#prayer circle that i can get back into barcelona fic now

[notbang]

burning up again

R/N. Set in some vague overlapping future universe of this, this and this, but requiring prior knowledge of none to understand.

(read on ao3)

“You know, this place sounded a lot more whimsical and fun when I was reading about it in letters.”

“I don’t think I was ever speaking specifically about the accommodations,” he says, wry, “so much as the symbolic act of coming here itself.”

“I know,” she shoots back, almost sulkily, and wriggles up the mattress to better rest her head in the crook of his arm. He stretches, and the fingers of her left hand cakewalk idly up his chest in her contemplation until he catches them and traps them in his own. “If anyone’s guilty of romanticising mediocrity, it’s me. I’m aware.”

“Well,” is all Nathaniel says, the smug twist of his mouth intended to tease, more than anything else.

Rebecca’s restless, perpetually in motion with an energy he doesn’t share. He’s been jungle-dwelling long enough that the humidity doesn’t bother him so much anymore, but there’s a difference between being able to sleep beneath a sheet in a sticky room and having to accommodate someone else’s body heat as well as your own. Still, the tightly-wound demeanour that had always felt like second nature to him has never really had a place here, and despite the queasy anticipation that has been slowly fraying his nerves all week in the lead-up to her arrival, having her sprawled out alongside him now, Nathaniel feels nothing but a sleepy sense of calm.

Even if her insisted-upon sleeping arrangements leave a little to be desired.

“This bed isn’t exactly built for two people,” he tells her when she starts to squirm, his eyebrows creeping upwards with a familiar cocktail of fondness and exasperation.

“You’re telling me. It’s not even built for one people, if the people is you.” Rebecca grunts, shifting again, trying to get comfortable and elbowing him sharply in the gut in the process. “You should really speak to someone about the quality of the facilities.”

“The facilities you were provided with are perfectly fine. You’re the one that was determined to play stowaway in mine.”

“Mm, yeah, but your room is so cosy and romantic, with the canopy, and the candles.”

He raises his eyebrows, dubious. “The mosquito net and the citronella coils?”

She waves him off, nearly clocking him in the face. “Okay, so the smell isn’t particularly enticing, but it’s fun, right? Being a little sneaky. Having a sleepover. Hmm?”

“It’d be a lot more fun in less than ninety percent humidity.” She pouts up at him, and he appeases her with a warm press of his palm to the small of her undeniably damp back. His lips graze across her forehead on his way to nosing into the cloud of her humidity-frizzed hair. “But yes—practically every defining detail aside, this is… nice.”

Rebecca sighs her agreement as she inches up his side, a greasy koala on a eucalyptus oil-slick tree. It should definitely be more off-putting, the mix of perspiration, pungent insect repellant and the remnants of lotion that only barely saved her shoulders. Instead he drinks in the sun kissed bridge of her nose, the pinking of her cheekbones and the abundance of freckles dusted across her face like constellations that can only be seen in clarity out of the city limits. It’s a hundred times better than any piece of paper, and every possible protest dies as a result on the tip of his tongue.

“I can’t believe you live like this,” she says eventually. At his frown she hastens to add, “I’m not passing judgement. Emphasis on the ‘you’, not the… ‘this’. You’ve always been so…” She trails off, gesturing vaguely at the length of him, and he huffs out a laugh.

“I know. It astounds me most days, too.”

“Was it hard? Getting used to everything?”

He considers that for a moment, knowing for a fact he’d spent a good number of days unavoidably rankled by his new circumstances, but unable to put his finger on the true moment of transition.

“I guess. But… hard in a good way. Hard in a way I was looking for, to wake me up. As embarrassingly cheesy as it sounds, even when I hated it, it felt… good, and important, to be following my heart for once, instead of something my father drilled into my head.”

She takes the hand not tangled in his and presses her open palm to his chest, fingers splayed out across his sternum, radiating warmth. “I mean, on some twisted level it makes sense. If you were a Planeteer, you’d definitely be the heart power,” she says, then to his confused look elaborates, “Apparently it means you can talk to monkeys.”

“I see. And you would be…?”

“Fire. For obvious reasons.” She tilts her head, considering. “Or maybe wind. For other, also probably obvious, equally unflattering reasons.”

He winces, and shakes his head as if to will the insinuation away. For all their overwhelming similarities, there’s still a lot of things they don’t have in common, and Rebecca’s penchant for toilet humour is one of them.

Her tone turns suddenly coy. “Speaking of saving the planet, here’s a thought on our current predicament with global warming. What if we shower—together, obviously, gotta think of the earth—and then just… don’t bother towelling dry?”

“Mm, that’d probably feel good for about thirty seconds, tops. Then: sticky. Also—and while I’m not sure that’s what you’re implying, it’s usually a pretty safe bet with you—you are not going to want to do anything sexy once you step foot in that shower. Believe me.”

“Believe you because you’ve tried?” she asks, eyes narrowed, frowning her suspicion.

“Believe me because I know what my shower stall looks like.”

She hums, apparently too skeptical to be truly appeased. “So the shower’s out. But we have prior experience. We’re intelligent. We’re innovative. We can find a position with minimal contact points and maximum air flow.”

