Ring Dance (Part Two of Two)
Mar. 12th, 2011 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonora_conejaPairing: Sosa/Face, Sosa/OMC
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: non-con
Summary: Part Two of Two of a fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
So, I was watching the phone booth scene again and a thought popped in my head when Face tells her, "I was a player and you wanted to play." I think we all pretty much assume that Sosa is (and was when she met Face) a woman of sexual prowess and experience.
Suppose she wasn't though? What if we go in the opposite direction of that assumption? What if she was virgin when they met? Face talks a lot about her ambition. Maybe she was so busy in high school and college (perhaps she was determined to go to West Point?) that she never dated? Maybe being in the army and determined to get ahead she spent all her time working and rejected any advances made to her because she felt it would mean she got less respect from the male soliders she was working with and for? Or maybe there were other reasons. That could be up to anon.
Then she decided it was time to change her status as a virgin because she was getting to the point where it was kind of silly that she was still a virgin. Then she met Face and figured he was the perfect choice for her first time because a) he is just so hot and b) he is a total player (slut) and there wouldn't be any emotional ramifications or messy relationship to deal with. Only then there was a relationship so she freaked when Face got serious.
Bonus points if Face doesn't even realize that Sosa has never had sex before. There are reasons why a woman might be a virgin but not have hymen (including extreme and intense athletic activity, like say sports and millitary training) so she might not have that physical evidence the first time they have sex. Double bonus points if Sosa has close friend who is the only one that knows she is a virgin and Sosa asks her for advice so she can appear experienced in bed. Triple bonus points for an ending to the story that jumps in time to after the events of movie and Face pays her a surprise visit. :D
Charisa Sosa’s still a virgin, following an incident at West Point, and she hates it. She figures that Face presents some interesting opportunities for her to finally lose it, but what she doesn’t count on is him falling in love with her...
"Hey, Sarah, I think I'm in trouble."
"Why?"
"He introduced me to Hannibal yesterday," Sosa said. They were off base, at the downtown coffee house they met up at on Sundays, and she felt like shit for what had gone on over the past forty-eight hours.
Greene leaned back and crossed her legs, obviously eager for the story. "This I have to hear."
Sosa sighs. Begins.
The other lieutenant had smiled and blushed a little, nervous. He’d been nervous on the whole drive over. Hannibal was having a burger burn at his house for the unit. The womenfolk were invited, Face had told her, and said he didn’t really want to deal with BA’s latest conquest without one of his own.
“That came out wrong,” he’d said, knuckles going white on the gearshift. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Sosa had reached over and squeezed his hand. “It’s kind of nice, being thought of like that...”
“You deserve better than that,” he’d told her. “You are better than that. I don’t think about you in that way, you know that, right?”
“Then how do you think about me?”
He’d frowned a little, some kind of confusion playing over those handsome features, and then he’d started laughing. Sosa loved the sound of it, and it wasn’t until he opened her car door and led her inside, to where she was now, that she realized he did it when he was trying to cover something up, distract her.
Now there she was, beer in hand, joking and laughing on the outside deck with a couple of the other officer, that crazy dark-haired, hawaiian-shirted Murdock guy messing around with a gigantic grill, a very pretty private giggling over BA, and Face poked her on the shoulder with his own bottle.
“Hey, honey? I, uh, Hannibal wanted to say hi.”
She turned around, and there he was. Tall, lean, silver, gorgeous. Sosa couldn’t help it, remembering what Greene said about these two, and found herself wondering if maybe it wasn’t true.
But that look Face was giving his CO wasn’t lust or affection or anything other than a kind of eagerness for approval she’d seen on her brother, when he’d brought his soon-to-be-finacee to Christmas last year.
She felt sick.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
“So, Lieutenant Sosa, Face has told me everything about you,” Hannibal said warmly, voice deep, and held out his hand. “And I have to say, he hasn’t been complimentary enough. You’re quite beautiful.”
She tried to bite down on the swelling fear, but a little leaked out around the edge of her teeth. Unintentional, but there it was. “Well, I guess I’m lucky he’s not a tit man.”
Face wrapped his arms around her waist, laughing again, as Hannibal’s expression fell a little. “You have gorgeous tits, baby.”
She smiled at Hannibal and leaned back a little in Face’s arms. She loved this, having him wrapped around her like this, holding her, like she could collapse and he’d keep her steady, so strong... “You know what he’s like.”
Hannibal just tapped his pockets and frowned. “Face, you go get a cigar?”
“Sorry, baby,” Face said, kissed her cheek, and was gone. They were alone, off on one end of the deck. Hannibal leaned on the railing and stared at her. That colonel stare. The same stare she got from her own boss on Monday, when she missed something in the intel brief.
Fuck.
“How’d you two meet?” Hannibal asked casually, on edge.
“You know,” she said, letting her elbows hit down about a foot away from him, sipping at her beer like it wasn’t a big deal, like he didn’t terrify her. As an officer and as the girl who was sleeping with one of his men. “At the Officer’s Club during one of those god-awful calls. Just kind of... happened.”
“You seem like a fairly blunt woman, Charisa, so let’s be blunt,” Hannibal said in that same strange friendliness. “Do you care about him?”
“What?”
“Face. Do you care about him?”
Everything was completely off-kilter now. And hadn’t Face told her at one point, when they were very very drunk after that last mission, that he was an orphan, that the Army was his home, that he viewed Hannibal almost like his dad? But she didn’t need to let him know that she knew that, did she? She had no idea what else to say, what else to go to. “Aren’t you just like his boss?”
“I’ve seen him go through a lot of... a lot of things in the eight years he’s been with me, Charisa. I don’t want to see him get hurt.”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” she said, completely confused now. “I don’t...”
“If you break his heart, lieutenant, you and I are going to have a problem. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“You threatening me or something?” Sosa asked, and Hannibal actually rolled his eyes. Then Face was there, a cigar for Hannibal and a beer for himself and a smile for Sosa, and then he was asking his boss to tell some story about some mission and the weird little moment passed entirely.
For those two at least.
Later, after the party had both wound down and wound up, Face had sobered up enough to drive, telling Sosa that they could just crash in the basement, Hannibal wouldn’t mind, they all did it all the time, that one of the other LTs had already claimed one of the extra bedrooms and she told him she didn’t want to stay, when they headed back to his apartment, he just had to say something.
“Hannibal liked meeting you,” he said, right in the middle of a kiss, right in the middle of the good part where she had his shirt off. “Thanks so much for coming today.”
“Was it just for Hannibal to meet me?”
“No. Not really. Murdock does a great job with brats.”
“Yeah, those were good. But Face, come on, Hannibal...”
“Yeah?”
“He’s nuts,” she said.
Face started laughing. A real laugh, agreeing with her.
“No, seriously, he’s crazy. He made you go get him a cigar. What the fuck was that about?”
“Are we going to fight about this?”
“No, I just mean, it’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Fetching stuff, ordering you around. You’re a lieutenant in his unit, not his house boy or something like that...”
“Charisa, stop. Just stop!” and something in the way he said it... she’d never heard that tone out of him. Like Hannibal’s, actually, cold and authoritative and expecting to be obeyed. He stared at her a moment, eyes hard, and then he ran his hand up her throat.
Her mind started racing, back to that hotel room she’d let herself be talked into in New York, after Ring Dance, where she thought everything would be okay, that she would be okay with it, and when it got right down to it, not being okay with it didn’t seem like an option...
But his hand was on her cheek and his lips were by her ear, and she could still see that huge Ranger tag on his bicep as he whispered, “Charisa, baby, don’t be angry with me. Whatever it was, look, I'm sorry. It’s you, sweetheart, I love you...”
Greene scoots up on her chair a little at the conclusion of the tale, mouth open and clearly excited. “Oh my god, you called him Colonel Smith’s houseboy? Jesus, Charisa, talk about balls...”
Sosa makes a flailing gesture with her hands and tries to remember to keep her voice down. “You are missing the point!” she hisses. “He fucking said that he loved me.”
“Well, was it like an I-love-you or an, you know, I love you?” Greene stirs her frappucino. “You know what I mean?”
“Fuck I don’t know, I don’t, none of this makes any sense to me!” and she stabs at her croussaint. Why had she ordered it? Way, way too much butter in these things. “Who says that?”
“Guys who are in love, usually.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I’m serious. So he’s, like, in love with you then?”
“I told you, I don’t know...”
“Well, what’d you say back?”
Really, really shouldn’t have ordered a pastry. She feels horrible. She’d felt sick since she left Peck’s place that morning. All day now. Horrible. Sosa sips at her latte. Can’t taste it. Says what she needs to say, really, really fast. “I told him I felt the same way and he screwed me through the mattress twice that night and we fell asleep and went for a bike ride in the morning. What?”
Greene has kind of a wistful expression on her face. “Oh, Charisa, honey, did you say I feel the same way or I love you?”
“Does that matter?” she asks. “Sarah, I’m worried.”
“About what?”
Sosa isn’t quite sure how to articulate this. It’s a feeling, one that’s scaring the hell out of her, so she just blurts it out. “What if he proposes or something?”
Greene has been eating her frappe with a spoon, but both cup and utensil hit the wooden table top. “Oh, honey, Charisa, what’s your problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened?”
“He fucking said...”
There’s a hand over hers now. “I mean, what are you so afraid of?”
“You were the one that recommended a hook-up!”
“Don’t put this on me. I recommended hook-ups. Plural. Singular nights spent with whoever the hell and never staying with one guy longer than that. Sexual independence, whatever you wanted. But you two have been together for what, eight, nine months? This kind of thing happens.”
“So I didn’t ditch him when I should have?” she asks, feeling totally lost now. “I just wanted...”
“If a guy’s sticking with a girl for that long, he’s probably not doing it just for the sex.”
And yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes way, way too much sense. The lieutenant lets herself flop back in the chair. “Fuck, that’s true, isn’t it?”
The female captain squeezes Sosa’s hand. “What happened, Charisa? What’s got you so freaked over this?”
She closes her eyes, wishes it would go away. Wishes she could stop seeing it. Wishes she hadn’t made that one fucking mistake on Ring Dance and hadn’t let...she can’t lie to her friend, but she can’t... “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says in a low voice, feeling the tears coming now.
