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She keeps her back turned on purpose. Her body moving with the rhythmic pulsing of the music, she keeps her back to him, just daring him. Not that she knows he’s even in the crowded club, not that she can see all that well by this planet’s version of strobe lighting, but she can feel him somehow. She can feel his eyes on her back where her top is fastened. There’s almost a physical sensation as his gaze rises up to her hair; it’s almost a literal touch, a thumb and forefinger pulling lightly where her hair falls out of its braid, the heat-inspired hairstyle suddenly having another purpose entirely. He likes her hair up and it looks like the braid is close enough.
You’re beautiful, she mouths to herself and grins a little.
She can feel his gaze slip back down and stay there, lingering as she sways, working her hips into the air. She can feel it even stronger in the crowd as he comes closer, that leather jacket enough of a spectacle on this hot world to draw the eye. Beyond her new status as a planetary celebrity, having a top that covers all the way down to her stomach has gotten her more than her fair share of looks, but this time, this look, she knows as his.
Still, she doesn’t turn.
She feels a shock of air as the throng parts, space opening up and filling in behind her. She shivers and that’s when his hands find her waist. She feels for them, counts five wide-spread fingers against her hip and relaxes backwards. Imagining what he won’t do, she can’t help the motion in her hips, can’t help the way her head tilts to the side, offering a bare neck and shoulder.
The moment lasts far longer than it should, her thinking of the bluest eyes and the way that, any second now, he could haul her against him and end their everlasting dance around one another. She feels a twinge between her legs as his cool breath blows over the back of her neck. Flashes of light blur and colour the world, setting it in sharp snapshots that stand out all the more against his steady movements, smooth and slow, and every second that passes is another second where she thinks that maybe, oh god, maybe this is finally happening.
“Time to go?” she asks, eyes closed to the flashing lights. She imagines him tugging her back against him, imagines the feel of him wanting her, needing her. She imagines one of those hands rising up across her chest in an outright claim.
She imagines a lot of things – she’s been imagining a lot of things – but when his thumbs press against her skin, it’s enough to make her gasp. Cool digits trace light circles on the skin above her jeans, caress the space between jeans and top. And then his knuckles, his curled hands teasing her sides with his chill the same way his breath does with her neck.
“Doctor....” She moans it, actually moans his name in a crowded nightclub, and somehow, impossibly, despite the music and the noise and the way she tries to muffle the word, he hears her.
He hears her and then his mouth is at her neck with nips and licks and kisses, an abrupt onslaught that arches her back, that arches her into him. His hands pull at her hips, pull her flush against him. She feels something both impressive and long-awaited pressing against her bum, pressing, but then his hips are moving too and there they go, then it happens, then she grinds back against him and he bites down, a startled breath escaping over her skin.
She gasps too and he kisses the bite better, his tongue a soft and lovely thing. One of a kind, she thinks, then giggles, then doesn’t know how horrible it is that she’d thought it and laughed. His tongue and teeth keep playing at her nape, though, and she’s just a little giddy.
His fingers tap at her sides, a tickling path quickly made to her stomach until she’s giggling again, giggling and melting in his arms. His hand goes flat over her navel, under her top, keeping her against him as the rhythm in the air pounds them together. It feels different there than she would have thought, but she can’t quite say why with him sucking on her ear like that. She can’t even keep her eyes open.
Suddenly remembering that she has arms too, she lifts her hand to run it over closely cropped hair, to very much encourage that he keep going. Because what he’s doing is brilliant. It’s fantastic.
She lifts her hand, runs it over his head, and finds her fingers buried in soft, thick hair.
At this point, it also occurs to her that whatever the man behind her is wearing, it’s not a leather jacket.
To his very minor credit, the man feels it when she goes tense. By the time she says “Let go,” he already has. She turns around and beneath the flashing and the blurring of the lights, her first impression is blue. She can’t make out his pale face, one of the lights directly behind his head and setting off a blinking purple corona, but she can see the very blue suit.
She shoves him on the chest, right between the lapels. He rocks backwards, unresisting. “What do you think you’re-”
“Rose,” the man says, light glinting off his glasses and hiding his eyes. “Hello.”
She pulls back farther, never mind that he’s stopped trying to touch her. “How d’you know my name?”
For a reason she can’t explain, she half expects him to say they’ve met somewhere in London – that’s where it sounds like he’s from, incredibly enough. Something in his unclear face looks almost familiar, but she’s not sure there either.
