anytime
javier peña x f!reader
summary: “Thank you for coming with me,” you whisper.
Nodding, he feels you follow his path—dropping, scorching his face, tracing the place where the hair sits atop his lip. “Anytime, cariño.”
“Anytime, really?”
wordcount: 3.1k.
warnings: fluff. bestfriends to lovers. banter. reader wears a dress and has a gloss on lips. no physical description. javi calls reader solecito as a nickname only. likely warnings for spelling as i wrote this on my phone.
an: huge thanks to @wildemaven for creating this moodboard (pls go show it some love), letting me make a banner from it, and then letting me write this for Javi instead of Frankie. bby, i hope you like this.
Javi had never been good at avoiding challenging situations.
For the longest time, he’s been finding himself in the centre of a whirlwind—whether in Bogotá, Cali or apparently even back home.
You, his friend, best friend—a well-kept secret, tucked away in his chest, not shared with a soul when he was away. You were a thing that he’d clutched close to his chest from the moment the two of you had first gotten close, through his failed engagement and even more so when he left for Colombia. You, in all your understanding, hugging him, telling him he’d be great, amazing, the very best.
Both of you were younger then, less worn down by life, its many obstacles and all the other things.
You best not become best friends with anyone over there, Peña.
As if anyone could annoy me as much as you, solecito.
In the brief interim of his return, you hadn’t appeared all that different. You may have had a job, a house—drove a slightly better car than when the two of you were staying out at all hours—but you, at your core remained very much the fucking same.
Still just as understanding, as kind. A person who got him, without really needing to try.
For Javi, the best thing—outside of you being you and the monthly calls you made him promise to keep when he was drowning in murder, drugs and Escobar—is that you never ask him about it. Any of it.
You had always let him pretend, escape, listen to you fill him in on gossip—things such as disagreements over the size of rhubarb and whether someone was having an affair. A thing you did even when he came back. Even more grateful for it then, when he grew tired of the questions, the compliments, the everything.
Its why he didn’t tell you when he would land back in Laredo for good. Just waiting, standing outside your place, leaning against your car as you walk down the street—eyes brushing over him, pausing, before he gets to see that smile. That signature fucking smile.
When he’d left the first time, he remembers how you’d lingered near your car, unwilling to climb into your bright yellow death trap—the entire reason he called you solecito to begin with—wearing the beginnings of that smile even then.
The difference is now he knows that there was something under it. Hidden, held back, kept from him.
It’s why it meant so much to him when he saw it in all its glory, all alight, blooming and somehow healing.
He can’t explain it, but it repairs strands inside of him. Your presence alone continuing to do so when he meets you for lunches, coffees, and late-night drinks. In exchange, he makes you laugh, your head thrown back as he tells you about whatever he did on the ranch—all of it comical, apparently. Because the idea of him, Javier Peña doing ranch work brought tears to your eyes.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Jealous?” you splutter, taking a mouthful of your beer as you narrow your eyes.
Nodding, he leans back into the booth, arm stretched out, picking and picking—the label crumbling from the sweating bottle. “Yeah. Bet you’re upset you don’t get to see me herd cattle and mend fences.”
“Oh, yeah. One-hundred-percent.”
Shrugging, he grins—an easy task with you. A thing that has always been that way, even when he turned up at your door when he couldn’t get married; even when the two of you sat under the stars when he told you about possibly going to Colombia. You still made him grin—even when things weren’t fucking easy at all.
“I’ll add it to my to-do list—visit Peña on the ranch—it’s currently sat under finding a dress, a boyfriend and the will to fucking live.”
Snorting, he traces his bottom lip with his thumb.
Your face scrutinises him, before rolling your eyes. And he just waits—because you always spill eventually.
One. Two. Th—
Fine, you huff, before it unravels from you. How the wedding of your work colleague is close, closer than I thought and you’re tired of attending these things alone, circled like a fucking fish by single sharks.
And he’s listening, taking it in. Trying to not wince at how high-pitched you’ve got as you’ve ranted.
Mainly, Javi finds there’s more questions rising than answers provided.
One singular one rising to the top. A thing he’s wanted to ask for the last few weeks. Not in a rude way, or in the way it burns inside his chest when he talks to you on the phone and he has to bury it. But, it’s there, bubbling, wishing to escape and know. It's even louder when the two of you are like this, crammed in a space, laughing, smiling, sharing, wondering—
Why are you even single? How are you?