Greene hands her a napkin and smiles a little, compassionate and warm. “I’m here. You know that.”
“Yeah, Sarah, I know that. Thanks,” she says, sniffling a little, wiping her nose, hoping her make-up isn’t running. “And... is there some kind of implication in the term houseboy?”
“You are joking, right?”
“It just sort of came to mind, and it’s probably like a slavery thing or something I remember from history class or...”
“Here,” and Greene pulls out her laptop. She usually spends the day here, working on coursework or trolling Facebook. “You can’t hold me responsible for the contents of this website.”
“What website?” Sosa asks, silently thanking her friend for trying to get things back to normal, trying to shock her like she always did. Greene’s a good girl, and a good friend, really, but she knows some bizarre shit... “Oh, wait, fuck, does this have anything to do with the two-guys-kissing thing?
Greene’s smile gets a little more devious, and Sosa can't help but giggle at that.
+++++
Sosa knows it’s over long before Face sits primed to pop the question. Ask her to marry him.
She can’t let that happen, she just can’t.
But they’d been dating for over a year.
So it’s coming.
It’s not like she wants him to. It’s not like she even knew.
Well, not until she finds the ring one day, buried at the bottom of his sock drawer and everything inside her just goes to shit.
She falls back against Face’s bed, too stunned to move, until he comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, asking her why she hadn’t gotten in yet and she started screaming at him about something or other, and slammed the door on her way out.
No, no, no.
She’s not ready to get married. She isn’t even really ready to be dating, and the lieutenant can’t let herself just be cajoled into that, too, can she? A marriage, just like this relationship, the whole fucking last fourteen months, has been? Just something she’s gone along with. Something she’s just let happen.
Like she doesn’t have a choice in it.
“You can’t really feel like that,” Greene says that evening, patting her back as Sosa reaches for another tissue in her apartment. It’s messy. She hasn’t been spending much time here lately. Not much time at all. “Why would you jut stick with him if you didn’t feel something for him?”
“That is so not the point!”
“Hon, nobody just forces you into a year-long relationship and then believes that you’re just as into it as he is. It doesn’t work like that.”
Sosa hates crying. She learned to hate it at West Point. The first thing the female cadre had told them at Basic had to do with crying. Don’t cry in front of anyone, especially not the guys, and especially not the drill sergeants. They’ll eat you alive... and she’s lived by that ever since. Females in the military are not allowed to have girly emotions. And she hates crying.
Even if she’s doing it right then.
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispers, and Greene catchest her up in a hard, fast hug. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“It’s only going to get worse, honey, the longer you drag him out like this,” her friend murmurs and god help her, Sosa nods.
“Yeah, I know.”
+++++
She’s running out of time.
Sosa thinks about breaking up with him over the phone. Like a bitch, she thinks about doing that. But she knows enough about dating to know that that probably isn’t a good idea.
She also doesn’t mention the ring, when she finally has the courage to do it face to face.
“What are you talking about, honey?” Face asks, confusion clouding across those handsome features of his, and he reaches for her hand across the table. “You’re not making any sense.”
They’re in public. A little too much public, really, that Italian restaurant that has the squid-ink pasta he’d introduced her to, on of her favorites now, something she just knows she’ll never be able to eat again after this, and she’s been seized up with fear since he’d ordered a very expensive merlot. Nearly breathless with panic since the salad course. This is where it’s going to happen. This is where she’s going to have to break his heart.
Sosa’s been thinking and thinking.
And she loved him.
But she can’t say yes.
So she needs something else to tell him instead. Half truths, the almost-there truths, things that don’t really fucking matter, but really, really do, because she needs them to.
“I mean, Face, that this just isn’t going to work out,” she tells him, marveling that she’s keeping her voice steady. Sosa slides her hand away from his, just out of range. If he keeps touching her, she won’t be able to do this. “With your job and I’m trying to get to DCIS, and you know that, we’ll never see each other and...”
“We’ve been doing okay so far, haven’t we?” he asks, eyes pleading, like a five year old who’s just been told he can’t have a popsicle. “I thought everything was fine. Charisa, baby, if I’m doing something wrong...”
“You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Then why... why do you...”
“Look, Face, I know how this works, these kind of relationships,” and Sosa takes a deep breath. Because she does know how this works, how her older friends have dealt with this, how she’s seen her fill of failed of mil-mil marriages in the few short years she’s been in and it scares the shit out of her.
How every female officer in the service knew that they’ll have to wear maternity ABUs to work and get six weeks maternity leave and then their kids will grow up in government daycares.
How she’ll constantly have to switch off on whose career was being helped by the next assignment, who’s getting the shit-end job just to stay in the same state, who’s getting a 365 deployment downrange, who’s going to Korea and fucking somebody else.
How many of these special forces guys can’t handle what they’re asked to do, how they beat their kids and abused alcohol and get PTSD so bad they never recover and... “And I don’t fucking want that, Face.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Face said, a little more desperate now. “You don’t think I haven’t seen that, too? But come on, Charisa, this is you and me we’re talking about.” He smiled. Not that conman smile of his, but his real smile, the shy lopsided smile she saw so often in bed in the morning, just waking up, and she felt something deep down in her chest cracking open. “Sweetheart, it wouldn’t be like that, I swear.”
“Then what? You’d expect me to get out after my commitment’s up? Sit around the house and get an Army wife ass and pop out a couple of kids?” she hisses, low, a little more angry than she’d intends. But maybe that’s exactly what this situation needs.
“We’ve talked about the kid thing, sweetheart, about maybe you staying home. I thought you wanted...”
“Don’t sit here and project, Face,” she says, and leans back in her chair a little. “Just because you had a fucked-up childhood doesn’t mean you get to fix it with me being pregnant and barefoot in the goddamn kitchen! I want my own life, too!”
His hands curl back into themselves and his eyes fall, and she realizes too late that it was a low blow. Too low, and cruel, and where the hell had she even gotten that from?
Whatever. She has to keep going, has to make this final in a way Face will understand.
So she stands and grabs her purse, shouldering it with what she hopes is a sense of finality. “Goodbye, Templeton.”
“Charisa,” he says, her name choking in his throat, “Charisa, sweetheart, please...”
“Talking me in to marrying you isn’t really the same thing as me saying yes, now, is it?” she replies, and without looking back, turns on her heel and walks out of that damn restaurant as quickly as she can, and it isn’t until she hails a cab and collapses on the back seat that she lets herself start crying.
+++++
Charisa has a dream that night, the night she leaves Face.
Or maybe it isn’t a dream.
More of a memory, really, but real. Like she’s back there again. Like it’s all fucking happening right the fuck now. Happening for the first time, all over again.
Drew has her on the sofa in the New York City hotel room.
It’s a suite. It’s huge. She knows exactly how much this cost him for the night - and she also knows he wasn’t planning on bringing her here, that there was another girl he wanted here instead, under him, like this. But they’re both drunk and she tells herself that’s enough of a reason to not try to analyze the reasons why.
He’s kissing her.
It’s... different, than the few fumbling attempts with one of her guy friends back in high school. But he’s gay now, anyway, so that doesn’t even really count at all. No, Rob hadn’t known what to do with her. The gay thing or the shy thing, probably. But Drew, Drew’s a little rough but his hands are easy, and she’s trying to force herself to relax.
That becomes a fuckload more difficult, once he slides that hand of his up underneath the long skirt of the dress uniform, fingers sliding along the seam right over her crotch and its automatic wetness, and suddenly she realizes why he told her to keep it on for the limo ride down here. He wants to take it off her, fuck her... and twenty minutes ago, she would have said that was just fine with her. Because she did know what she was doing when she got in that limo with him earlier.
But the anger she felt earlier, towards her friend from the other company who didn’t do the right thing and take her to Ring Dance, that anger’s fading. But the alcohol isn’t - half a bottle of champagne and god knows how many Jack and Cokes will do that to a girl. And she giggles a little, into that kiss, breaking it.
“Shh,” he murmurs in her ear, and removes his hand to pull her uniform jacket off, rip the velcro closure on the black tie tab, tossing it away. Sosa feels cold. She’s soaked the white blouse with sweat. “Shh, Charisa, you’re so wet for me, aren’t you?”
She whimpers as the zipper’s tugged open on her skirt and he eases it away. He knows what he’s doing, Sosa thinks dimly, or maybe it’s the alcohol telling her it feels good, big palm sliding down the sheer hose of her leg. It feels... nobody’s ever touched her like this. She whimpers again.
“How long’s it been, Charisa?” he asks, working on the panty hose now. “Since the last time somebody fucked you? It’s going to feel so good...” and he’s frowning a little at her cotton undies, playing through her pubic hair, and leans back over her, pressing his middle finger straight into her cleft, where only her finger’s ever been. It’s too hard, too rough, but it feels good, based on that alone. “So much hair, honey,” he murmurs in her ear, going deeper, harder, faster, bringing in his second to roll her clit. “I like just a little bit, right at the top...”
Then he’s doing something with that hand as he unsnaps the buttons of her blouse, one at a time, something that has Sosa gasping and writhing and coming, almost before he’s got the garment off of her. He grins and tears off her bra, rolling her small breasts with both palms, kissing her, and she can smell herself on him.
Then he’s picking her up, carrying her away, laying her down, and before she can register what the hell’s going on, her mind swimming from the hour and the booze, his head’s between her legs, his tongue going...
“Ohh!” she half yells, arching up, and he holds her down, hand to belly, that tongue sliding around, sucking and flicking and all kinds of things she’s never had the pleasure of accurately imaging before, and then those fingers are back, two, thrusting deep into her, and it hurts, it really hurts, and she jerks back. “Stop, stop...” she pants, very much aware of how exposed she is. How still-clothed he is.
Drew’s got a curious expression on his face, looking at her, and then grins, feral and wild. “You ever done this before?” he asks in a voice that could be excitement or anger. Sosa can’t tell which. The world’s tilting... “You a virgin, Charisa?”
Her face is burning, and she just nods once.
That grin grows, if that’s possible, and he slides out of his jacket, his pants and shoes, black socks still on as he moves over her on the bed, back into the pillows, dropping one hand to pull her long, dark tresses out of the anal little bun all the girls have to wear, and catches her up into a hard, hard kiss that leaves her breathless. She can feel her wetness, on her thigh now, and it’s just her body responding, Sosa knows. It’s not good, but it’s the closest she’s gotten in three years of being in this damn school and she’s so fucking sick of not...
