Chapter 18 #2
PK points and busies himself adjusting a camera on the desk. Clarke turns just as Julian emerges from the bathroom, yawning and scratching at his stomach under his shirt. “Hey, Clarke.”
Hey, Clarke. Casual, comfortable, easy. Something she thought she’d never get back.
“Hi,” Clarke says, the simple word bittersweet on her tongue. Julian drops his hand. His shirt stays rucked up, exposing a strip of tan, flat abdomen right above the waistband of his sweats. Clarke unsticks her tongue and averts her eyes, choosing to look instead at PK. “What are we doing today?”
“Nothing,” Julian says. He steps around her. The entryway to this room isn’t large; he brushes against her as he goes, his chest skimming her shoulder.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” PK confirms. He checks the angle the camera has on the main area of the room, where a squashy-looking couch takes up one wall.
He checks again using a feed to a holoscreen, and nods, satisfied.
“The two of you are going to sit in here for an hour and do nothing. Dick around on your cuff. Read. Take a nap. The goal of today’s exercise is to coexist peacefully in the same space. ”
“And no talking.” Julian drops heavily onto the couch and stretches to open the tiny fridge that’s just within arm’s reach, pulling the hem of his shirt up even farther. “Right?”
“Limited conversation is okay, but nothing heavy,” PK says. “It needs to look like this is something you guys do: spend enough time together that you run out of things to talk about, and not feel compelled to fill the silence.”
Clarke gets to fulfill her obligations to Elemental by sitting still in relative privacy and not doing anything for an hour, when she normally barely gets five minutes to herself the whole weekend?
“Do I owe you or Sara a gift basket for coming up with this idea?” she asks, depositing herself onto the other end of the couch.
Clarke has a small side table next to the couch in her prep room; Julian’s sacrificed that for a longer sofa, so there’s a swath of open cushion between them.
Julian claims a yellow sports drink for himself from the fridge, then hovers his hand over a shorter row of blue pouches with a questioning look at Clarke.
She scrunches her nose and jerks her head to the left.
He moves his hand over to snag an orange pouch instead and passes it to her.
“Neither. All credit to Julian,” PK says, smiling at his holoscreen.
“And he was right, this is going to be easy. Okay, I’m going to go hang out in Engel’s room so you two can unwind.
I’ll be watching, though, so just speak up if you need anything.
Otherwise, be good little grossly overpaid superstars and I’ll be back in an hour. ”
He leaves. Clarke takes a swig of the drink and settles back farther into the couch, pulling a holoscreen out of her cuff.
Julian does the same, detaching an audio loop from the underside of his cuff and hooking it onto the shell of his ear so he can listen to music without disturbing Clarke.
He roots around under the couch and comes up with a sketchbook and set of pencils.
He’s always liked to keep his hands busy when he’s decompressing.
Clarke’d put money on the sketchbook being filled with drawings of ship components.
Or lizards, maybe. There’s no native wildlife in the colonies, but several species of Terran lizard had flourished there after the terraforming and some genetic modification, and Julian has a fondness for them.
He and Kuari used to spend hours discussing lizards and bugs and all manner of small creeping creatures that Clarke preferred not to think about.
While Julian draws, Clarke catches up on messages.
Thierry’d sent her a string of them, starting by saying that he felt he should be thanking Clarke for taking Raff off his hands and ending with a lament that Umeko doesn’t think his jokes are funny.
Umeko herself had thanked Clarke for reaching out, short and to the point. Matthew still hasn’t responded.
She confirms her family’s travel arrangements for next week’s race.
She interacts with a bunch of fan posts cheering Elemental on this weekend, careful to avoid the ones that mention Raff’s less-than-impressive qualifying performance.
She replies to a bewildered Yves still hasn’t said anything about your contract, even with this Agresta-St. Sebastian mess? from Rhynn.
The couch is comfortable. She sinks deeper and deeper into it, Julian’s steady breathing and the skritch of his pencil against paper the only sounds beyond the occasional rumble of distant conversation or footsteps on the floor above them.