You’ve mentioned people—names, here and there when the two of you had been on the phone. Them fluttering out before you can pull them back, but then they’re forgotten. Javi, I get one call a month—let me tell you about the cattle war going off. And, in a way, he didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to know, so he never asked.
Now, it’s all he wants to ask.
Because you’re… you. You’re brilliant, beautiful—funny, clever, witty. And yet—
“—so, now it’s a week out, and I need to find a dress, a date and drive there to watch another person I know get married.”
He knows he should busy his mouth with the bottle—wrap his odd idea in beer. But, that part of him—the one which wants to help, solve issues, and be useful—rises up in him like a phoenix left from the ashes of Colombia.
“I’ll go with you.”
He expects the pause, even braces for the look of shock.
He doesn’t expect the smirk. Doesn’t expect the way it spreads out, to hit your eyes. How under the low-bar light over the table, it makes your eyes glimmer and fucking shimmer.
“You want to go to a wedding with me?”
Shrugging, he picks off the last part of the label—the mess of it all circling around where the glass meets the wood.
Mirroring him, you shrug. “Alright.”
“Alright.”
He should take his eyes off you, but he finds he can’t.
Javi hasn’t been able to since you stepped out of your place, a handful of your dress as you locked up—stepping down your steps to his car, letting it flutter down to your ankles.
You look like a fucking dream.
A thought he knows he shouldn’t have—but has all the same. His heart staggered, half-halting in its hammering as his hands paused in their drumming on the steering wheel; his glasses slid down his nose, his skin suddenly warm all over, even if his jacket was already splayed out across the backseat.
Close your mouth, Peña.
I’m chewing gum, solecito.
Yeah, that’s why your mouth is open.
It hadn’t passed his notice that you were good-looking before today. He’s known you were, had always known it—he had eyes, after all. But, he’d always felt there was a line. A line the two of you never delved too close to step over. The sign above both of your heads already illuminated in bright bulbs and flashing lights:
JUST FRIENDS.
Until this, anyway. This thing that can only be described as the longest one-hour drive he’s ever been on. And he used to do recon with Murphy.
Because you’re teasing, taunting him. All in that usual way that you do. And it’s so easy to flirt back, to let line after line roll, but he has begun to spot you squirming.
Doing so while matching his suit in a deep brown shade—chosen by him, ‘pick a colour suit, Javi’. Adding a tinge to some of your comments—things that if said by someone that wasn’t you, he’d ask them (flirtingly) if they were coming on to him.
But with you, it’s something he can never be sure. Never something that can be completely understood, known, cracked or figured out. In the same way, he can’t understand how your perfume keeps following him. How it embeds itself into the cabin of his truck when he picks you up, sews itself into his clothing when the two of you meet—and right now, is attempting to bury itself in his skin, muscles, and bones.
“You’ve been abnormally quiet.”
Smirking, he snorts. Fingers smoothing out his hair as he swings into a spot—the tyres crunching over the gravel. “Have I? Or have you just not shut up.”
“Rude.”
Laughing, he cuts the engine—hands resting on the top of his thighs, not missing the way your eyes follow his movements before clearing your throat. It shifts something in him, makes a little part of him surge, like the smallest of fireworks suddenly erupting in his chest.
Something he forces himself to shut down the moment you shove open your door, slipping out, as he grabs his jacket.
“Do I need to be worried about you crying today, solecito?”
Rearranging your dress, and slipping the strap of your bag over your shoulder, you squint as you stand tall, hand covering your brow as you meet his gaze.
And fuck, with this backdrop, even squinting, you look beautiful, radiant, stunning all over again. Somehow his brain having forgotten when you were next to him, when you were acting as if this was the most normal fucking thing they’ve ever done.
It isn’t.
Something he’s becoming more aware of as his throat goes dry, and his thoughts slow to nothing—
“No, you’re good. Your mouth is open again.”
You say it with a smirk, all teasing—making heat lick up his spine all over again. And, if you were anyone else, he’d have already pulled you close, tilted your chin up, and likely smothered your mouth with his.