He looks at her a moment longer before answering, like she’s said something completely unexpected. “You were on the news,” he says and his accent is something else entirely. Probably misheard it with the music, all of it still pounding. He’s somehow modulating his voice to be clearly heard under it. “All over the planet. The Doctor and Rose Tyler call invader’s bluff and save planet, Grand Chancellor swears thankfulness on behalf of the world – it’s on every news feed.”
“And you thought you’d grope me in a club to say thanks?” she demands.
Even without the ability to see his face, let alone his eyes, she’s pretty sure he’s staring at her.
“You heard me,” she says, though now she’s starting to have that annoying feeling of being the rude, ignorant tourist who never checked what the local sexual norms were. Which is at least true on the “never having checked” side of things.
Then: “Sorry,” he says. “I just-” He looks down, shoves his hands in his pockets and mumbles something.
“What?”
“I wanted to see you,” he says and the way he says it makes it immensely important. “In person.” He looks to the side and his glasses frames reflect startling light in a strange shape, though she couldn’t say why they do. “Saw you on the news, and I thought- Sorry, I’m sorry. This was a bad idea – I’ll go.”
“Wait.” She catches at his arm before she can think better of it. “Come sit.”
He pulls away and her hand slips down his blue sleeve and their hands clasp, an unwitting reaction at the feel of palm against palm. His skin is cool, his fingers long and thin. They tighten around her hand, the grip almost too hard and then, just as abruptly, he tries to let go. He looks at her as he does, though, a gaze she can feel from behind the glare of his glasses.
“Come sit,” she tells him again. “I’m getting free drinks tonight and it looks like you need one.”
“Rose, I....”
With a tone like that, she doesn’t need to see his eyes. “C’mon,” she says. And this time when she pulls, he follows.
His hand keeps trying to go limp in hers – she probably scared him off any more attempts to touch her – but he never manages to completely let go. The temperature is almost exactly the same as the Doctor’s, but the intent behind it couldn’t be more different. It’s strange on so many levels.
She works her way out of the crowd of so many shapes and shades, giving a small wave to the security guard by the door, the one whose name is a cross between “Blish” and a sneeze. She knows she’s got at least him looking out for her here; the Grand Chancellor had put out something of a blanketing protection statement for her and the Doctor earlier that day. It’s been her first time experiencing the perks that came of planet-saving. Instead of running off this time, they’ve stayed for TARDIS repair. There hadn’t been much of an option about that. They’re here until the Doctor finds a substitute for whatever incomprehensibly named part had violently shattered.
At the moment, though, slight awkwardness of her newfound popularity aside, she’s really enjoying herself. It’s hard not to be when almost everyone in the world is happy to see you and good at showing it. Maybe a little too good at it, in the case of this one.
She slips into one of the booths opposite the door, a small thing with space enough for just one on either side of a foggy glass table. Jutting artistically out of the wooden paneling of the wall, the table’s a little low and his long legs stretch out on either side of hers. He leans forward, slumped a little, and when she leans in to try to get a better look him, she has a moment of amazement – all of the other sounds in the room just cut out. Almost all of them. She can hear the music, just barely.
“What just-”
“Acoustic barrier,” he tells her, sounding almost bored with the term. Though if this is his planet, she imagines he could be. That sort of thing might be how he was able to make himself heard so easily beneath the music.
“Can anyone else hear us?” she asks, tucking her hair behind her ear, then throwing it over her shoulder when that doesn’t stop it from falling forward. She keeps meaning to cut it, but she never does.
He shakes his head, the light glinting and flashing off those frames. Beneath the lenses, his eyes are some kind of dark, maybe hazel or deep blue or a simple brown. Trying to pin it down in here gives her a headache, makes her feel like her mind is blurring because of her eyes, so she soon stops.
Just to test the acoustic barrier, she leans back to be hit with the sounds of the club, then leans forward again, plunging herself into near silence. “That’s handy, I guess.” And a few buttons on the table let her order drinks to her new tab. Without thinking about it, she punches in the order she would’ve placed for herself and the Doctor, not herself and this bloke. Still, a free drink is a free drink and those are the only two she knows how to order.
As they wait for the drinks to show, he doesn’t speak, simply takes the numerous coasters and, treating them like particularly thick cards, begins to build houses out of them. Occasionally, his mouth works as if he’s struggling to hold something back, to keep something inside him. There’s a tension to him and he keeps moving like he’s about to bolt, like he’s getting ready to. When he ruffles his hair, the movement almost violent, it makes him look more than slightly deranged. Not for the first time, she wonders what exactly she’s doing.