Drew’s on his back now, nestled back in the pillows, and kind of crooks his finger at her, reaching over to draw her up by the chin and take one of her hands in his, wrapping it around his cock. “Never felt one of these before, have you?” he asks, moving her hand up and down the throbbing length. It’s... weird. Like a bag full of jello. “Go ahead, explore a little.”
But the second his hand comes off hers, she removes hers as well. It’s... it’s just not...
“Want to taste it?” he asks in that same smooth voice, and Sosa feels herself blushing again, shakes her head. “Come on,” Drew says again, and this time, there’s an edge there. “Fair’s fair...”
He spreads his legs and guides her head down, slow but firm. “Come on,” he says, fist around the base of his cock, holding her so he can tease the head of it, swollen and red, across her lips, across her cheek. “Just lick it.”
Sosa takes a deep breath. She can do this. She went off the ten meter diving board in BDUs. She killed a fucking rabbit. She can suck a guy’s cock. She can... and she parts her lips, just enough for him to shove in.
It’s not pretty, and she’s not sure how long it goes on for. It’s a kind of detachment, she supposes, feeling herself floating out on the alcohol, her exhaustion, her mind carrying her away. It’s not good. She knows that. From the place she’s drifting off to, she can hear it, the displeasure, the anger little corrections, the guidance she can’t follow, and her lips are stretched to the point of pain, that cockhead’s nudging the back of her throat, making her want to vomit, all that hard flesh just a terrible fucking feeling that she wants nothing to do with, going on and on and on like it’s never going to end, and she only really notices it’s gone when he’s covering her once again, words smelling of sin, frustration, herself.
Repulsive things.
“Gonna fuck you, Charisa. It’s going to feel so damn good, best fucking thing you’ve ever felt...”
She’s not going to be able to stop him. Fuck, she’s not. She’s going to become one of those fucking statistics they like to trot out on the national news...and this wasn't how this was supposed to go her first time. It's supposed to mean something, isn't it? Isn't she supposed to love him, the first time? Shouldn't it be good, the first time?
But no.
Goddammit. The military's going to take this too, Sosa thinks. First college and now this.
She wants to cry, but she remembers. She does remember.
Never cry in front of anyone, especially the guys...
“No,” she manages to gasp, holding on to the one thought that fights its way to the surface of her exhaustion and intoxication and fear. She can still say no. She can at least say it, and hope to hell that whoever signed this asshole’s appointment letter knew what they were doing, that’s he’s honorable enough... “no. I-I can’t. I can’t let you do...”
He sighs, looks down at her. He’s still got his damn shirt on, dick hanging out under the tails, and from what little she knows about these things, it looks damn painful. A little shiny in the low light, her saliva and his precum. A finger circles back a little further. “How about...”
“You don’t get to fuck me,” Sosa says with everything she can muster. “Not you.”
But that’s it. There’s no more. She has to hurtle it out and across the wide gulf of weariness and alcohol and fucked-out emotion that’s submerging her now, dragging her under.
“Cocktease,” he growls.
And the female cadet can’t stop that male from yanking her down a little further on the mattress and straddling her with his knees, cock in hand, and that hand starts moving. Sosa knows, somehow, somehow, that she did bring this on herself, that she knew exactly what was going to happen when she agreed to come down here with Drew, that her virginity’s worth something and why would she ever have imagined that she could do this, go through with this...
And her last conscious thought, as the first spurt hits her cheek and she has to close her eyes, falling into merciful unconsciousness, is that she probably ruined his weekend...
The lieutenant jerks up, clawing at her face, heart racing, panicking again at some four year fear that’s never left her, at the shame of that, his semen dripping off her skin, drying hard and itchy, at the thought that’s stayed with her since then, that’s she’s not good enough for anybody.
That she was useless that night.
That nobody really wants her.
That any time a guy tells her she’s beautiful it’s just because he wants to fuck her, no meaning to any of it.
That that’s all she’s good for and she’s no good at that, so she’s worthless, worthless underneath everything else.
That she doesn’t deserve anything good, after what she let happen to her...
“Hey,” Face whispers, curling up behind her and stroking her hair out of her face, stilling her tears. “Hey, sweetheart, it’s okay, it’s just a dream, I’m here. I’m here, I love you, it doesn’t matter, I’ll keep you safe...”
Her eyes snap open. It’s broad daylight, room flooded with light. There’s a picture of Face on her nightstand.
Sosa throws it across the bedroom, listening to glass shatter against the wall, and falls back into her sheets, sobbing until there’s nothing left.
+++++
Her assignment to DCIS comes. From what Sosa’s told on her first day of work, a Colonel John Smith wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation that tipped the board in her favor.
Dry-mouthed, she has to swallow twice before she can ask, “What, exactly, did he say about me, Mr. McCready?”
The GS-15 doesn’t even glance down at the open folder on his desk to answer her. “The colonel said you were ruthless, tenacious and aggressive. Are you?”
Her eyes sting, but she’s not going to cry, not here, not in front of her new commander. “I’d like to think I am,” she says firmly, and the director smiles back at her. It reminds her of Drew’s smile, and she has to spend a few minutes in the bathroom, getting her composure.
It’s not a bad job, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. Get to work in DC, in one of the office buildings downtown. Have lunch with Congressional staffers and grad students, wear civvies every day to work, hair in a ponytail. And the work’s stimulating, hunting down the bad guys, the investigations and interrogations so much fun to conduct.
She gets a couple of enlists guys assigned to her, to help her with paperwork and that sort of thing. They rotate out every few months, which she thinks is normal until one of them, a woman, is in her office, in tears, telling the lieutenant that she’s a cold hard bitch and what the fuck does she expect, treating her people the way she does.
Sosa hands her a box of tissues she has for some reason. “I don’t want you crying in my office, Sergent Oleander. It’s unprofessional.”
Her apartment’s small and overpriced, but her morning runs take in the Tidal Basin, and on the weekends, she can drive to Vermont and stay at this spa she finds up in the hills, or head downtown to the bars, sleep with the diplomats and the lobbists if she’d like, and they always wear the best cologne and don’t complain if she’s not there in the morning.
She never thinks of Face.
Never.
Not until well after she makes captain.
Not after she’s finally gotten a couple of guys, Gammons and Ravech, who seem to get a kick out of pissing her off but are otherwise good to work with.
Not after she’s already had a really bad break-up with a British guy who works at the embassy. She blamed it on her security clearance paperwork. He called her a lying whore. They haven’t talked in six weeks, and her favorite sweater’s still at his apartment.
Not until the folder comes across her desk.
“What is this?” she demands, barging into Director McCready’s office, and the man looks up from behind that ridiculously Baroque desk he’s got.
“It’s orders to go to Iraq, find me those printing plates.”
“No, I get that, we discussed this in the mission brief yesterday,” and Sosa grabs one of the documents in there. “What I’m asking is why in the hell you want me keeping tabs on Colonel Smith’s alpha team now?”
The director just folds his hands on his desk and looks right at her. “That going to be a problem, captain?”
She closes her eyes. “It might be,” she admits.
“Well, see that it’s not,” McCready says, and goes back to his computer. Sosa fumes for a moment at the end of the wooden monstrosity, and then storms out. Gammons and Ravech take her bad mood in stride, cracking jokes about their mother-in-laws and menopause until she finally agrees to let them have the rest of the day off to go pack.
And the whole thing, predictably, goes to shit.
+++++
Sosa’s not really prepared for it, Face, half naked, sitting with a beer and a damn kiddie pool and an IV hooked into his arm. Murdock and BA both stare at her the second she walks up. Big, open-mouthed stares, and something cold runs through her. Thank god Hannibal’s not here, she thinks to herself, remembering his threat to her.
If you break his heart, lieutenant, you and I are going to have a problem. You understand what I’m telling you?
But she bullshits her way through it. Totally fine. It’s even easy, asshole that Face is being, refusing to stay on topic, be professional. Real easy. Right up until the...
“You know, I thought you were going come back.”
It’s like a knife, right through her. Had he really thought that? He he really wanted her to, after what she’d said to him? Had he really felt... Face’s fucking flippant attitude right now it the same as hers - bullshit. The conman in him talking. But that, as light as it was, that was Templeton talking.
The man who’d loved her, once, a long time ago.
And Sosa stands, brusque as she can manage, and gives him a big, shit-eating grin to hide the way her insides are turning to ash. “Well, this is me. Coming back.”
She’s alone over the next couple of days, sequestered in some damn government hotel working on intel reports, Gammons and Ravech out at the base keeping an eye on the team. Alone with her thoughts. And there’s far too much to think about.
The way Face used to smell, strong and safe...
That time he mentioned, the terrible wine and his Steely Dan obsession and one of those kinky position experiments that went not well at all, that ended up with them heaped together, giggling like idiots, and he’d kissed her nose and asked her if she wanted to go to the movies...
Christmas, when Hannibal had had everybody over, and she’d helped Murdock bake and found Face in the bathroom, stone cold sober and weeping. When she’d asked him what was wrong, he just caught her up and kissed her breathless...
How they never talked again, her and Face, after the break-up, not even for her to go get her stuff. That had shown up in a box on her front mat one evening. No note.
How hard did Face take it? What had she done to him?
Sosa realizes that she’s never once thought to wonder about that. Never once asked herself if she’d hurt him. Hadn’t thought to care. Hadn’t thought he would care, really...
But it really all does go to shit. Face lies to her about the team going after the plates, and so there she is, having to arrest the bastard, a very pissed off Hannibal, and she doesn’t say a damn word to any of them about it.
It’s not like the captain doesn’t try to get them off the charges. Hannibal’s a lot of things, but he’s no thief. Nobody on that team cares about money. So it doesn’t really add up.
But somebody’s pulled the RAPCON and air tower recordings for the night of the explosion that claimed General Morrison’s life, and by the time she gets there, all she gets are wide-eyed stares that won’t hold up in court. She doesn’t have anything to back her suspicions, so there they are, being hauled out of court right in front of her, Face screaming at her...
But the second time around?
That’s an entirely different story.
Her anger’s spending itself out on this investigation.