There’s no question of what she’s implying now, even if her tone is still currently set to teasing, and his stomach tightens in acknowledgement. He’d been too cautious to take it as a given that her trip was intended as a romantic one, even if it was difficult to read between the lines of her intentions and find them to be anything else. Just because his most recent trip back to West Covina had led to them falling back into bed together didn’t mean anything concrete—their letters since have been as carefully choreographed as always, deftly walking the tightrope between tentative flirtation and outright propositioning without either of them being bold enough to quantify the true nature of their long distance relationship.

If the hug she accosted him with upon her arrival and all the excuses she’s found to touch him throughout the day haven’t adequately telegraphed her intent, though, surely her presence now in his tiny standard issue sanctuary housing cot has well and truly dashed any illusions that the purposes of her visit are purely platonic.

The woman in question pulls him from his musings with a drawn-out, nasally whine. “God, I just have to…”

The rest of her sentence is lost in the fabric of her t-shirt as she squirms to get it up and over her head, and sure, he has to actively tamp down on the impulse to jerk away when her moist skin hits his, but then certain parts of his anatomy waste no time in sounding the alarm that for the first time in longer than he can currently properly recall, Rebecca Bunch’s scantily clad body is in unmistakable, maddening proximity, and his breath leaves him in a shaky huff. Despite the fact they’ve been engaged in banter around the topic for the last ten minutes at least and in fact, most of the day, it’s a very particular jolt calling attention to the impending physical reality of it now, running through him like electromagnetic muscle memory.

“Oh,” she says quietly, as if sharing the exact same revelation, eyes dropping down and to his mouth.

They shift minutely against one another until he takes her by the waist and twists, orienting her so she can feel the the fan on her face. His fingers smooth through the resulting restless waves of her hair.

Just like that it’s back at full force again—the stubborn twist of heat that exists between them, both impeded and exacerbated by the suffocating jungle humidity, like an itch you couldn’t stop yourself from scratching, if only you had the energy to move.

It’s unnerving as it’s always been, the ways in which she tames him and makes him wild.

“Hello,” he says, going for suave but falling somewhere a lot closer to shaky.

Rebecca lets out a soft giggle and bends at the knee, toes leading the way to twist her leg between his.

“Hi,” she breathes into his mouth, the cartilage of her nose crushing against his own.

Apparently, that far-from-sophisticated call and response is all the encouragement they need before they’re crashing back into each other’s orbits, an alignment of single-minded satellites colliding for the thousandth time.

It’s not as needy as their last kiss, instead whittled down into languidity by the slow burn of whatever it is they’ve been allowing to rekindle between them over months of correspondence and an overnight temperature that lends itself to a leisurely pace. I’ve missed you, she tells him in no uncertain terms, and he feels unhurried in his efforts to lay out his supporting arguments of every way he intends to miss her back.

Her nails drag across his scalp and he groans, fingertips hinting at the band of her bra.

“Nope, I can’t,” she blurts suddenly after another enthusiastic minute of making out, pushing back at him and scrunching up her face. The disappointment doesn’t even have time to sour in his stomach before she’s rushing to make the grounds of her rejection clear. “I’m sorry. It’s just so sticky. Like, disgustingly sticky. An I-can’t-expend-the-energy-that-would-only-make-us-stickier sticky.”

He obediently withdraws, rolling off of her and back towards his side of the bed, as much as their cramped shared space currently allows and what ultimately ends up being much the same arrangement as before, albeit with his body being the one caged by hers against the mattress as she holds herself away in something reminiscent of a reluctant push-up. “Absurdly,” he agrees, unable to deny himself the skin-to-skin contact of combing her matted hair back behind her ear.

“Like, I can’t tell where my body ends and yours begins, and not in a… well, it is in a hot way, technically, but not in a sexy-hot way? More in the way that I’m just melting into you until we form some kind of amorphous, perspiring blob.”

“Charming,” he says lightly.

He takes some satisfaction that he’s not alone in the dull throb of his frustration, judging by the way she shifts to squeeze her thighs together.

“Can we maybe just, I don’t know, sleep on the floor? With a companionable inch of breathing space between us as we gaze wantonly into each others’ eyes? That concrete looks cool and I mean, heat rises, right?”

“Sure, if you want to hang with the scorpions.”

Her upper body, which had been in the process of relaxing back towards his, slingshots back up off of him at that, eyes going disproportionately wide to the rest of her face. “Dude. You get scorpions in your room?”

“Sometimes. Also: lizards.”

“That’s it—I’m taking the next flight home.”

His palm skirts her shoulder blades, coaxing her back down. “Uh-huh.”

Amused as he is by her theatrics, there’s another more obvious option, one that he would have offered hours ago if only she’d given him the chance, stubborn as she’d insisted on being in response to his attempts to organise her transport back into town. He absently wonders what their chances of getting a taxi are at this time of night.

“Nathaniel?” she ventures tentatively, her voice small amongst the encroaching outside chorus of cicadas.

“Mmm?”

“Do you want to sneak into my hotel room with me? I’m pretty sure it has air conditioning.”

His smile stretches wider as he pats her encouragingly on the back. “There you go.”

She carefully peels herself off of him, and he lets her drag him, good-natured, from the bed.