But then, when he looks at her, when his attention is undeniably focused on her with lonely intensity, she knows that if she left now, she wouldn’t forgive herself for it.
Their drinks arrive and Rose thanks the server, leaning back to hear and be heard. After, she leans back in to where she might hear the man, were he to speak. There isn’t so much as a word out of him until he downs his entire glass with his head thrown back, his neck long and pale. “Thanks,” he says, and sets the empty mug on top of his coaster-tower. The light structure holds steady, doesn’t so much as wobble.
“Liked your drink then?” she asks, eyebrows raised high.
“One of my favorites,” he admits, looking at her through the mug. The way they have to lean forward would’ve created intimacy without the structure in the way; she thinks that’s why he made it. She’s not about to protest. She can see his forehead and hair over the mug. She wonders how much of her he can look at.
“Lucky guess.”
He hums his agreement, or maybe his doubt. It’s always hard to tell with alien humming.
“So,” she says after a pause.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Why me?”
“You saved the world today,” he tells her, matter-of-fact. “Who better?”
“I helped. The Doctor, he-”
“You saved the world today,” he repeats, just a little bit louder. Not rudely, though, not insistent in a way that frightens. In a way that assures, maybe. She likes it, his voice.
She feels her face heat a little and makes herself ignore it. “It’s not as hard as you’d think,” she tells him, giving him a bit of a grin and expecting one in return.
She doesn’t get one.
Instead, his head ducks down and though he hides behind the coaster tower, she can still see his shoulders shake. She can still hear the sudden trembling inside of him as he replies, “Yes it is.” His arms are crossed on the table, his voice muffled from speaking into them.
Under the table, she bumps the side of her knee against the side of his. “Hey,” she says.
He doesn’t look up.
She tries again. Says, a little softer, “It’s all right.”
There’s a shifting sort of sound and, when she looks for it, she can see signs of him shaking his head against his arms.
It’s enough to make her move his mug from the coasters, for her to topple the tower and pull down the castle, because if there’s one thing she knows about comforting people, it’s contact. She knows to reach and touch and, unable to hold his hand, she pets his hair instead, smoothes it down.
He tenses at first, is initially slow to accept the touch, but her instincts prove their worth when he relaxes, when he sighs like he’s about to break. It’s a strange sound and she imagines it says a lot about her that she recognizes it instantly.
“It’s all right,” she says once more. Keeps petting his hair. It’s soft and thick, definitely brown and definitely not belonging to a human. “You’re okay. It’s all right.”
“It’s not,” he tells her, voice muffled and thick, and she can’t tell if he’s crying. “You don’t know how much it’s not.”
“Tell me.” She asks it, offers it. Her hand keeps moving through his hair.
“I can’t.”
“How come?”
“I can’t.”
With gentle movements, she starts trying to smooth down the hair on the back of his head. “Is there anyone you have told?”
“No.”
“Then tell me,” she suggests. “Why not me? I saved the world today, remember?”
He makes a sound, a small, choked noise, and it takes one long horrible moment to realize he’s laughing. “Can’t deny that.”
When he goes quiet again, she lets him. There’s no more pressing, not when she can feel the build-up in him. It’s almost like he’s trembling from keeping all the words in.
“I...” he says. He stops.
She waits.
“I didn’t-” A frustrated noise.
She stops petting his hair and he looks up, startled and afraid behind those glasses. He grabs her hand, the motion inhumanly fast, holds it in both of his. He brings her hand to his mouth and when he presses his lips to her knuckles, it’s less of a kiss and more an attempt to stopper up the words inside him.
When he lowers her hand to the table, it all comes tumbling out.
“I couldn’t do it,” he says. “I couldn’t. I told them I could- I promised I could, but I couldn’t and they died, Rose, they died and I couldn’t stop it. Morvin and Foon and Bannakaffalatta, everyone, they died. The entire ship. And Astrid, I had to-” He shakes his head, a hard and angry movement. “She shouldn’t have been down there. All she wanted was to see the universe and what she got was a death cruise. How is that fair?”
He stops there, stops with his fingers tight around her hand, tight enough to hurt, but all she can do is encourage him to continue. “It’s not,” she tells him.
“I know it’s not,” he answers, snapping the words out. “Believe me, I know that better than most. But just once, you’d think, just the once, it could happen. It was a ship of thousands. Thousands, Rose, and only four of us lived. And for what? For nothing. For absolutely nothing and I am so tired of it.” He drops her hand to swipe at his eyes, covering his face as lifts his glasses. “I’ve never been so tired. I want it to stop but it never does. For once, I want it to stop. I could, you know. Just stop.”