And really, objectively, realistically, she knows she’s got nothing to be angry at Face for - and she’s been angry at Face for a long, long time. Bitter about the relationship, bitter at her own surrender, bitter at giving up on herself... none of it’s fault. It’s hers. It’s all hers. The relationship and the surrender and the giving up and the years spent alone and the sexual assault she’s never been able to talk to anybody about... all her fault.
Not his.
She finally figures this out in Germany, when he’s got her handcuffed in that damn photo booth. When they’re yelling at each other.
“You heard I was a player and you wanted to play. Then I got serious, and you freaked!”
“Freak? I did not freak...”
“You panicked... and you ran,” Peck says, going on about something else she can’t quite hear over the pounding echo , and stares at her for a few moments, something shifting in his eyes. “I believe in you even if you don’t believe in me,” he murmurs then, barely an inch from her mouth, “God, I forgot how beautiful you are.”
It wasn’t Templeton talking to her, that last bit. The captain knows that much. It was Faceman, the conman. Hannibal probably wants to play her. And somehow, that one little fact makes it easier, going along with Face’s plan. Former colleague, not a former lover, and it helps her along over the next few days. Flying back to the States, getting to Los Angeles, setting Lynch up... it all comes together, just like Hannibal’s plans always seem to, and ends with that bastard’s arrests.
And Murdock’s. And Hannibal’s. And BA’s.
And Face’s.
Sosa had been worried about this as a possibility. McCready can really be an ass sometimes, and these guys are out on warrant. She doesn’t want to see any of them go to jail. No matter how hard she is on Face. No matter how much she hates Hannibal, or how afraid of BA she is, or how much Murdock just... weirds her out. Not matter how she can’t stop thinking about Hannibal that day at the barbeque, so long ago, and the way he and Face seemed to have all that... whatever it was... going on under the surface. How it seems to be more, now.
It doesn’t matter.
Sosa’s not going to let them go to jail.
Face, for all his fucking and drinking and killing, has something pure inside him, belief in something, and she can’t quite let herself see that destroyed, as it will be, by a second betrayal. From the military. From her.
He’d asked her about this on the phone, when they were finalizing plans. “What if they try to arrest us again, Charisa?”
Her hand tightened down around her cell, mind spinning up an easy answer. But it won’t come out, because she’s remembering that night, the way it felt, the only one in her entire company without a date, other girls passing their dates their fucking rings over with... “I’ll get you the key,” she says. “A handcuff key, that’ll be enough, right?”
“Hell, Hannibal broke us all out with a cigar,” Face had replied, merry. “I think we could conquer Russia with the key.”
So McCready’s his typical asshole self, and so she has to do it, after all.
She doesn’t mind.
It’s almost like it was, for a moment, her lips sealing down over his, him leaning into it, just enough. But there’s no spark anymore. He doesn’t want her anymore, doesn’t need her. She’s lost her chance with that.
He smiles a little as he’s pulled away from her, thrown into the back of the police van.
And she’s making a grilled cheese on her iron that night, in her LA hotel room, when she gets the call that they’ve escaped.
“Am I back on the case, Director McCready?” she asks, sucking on her thumb, burned in her haste to get to her cell.
“No, it’s out of our hands. Colonel Decker’s taking it over...”
Sosa hangs up and tosses the phone onto her bed. And she curls up on the mattress with her sandwich and some bad movie on HBO and realizes her hands are trembling as she sits there, telling herself not to cry.
It doesn’t work. For the first time, it doesn’t work, and she doesn’t know why.
+++++
“That was what, five months ago? Have you seen him since then?”
“No. DCIS has got no idea where they are, either. Just up and vanished.”
“Damn,” and Sarah Greene - now Sarah Hatfield - whistles on the other end of the phone. Sosa can hear a baby crying in the background. Sarah got married about a year ago, a whoops-I’m-pregnant marriage, but it actually seems to be working out. Her friend seems... happy, like that, even with the government daycares, and Sosa doesn’t call her as often anymore. It’s too hard to listen to, that baby. At this rate, she’ll probably never get one of her own. “So, did he, like, say anything?”
“Nothing real,” Sosa says, tossing herself back into an armchair now. “Hannibal was probably just trying to play me or something like that.”
“Charisa,” Sarah says, soft and kind of sad, “when are you going to just open up and trust that somebody’s not fucking lying to you?”
“I hurt him too bad, Sarah. There’s no way he’d ever really trust me after what I...”
“Why not?”
Sosa jerks and jumps and screams a little, dropping the phone on the sofa as her ass hits the carpet. She can hear Sarah, still, concerned and then worried, now yelling, until a hand drops down over the back and picks it up, tosses it over to her.
It’s an easy enough catch to make, and Sosa cups the cell back to her ear. “Sarah?”
“What the fuck’s going on, Charisa?”
She’s staring up, right at the answer, who’s ruefully smiling at her, that cute little-boy blush she knows so well spreading, and the captain finds herself wondering how much of this is an act. “Face dropped in for a visit.” She glares at him. “Scared the shit out of me.”
On the other end, Sarah makes an eager whining sound and Charisa can practically hear the grin as she adds, “ask him if he’s been fucking Colonel Smith! I’d bet you a thousand bucks he has been...”
And Sarah’s being loud, really loud, loud enough for that blush to be turning a dangerous shade of red, and isn’t that just fucking wonderful? “Good night, Sarah,” she says, and hangs up, up over the top of her buddy’s protests. She really, really does not need to be dealing with on top of whatever this is, right now.
Face pulls some maneuver that sees him up and over the back of her couch and comfortably lounging in the spot she just vacated so rapidly. He holds out a hand for to, after a quick moment, and Sosa lets him haul her back up next to him. Both of them are scrunching back onto opposite sides. Fantastic.
“What the fuck do you want?” she blurts out, not really even thinking about it, and Face just grins that conman grin of his at her. Sosa’s suddenly reminded of one night they spent together on this sofa, watching TV until Face poked her with his foot, and then pouncing, tickling, laughing, drawing her right along... but the days when he could just swoop in and sweep her away are long, long gone. Long gone. So why is he here?
“I wanted to thank you,” he tries, and she crosses her arms.
“Bullshit.”
That grins falters a little, and he nods back and forth. “Okay, uhh, I...I wanted to see if you were okay. Not in a creepy stalker way, but...”
“But what?”
The last words are almost swallowed. Very quiet. “Charisa, I know you. Sarcastic, biting, a little too direct, yeah, that’s you. But how you were... that’s not you.”
“So you think there’s something wrong with me now?”
Face doesn’t respond to that, just looks at his hands, one finger tracing a line down another. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
He swallows. “That first night, when we... you hadn’t, right?”
“That sentence made no sense,” she laughs, trying to ease the growing nervousness. And this is what she never could quite understand about Face. That empathetic streak in him, the ability to figure people out, usually reserved only for the con, but every so often, when they were together, he’d been able to look at her and tell her exactly what she was thinking.
“It took me a while to figure it out,” he says, just steamrolling over the top of her protests, like he always did. “I thought for a while it was because you actually wanted me, and that was... and then I realized...and I tried, I wanted, I hoped it wasn’t just about...” Blue eyes lift to meet hers, and the emotion there is all real.
“I’m sorry, Charisa, if I took something away from you...”
“You didn’t take anything.”
“Your virginity’s not anything?”
On the defensive now, Sosa automatically goes for what’s going to cause the most damage, what’s going to get Face to back the fuck off like he always did, cringing away from the argument. “When’d you lose yours, Face? Who to? Some goddamn priest in that orphanage of yours?”
But he doesn’t back down. Doesn’t even seem to hear it. “I don’t remember,” he says. “But I can tell you this, Charisa, there are days when I wish I’d been able keep it for...”
“Hannibal?” she asks tentatively.
There’s a nod. “Or you,” he adds. “Having somebody that’s just yours, something that belongs to just the two of you, a little closed loop like that, like having...”
“Family?” she asks, tearing up, unable to stop the swell, the depths carrying up to the surface. “I didn’t want to take anything from you either, Face. You know? I just, I just couldn’t trust...”
“Me?”
And the words are just coming out. Fast and slow and loud and soft. No regulation at all. She can’t stop them. Couldn’t, not for anything. The last few months, since seeing him again, since figuring all of this out, it’s been hard to keep anything in check. Face, Drew, the others in between who wanted to try, the men since.
All those memories.
Every one a regret, every one about nothing more than proving something she never seemed able to prove to herself, and this one, Face, most of all.
“Anybody. I just wanted it to be quick and simple and over with, and here you were, this great lay according to everybody and then, then, I really don’t know what happened, why you’d want me, I mean, nobody else has ever wanted me, Face, and... and...”
He leans forward, scooting in between her curled legs, and thumbs a tear off her cheek. She falls into that, feeling that one little gesture start undo her complete, rip her apart, taking her back to that hotel room when she thought it might be okay, the scared girl who just wanted to prove that somebody wanted her. That she could be wanted..
The scared girl who thought that somehow, some way, losing it was going to make everything okay. Better. Great. Fantastic.
That it would fix everything that was wrong...
Templeton, not Face, folds her up in his arms, cradling her head against his chest. When he finally speaks, in it’s a whisper. It’s sincere. It’s concerned.
“Charisa, beautiful, you can tell me. I’m here,” he says, rocking her a little now. “I’m right here.”
Sincere. Concerned.
That very fact, that somebody might care, even the man whose heart she damn near destroyed, that something in him still knows her, still worries, still came, still wants, even if he doesn’t want her like that anymore, and since he doesn’t, since this isn’t about sex, isn’t about anything other than...
Sosa presses her cheek against his chest, remembering the sound of his heartbeat, somehow relieved it’s still there, that she hasn’t shattered its rhythm. That if he’s whole after everything he’s been through, maybe she can be, too, and she feels a shudder run through her.
“It was Ring Dance,” she begins.
His arms tighten down around her as the words slowly ebb out.
And away.
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: non-con
Summary: Part Two of Two of a fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
So, I was watching the phone booth scene again and a thought popped in my head when Face tells her, "I was a player and you wanted to play." I think we all pretty much assume that Sosa is (and was when she met Face) a woman of sexual prowess and experience.
