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promethia_tenkTitle: Tied Up
Fandom: himym, B/R
Length: 3,252 words
Rating: R for artsy, metaphor-laden sex and emotional trauma
Spoilers: Through "The Possimpible"
Summary: Barney and Robin negotiate the very beginnings of a relationship.
Disclaimer: HIMYM is not mine :-(
AN: So, this is an epilogue to "The Great Picspam Caper," which I haven't actually finished yet, but you should be able to follow this anyway. My muse whispered in my ear that I should write a nice, funny, smutty bonus for the end of the Caper that might be suitable for entry in the Great Smut Duel. My muse then proceeded to tie me down for an entire weekend and torment this out of me. I am now scared of my muse, so if anyone else wants her, help yourself.
Previously in our story:
Everything: Lily tricks Barney and Robin into slow dancing and then takes pictures of Robin enjoying the chance to cuddle up.
The Great Picspam Caper, Part One: Lily, Marshall, and Ted kidnap Barney and Robin and tie them to chairs in the apartment. Lily reveals Barney's secret love and says some mean things about Robin.
The Great Picspam Caper, Part Two: Still not written. Lily picspams the captive Barney and Robin into admitting their love for each other.
Tied Up: Barney and Robin are left alone in the apartment to escape their bonds and decide how to proceed. A radical departure in tone from earlier parts--deal with it.
Oh, I think you two will have more fun if we let you figure that out for yourselves.
The door clicked shut behind their friends, and then they were alone.
Barney twisted around to face her, put on the leer, made the requisite joke: “First one out of their ropes gets to do what they like to the other?”
She was grateful to him for the attempt, but it was lame, and they both knew it. Now wasn’t the time. She corrected him with a sad half-smile: “Barney, I’ve seen you get out of a full restraint system after 17 minutes underwater. We know who’s winning that one.”
“Yeah, well . . . ,” Barney looked down at his knees. “I thought I’d offer.”
“Thanks,” Robin acknowledged in a breath. There was something gentlemanly about the overture—a nod to their twisted sense of propriety—and Robin first chuckled and then gave a harsh, barking laugh at the part of herself that translated his ribald suggestion into a kiss on the hand. Indeed, chivalry was not dead—just deeply, deeply fucked up.
“Listen, Robin,” Barney tried again, “that was all sudden and . . . invasive.” His voice was starting to fray. “If you want me to untie you and go, I will. If you need to think . . . .” She bit her lip and glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes. He was sincere.
Half of her brain had jumped immediately at the offer: go, go, go, go, gogogogogogogo— She would have left too, taken him up on it. Except that he was sincere.
That hadn’t stopped shocking her yet.
Instead she let her eyes trail from his sober face over to the projection screen, now blank. The pictures were still burned in her mind, and she could almost see them: ghostly, negative exposures over the shadowed surface. Most of it was not new. The images of him (the face, the eyes—the unendurable softness—the fingers, the parted lips, the trembling illumination of it all) those she had been seeing for months, awake and asleep. Those she had given up trying to ignore, and she had moved on to fighting the gnarl they caused in her stomach, the burning wash of tightness, the taste of cloves and vinegar. She’d had to fight it all again, sitting there, tied to a chair by her friends.
But this was not new—not really.
What was new were the few pictures Lily had stolen of her. It was a terrible violation—of her, of them (her and Barney), of them all (the group)—it was a violation of the walls, the flood dams, she had built to protect them all. They knew about the walls—her friends—of course they did. But no one knew how carefully she tended them, how she patched them with things so tenuous, how she kept the waters back with twigs and leaves, or her own slender fingers, or her own slender jokes.
But Lily, Lily had somehow been even more careful (why?), and Lily had found the cracks. She had found them and shone them up on the screen. Had her friend gone after her with a scalpel and a rib-spreader it could not have hurt more (where was the ether?), and now she had left her here, a patient in this darkened surgical theater. If she looked down, she would see her open chest cavity. And then there was this man (did she know him?) who was so polite not to stare.
Had she not been tied down, she would have run. Had she not been tied down, she would have died . . . .
She wasn’t ready.
“I’ll just stay here a bit, thanks.”