She reaches across the small distance between them, touches his arm. “Don’t.”
“I’m not going to cry,” he tells her, sounding hurt. “I’m not, I’m only-”
“Don’t,” she says again. “Don’t do anything stupid, yeah? Things are gonna get better. I know it doesn’t look like it right now, but trust me, they are. They’re gonna get so much better and you’re gonna want to still be here when they are.”
“I’m not,” he says and it sounds too defensive. “I wouldn’t.”
“Good,” she says, says it as strongly as she can. “’Cause I don’t want you to. ‘Cause, y’know what? You’re gonna be happy again. I swear.”
He looks at her and even with half his expression hidden, she can still see his doubt.
“Do you trust me?” she asks, the only gamble she can think of.
“Yes,” he says, the reply almost unnervingly immediate.
“Okay. Then you have to believe me when I say you’re gonna be happy again. ‘Cause you are.”
He shakes his head.
“You are,” she insists.
“I’m not going to kill myself.”
“And I’m not saying you’re going to,” she counters. “Just that things are gonna get better. All right?”
“Rose,” he says.
“I’m not saying everything’ll get better, but you can’t give up hope. And,” she adds, “I got you a free drink, so you have to listen to me.”
His lips quirk, just a little.
“I’m serious,” she says and she means it, except for how she’s a little playful now.
Something almost like a smile pulls at his mouth. “Dead serious?” he asks and maybe he’s a little playful too.
“Think that’s a little too serious for both of us,” she replies and then she gets that smile out of him for real. “There you go,” she encourages, unable to help noticing his sudden transition from attractive to gorgeous. It seems a strange thing to notice when she can’t pin down the details of him, can’t remotely put an age to him. This far into things, she thinks he might be some sort of psychic, bending her mind away from his face.
He shies away a little at her smile, a motion that makes him look younger than he probably is. She thinks he might be her age, for all his voice sounds older. But then, different species do age differently: there’s really no telling. She studies him a little, trying to sort him out. Under her close inspection, he visibly forces his mouth back into a line as he rolls his empty glass between his hands, the handle of the mug slipping between long fingers.
She bumps the side of her knee against the side of his once again. It’s a little flirty, a little impish, but it does make him look at her directly.
“How do you do it?” he asks, his question at once rhetorical, amazed and tired. He seems so old in that moment but he makes it seem like she must be older, for him to ask her questions like these, vague as they are.
“Do what?”
“Know the right thing to say.”
She shakes her head, has to fight down something of a laugh or a giggle at how absurd that is. “I really, really don’t. I’m sorta scrambling around and I find things to say. Sometimes, they work. Guess I’m just lucky.”
“I don’t believe that,” he says.
“Why not?” She leans forward more than she really has to. “Think I would be the one to know how I work.”
He stops rolling the mug between his palms. “You saved the world today. You saved my life. You... you’ve been wonderful tonight. All of that, and only with things you say.”
“I guess so, yeah,” she agrees, more or less, “but I didn’t know any of it would work until I risked it. ‘S like I was saying: you have to be hopeful.”
He stays hunched, keeps looking at the empty mug rather than at her.
“Besides,” she says, tongue touching her teeth as she grins, “you’re gorgeous when you smile. Wouldn’t mind looking at you properly.”
He jerks up, sits up straight, his hand going to his glasses in a protective gesture. So it’s a device instead of a mind trick. That makes her feel a bit better about it all, even with his blatant discomfort with his appearance. “Don’t.”
“Oh, go on,” she urges him. “Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you can’t show your face.”
“I can’t,” he says and the seriousness of the statement cuts through all her teasing. “If you try to make me, I’ll have to leave.” He states it as a fact, maybe as a cultural standard. The way his voice turns and his mouth twists, it sounds like it could be an expression of grief.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll leave it alone. Promise.”
He nods, slowly returning to his former position. Leaning forward, his elbows on the table, he folds his hands in front of his face.
“Was there someone with you?” she asks. “On that cruise. That woman, you said Astrid?”
“No.” It’s a soft sigh of denial. “I only met her on the ship.”
“But you cared about her.”
“I care about everyone,” he says, confesses it like a dark secret. His clasped hands fall from before his face, are lowered to the table as he leans forward, as he insists, “I don’t mean to, but it keeps happening.”