Suppose she wasn't though? What if we go in the opposite direction of that assumption? What if she was virgin when they met? Face talks a lot about her ambition. Maybe she was so busy in high school and college (perhaps she was determined to go to West Point?) that she never dated? Maybe being in the army and determined to get ahead she spent all her time working and rejected any advances made to her because she felt it would mean she got less respect from the male soliders she was working with and for? Or maybe there were other reasons. That could be up to anon.
Then she decided it was time to change her status as a virgin because she was getting to the point where it was kind of silly that she was still a virgin. Then she met Face and figured he was the perfect choice for her first time because a) he is just so hot and b) he is a total player (slut) and there wouldn't be any emotional ramifications or messy relationship to deal with. Only then there was a relationship so she freaked when Face got serious.
Bonus points if Face doesn't even realize that Sosa has never had sex before. There are reasons why a woman might be a virgin but not have hymen (including extreme and intense athletic activity, like say sports and millitary training) so she might not have that physical evidence the first time they have sex. Double bonus points if Sosa has close friend who is the only one that knows she is a virgin and Sosa asks her for advice so she can appear experienced in bed. Triple bonus points for an ending to the story that jumps in time to after the events of movie and Face pays her a surprise visit. :D
Charisa Sosa’s still a virgin, following an incident at West Point, and she hates it. She figures that Face presents some interesting opportunities for her to finally lose it, but what she doesn’t count on is him falling in love with her...
"Hey, Sarah, I think I'm in trouble."
"Why?"
"He introduced me to Hannibal yesterday," Sosa said. They were off base, at the downtown coffee house they met up at on Sundays, and she felt like shit for what had gone on over the past forty-eight hours.
Greene leaned back and crossed her legs, obviously eager for the story. "This I have to hear."
Sosa sighs. Begins.
The other lieutenant had smiled and blushed a little, nervous. He’d been nervous on the whole drive over. Hannibal was having a burger burn at his house for the unit. The womenfolk were invited, Face had told her, and said he didn’t really want to deal with BA’s latest conquest without one of his own.
“That came out wrong,” he’d said, knuckles going white on the gearshift. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Sosa had reached over and squeezed his hand. “It’s kind of nice, being thought of like that...”
“You deserve better than that,” he’d told her. “You are better than that. I don’t think about you in that way, you know that, right?”
“Then how do you think about me?”
He’d frowned a little, some kind of confusion playing over those handsome features, and then he’d started laughing. Sosa loved the sound of it, and it wasn’t until he opened her car door and led her inside, to where she was now, that she realized he did it when he was trying to cover something up, distract her.
Now there she was, beer in hand, joking and laughing on the outside deck with a couple of the other officer, that crazy dark-haired, hawaiian-shirted Murdock guy messing around with a gigantic grill, a very pretty private giggling over BA, and Face poked her on the shoulder with his own bottle.
“Hey, honey? I, uh, Hannibal wanted to say hi.”
She turned around, and there he was. Tall, lean, silver, gorgeous. Sosa couldn’t help it, remembering what Greene said about these two, and found herself wondering if maybe it wasn’t true.
But that look Face was giving his CO wasn’t lust or affection or anything other than a kind of eagerness for approval she’d seen on her brother, when he’d brought his soon-to-be-finacee to Christmas last year.
She felt sick.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening.
“So, Lieutenant Sosa, Face has told me everything about you,” Hannibal said warmly, voice deep, and held out his hand. “And I have to say, he hasn’t been complimentary enough. You’re quite beautiful.”
She tried to bite down on the swelling fear, but a little leaked out around the edge of her teeth. Unintentional, but there it was. “Well, I guess I’m lucky he’s not a tit man.”
Face wrapped his arms around her waist, laughing again, as Hannibal’s expression fell a little. “You have gorgeous tits, baby.”
She smiled at Hannibal and leaned back a little in Face’s arms. She loved this, having him wrapped around her like this, holding her, like she could collapse and he’d keep her steady, so strong... “You know what he’s like.”
Hannibal just tapped his pockets and frowned. “Face, you go get a cigar?”
“Sorry, baby,” Face said, kissed her cheek, and was gone. They were alone, off on one end of the deck. Hannibal leaned on the railing and stared at her. That colonel stare. The same stare she got from her own boss on Monday, when she missed something in the intel brief.
Fuck.
“How’d you two meet?” Hannibal asked casually, on edge.
“You know,” she said, letting her elbows hit down about a foot away from him, sipping at her beer like it wasn’t a big deal, like he didn’t terrify her. As an officer and as the girl who was sleeping with one of his men. “At the Officer’s Club during one of those god-awful calls. Just kind of... happened.”
“You seem like a fairly blunt woman, Charisa, so let’s be blunt,” Hannibal said in that same strange friendliness. “Do you care about him?”
“What?”
“Face. Do you care about him?”
Everything was completely off-kilter now. And hadn’t Face told her at one point, when they were very very drunk after that last mission, that he was an orphan, that the Army was his home, that he viewed Hannibal almost like his dad? But she didn’t need to let him know that she knew that, did she? She had no idea what else to say, what else to go to. “Aren’t you just like his boss?”
“I’ve seen him go through a lot of... a lot of things in the eight years he’s been with me, Charisa. I don’t want to see him get hurt.”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” she said, completely confused now. “I don’t...”
“If you break his heart, lieutenant, you and I are going to have a problem. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“You threatening me or something?” Sosa asked, and Hannibal actually rolled his eyes. Then Face was there, a cigar for Hannibal and a beer for himself and a smile for Sosa, and then he was asking his boss to tell some story about some mission and the weird little moment passed entirely.
For those two at least.
Later, after the party had both wound down and wound up, Face had sobered up enough to drive, telling Sosa that they could just crash in the basement, Hannibal wouldn’t mind, they all did it all the time, that one of the other LTs had already claimed one of the extra bedrooms and she told him she didn’t want to stay, when they headed back to his apartment, he just had to say something.
“Hannibal liked meeting you,” he said, right in the middle of a kiss, right in the middle of the good part where she had his shirt off. “Thanks so much for coming today.”
“Was it just for Hannibal to meet me?”
“No. Not really. Murdock does a great job with brats.”
“Yeah, those were good. But Face, come on, Hannibal...”
“Yeah?”
“He’s nuts,” she said.
Face started laughing. A real laugh, agreeing with her.
“No, seriously, he’s crazy. He made you go get him a cigar. What the fuck was that about?”
“Are we going to fight about this?”
“No, I just mean, it’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Fetching stuff, ordering you around. You’re a lieutenant in his unit, not his house boy or something like that...”
“Charisa, stop. Just stop!” and something in the way he said it... she’d never heard that tone out of him. Like Hannibal’s, actually, cold and authoritative and expecting to be obeyed. He stared at her a moment, eyes hard, and then he ran his hand up her throat.
Her mind started racing, back to that hotel room she’d let herself be talked into in New York, after Ring Dance, where she thought everything would be okay, that she would be okay with it, and when it got right down to it, not being okay with it didn’t seem like an option...
But his hand was on her cheek and his lips were by her ear, and she could still see that huge Ranger tag on his bicep as he whispered, “Charisa, baby, don’t be angry with me. Whatever it was, look, I'm sorry. It’s you, sweetheart, I love you...”
Greene scoots up on her chair a little at the conclusion of the tale, mouth open and clearly excited. “Oh my god, you called him Colonel Smith’s houseboy? Jesus, Charisa, talk about balls...”
Sosa makes a flailing gesture with her hands and tries to remember to keep her voice down. “You are missing the point!” she hisses. “He fucking said that he loved me.”
“Well, was it like an I-love-you or an, you know, I love you?” Greene stirs her frappucino. “You know what I mean?”
“Fuck I don’t know, I don’t, none of this makes any sense to me!” and she stabs at her croussaint. Why had she ordered it? Way, way too much butter in these things. “Who says that?”
“Guys who are in love, usually.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I’m serious. So he’s, like, in love with you then?”
“I told you, I don’t know...”
“Well, what’d you say back?”
Really, really shouldn’t have ordered a pastry. She feels horrible. She’d felt sick since she left Peck’s place that morning. All day now. Horrible. Sosa sips at her latte. Can’t taste it. Says what she needs to say, really, really fast. “I told him I felt the same way and he screwed me through the mattress twice that night and we fell asleep and went for a bike ride in the morning. What?”
Greene has kind of a wistful expression on her face. “Oh, Charisa, honey, did you say I feel the same way or I love you?”
“Does that matter?” she asks. “Sarah, I’m worried.”
“About what?”
Sosa isn’t quite sure how to articulate this. It’s a feeling, one that’s scaring the hell out of her, so she just blurts it out. “What if he proposes or something?”
Greene has been eating her frappe with a spoon, but both cup and utensil hit the wooden table top. “Oh, honey, Charisa, what’s your problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened?”
“He fucking said...”
There’s a hand over hers now. “I mean, what are you so afraid of?”
“You were the one that recommended a hook-up!”
“Don’t put this on me. I recommended hook-ups. Plural. Singular nights spent with whoever the hell and never staying with one guy longer than that. Sexual independence, whatever you wanted. But you two have been together for what, eight, nine months? This kind of thing happens.”
“So I didn’t ditch him when I should have?” she asks, feeling totally lost now. “I just wanted...”
“If a guy’s sticking with a girl for that long, he’s probably not doing it just for the sex.”
And yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes way, way too much sense. The lieutenant lets herself flop back in the chair. “Fuck, that’s true, isn’t it?”
The female captain squeezes Sosa’s hand. “What happened, Charisa? What’s got you so freaked over this?”
She closes her eyes, wishes it would go away. Wishes she could stop seeing it. Wishes she hadn’t made that one fucking mistake on Ring Dance and hadn’t let...she can’t lie to her friend, but she can’t... “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says in a low voice, feeling the tears coming now.
Greene hands her a napkin and smiles a little, compassionate and warm. “I’m here. You know that.”
“Yeah, Sarah, I know that. Thanks,” she says, sniffling a little, wiping her nose, hoping her make-up isn’t running. “And... is there some kind of implication in the term houseboy?”
“You are joking, right?”
“It just sort of came to mind, and it’s probably like a slavery thing or something I remember from history class or...”
“Here,” and Greene pulls out her laptop. She usually spends the day here, working on coursework or trolling Facebook. “You can’t hold me responsible for the contents of this website.”