Barney nodded to her in confirmation and began slowly snaking his shoulders back and forth as he worked on his own bonds. He was so steady, so unhurried. Robin was reminded again of how manic he had been of late: extravagant, hysterical, constructing ever-more desperate schemes on ever-more shaky foundations . . . bleeding (she now realized) all around the edges. She had taught herself to accept it; she had made it normal in her head, and now this peace unnerved her more than even the mounting frenzy. Somehow Lily’s intervention had released him. Lily had thrown up a lightening rod for his harsh jag of energy and thrown him to the ground, where he had rematerialized: substance and stillness.
He spoke to her out of the stillness:
“Lily shouldn’t have done that.” He watched her carefully as he continued working at the ropes. “She shouldn’t have had to have done that. If I could have—” But here Robin shook her head: they were both at fault. “Anyway, I need to apologize for my general lack of awesomeness lately—I guess you’ve noticed. You see, I’ve been sick—yes—and I think it’s chronic. If it doesn’t kill me, I should be fine, so I don’t want you worrying about me.” Robin laughed a bit bitterly. “It’s true,” he smiled, “I don’t think there was any avoiding it, so I’m just going to make the best of what I get.” He looked down and scrunched his face in concentration, and then he made a little shimmy in his chair. “Ahhh—there we go.” He held up the end of the now-dangling rope and gave her a wink. “I win.” He let the rope fall and jumped up to go open the blinds.
Light spilled into the room—it was late afternoon—and filtered through the sheets that curtained the back of the apartment.
Barney popped back out through the sheets and slid in behind Robin’s chair, kneeling to whisper huskily in her ear: “Now, what shall I do with you, hmmmmm?” More politeness. He pivoted around to the other side and this time pushed her hair behind her ear so he could nose in closer. “I do have more than a few tricks I’ve been saving up for you.”
His breath was warm and moist on her ear—a suggestive vibration—and suddenly Robin was shaking. She wasn’t crying (she was grateful for that), but she had gone strangely numb in her body—had, she found, suddenly left it. She looked on from a distance as her frame trembled in the seat; she felt and did not feel the tightness; she tasted and did not taste the vinegar as every nerve ending shrieked against the acrid wash. She watched her body’s shakes and observed very dryly to herself that she must be going through shock. She had, after all, lost a lot of blood (wait—huh?). Her brain seemed a bit fuzzy around the edges. There was a pinching at the base of her skull.
And then Barney’s hands were on her shoulders and then his voice was stroking her steadily: “Hey, hey, Robin. Oh, Robin. Hey.” And now he was around by her side, holding her face, her hair, trying to look in her eyes. She made the effort to look back, and his gaze steadied her. The tremors slowed, lessened . . . she was still shaky. “Hey, ok . . . ,” his eyes were wide, and he had the faintest of soothing smiles, “do you want me to untie you?”
Robin blinked: untie . . . ? It took her a moment to put the words together with her situation. She shook her head back and forth between Barney’s hands: no, she really couldn’t recommend it. His forehead furrowed. “You sure?” Robin managed a weak smile and twisted her face to kiss his palm:
“Yeah,” she whispered into his hand. And then, because he didn’t look convinced, she kissed him again. “Really. Go on. I’m gonna be all right. It’s just . . . a lot at once.”
He let one hand slide down so he could kiss her cheek, nuzzle at her jaw line. Robin still hovered somewhere outside herself and looked on. She reasoned, in her detachment, that the warm ghosting of his breath over her skin, the soft sweep of his lips and nose against her throat must feel very pleasant. Certainly the way his hands were cupping her hair, her shoulder—settling around her waist—ought to be comforting. If she were with herself, she might find the trace of his eyes, and now his fingers, down the line of her collar towards the crevice of her breasts, that top button, to be arousing. But since she was not, in fact, with herself, she watched with mild curiosity. She wondered if Barney would manage to smooth out the tremors, to calm the stinging flesh.