She reaches forward, spreads her hand across the tense fists he makes. “I’m glad. I like being cared about, don’t you?”
Lips pressed tight, he nods.
She strokes her thumb over cool skin, over thin fingers and the bumps of knuckles. Even if it’s not quite the same texture as the Doctor’s, his skin is still the same temperature, and he’s broken and sad and gorgeous. He folds his hands around hers, the motion starting slowly and growing desperate, like he’s been drowning in his need for contact, dying from it. Although it’s not a desperation she can understand, it is one she’s familiar with, one she’s seen so many times before from a man in a leather jacket. He’s anything but a stranger when he holds onto her like that. He’s someone who needs something just a bit fantastic and that makes him someone like her.
And while she can’t show him all the wonders the universe has to offer, she can do this.
She tugs at his hands, slipping out of the booth and into a sudden roar of music. He blinks up at her as she leans down back into the acoustic barrier, leans down close enough to ask, right into his ear, “Wanna dance?”
He looks so hopeful, so achingly hopeful, and when he speaks, it’s as if he’s trying to break himself with doubt. “I thought- Well, I mean, I... You said-”
“Changed my mind.” She nods at the crowd behind her. “C’mon.”
He follows where she leads, his hands falling from hers for one to hover at the small of her back. It’s a light, gentle touch, and so tentative that she almost wants to snog him just to bring back his earlier confidence. Once they’re into the throng – not so far in that she couldn’t slip back out if he went too far, not so far in that Blish the guard can’t see her – once they’re in, she’s moving to the music and he’s standing still. She takes his hands and pulls them to the small of her back once more, steps into an embrace she makes for herself. She hugs him back, hugs him tight, her arms around his neck and her cheek tucked against his collarbone.
The thrum and throb of the music bring them to move, the grinding rhythm oddly gentle between them. She can feel it when he gives in to their position, when he goes from holding her like glass to handling her like something that ought to melt. His touch makes her shiver in the heat and that’s when she knows he’s more than she can manage on her own. That’s when, with her body flush against his and his fingers curling at her back, she thinks maybe she’d like to be on her own with him anyway.
Having a particularly sane moment, she slides her hands from behind his head and moves them downwards. She gets her arms between their chests for the sake of some distance, but when he catches her wrists and pulls her hands back up, she lets him. It’s something in the way his tall body bends around hers, something in the way his eyes hold hers, their intensity shining through the obscuring lenses.
His mouth moves like he’s about to say something, like he wants to whimper, and she looks at his lips the way he’s looking at hers. Their hips rolling together, their centers pressed and hot and feeling every throb of the deep bass beat, she can’t help the way her eyes slide shut, the way her mouth falls open. He probably can’t help kissing her and that’s what makes it so easy to go along with, to return in kind.
Warmer than his hands, his mouth and tongue are as clever as the fingers at the small of her back. He doesn’t taste human, tastes like metallic honey and the drink she gave him. It’s a stray thought across the back of her mind, that this is what the Doctor would taste like, what he might feel like against her lips and under her tongue. She pulls back again, just a little, but the whine of protest in the back of his mouth is soon to enter hers. Even if she didn’t mean for this to happen, it’s too good to stop.
His hands begin to roam, but only after hers do. He’s got great hair and an even better ass and she can’t make up her mind which one she’d rather touch. She’s pretty sure their display is still within the range of what’s publicly acceptable and if it’s not, that’s a risk she’s increasingly willing to take. His hand on her breast is a beautiful thing and when he finds her nipple through the cloth, she’s flushed and helpless, gasping out of his mouth and sighing back into it.
His lips pull away from hers to seek out the skin of her neck, her shoulder, and there’s his teeth and his tongue even as his thumb keeps flicking over sensitive skin. His other hand smoothes down her arching back, keeps her pressed against him where he’s hard and wanting. She moves against him, almost writhes against him, her head thrown back and everyone can see and everyone knows who she is and she still doesn’t care, she doesn’t even remember that when she tries to gasp out permission.
Whatever she says, he understands it, slips his hand up beneath her top, cool skin against heated flesh, and it amazes her, how much she wants to shag this man. Her legs shake from wanting to be wrapped around him. Maybe it’s months of frustration coming out, maybe this is what happens when a healthy libido lives with an uninterested Time Lord, or maybe he’s really just that good. It’s probably a mix of it all or maybe even none of it, but she still wants him, still can’t manage to breathe when he kisses her jaw from chin to ear, so very tender.
