You like his boring because it matches your boring. Straight girl.”
Booker sighs. Fidgets a moment, and then, “I don’t feel like sleeping with you and the woman who recently tied me up and waterboarded me to try and find out your location.” He tries for a smile, but it’s more of a grimace. “You’ve all been telling me to find some self respect for centuries. Now that I’m making some progress you call me boring?”
Andy bites back, the venom uncalled for, in Nile's opinion, “I would have wanted you to tell her where to find me. I don’t care what she said she was going to do. She didn’t mean it.”
Joe and Nicky wouldn’t have wanted him to, and I don't think Quynh even knows if she means things when she says them, Nile doesn’t say. Booker also has the good sense to look down, turn his page, take a deep breath. Give Andy the opportunity to choose not to pick this fight with him, too.
“Also,” Andy adds, saccharine sweet, like tear gas, “you would have loved for me to have waterboarded you before-“ she flicks her wrist, mouth open, brows drawn as she struggles for the words.
Booker snaps his book closed. “Before I shot you and almost killed you?”
Andy’s head jerks to the side to meet Booker’s gaze. That’s how Nile knows it’s not only her own, but Andy’s first time hearing him truly angry since he’s been back. His jaw jumps, his chest beginning to heave.
“Joe and Nicky have spent the past thousand years loving you fiercely enough to want you to be as happy as they are, despite the absolute fucking misery you have carried as long as I’ve known you. I never let them love me that much. You never loved me that much. And why should you have? What we had in common was grief. And now Quynh is back, and you can't handle that it isn't what it was before, and you're fucking letting her ruin you.”
Andy flinches. Nile feels sort of detached from her body, from the unfolding scene in front of her, like she's watching from a time and place far, far away.
Booker stands, breathing shaking as much as his hands, his skin red. “Nile loves us all that much, which is why she’s spent the past week trying to get in touch with Joe and Nicky to convince them to fucking come back before you die for good and finally manage to make them understand our misery. Don’t wallow in your self pity long enough to convince yourself it’s a good idea to side with those who share in the pain, boss.” He spits the word like a slur, like broken glass. “You’ll drive the people who actually love you away, and you don't have many. I’ve been there and done that. Things will not be the same after. And they shouldn’t be.”
He’s gone, then. Another slammed door, another man down.
Nile learns what it is to watch an earthquake destroy entire mountain ranges, watches Andromache the Scythian sob like an infant. And for the first time, when Quynh comes in and tries to claim Andy like it's her God given right, Nile pushes back.
*
Andy is finally asleep when Nile climbs the stairs. She finds Booker in his bedroom, towel in hand. He's heading for the en-suite.
“Thought you might have left.”
He doesn't flinch. “I will not leave that woman again so long as she lives.”
He’s still angry. But Quynh is gone now. Andy told her not to come back until she’s finished with the self-torture, because Andy has been living in hell since the iron maiden dropped too, and that she can't do it anymore doesn't mean that she loves Quynh any less. Quynh had asked, and what if you're gone by then?
Andy hadn't said anything at all, mouth trembling, tears pouring down her face.
Quynh slammed the door so hard the walls shook, and Nile held Andy until the aftershocks left her bones to rest.
Nile follows him into the shower.
He grabs at her readily, kisses her like he wants to crawl inside her skin. She wonders how long it’s been since anybody touched him, not to hurt him, but to make him feel better.
He pins her against the wall, and it’s rushed and rough, giving each other new bruises as quickly as they can heal. He tries to touch her first, but she stops him, grabs his cock and lets him fuck into her to find out how wet she already is. He jolts like he's been shocked, fingertips digging into her thigh as he grinds into the wet heat of her, his moan throaty, half torn from him, half choked off.
He doesn’t reach for her clit, but her breast. Steadies himself with his other hand, begins to fuck her hard. He pinches her nipple and she moans, pulls his hair so hard he whimpers her name. His teeth scrape her neck, her fingers sink into his throat when he turns her around, blood passing between their lips when they kiss, bite, beg.
Before long the water runs cold. Nile can only laugh, the aggression and anger bleeding out with the heat, and as his been true since they’ve met, he only seems able to follow her lead.
He picks up the towel and begins to dry her off unprompted after helping her step out, wipes the water from her face gentle as a whisper. Kisses her neck, her chest, her breasts, worshipping and tickling where he was being so rough before, raising goosebumps against her skin. Walks her back towards his bed. He rubs his beard against her thighs like he knows somehow, kneeling on the floor in front of her, like he’s trying to prove Nile’s point to Andy, that yeah, Andy can make Nile cum, but she can’t make her clit throb and wetness smear her thighs before ever touching her the way a man can, the way this man can. He seems insistent on making her cum before he gets in the bed himself, and hell if Nile doesn't respect that, if she doesn't readily knot her fingers into his hair, let herself hump his tongue, his nose bumping her clit. He gets his lips around her clit the same time he gets two fingers inside, calloused and thick and soaked, rubs at that spot, and Nile arches up into it so fast she might be embarrassed if he wasn't looking so dazed himself, if he wasn't so visibly and achingly hard, so into it, so ready.