He seemed willing to try. Oh, but he was stillness and substance and warm and real. Robin willed herself to get back into her body so she could experience what she’d longed for—tried not to long for—for so many months. The button popped, and he pressed his lips to the skin between her breasts . . . nothing. He moved over her body steadily, deliberately: stroking, soothing, caressing. She closed her eyes and tried to feel it; she tried to let his hands brush away the bitter jangling, the rawness, the tightness, the—
It wasn’t working. She felt him shift around. He settled on his knees in front of her and pulled one of her feet into his lap with the same sureness—ran a palm down her thigh, her calf, and she tried to absorb his quietude.
Wasn’t working. Her eyes snapped open, and she decided to talk to him instead as he slowly removed her boots and discarded them behind him. “They meant well, didn’t they?” she asked—her throat was raw too. Barney looked up at her, nodded. He brushed his lips against her now-bare knee. She pushed on: “Lily, she wants everyone to be happy, but it’s just so simple to her that she doesn’t see, well . . . the rest of it.” More nodding. Barney slid his hands up under the hem of her skirt and down the sensitive skin on the backs of her thighs, behind her knees. Robin was still shaking but lightly, faintly. He could probably feel it in his fingertips. “She doesn’t see how much you have to tear down before you can even try or how much you have to rebuild after—just to make all that destruction worthwhile.” She looked down, finally, between her opened ribs and into the cavity. He looked too, and for a moment they watched her heart beating and her lungs pulling in oxygen and pushing it back out. And she looked at the strange man before her, watching her (and was he a stranger, after all?), and she decided that maybe he could stay. Certainly the time for formalities was over. If she could just get back into her skin, maybe they could . . . well, they would figure it out when they got there.
She nodded him down to the zipper at the side of her waist. “Maybe she’s forgotten,” Robin continued, “with Marshall, after all, it’s been so long. She may have forgotten.” Barney tugged, and she raised her hips just off the seat so he could ease the skirt down to the floor. “Then again, maybe it was never like this for her, for them. Can it really be that easy?” She was sitting, now, in panties and her tailored shirt, and Barney placed a tentative kiss on the inside of one thigh, watching her as he did so.
“Maybe,” he told her, and kissed again, an inch farther along. His lips rested on her skin, and he seemed to think. “No, yes it can, it can, just not . . . .”
“For us,” Robin concluded. To herself she concluded that she ought to feel a bit chilled with all that air against her bare legs, but she couldn’t tell if she was. “I suppose what they had—have—is a template, don’t they? A model. Easier to start when you know what you want to build. But this . . . .”
Barney stopped the progress of his mouth to chuckle into her thigh: “No maps, no floorplans . . . heh . . . no fairytales. We are starting from scratch, aren’t we?”
“Yeah . . . we are.” She said it thoughtfully, but in her head she heard the suggestive echo of their group’s usual intonations—yeah, you are!—and she had to laugh out loud. The laugh lapped out across her chest and suddenly she could feel her breathing again. The tightness eased. Barney smiled to see a sign of life (hello, stranger), and sliding an arm under her leg, ran his palm from hipbone to knee, guiding it over his shoulder.
She watched him string a few more kisses down the same thigh, and then, eyes locked on hers, he blew a long, fevered breath through the fabric between her legs.
Warmth blossomed deep in her abdomen, spreading out, and Robin poured back into her body to meet it with a stumbling gasp. The world rushed back in around her, and suddenly every one of her senses was a torrent of life: washing over her, overwhelming her. She felt the muscles moving under his shirt against the back of her calf. Heard at once the blood pulsing in her ears and the trailing whisper of Barney’s exhaled breath. There was honeyed light through her half-closed eyelids and then, as they snapped back open, dust motes swimming in the slanting, afternoon rays. Robin realized her head had fallen back in the surge, and the stretch down her throat and into her breastbone was amazing—she took a second, gasping breath just to feel her chest expand. Her every limb was goose bumped; her mouth tasted dry and dusty . . . .
And she hurt—every muscle in her ached from the months of building tension, the crippling stresses of the past hour. She had never thought it was possible to taste pain, but the burning dredges of so much adrenaline, so much bile, soaked and scorched her in their bitterness. She was acutely aware of a sharp cramp between her shoulders, of the numbness in her hands and forearms. How long had she been tied up? The back of the chair dug into her spine, and the ropes prickled her skin.
She hurt. She felt good.