Their feet shuffle as they strive for contact and balance both, each of them needing a leg between those of the other. It’s nothing like dancing anymore; only their clothes keep them from fucking on their feet. But it’s not that either, it’s more than that, whether or not it should be. Because he’d sought her out, he’d wanted her and needed her and she can feel it in him even if she doesn’t understand it. He’s so alone and for whatever reason, it’s only her he wants to be with, only her he’s so desperate to unleash his lust and affection on. It’s fast and hurried and he holds onto her like she could disappear at any moment, simply fade away and leave him lonely and wanting. Why that doesn’t scare her, she’ll never know.
He makes her clutch at him in return, one hand on his nape and the other on his ass, and then they’re too close for him to keep his hand on her breasts, then his hand’s against the skin of her back. She pulls his mouth back to hers, kisses him hard. Breaking the rhythm of their hips, she slips her hand between them, cups him and knows she’ll be feeling it in the morning. He groans at the touch and she groans at the thought, this moan forming between their mouths.
“Please,” he begs, breaking the kiss to put his lips to her ear. His accent does strange things as his control wavers. “Rose, please, let me.”
She strokes him through his trousers and he trembles. “Condom?”
“Dis- ahh, dispenser in the, the loo.” He thrusts against her hand, his breaths quick and shallow. “I’m- I’m clean, but- please. Please, Rose.”
She stops touching him to take his hand, to pull him through the crowd, and the tiny friction that walking puts between her thighs is almost too much with him so close behind her. She wishes he was wearing a tie to go with that suit, has the sudden delicious fantasy of leading him like that. It’s all so fast and insane and there has to be something seriously wrong with her tonight, but she’ll care about that in the morning.
They duck into the back hall of the club, the spot anything but an abandoned one. Couples and even a trio are enjoying each other and once she steps into the bathroom, she’s relieved when he follows, locking the door behind him. She fumbles at the dispenser with her currency chip, the currency chip the Doctor gave her when they landed, and the guilt hits hard. It wedges inside her next to the lust and sympathy and fierce, protective affection, and she can’t move one way or the other.
Kissing at the back of her neck, pressed behind her, he takes the currency chip from her hands and operates the dispenser himself. Breathing heavily, she feels so much warring inside her, and then he presses both currency chip and condom into her hands. He pulls away from her back and she hears him shuck his clothes, hears the suit jacket hit the bathroom floor. “Rose?” he asks, sounding winded, sounding scared she’ll run.
She turns around to find him with his shirt unbuttoned, with it open and half off. She gasps, not out of lust but out of shock. The pale skin of his chest is crossed with white lines, a blemish that doesn’t look natural. It looks almost like stretch marks, somehow, but he’s far too skinny and his flesh far too firm for that to be possible. It can’t be natural and if it’s not natural, then it has to be inflicted.
His face falls as he registers her surprise, takes in her reaction. “It’s all right,” he says. “It’s not from a disease. Should fade in a week or so and then I’ll be good as new.”
“How long-” She can’t finish the question at first. She shakes her head, puts the condom on top of the dispenser and the currency chip back into her pocket. The motion frees her hands for when she has to wipe away tears and choke even more down. She has no idea when she became so desperately attached to this man. “How long were you tortured?”
“A year,” he says, like it doesn’t matter. “By my childhood best friend.” He swallows then, looks away and holds his shirt in front of himself. “And I ruined my other friend’s life while I was at it. I knew I was doing it, but I didn’t notice either. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true.” He glances at her, tries to, all of these confessions spilling out like a flood that was waiting for her and her alone. “Too busy being hung up on someone else. So I thought,” he says, and he laughs at what he’d thought, a bitter sound that proves he cares, that proves he hurts. “ I thought, after, once he was dead and she was gone, I thought I’d take a cruise.”
Her arms open to him. There’s no other possible reply but this. “C’mere,” she says, and he drops his shirt to hug her tight. His erection still presses into her and, despite that cold shock of revelation, her body still wants this, wants him against her. She strokes his back and pets his hair, and he slows to her pace even as he backs her against the wall. He tries to slow to her pace, but maybe he can’t or maybe he simply doesn’t want to. It’s so easy to follow his lead. The way he kisses her is like making love. The way he murmurs her name is like confessing it.
She breaks away, her hands in his hair, and his hands toying with her top. “There’s someone I’m hung up on too,” she admits. “Is that okay?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding as he says it, and she lifts her arms as he pulls off her top. He ducks his head down to her breasts, pushing up her bra and sucking at her skin. She touches his shoulders, gently as her fingers first encounter those marks. She’s soon clutching at him, soon well on her way to a blissful obliviousness of anything unrelated to his mouth, his tongue. She shifts against the wall, getting off one trainer and then the other. The bathroom floor feels strange between beneath her socks. He takes the cue, but asks for permission first, his fingers on the clasp of her fly. “Jeans?”