She giggles at a particularly unflattering picture of Raff getting towed back to the garage after his failed qualifying attempt.
Julian nudges her leg with his foot, eyebrows raised to ask what she’s laughing at.
She shows him the photo; he smirks. They start sharing tidbits of what they’re looking at or working on (Clarke was right, he’s drawing a lizard.
It’s his parents’ pet lizard, and its thorned head comes up to Clarke’s hip) every few minutes, and if it feels too easy—if it feels like they’re glossing over the rocky ground between them, like there’s something disingenuous about a peace that only holds so long as neither of them is speaking, well—she glances at the camera and reminds herself that this isn’t real.
They’re working toward something real, though, and that’s a balm to her soul.
At some point, it seems dumb to keep leaning over to show him her holoscreen and then sit up again.
She lies down on her back, head toward Julian, knees hooked over the arm of the couch, holding her screen above her face where she can easily tilt it to him.
He takes it out of her hand to get a closer look at something, and she closes her eyes and laces her fingers together over her ribs when he doesn’t give it back right away.
—
She wakes warm and groggy. It takes a few minutes to orient herself, her brain always slow to fire up again after a nap—because that’s what this was, a nap. She fell asleep in Julian’s prep room.
She fell asleep on Julian.
He’s stretched out along the couch, one foot planted on the floor, the other dangling off the cushion at an angle.
Clarke’s lying on her side, her back pressed up against the back of the couch.
Her head is pillowed on his thigh. Her top arm is looped around his leg, her hand far too close to his dick for comfort.
His fingers are in her hair. Not moving, not gripping, just…resting there.
Clarke goes from sleepy-calm to the polar opposite of sleepy-calm.
She forces herself not to move quickly. She cranes her neck back at a glacial pace, eyes just barely slitted open, until she can see his face.
He’s asleep. His head is propped against the crux where the arm of the couch meets the back. His neck’s going to be sore when he wakes up.
Okay. She can get out of this. She just has to be careful about it; he’s a light sleeper.
She tries to push herself upright with the arm that’s trapped underneath her, but that’s all pins and needles.
She tries contracting along the top side of her body, but doesn’t have the leverage needed against his heavy hand on her head.
She’s going to have to use her free hand, but the only place she can plant it is on the sliver of cushion between his splayed legs, and—
“Hey.”
Julian’s voice is low, raspy with sleep.
Clarke curses internally and looks at him again, this time a million percent more aware of how she has to look all the way up the line of his body to get to his face.
The strong curve of his thigh, the angle of his hips, the spread of his chest, the span of his shoulders.
She is not thinking about the subtle bulge at the front of his sweatpants. She is not.
Her hair falls into her face, dislodged by his fingers. He tucks it behind her ear, then keeps moving his hand down, fingers coming to rest along the side of her neck. His thumb traces forward along her jaw. Every touch leaves a flare under Clarke’s skin. Clarke could—
There’s a lot Clarke could do right now.
She could climb into his lap, knees pressed into the cushion on either side of his hips.
His hands would grip her waist, spread across the small of her back, control the rhythm just like he’d done on the dance floor at Thierry’s birthday.
He’d get his fingers in her hair again, tight at the nape of her neck, pulling until her throat is exposed and he can put his lips and teeth and tongue on her.
His other hand would slide around to the front of her belly, toy with the drawstring of her pants, dip under the elastic.
This is the exact sort of thing that can’t happen if they’re going to be friends. They can’t have moments that remind them of what they want but can’t have.
A loud, deliberate knock on the door has both of them scrambling. Clarke shoves away and slams against the opposite armrest; Julian jerks himself into a sitting position and grabs for his fallen sketchbook, setting it over his lap just as the door opens.
“Hey, guys,” PK says, eyes on the ceiling. “Time really flies, huh? We’re all done, so—”
Clarke bolts.
Julian lets her.