She rolled her head around to her shoulder to look sideways at Barney. He must have felt her reaction because he gently squeezed her thigh and gave her a grin so broad his entire face crinkled in pleasure. He reached a hand up to brush the back of his fingers against her cheek and then hurriedly pushed the fabric of her panties aside to press his mouth, full and open, against her clit.
Again he breathed on her, and the flow of air against her now-moistened skin set her shuddering once more. The feeling was considerably different this time, though, and Robin savored the contrast between the sharp chill on her skin and the swelling, viscous warmth in her core. She smiled at her trembling, grateful to be back in her body, and sent out a whimper of thanks.
Barney’s tongue began making slow circles, and as a sweet haze crept in from all sides, a thought slipped, unbidden, into Robin’s mind:
The people who do the most to avoid commitment are the ones who care about it most deeply.
It was a sentiment she had heard once, long ago, and she had clung to it, hidden it away, saved it up for she didn’t know what. She hadn’t understood it, wasn’t sure why it was important, but now here it was—insistent, inevitable—hovering over her and Barney as their bodies moved steadily together.
She curved her spine to give him a better angle, gazed down at the crown of his head, and thought about it as best she could, given the circumstances.
She didn’t know that she actually believed it—didn’t want to rank anyone’s capacities or desires for connection, for that kind of meaning. Certainly she couldn’t bring herself to lessen what Lily and Marshall had, what Ted wanted, wouldn’t build herself up at their expense, and yet . . .
Behind the words, behind the judgment of them, was something that rang true—she felt it there even if she could not explain it. And as she looked at Barney now, it settled over them in a forgiving silence, so she took the words to her as fumbled benediction of their fumbled lives.
And watching him now, crouched between her legs in the shadow of her body, the sunlight scattered around, she wanted nothing more than to see him bathed in it, glowing above her in the dripping amber of the afternoon. She wanted her hands in his hair and down his back. She wanted to taste honey and spice. She wanted his skin, his warmth, his substance, and she wanted his stillness to spread across the barriers between them, to enfold them both with a weight and a quiet she hadn’t know before, hadn’t imagined. She wanted—
“Barney?”
He looked up.
“Untie me?”
He kissed her leg once more: “of course.” And he slid out of his spot, standing, and moved around behind her to let her loose.
She took him by the hand and pulled him in a rush towards the bedroom. Her arms, her hands began to tingle as the blood finally flowed back into them. She felt giddy and stumbled picking her way past the hanging sheets, around the piled furniture and towards her door. Once they passed over the threshold, however, she slowed. She slipped her fingers under his collar to hold the back of his neck and draw him in for a kiss. She did it patiently, deliberately, because this needed to be a choice. His hands rose to just graze her elbows, and that gentlest of holds was a choice.
She moved her eyes to his buttons and undid them one after another: choice, choice, choice . . .
He pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed its shell—a choice.
And she shuffled backwards to the bed, bringing him with her, guiding him over her, settling him into her . . . and she made the choices. They began to move without hurry. They made a slow, savory exploration. They kept eye contact. They dared each other to leave.
Choices.
And it was what she’d wanted—the light and the honey, the stillness . . . the weight. Later there would be time for tangled limbs and heated, animal longing. There would be hurried, quivering encounters against walls and stalls and wobbling furniture. Time for words, cries, and panted oaths. Ropes—yes—but not those ropes (those were finished), and the wrestled, sweat-soaked sheets. All of that would come, but here, now, this needed to be a choice, so she raised her knees a fraction higher and guided him a fraction deeper, and together they rocked and hummed and breathed.
When it came, her climax welled up out of a yawning recess he touched in her core, and it spread in pools of liquid warmth through the spaces of her body. And the warmth flowed away through her fingers and hair—seeped out through her skin—and it ran off in rivers over their twisted bodies and it trickled off through the furrowed sheets. And the ache and the vinegar washed away with it and flowed clean from her flesh and returned to the ground.
Fandom: himym, B/R
Length: 3,252 words
Rating: R for artsy, metaphor-laden sex and emotional trauma
Spoilers: Through "The Possimpible"
Summary: Barney and Robin negotiate the very beginnings of a relationship.