“Yeah,” she says, her hands going to his trousers in turn. Their motions put confused space between their bodies, pushing them apart far enough to look at each other, to beg with kisses. “I might,” she thinks to warn, “I might say his name.”
“What name?” he asks, helping to balance her as she steps out of her jeans and knickers. Somehow, this involves licking her neck and chest.
“It’s not- It’s not really a name,” she says and then he sucks hard on her skin.
His fingers slip down, touch her without slipping inside, without trying to. “Tell me.”
She works herself against his palm, whimpers for him when he keeps the pressure light.
“Tell me,” he demands and it’s the sexiest thing she’s ever known.
“Doc-”
His fingers, slipping into her, curl. Hard. Fast. And again and again and she’s shaking, she’s shaking apart and clutching at his shoulders. She’d been wet and ready, but she hadn’t been expecting, she couldn’t have expected this.
She arches between him and the wall, between his mouth at her breast and his fingers in her sex. His hair brushes against her chin, his glasses a strange, cold touch against her chest. He works her inside, fingers sliding and pressing.
He growls something around her breast, the vibrations sinking into her while she holds onto him, to his shoulders, his neck, his hair. She gasps out something like a question, not understanding.
“Didn’t hear you,” he lies, so smugly, blatantly lies.
“Doctor....” It can’t be anything other than a moan.
He thumbs at her clit. “Still didn’t hear you.”
“Doctor!” she cries out, face flooding with heat as he chuckles against her skin. Oh god, he’s getting off on this.
And so is she.
The word keeps spilling out of her in gasps and moans and curses that she can only hope the pounding music outside the door will mask. His fingers thrust inside her and twist within her and she comes, shouting for her Doctor and for the man before her, for both of them at once.
Her legs can’t seem to stop shaking as he pulls his fingers from her. In desperate need of support, she leans back against the wall, watching with glazed eyes as he licks his hands clean, his eyes dark behind dark frames. Her hand unsteady, her nerves buzzing, she finally wraps her fingers around him and a few uncoordinated strokes send him gasping. He’s so hot down there, both heated and beautiful, and if she’d known more about his species, about what would happen, she would’ve dropped to her knees.
He grabs for the condom on the dispenser and she can’t seem to stop nodding as he tears the packet open. He’s trembling as he rolls it on himself, trembles all the more when she helps.
It’s a hurried bit of arrangement, her against the wall and her leg up to hook over a hip he doesn’t really have. He’s so skinny, but he proves he’s strong despite it, hauling her up and slamming himself inside her, and then she’s clutching at him all over again. Her legs as tight around him as she can manage, she holds to his shoulders. She kisses him on the glasses by accident and it surprises a loud, deep laugh out of him.
“You were saying,” he prompts and he can’t really mean that, he can’t, except for how he does.
“Doctor?” she asks, her senses far too overloaded for her to be sure of anything by this point.
“Yes. Oh, yes,” He thrusts up into her, against her, and it doesn’t matter when the wall isn’t kind to her back. She feels it without feeling it.
“Doctor, oh god, Doctor.” It’s too much. He’s too much. He makes these ridiculous noises, burying himself inside her, and the more she cries, the louder she calls out, the better it gets. “Doctor, Doctor, please, I- I, oh god....” She’s gasping and moaning, her voice roughening with it as he pounds her into the wall. She clings to him, tightens around him.
“Rose,” he says, his voice dark and inside her, stroking through her with a touch somehow more intimate than anything else he’s done.
“Doctor,” she gasps, so far beyond knowing what she’s saying. “I want, you, ah, harder. In me. Doctor.”
He gives it to her, gives her everything she asks for and then everything else he wants to do. When her legs start to slip down, he pulls her back up, his hands clutching at her ass, his hips working between her thighs. He’s a man in a club, a shag in a bathroom, but he kisses her like he loves her, presses into her like she’s a piece of wonderment he can’t quite reach.
“Come for me,” he begs, slamming up into her, making the wall shake from their coupling. His glasses fall down his nose and she sees brown eyes widen in panic, but he doesn’t stop, doesn’t pause. He can’t. “Rose-”
She takes matters into her own hands, adjusts those frames for him before slipping her fingers into his hair. “It’s okay,” she tells him, barely holding herself together. “It’s okay, I won’t look, it’s okay.”