She doesn't think about Joe, or about Booker with Andy, if it was anything like this (how could it have been?), or about Andy at all. She thinks about the texture of his hair under her fingers, the woodsy scent of him, the warmth of his skin against hers, the pounding of his heart and the trembling in her thighs. He groans when he enters her again, shivering and mouthing at her neck, and she squirms, wraps her legs around him, licks her lips and just feels it all. The obscene heat of him, his breaths moving through his chest, firm and solid on top of her, the insistence of his tongue as he kisses her. And he kisses her a lot, dizzying and breathless, pulling just far enough away when he finishes, rutting close and warm, panting softly. And then he kisses her some more, his hands travelling firm and warm up and down her sides, his exhale still a bit shaky. His thigh lands over hers. She's sure they're not done tonight, and he seems sure, his lips at her jaw before he finally relaxes beside her, settles just far enough away that they can look each other in the eye as she rubs at his scalp, swirls his short hair round and round her fingertips.
With his sleepy smile, it occurs to her that this man is her best friend. She admits, "I think I might want to fuck Joe a little bit."
He stares at her for a few long moments, eyebrows doing complicated things. Finally, he says, "well, who doesn't? That beard he's keeping these days. Christ."
Nile grins, runs her hand over his jaw, over his beard, and then kisses him.
*
Joe and Nicky were always going to come back on their own, whether or not Quynh cleared off. They pull up the next morning. Nicky’s sporting an army style buzz cut now, and he and Joe sit in the car holding hands and just talking for almost twenty minutes before they actually come inside. Nile watches from the window in Booker’s room, alternating between staring down at them and staring over at Booker asleep under the covers, the steady rise and fall of his chest.
It’s another hour before he wakes. Nile climbs back into bed with him. She doesn’t want to go downstairs. Still, she knows it's best not to postpone the inevitable. For too long. Long enough for a quick fuck, maybe, but not longer.
It’s almost normal. Joe and Andy are talking quietly, their hands clasped over the table. Nicky is stirring sugar into Andy’s tea.
There is one horrible moment of quiet when Booker emerges from behind her into the kitchen. Nile would guess that Andy clocks what's happened immediately, going off the slight narrowing of her eyes, and then the curious smile that blossoms across her face. She still looks half haunted, but Nile knows she'll be alright. Joe and Nicky saw her through this heartbreak once, a very long time ago. They'll do it again.
Nicky is looking only at Nile, as open and ashamed and sorry as can be. They haven't spoken since that night he screamed at Andy.
Joe speaks first. A calculated move, an acknowledgement. "Are you leaning towards tea or coffee this week, Book?"
Booker is leaning towards orange juice this week, Nile knows. But this morning he looks at the box of tea Nicky has out on the counter and says, "earl grey sounds lovely."
Nicky silently sets about pouring the water, after darting another glance at Nile.
She crosses the room in five steps and wraps him up in a hug from behind. Feels him relax.
"Alright, Nicky?"
He smiles, just a little. "Yessir."
*
Today is quiet. The sun has stubbornly tucked itself away behind the clouds, the wind just beginning to nip. Nile is sitting on the porch with Nicky, sharpening blades. Nile doesn't know why they have so many. Two of them are hers. They've done a dozen each so far, and they aren't even halfway through the stockpile.
It's getting cold. Nile is in a hoodie and a leather jacket. Nicky is wearing an old man's fleece. He's kept the short haircut for awhile now. Nile is almost beginning to think it suits him.
Joe is dressed like a lumberjack out of a movie, his boot cut jeans and hiking boots pristine, his flannel jacket red, extremely well fitted. Nile hasn't had a dream about him in a long time, much less fantasised about any part of him. She's no longer sexually frustrated, thanks to the man currently working on French onion soup at her request. It's Nicky's recipe, but they're testing the hypothesis that it might taste more, well, French, if the Frenchman makes it. But she has to admit Joe looks good right now, chopping wood like it's what he has all those muscles for, like he's a gentle mountain man instead of a deadly mercenary. It's an appealing fantasy.
She slows only for a second, eyeing him, before turning back down to the blade in her hands. Nicky pipes up after just a moment, once he's torn his own eyes away, softly, smile in his voice, "is it the beard, for you?"
Nile turns her wide eyes on him slowly, face heating up. He only smiles at her, knowing, as sheepishly and kindly as Nicky always does.