But, you’re his friend—his best friend. The one solid thing he’s had in his life since he became a name, a poster, a hero.
“C’mon,” you say, turning on your heel as you head in the direction of the entrance, him following, jacket slipping on as he mutters mouth isn’t fucking open under his breath.
Even if he knows it was. Even if he’s desperately trying to stop his eyes from descending down to your hips, eyes fixated on the way you walk with ease to the wooden sign which greets all the guests.
He knows, due to his absence from home, there haven’t been many weddings he’s attended. Least of all like this. But even he thinks this is over the top, suddenly understanding why you hadn’t wanted to come alone. Because grand doesn’t quite cover it—not after the last one he’d attended.
This one has flickering candles lit in the day, waiters all set to hand glasses of bubbles and offer little mouthfuls of flavour on silver trays. Then, there’s the backdrop—the enormity of the building, only for you to tell him that it’s an outside wedding.
It’s more of a comfort as to why his hand drops to the small of your back than anything else. A need to be rooted, to feel calmer as he nods at passing people he doesn’t know (and hopes don’t know him), feeling you curl into him subconsciously, your bag swinging between the two of you both—affording a gap, forcing it, in fact.
The ceremony will start soon.
He overhears it, as he assumes you do, because your fingers wrap around his wrist—taking it from your back, before your palm meets his, and then you’re guiding, leading. Dragging him. All willingly to the back of the building where he sees it—the makeshift aisle. A wooden arch, and lots of deep orange-brown chairs all line up on either side of an orange aisle.
“Glad we chose brown now,” he murmurs.
“Does it make you think, y’know—being at a wedding?”
He swallows. Because it’s a loaded question.
One he assumes has been sitting all politely on the tip of your tongue since you sat beside him in his vehicle. It’s why his eyes watch you carefully as you grab the two of them a flute each from a passing waiter. Handing it to him, adding nothing—not rescuing him. Just waiting instead, doing that thing you do, where your eyes widen as you wait, trying to look all innocent even though it’s you who has just dropped a live grenade into the centre of the conversation.
Shaking his head, he snorts. “No. Not really. Knew… I knew deep down it wasn’t right. Her… and me.”
“You got any idea what’s right?”
You take a sip this time when the question lands, it again sparkling in glittered innocence, the softest of smiles pressed against the glass.
You he thinks. But he swallows that away and says ‘Not a fucking clue’ instead.
Throughout the day, he’s been desperate for a reason to stop looking at you.
So far, he’s found none.
Bits and pieces of things Murphy used to say, the words he’d drop into conversation when talking about his wife: how he knew, why she was the one, all coming back to him in drips and drops.
It dawns on him, the same as it had done since before he went to Cali, that you might mean a little more than a friend. A lot of what Murphy used to say, so easily applied to how Javi felt about you.
You make him feel calmer, create a space where he can relax, really unwind. It’s easy, uncomplicated, when he’s with you—from the conversation to the things he thinks. Complex balled thoughts stretch out until they’re in easy-to-decipher lines, able to process, able to understand.
He even told you about the boats.
A secret he’d have been prepared to take to the grave, if not for the fact you pointed out he wasn’t sleeping. Your eyes watching, pleading, don’t lie to me. And fuck, he couldn’t—not even if he wanted to.
That should have been the first sign.
He guesses he should be thankful today has been stuffed with more of them. One after the other. From the way you made sure to make him a plate of only his favourite things, to the way you knew when he needed a bit of space from the thousand questions as to how you both knew one another, and what he does.
Now, Javi is on the sidelines, admiring you in a way that makes his heart double in size.
Your dress skims around your calves as you dance—your arms rising above your head, glee stitched itself from cheek to cheek. On occasion, time halts when your eyes land on his—stealing whatever thought he had, only resuming normality when you close your eyes, belting out the lyrics to the song.
Mainly, the thought he finds which keeps returning is: I wanna do this with you again. any place. any time.
A hollowness scratches out in his chest as he lets himself acknowledge it. A thickness growing in his throat, a sorrowness weighs down on his shoulders as he nurses his glass—hand in his trouser pocket, telling himself he should be content he got to be on your arm, got to have you against him during a slow dance over an hour ago. That he gets to see you smile, hear your laugh—even know you.
“Hey, Peña.”