Disclaimer: HIMYM is not mine :-(
AN: So, this is an epilogue to "The Great Picspam Caper," which I haven't actually finished yet, but you should be able to follow this anyway. My muse whispered in my ear that I should write a nice, funny, smutty bonus for the end of the Caper that might be suitable for entry in the Great Smut Duel. My muse then proceeded to tie me down for an entire weekend and torment this out of me. I am now scared of my muse, so if anyone else wants her, help yourself.
Previously in our story:
Everything: Lily tricks Barney and Robin into slow dancing and then takes pictures of Robin enjoying the chance to cuddle up.
The Great Picspam Caper, Part One: Lily, Marshall, and Ted kidnap Barney and Robin and tie them to chairs in the apartment. Lily reveals Barney's secret love and says some mean things about Robin.
The Great Picspam Caper, Part Two: Still not written. Lily picspams the captive Barney and Robin into admitting their love for each other.
Tied Up: Barney and Robin are left alone in the apartment to escape their bonds and decide how to proceed. A radical departure in tone from earlier parts--deal with it.
Oh, I think you two will have more fun if we let you figure that out for yourselves.
The door clicked shut behind their friends, and then they were alone.
Barney twisted around to face her, put on the leer, made the requisite joke: “First one out of their ropes gets to do what they like to the other?”
She was grateful to him for the attempt, but it was lame, and they both knew it. Now wasn’t the time. She corrected him with a sad half-smile: “Barney, I’ve seen you get out of a full restraint system after 17 minutes underwater. We know who’s winning that one.”
“Yeah, well . . . ,” Barney looked down at his knees. “I thought I’d offer.”
“Thanks,” Robin acknowledged in a breath. There was something gentlemanly about the overture—a nod to their twisted sense of propriety—and Robin first chuckled and then gave a harsh, barking laugh at the part of herself that translated his ribald suggestion into a kiss on the hand. Indeed, chivalry was not dead—just deeply, deeply fucked up.
“Listen, Robin,” Barney tried again, “that was all sudden and . . . invasive.” His voice was starting to fray. “If you want me to untie you and go, I will. If you need to think . . . .” She bit her lip and glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes. He was sincere.
Half of her brain had jumped immediately at the offer: go, go, go, go, gogogogogogogo— She would have left too, taken him up on it. Except that he was sincere.
That hadn’t stopped shocking her yet.
Instead she let her eyes trail from his sober face over to the projection screen, now blank. The pictures were still burned in her mind, and she could almost see them: ghostly, negative exposures over the shadowed surface. Most of it was not new. The images of him (the face, the eyes—the unendurable softness—the fingers, the parted lips, the trembling illumination of it all) those she had been seeing for months, awake and asleep. Those she had given up trying to ignore, and she had moved on to fighting the gnarl they caused in her stomach, the burning wash of tightness, the taste of cloves and vinegar. She’d had to fight it all again, sitting there, tied to a chair by her friends.
But this was not new—not really.
What was new were the few pictures Lily had stolen of her. It was a terrible violation—of her, of them (her and Barney), of them all (the group)—it was a violation of the walls, the flood dams, she had built to protect them all. They knew about the walls—her friends—of course they did. But no one knew how carefully she tended them, how she patched them with things so tenuous, how she kept the waters back with twigs and leaves, or her own slender fingers, or her own slender jokes.
But Lily, Lily had somehow been even more careful (why?), and Lily had found the cracks. She had found them and shone them up on the screen. Had her friend gone after her with a scalpel and a rib-spreader it could not have hurt more (where was the ether?), and now she had left her here, a patient in this darkened surgical theater. If she looked down, she would see her open chest cavity. And then there was this man (did she know him?) who was so polite not to stare.
Had she not been tied down, she would have run. Had she not been tied down, she would have died . . . .
She wasn’t ready.
“I’ll just stay here a bit, thanks.”
Barney nodded to her in confirmation and began slowly snaking his shoulders back and forth as he worked on his own bonds. He was so steady, so unhurried. Robin was reminded again of how manic he had been of late: extravagant, hysterical, constructing ever-more desperate schemes on ever-more shaky foundations . . . bleeding (she now realized) all around the edges. She had taught herself to accept it; she had made it normal in her head, and now this peace unnerved her more than even the mounting frenzy. Somehow Lily’s intervention had released him. Lily had thrown up a lightening rod for his harsh jag of energy and thrown him to the ground, where he had rematerialized: substance and stillness.