“What website?” Sosa asks, silently thanking her friend for trying to get things back to normal, trying to shock her like she always did. Greene’s a good girl, and a good friend, really, but she knows some bizarre shit... “Oh, wait, fuck, does this have anything to do with the two-guys-kissing thing?
Greene’s smile gets a little more devious, and Sosa can't help but giggle at that.
+++++
Sosa knows it’s over long before Face sits primed to pop the question. Ask her to marry him.
She can’t let that happen, she just can’t.
But they’d been dating for over a year.
So it’s coming.
It’s not like she wants him to. It’s not like she even knew.
Well, not until she finds the ring one day, buried at the bottom of his sock drawer and everything inside her just goes to shit.
She falls back against Face’s bed, too stunned to move, until he comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, asking her why she hadn’t gotten in yet and she started screaming at him about something or other, and slammed the door on her way out.
No, no, no.
She’s not ready to get married. She isn’t even really ready to be dating, and the lieutenant can’t let herself just be cajoled into that, too, can she? A marriage, just like this relationship, the whole fucking last fourteen months, has been? Just something she’s gone along with. Something she’s just let happen.
Like she doesn’t have a choice in it.
“You can’t really feel like that,” Greene says that evening, patting her back as Sosa reaches for another tissue in her apartment. It’s messy. She hasn’t been spending much time here lately. Not much time at all. “Why would you jut stick with him if you didn’t feel something for him?”
“That is so not the point!”
“Hon, nobody just forces you into a year-long relationship and then believes that you’re just as into it as he is. It doesn’t work like that.”
Sosa hates crying. She learned to hate it at West Point. The first thing the female cadre had told them at Basic had to do with crying. Don’t cry in front of anyone, especially not the guys, and especially not the drill sergeants. They’ll eat you alive... and she’s lived by that ever since. Females in the military are not allowed to have girly emotions. And she hates crying.
Even if she’s doing it right then.
“What am I supposed to do?” she whispers, and Greene catchest her up in a hard, fast hug. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“It’s only going to get worse, honey, the longer you drag him out like this,” her friend murmurs and god help her, Sosa nods.
“Yeah, I know.”
+++++
She’s running out of time.
Sosa thinks about breaking up with him over the phone. Like a bitch, she thinks about doing that. But she knows enough about dating to know that that probably isn’t a good idea.
She also doesn’t mention the ring, when she finally has the courage to do it face to face.
“What are you talking about, honey?” Face asks, confusion clouding across those handsome features of his, and he reaches for her hand across the table. “You’re not making any sense.”
They’re in public. A little too much public, really, that Italian restaurant that has the squid-ink pasta he’d introduced her to, on of her favorites now, something she just knows she’ll never be able to eat again after this, and she’s been seized up with fear since he’d ordered a very expensive merlot. Nearly breathless with panic since the salad course. This is where it’s going to happen. This is where she’s going to have to break his heart.
Sosa’s been thinking and thinking.
And she loved him.
But she can’t say yes.
So she needs something else to tell him instead. Half truths, the almost-there truths, things that don’t really fucking matter, but really, really do, because she needs them to.
“I mean, Face, that this just isn’t going to work out,” she tells him, marveling that she’s keeping her voice steady. Sosa slides her hand away from his, just out of range. If he keeps touching her, she won’t be able to do this. “With your job and I’m trying to get to DCIS, and you know that, we’ll never see each other and...”
“We’ve been doing okay so far, haven’t we?” he asks, eyes pleading, like a five year old who’s just been told he can’t have a popsicle. “I thought everything was fine. Charisa, baby, if I’m doing something wrong...”
“You’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Then why... why do you...”
“Look, Face, I know how this works, these kind of relationships,” and Sosa takes a deep breath. Because she does know how this works, how her older friends have dealt with this, how she’s seen her fill of failed of mil-mil marriages in the few short years she’s been in and it scares the shit out of her.
How every female officer in the service knew that they’ll have to wear maternity ABUs to work and get six weeks maternity leave and then their kids will grow up in government daycares.
How she’ll constantly have to switch off on whose career was being helped by the next assignment, who’s getting the shit-end job just to stay in the same state, who’s getting a 365 deployment downrange, who’s going to Korea and fucking somebody else.
How many of these special forces guys can’t handle what they’re asked to do, how they beat their kids and abused alcohol and get PTSD so bad they never recover and... “And I don’t fucking want that, Face.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Face said, a little more desperate now. “You don’t think I haven’t seen that, too? But come on, Charisa, this is you and me we’re talking about.” He smiled. Not that conman smile of his, but his real smile, the shy lopsided smile she saw so often in bed in the morning, just waking up, and she felt something deep down in her chest cracking open. “Sweetheart, it wouldn’t be like that, I swear.”
“Then what? You’d expect me to get out after my commitment’s up? Sit around the house and get an Army wife ass and pop out a couple of kids?” she hisses, low, a little more angry than she’d intends. But maybe that’s exactly what this situation needs.
“We’ve talked about the kid thing, sweetheart, about maybe you staying home. I thought you wanted...”
“Don’t sit here and project, Face,” she says, and leans back in her chair a little. “Just because you had a fucked-up childhood doesn’t mean you get to fix it with me being pregnant and barefoot in the goddamn kitchen! I want my own life, too!”
His hands curl back into themselves and his eyes fall, and she realizes too late that it was a low blow. Too low, and cruel, and where the hell had she even gotten that from?
Whatever. She has to keep going, has to make this final in a way Face will understand.
So she stands and grabs her purse, shouldering it with what she hopes is a sense of finality. “Goodbye, Templeton.”
“Charisa,” he says, her name choking in his throat, “Charisa, sweetheart, please...”
“Talking me in to marrying you isn’t really the same thing as me saying yes, now, is it?” she replies, and without looking back, turns on her heel and walks out of that damn restaurant as quickly as she can, and it isn’t until she hails a cab and collapses on the back seat that she lets herself start crying.
+++++
Charisa has a dream that night, the night she leaves Face.
Or maybe it isn’t a dream.
More of a memory, really, but real. Like she’s back there again. Like it’s all fucking happening right the fuck now. Happening for the first time, all over again.
Drew has her on the sofa in the New York City hotel room.
It’s a suite. It’s huge. She knows exactly how much this cost him for the night - and she also knows he wasn’t planning on bringing her here, that there was another girl he wanted here instead, under him, like this. But they’re both drunk and she tells herself that’s enough of a reason to not try to analyze the reasons why.
He’s kissing her.
It’s... different, than the few fumbling attempts with one of her guy friends back in high school. But he’s gay now, anyway, so that doesn’t even really count at all. No, Rob hadn’t known what to do with her. The gay thing or the shy thing, probably. But Drew, Drew’s a little rough but his hands are easy, and she’s trying to force herself to relax.
That becomes a fuckload more difficult, once he slides that hand of his up underneath the long skirt of the dress uniform, fingers sliding along the seam right over her crotch and its automatic wetness, and suddenly she realizes why he told her to keep it on for the limo ride down here. He wants to take it off her, fuck her... and twenty minutes ago, she would have said that was just fine with her. Because she did know what she was doing when she got in that limo with him earlier.
But the anger she felt earlier, towards her friend from the other company who didn’t do the right thing and take her to Ring Dance, that anger’s fading. But the alcohol isn’t - half a bottle of champagne and god knows how many Jack and Cokes will do that to a girl. And she giggles a little, into that kiss, breaking it.
“Shh,” he murmurs in her ear, and removes his hand to pull her uniform jacket off, rip the velcro closure on the black tie tab, tossing it away. Sosa feels cold. She’s soaked the white blouse with sweat. “Shh, Charisa, you’re so wet for me, aren’t you?”
She whimpers as the zipper’s tugged open on her skirt and he eases it away. He knows what he’s doing, Sosa thinks dimly, or maybe it’s the alcohol telling her it feels good, big palm sliding down the sheer hose of her leg. It feels... nobody’s ever touched her like this. She whimpers again.
“How long’s it been, Charisa?” he asks, working on the panty hose now. “Since the last time somebody fucked you? It’s going to feel so good...” and he’s frowning a little at her cotton undies, playing through her pubic hair, and leans back over her, pressing his middle finger straight into her cleft, where only her finger’s ever been. It’s too hard, too rough, but it feels good, based on that alone. “So much hair, honey,” he murmurs in her ear, going deeper, harder, faster, bringing in his second to roll her clit. “I like just a little bit, right at the top...”
Then he’s doing something with that hand as he unsnaps the buttons of her blouse, one at a time, something that has Sosa gasping and writhing and coming, almost before he’s got the garment off of her. He grins and tears off her bra, rolling her small breasts with both palms, kissing her, and she can smell herself on him.
Then he’s picking her up, carrying her away, laying her down, and before she can register what the hell’s going on, her mind swimming from the hour and the booze, his head’s between her legs, his tongue going...
“Ohh!” she half yells, arching up, and he holds her down, hand to belly, that tongue sliding around, sucking and flicking and all kinds of things she’s never had the pleasure of accurately imaging before, and then those fingers are back, two, thrusting deep into her, and it hurts, it really hurts, and she jerks back. “Stop, stop...” she pants, very much aware of how exposed she is. How still-clothed he is.
Drew’s got a curious expression on his face, looking at her, and then grins, feral and wild. “You ever done this before?” he asks in a voice that could be excitement or anger. Sosa can’t tell which. The world’s tilting... “You a virgin, Charisa?”
Her face is burning, and she just nods once.
That grin grows, if that’s possible, and he slides out of his jacket, his pants and shoes, black socks still on as he moves over her on the bed, back into the pillows, dropping one hand to pull her long, dark tresses out of the anal little bun all the girls have to wear, and catches her up into a hard, hard kiss that leaves her breathless. She can feel her wetness, on her thigh now, and it’s just her body responding, Sosa knows. It’s not good, but it’s the closest she’s gotten in three years of being in this damn school and she’s so fucking sick of not...
Drew’s on his back now, nestled back in the pillows, and kind of crooks his finger at her, reaching over to draw her up by the chin and take one of her hands in his, wrapping it around his cock. “Never felt one of these before, have you?” he asks, moving her hand up and down the throbbing length. It’s... weird. Like a bag full of jello. “Go ahead, explore a little.”
But the second his hand comes off hers, she removes hers as well. It’s... it’s just not...