“Hey solecito.”
You grin—a little breathless, the music having changed, becoming slower, softer—wrenching the glass from his hand as you drain it.
“Fuck me. Y’thirsty?”
“Very. You’d know if you had any rhythm.”
He pinches you, lightly—teasingly. Your grin shifts into a laugh, tucking yourself in against him, arm around his back. And fuck, the way you’re looking up at him, he wants to warn you.
If you look at me like that, I’m going to kiss you.
Javi wonders what you’d do if you did. Whether you’d pull away, hissing the two of you are friends. Or whether you’d kiss him back.
“Want to get some fresh air?” you ask, your words against his ear—lips so close to ghosting his skin.
“Sure.”
It’s cooler when the two of you step out from under the marquee, the music getting quieter when your fingers loop in his, guiding, easing him around plant pots and tall trees, until the two of you are descending marble stairs and past iron fencing, to take him to the perimeter, to the view looking out over the city.
He watches as you step forward, fingers around the iron fencing, leaning, staring out as you let out a heavy sigh. One laced with things he wants to ask for, tug it from you, let you unload whatever is weighing on you—because that’s what you both do for one another.
You make it easy.
Make it all bearable.
But, whether you mean to, or not, you shiver. A light one, barely noticeable by most—but he isn’t most. His fingers are already at the button, undoing it, sliding his jacket down his arms before he places it over your shoulders, watching your head turn, meeting his gaze.
“You look really pretty.”
Flicking your eyes down, you smile. Sweetly. Unreadably. “Well, you’ve always been pretty.”
“Pretty?”
Laughing, your fingers tug his jacket closer, burying yourself in it. “The prettiest, Javier.”
Leaning beside you, he feels the metal from the railings, you’re both resting on, cut into his palms. He wonders if you feel the same, your dress billowing in the gentle breeze as the two of you stare off into the distance, spotting the flickering lights of a city, of homes tucking in for the night.
Then he turns his head, finding you already watching him, studying him in a similar way as you were before.
And, he lets his eyes drop to your mouth. A sign. A signal. It’s not the first time, usually, he does so when you’re not looking, letting himself trace the curve of your lips. Now, he stares at the way your gloss has long since gone, left behind on glasses and straws.
“Thank you for coming with me,” you whisper.
Nodding, he feels you follow his path—dropping, scorching his face, tracing where the hair sits atop his lip.
“Anytime, cariño.”
“Anytime, really?”
Nodding, he swallows. A thousand things he’s thought, and felt, all rushing to the surface—unwilling to bury itself, to descend under the usual guilt and feelings of inadequacies when it comes to you.
“I’d do anything for you.”
Smirking, you tilt your head. “Anything?”
Biting your lip, he feels it—something thrumming in him, being plucked.
“Will you kiss me?”
“I could…”
Your brows rise, a louder cheer coming from inside, but it doesn’t do anything to tear your eyes away from the other.
The whole world could slowly vanish from around the two of you, and all he’d want is just to stare at you.
“But?” you ask, delicately.
Almost so softly, it makes his chest ache.
Dipping his head, he lets his gaze wash over the place again—the rolling land, the trees, the houses in the distance.
“If I kiss you, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”
You slide closer, shoulder to shoulder, eyes scorching his jaw, his neck, the side profile he can feel you tracing with your gaze.
“Then don’t,” you say.
His neck almost cracks with the quickness of his movement, his eyes scanning, reading, a part of him wanting to step back, and protect you. Because he’s not sure about the parts of him you’d find easy to love—
“You don’t know what you’re—“
“Don’t care,” you interrupt, fingers twitching on the lapel of his jacket. “I know you—Javi, not Agent Peña. I know the boy who cloud-watched with me when my parents wouldn’t stop fighting; I know the man who told me to stop sending him postcards from the town shop—but also whispered that he liked them.”
Snorting, he smiles.
“So, if you want to, no pressure—but, I think you should kiss me.”
“Yeah?”
Nodding, you bite your cheek. “Think you’ve wasted a lot of time not kissing me already, honestly.”
Of course you do, he thinks. And then he kisses you, palms on your cheeks, slanting his mouth over yours.
And fuck, it’s the best fucking thing he’s ever done.
an: honestly, this made me so fucking happy to write.
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