“Rose,” he says again, her name a word of awe and wonder, and that’s when she breaks, that’s when she comes. She almost falls from his grip before her body remembers to hold on, to hold close and never let go. She’s gasping something, can’t stop gasping it, and it’s very good that he tells her to say it louder because she can’t seem to stop.
“Doctor,” she pants, running her shaking hands over his scarred skin. “Doctor.”
He squeezes his eyes shut and his mouth twists. She feels it start, feels him coming inside her and she holds onto him, suddenly hit by the knowledge that this is it, it’s over, and she’s never going to have this man ever again. How did this even happen?
He finishes with a low groan, his face damp with sweat. Adrenaline draining from their bodies, she has to get down and he has to let her. He slips out of her with a sound of complete reluctance and she only waits long enough for him to dump the condom before she’s hugging him. She’s naked in a bathroom and he’s still got his trousers around his ankles and this shouldn’t mean so much, it shouldn’t, but it does. It does, so much more than she can understand.
Eventually, the heat of the room isn’t enough to keep her from shivering, his cooling skin little help. Running his hands up and down her arms, a warming gesture, he pulls back only to blink when he looks at her face.
His brow furrows above his glasses. “You’re crying.”
“You’re one to talk.” She touches his damp cheek and he turns his head to kiss her palm.
“I am at that,” he murmurs, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. Either way, the sound of it falls flat.
They hold to each other, look at each other. She’d rather stand here and shiver than put her clothes back on; any excuse to keep that door closed and them on this side of it.
Eventually, though, they pull apart. He pulls up his trousers and she shrugs back into her top. Between them, the act of dressing is a long, painful goodbye.
“Am I ever going to see you again?” she asks, has to ask once her trainers are back on and he’s buttoning up his suit jacket. The question makes his fingers fumble, fumble and then freeze. He looks away, but she can see him swallow, see the strain in his long neck.
“That’s hard to say,” he answers, still sounding a bit choked up. “But I hope so.” He looks at her then, tries for a smile.
She laughs a little because she can’t let herself keep crying. It doesn’t make sense, how important this is to her. “Can’t let go of that hope,” she agrees. “’Cause things are gonna get better, yeah?”
“Oh, Rose,” he says, like she’s brilliant and wonderful and missing something so completely obvious. “They just did.”
Those three words pull her back into his arms. She leans up and in for soft kisses, noses bumping and lips brushing and the pair of them so reluctant to let go.
“You’re not making this easy,” he murmurs down to her.
“Good,” she says.
“Rose....” The word is at once a warning and an endearment.
“Doctor,” she replies with a grin, expecting him maybe to laugh.
He doesn’t.
...Oh. “Were you okay with- with all that?” she asks.
“Oh yes,” he says, and he even seems to mean it. “More than okay. Or good. More than very good.”
“Fantastic?” she offers and this time, for no reason, he laughs.
He laughs and he kisses her, a firm farewell kiss. “Yes,” he agrees. “That too. Though,” he adds, looking around and looking sheepish, “we should get out of here before someone needs to use the loo for its intended purpose.”
“Or our purpose,” she says, making herself open the door and step through it.
He follows, keeping close behind her. He doesn’t touch her now, but he doesn’t allow for much space between them either. “Yes,” he says again, “that too.”
She giggles, at the same time fighting down the urge to ask for his name. If he doesn’t want her to see his face, he can’t want her to know that. Still, she has to ask something. “One last dance?”
There’s no reply and she turns around as quickly as she can, certain even as her eyes find his that he’s already gone. The thought scares her more than she’d like to admit. “One last dance?” she repeats.
He shakes his head, once again the sad man from not so long ago at all. “No,” he says, the denial somehow both whispered and heard under the music. His hands are in his pockets where she can’t reach for them. “That’s a bad habit to get into, multiple last dances. Too many kisses goodbye, that’s just kissing.”
“I guess.” She looks down at her feet. “Okay,” she says after a pause, says it without wanting to. She steps forward and hugs him, feels how he wants to hug her back and mourns the way he doesn’t. She presses a quick kiss to his jaw instead of his cheek, her movements rushed. She pulls herself from him before either of them can reconsider, moves and turns away and she’ll always remember this as a goodbye that should have been so much better than it was, that could have been so much more.
She ducks out through a side door and gets walking. Never, not once, does she let herself look back.
She’ll spend years wishing she had.