“Want to taste it?” he asks in that same smooth voice, and Sosa feels herself blushing again, shakes her head. “Come on,” Drew says again, and this time, there’s an edge there. “Fair’s fair...”
He spreads his legs and guides her head down, slow but firm. “Come on,” he says, fist around the base of his cock, holding her so he can tease the head of it, swollen and red, across her lips, across her cheek. “Just lick it.”
Sosa takes a deep breath. She can do this. She went off the ten meter diving board in BDUs. She killed a fucking rabbit. She can suck a guy’s cock. She can... and she parts her lips, just enough for him to shove in.
It’s not pretty, and she’s not sure how long it goes on for. It’s a kind of detachment, she supposes, feeling herself floating out on the alcohol, her exhaustion, her mind carrying her away. It’s not good. She knows that. From the place she’s drifting off to, she can hear it, the displeasure, the anger little corrections, the guidance she can’t follow, and her lips are stretched to the point of pain, that cockhead’s nudging the back of her throat, making her want to vomit, all that hard flesh just a terrible fucking feeling that she wants nothing to do with, going on and on and on like it’s never going to end, and she only really notices it’s gone when he’s covering her once again, words smelling of sin, frustration, herself.
Repulsive things.
“Gonna fuck you, Charisa. It’s going to feel so damn good, best fucking thing you’ve ever felt...”
She’s not going to be able to stop him. Fuck, she’s not. She’s going to become one of those fucking statistics they like to trot out on the national news...and this wasn't how this was supposed to go her first time. It's supposed to mean something, isn't it? Isn't she supposed to love him, the first time? Shouldn't it be good, the first time?
But no.
Goddammit. The military's going to take this too, Sosa thinks. First college and now this.
She wants to cry, but she remembers. She does remember.
Never cry in front of anyone, especially the guys...
“No,” she manages to gasp, holding on to the one thought that fights its way to the surface of her exhaustion and intoxication and fear. She can still say no. She can at least say it, and hope to hell that whoever signed this asshole’s appointment letter knew what they were doing, that’s he’s honorable enough... “no. I-I can’t. I can’t let you do...”
He sighs, looks down at her. He’s still got his damn shirt on, dick hanging out under the tails, and from what little she knows about these things, it looks damn painful. A little shiny in the low light, her saliva and his precum. A finger circles back a little further. “How about...”
“You don’t get to fuck me,” Sosa says with everything she can muster. “Not you.”
But that’s it. There’s no more. She has to hurtle it out and across the wide gulf of weariness and alcohol and fucked-out emotion that’s submerging her now, dragging her under.
“Cocktease,” he growls.
And the female cadet can’t stop that male from yanking her down a little further on the mattress and straddling her with his knees, cock in hand, and that hand starts moving. Sosa knows, somehow, somehow, that she did bring this on herself, that she knew exactly what was going to happen when she agreed to come down here with Drew, that her virginity’s worth something and why would she ever have imagined that she could do this, go through with this...
And her last conscious thought, as the first spurt hits her cheek and she has to close her eyes, falling into merciful unconsciousness, is that she probably ruined his weekend...
The lieutenant jerks up, clawing at her face, heart racing, panicking again at some four year fear that’s never left her, at the shame of that, his semen dripping off her skin, drying hard and itchy, at the thought that’s stayed with her since then, that’s she’s not good enough for anybody.
That she was useless that night.
That nobody really wants her.
That any time a guy tells her she’s beautiful it’s just because he wants to fuck her, no meaning to any of it.
That that’s all she’s good for and she’s no good at that, so she’s worthless, worthless underneath everything else.
That she doesn’t deserve anything good, after what she let happen to her...
“Hey,” Face whispers, curling up behind her and stroking her hair out of her face, stilling her tears. “Hey, sweetheart, it’s okay, it’s just a dream, I’m here. I’m here, I love you, it doesn’t matter, I’ll keep you safe...”
Her eyes snap open. It’s broad daylight, room flooded with light. There’s a picture of Face on her nightstand.
Sosa throws it across the bedroom, listening to glass shatter against the wall, and falls back into her sheets, sobbing until there’s nothing left.
+++++
Her assignment to DCIS comes. From what Sosa’s told on her first day of work, a Colonel John Smith wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation that tipped the board in her favor.
Dry-mouthed, she has to swallow twice before she can ask, “What, exactly, did he say about me, Mr. McCready?”
The GS-15 doesn’t even glance down at the open folder on his desk to answer her. “The colonel said you were ruthless, tenacious and aggressive. Are you?”
Her eyes sting, but she’s not going to cry, not here, not in front of her new commander. “I’d like to think I am,” she says firmly, and the director smiles back at her. It reminds her of Drew’s smile, and she has to spend a few minutes in the bathroom, getting her composure.
It’s not a bad job, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service. Get to work in DC, in one of the office buildings downtown. Have lunch with Congressional staffers and grad students, wear civvies every day to work, hair in a ponytail. And the work’s stimulating, hunting down the bad guys, the investigations and interrogations so much fun to conduct.
She gets a couple of enlists guys assigned to her, to help her with paperwork and that sort of thing. They rotate out every few months, which she thinks is normal until one of them, a woman, is in her office, in tears, telling the lieutenant that she’s a cold hard bitch and what the fuck does she expect, treating her people the way she does.
Sosa hands her a box of tissues she has for some reason. “I don’t want you crying in my office, Sergent Oleander. It’s unprofessional.”
Her apartment’s small and overpriced, but her morning runs take in the Tidal Basin, and on the weekends, she can drive to Vermont and stay at this spa she finds up in the hills, or head downtown to the bars, sleep with the diplomats and the lobbists if she’d like, and they always wear the best cologne and don’t complain if she’s not there in the morning.
She never thinks of Face.
Never.
Not until well after she makes captain.
Not after she’s finally gotten a couple of guys, Gammons and Ravech, who seem to get a kick out of pissing her off but are otherwise good to work with.
Not after she’s already had a really bad break-up with a British guy who works at the embassy. She blamed it on her security clearance paperwork. He called her a lying whore. They haven’t talked in six weeks, and her favorite sweater’s still at his apartment.
Not until the folder comes across her desk.
“What is this?” she demands, barging into Director McCready’s office, and the man looks up from behind that ridiculously Baroque desk he’s got.
“It’s orders to go to Iraq, find me those printing plates.”
“No, I get that, we discussed this in the mission brief yesterday,” and Sosa grabs one of the documents in there. “What I’m asking is why in the hell you want me keeping tabs on Colonel Smith’s alpha team now?”
The director just folds his hands on his desk and looks right at her. “That going to be a problem, captain?”
She closes her eyes. “It might be,” she admits.
“Well, see that it’s not,” McCready says, and goes back to his computer. Sosa fumes for a moment at the end of the wooden monstrosity, and then storms out. Gammons and Ravech take her bad mood in stride, cracking jokes about their mother-in-laws and menopause until she finally agrees to let them have the rest of the day off to go pack.
And the whole thing, predictably, goes to shit.
+++++
Sosa’s not really prepared for it, Face, half naked, sitting with a beer and a damn kiddie pool and an IV hooked into his arm. Murdock and BA both stare at her the second she walks up. Big, open-mouthed stares, and something cold runs through her. Thank god Hannibal’s not here, she thinks to herself, remembering his threat to her.
If you break his heart, lieutenant, you and I are going to have a problem. You understand what I’m telling you?
But she bullshits her way through it. Totally fine. It’s even easy, asshole that Face is being, refusing to stay on topic, be professional. Real easy. Right up until the...
“You know, I thought you were going come back.”
It’s like a knife, right through her. Had he really thought that? He he really wanted her to, after what she’d said to him? Had he really felt... Face’s fucking flippant attitude right now it the same as hers - bullshit. The conman in him talking. But that, as light as it was, that was Templeton talking.
The man who’d loved her, once, a long time ago.
And Sosa stands, brusque as she can manage, and gives him a big, shit-eating grin to hide the way her insides are turning to ash. “Well, this is me. Coming back.”
She’s alone over the next couple of days, sequestered in some damn government hotel working on intel reports, Gammons and Ravech out at the base keeping an eye on the team. Alone with her thoughts. And there’s far too much to think about.
The way Face used to smell, strong and safe...
That time he mentioned, the terrible wine and his Steely Dan obsession and one of those kinky position experiments that went not well at all, that ended up with them heaped together, giggling like idiots, and he’d kissed her nose and asked her if she wanted to go to the movies...
Christmas, when Hannibal had had everybody over, and she’d helped Murdock bake and found Face in the bathroom, stone cold sober and weeping. When she’d asked him what was wrong, he just caught her up and kissed her breathless...
How they never talked again, her and Face, after the break-up, not even for her to go get her stuff. That had shown up in a box on her front mat one evening. No note.
How hard did Face take it? What had she done to him?
Sosa realizes that she’s never once thought to wonder about that. Never once asked herself if she’d hurt him. Hadn’t thought to care. Hadn’t thought he would care, really...
But it really all does go to shit. Face lies to her about the team going after the plates, and so there she is, having to arrest the bastard, a very pissed off Hannibal, and she doesn’t say a damn word to any of them about it.
It’s not like the captain doesn’t try to get them off the charges. Hannibal’s a lot of things, but he’s no thief. Nobody on that team cares about money. So it doesn’t really add up.
But somebody’s pulled the RAPCON and air tower recordings for the night of the explosion that claimed General Morrison’s life, and by the time she gets there, all she gets are wide-eyed stares that won’t hold up in court. She doesn’t have anything to back her suspicions, so there they are, being hauled out of court right in front of her, Face screaming at her...
But the second time around?
That’s an entirely different story.
Her anger’s spending itself out on this investigation.
And really, objectively, realistically, she knows she’s got nothing to be angry at Face for - and she’s been angry at Face for a long, long time. Bitter about the relationship, bitter at her own surrender, bitter at giving up on herself... none of it’s fault. It’s hers. It’s all hers. The relationship and the surrender and the giving up and the years spent alone and the sexual assault she’s never been able to talk to anybody about... all her fault.
Not his.
She finally figures this out in Germany, when he’s got her handcuffed in that damn photo booth. When they’re yelling at each other.
“You heard I was a player and you wanted to play. Then I got serious, and you freaked!”
“Freak? I did not freak...”
“You panicked... and you ran,” Peck says, going on about something else she can’t quite hear over the pounding echo , and stares at her for a few moments, something shifting in his eyes. “I believe in you even if you don’t believe in me,” he murmurs then, barely an inch from her mouth, “God, I forgot how beautiful you are.”
It wasn’t Templeton talking to her, that last bit. The captain knows that much. It was Faceman, the conman. Hannibal probably wants to play her. And somehow, that one little fact makes it easier, going along with Face’s plan. Former colleague, not a former lover, and it helps her along over the next few days. Flying back to the States, getting to Los Angeles, setting Lynch up... it all comes together, just like Hannibal’s plans always seem to, and ends with that bastard’s arrests.
And Murdock’s. And Hannibal’s. And BA’s.
And Face’s.
Sosa had been worried about this as a possibility. McCready can really be an ass sometimes, and these guys are out on warrant. She doesn’t want to see any of them go to jail. No matter how hard she is on Face. No matter how much she hates Hannibal, or how afraid of BA she is, or how much Murdock just... weirds her out. Not matter how she can’t stop thinking about Hannibal that day at the barbeque, so long ago, and the way he and Face seemed to have all that... whatever it was... going on under the surface. How it seems to be more, now.
It doesn’t matter.
Sosa’s not going to let them go to jail.
Face, for all his fucking and drinking and killing, has something pure inside him, belief in something, and she can’t quite let herself see that destroyed, as it will be, by a second betrayal. From the military. From her.
He’d asked her about this on the phone, when they were finalizing plans. “What if they try to arrest us again, Charisa?”
Her hand tightened down around her cell, mind spinning up an easy answer. But it won’t come out, because she’s remembering that night, the way it felt, the only one in her entire company without a date, other girls passing their dates their fucking rings over with... “I’ll get you the key,” she says. “A handcuff key, that’ll be enough, right?”
“Hell, Hannibal broke us all out with a cigar,” Face had replied, merry. “I think we could conquer Russia with the key.”
So McCready’s his typical asshole self, and so she has to do it, after all.
She doesn’t mind.
It’s almost like it was, for a moment, her lips sealing down over his, him leaning into it, just enough. But there’s no spark anymore. He doesn’t want her anymore, doesn’t need her. She’s lost her chance with that.
He smiles a little as he’s pulled away from her, thrown into the back of the police van.
And she’s making a grilled cheese on her iron that night, in her LA hotel room, when she gets the call that they’ve escaped.
“Am I back on the case, Director McCready?” she asks, sucking on her thumb, burned in her haste to get to her cell.
“No, it’s out of our hands. Colonel Decker’s taking it over...”
Sosa hangs up and tosses the phone onto her bed. And she curls up on the mattress with her sandwich and some bad movie on HBO and realizes her hands are trembling as she sits there, telling herself not to cry.
It doesn’t work. For the first time, it doesn’t work, and she doesn’t know why.
+++++
“That was what, five months ago? Have you seen him since then?”
“No. DCIS has got no idea where they are, either. Just up and vanished.”
“Damn,” and Sarah Greene - now Sarah Hatfield - whistles on the other end of the phone. Sosa can hear a baby crying in the background. Sarah got married about a year ago, a whoops-I’m-pregnant marriage, but it actually seems to be working out. Her friend seems... happy, like that, even with the government daycares, and Sosa doesn’t call her as often anymore. It’s too hard to listen to, that baby. At this rate, she’ll probably never get one of her own. “So, did he, like, say anything?”
“Nothing real,” Sosa says, tossing herself back into an armchair now. “Hannibal was probably just trying to play me or something like that.”
“Charisa,” Sarah says, soft and kind of sad, “when are you going to just open up and trust that somebody’s not fucking lying to you?”
“I hurt him too bad, Sarah. There’s no way he’d ever really trust me after what I...”
“Why not?”
Sosa jerks and jumps and screams a little, dropping the phone on the sofa as her ass hits the carpet. She can hear Sarah, still, concerned and then worried, now yelling, until a hand drops down over the back and picks it up, tosses it over to her.
It’s an easy enough catch to make, and Sosa cups the cell back to her ear. “Sarah?”
“What the fuck’s going on, Charisa?”
She’s staring up, right at the answer, who’s ruefully smiling at her, that cute little-boy blush she knows so well spreading, and the captain finds herself wondering how much of this is an act. “Face dropped in for a visit.” She glares at him. “Scared the shit out of me.”
On the other end, Sarah makes an eager whining sound and Charisa can practically hear the grin as she adds, “ask him if he’s been fucking Colonel Smith! I’d bet you a thousand bucks he has been...”
And Sarah’s being loud, really loud, loud enough for that blush to be turning a dangerous shade of red, and isn’t that just fucking wonderful? “Good night, Sarah,” she says, and hangs up, up over the top of her buddy’s protests. She really, really does not need to be dealing with on top of whatever this is, right now.
Face pulls some maneuver that sees him up and over the back of her couch and comfortably lounging in the spot she just vacated so rapidly. He holds out a hand for to, after a quick moment, and Sosa lets him haul her back up next to him. Both of them are scrunching back onto opposite sides. Fantastic.
“What the fuck do you want?” she blurts out, not really even thinking about it, and Face just grins that conman grin of his at her. Sosa’s suddenly reminded of one night they spent together on this sofa, watching TV until Face poked her with his foot, and then pouncing, tickling, laughing, drawing her right along... but the days when he could just swoop in and sweep her away are long, long gone. Long gone. So why is he here?
“I wanted to thank you,” he tries, and she crosses her arms.
“Bullshit.”
That grins falters a little, and he nods back and forth. “Okay, uhh, I...I wanted to see if you were okay. Not in a creepy stalker way, but...”
“But what?”
The last words are almost swallowed. Very quiet. “Charisa, I know you. Sarcastic, biting, a little too direct, yeah, that’s you. But how you were... that’s not you.”
“So you think there’s something wrong with me now?”
Face doesn’t respond to that, just looks at his hands, one finger tracing a line down another. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
He swallows. “That first night, when we... you hadn’t, right?”
“That sentence made no sense,” she laughs, trying to ease the growing nervousness. And this is what she never could quite understand about Face. That empathetic streak in him, the ability to figure people out, usually reserved only for the con, but every so often, when they were together, he’d been able to look at her and tell her exactly what she was thinking.
“It took me a while to figure it out,” he says, just steamrolling over the top of her protests, like he always did. “I thought for a while it was because you actually wanted me, and that was... and then I realized...and I tried, I wanted, I hoped it wasn’t just about...” Blue eyes lift to meet hers, and the emotion there is all real.
“I’m sorry, Charisa, if I took something away from you...”
“You didn’t take anything.”
“Your virginity’s not anything?”
On the defensive now, Sosa automatically goes for what’s going to cause the most damage, what’s going to get Face to back the fuck off like he always did, cringing away from the argument. “When’d you lose yours, Face? Who to? Some goddamn priest in that orphanage of yours?”
But he doesn’t back down. Doesn’t even seem to hear it. “I don’t remember,” he says. “But I can tell you this, Charisa, there are days when I wish I’d been able keep it for...”
“Hannibal?” she asks tentatively.
There’s a nod. “Or you,” he adds. “Having somebody that’s just yours, something that belongs to just the two of you, a little closed loop like that, like having...”
“Family?” she asks, tearing up, unable to stop the swell, the depths carrying up to the surface. “I didn’t want to take anything from you either, Face. You know? I just, I just couldn’t trust...”
“Me?”
And the words are just coming out. Fast and slow and loud and soft. No regulation at all. She can’t stop them. Couldn’t, not for anything. The last few months, since seeing him again, since figuring all of this out, it’s been hard to keep anything in check. Face, Drew, the others in between who wanted to try, the men since.
All those memories.
Every one a regret, every one about nothing more than proving something she never seemed able to prove to herself, and this one, Face, most of all.
“Anybody. I just wanted it to be quick and simple and over with, and here you were, this great lay according to everybody and then, then, I really don’t know what happened, why you’d want me, I mean, nobody else has ever wanted me, Face, and... and...”
He leans forward, scooting in between her curled legs, and thumbs a tear off her cheek. She falls into that, feeling that one little gesture start undo her complete, rip her apart, taking her back to that hotel room when she thought it might be okay, the scared girl who just wanted to prove that somebody wanted her. That she could be wanted..
The scared girl who thought that somehow, some way, losing it was going to make everything okay. Better. Great. Fantastic.
That it would fix everything that was wrong...
Templeton, not Face, folds her up in his arms, cradling her head against his chest. When he finally speaks, in it’s a whisper. It’s sincere. It’s concerned.
“Charisa, beautiful, you can tell me. I’m here,” he says, rocking her a little now. “I’m right here.”
Sincere. Concerned.
That very fact, that somebody might care, even the man whose heart she damn near destroyed, that something in him still knows her, still worries, still came, still wants, even if he doesn’t want her like that anymore, and since he doesn’t, since this isn’t about sex, isn’t about anything other than...
Sosa presses her cheek against his chest, remembering the sound of his heartbeat, somehow relieved it’s still there, that she hasn’t shattered its rhythm. That if he’s whole after everything he’s been through, maybe she can be, too, and she feels a shudder run through her.
“It was Ring Dance,” she begins.
His arms tighten down around her as the words slowly ebb out.
And away.
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Date: 2011-03-22 10:03 pm (UTC)Even though I think, when he says "God, I forgot how beautiful you are." he really means it! And that kiss to get the key...I liked it though... (That's why I wrote them a threesome lol)
Wonderful story, love the story you gave them. And again, her too, totally IC :D
++
But psst there is something wrong in the middle of this doc. Like something from the beginning pasted in again, a kind of error in LJ. Thought you might like to know.
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Date: 2011-03-22 11:42 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked it and thought it was believable and IC and everything! Yay, I got Sosa right! Face was totally in love with her, and I think she was in love with him too, but she didn't know how to handle any of it.
One of the other gals around here's asked me to do a sequel. Which I will be doing in a week or two...
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Date: 2011-03-24 08:43 pm (UTC)You gonna make them a threesome as well? *hinntttt*
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Date: 2011-03-24 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-26 09:38 am (UTC)Thanks for telling me you like mine! I wish I could write faster and more lolol