He spoke to her out of the stillness:
“Lily shouldn’t have done that.” He watched her carefully as he continued working at the ropes. “She shouldn’t have had to have done that. If I could have—” But here Robin shook her head: they were both at fault. “Anyway, I need to apologize for my general lack of awesomeness lately—I guess you’ve noticed. You see, I’ve been sick—yes—and I think it’s chronic. If it doesn’t kill me, I should be fine, so I don’t want you worrying about me.” Robin laughed a bit bitterly. “It’s true,” he smiled, “I don’t think there was any avoiding it, so I’m just going to make the best of what I get.” He looked down and scrunched his face in concentration, and then he made a little shimmy in his chair. “Ahhh—there we go.” He held up the end of the now-dangling rope and gave her a wink. “I win.” He let the rope fall and jumped up to go open the blinds.
Light spilled into the room—it was late afternoon—and filtered through the sheets that curtained the back of the apartment.
Barney popped back out through the sheets and slid in behind Robin’s chair, kneeling to whisper huskily in her ear: “Now, what shall I do with you, hmmmmm?” More politeness. He pivoted around to the other side and this time pushed her hair behind her ear so he could nose in closer. “I do have more than a few tricks I’ve been saving up for you.”
His breath was warm and moist on her ear—a suggestive vibration—and suddenly Robin was shaking. She wasn’t crying (she was grateful for that), but she had gone strangely numb in her body—had, she found, suddenly left it. She looked on from a distance as her frame trembled in the seat; she felt and did not feel the tightness; she tasted and did not taste the vinegar as every nerve ending shrieked against the acrid wash. She watched her body’s shakes and observed very dryly to herself that she must be going through shock. She had, after all, lost a lot of blood (wait—huh?). Her brain seemed a bit fuzzy around the edges. There was a pinching at the base of her skull.
And then Barney’s hands were on her shoulders and then his voice was stroking her steadily: “Hey, hey, Robin. Oh, Robin. Hey.” And now he was around by her side, holding her face, her hair, trying to look in her eyes. She made the effort to look back, and his gaze steadied her. The tremors slowed, lessened . . . she was still shaky. “Hey, ok . . . ,” his eyes were wide, and he had the faintest of soothing smiles, “do you want me to untie you?”
Robin blinked: untie . . . ? It took her a moment to put the words together with her situation. She shook her head back and forth between Barney’s hands: no, she really couldn’t recommend it. His forehead furrowed. “You sure?” Robin managed a weak smile and twisted her face to kiss his palm:
“Yeah,” she whispered into his hand. And then, because he didn’t look convinced, she kissed him again. “Really. Go on. I’m gonna be all right. It’s just . . . a lot at once.”
He let one hand slide down so he could kiss her cheek, nuzzle at her jaw line. Robin still hovered somewhere outside herself and looked on. She reasoned, in her detachment, that the warm ghosting of his breath over her skin, the soft sweep of his lips and nose against her throat must feel very pleasant. Certainly the way his hands were cupping her hair, her shoulder—settling around her waist—ought to be comforting. If she were with herself, she might find the trace of his eyes, and now his fingers, down the line of her collar towards the crevice of her breasts, that top button, to be arousing. But since she was not, in fact, with herself, she watched with mild curiosity. She wondered if Barney would manage to smooth out the tremors, to calm the stinging flesh.
He seemed willing to try. Oh, but he was stillness and substance and warm and real. Robin willed herself to get back into her body so she could experience what she’d longed for—tried not to long for—for so many months. The button popped, and he pressed his lips to the skin between her breasts . . . nothing. He moved over her body steadily, deliberately: stroking, soothing, caressing. She closed her eyes and tried to feel it; she tried to let his hands brush away the bitter jangling, the rawness, the tightness, the—
It wasn’t working. She felt him shift around. He settled on his knees in front of her and pulled one of her feet into his lap with the same sureness—ran a palm down her thigh, her calf, and she tried to absorb his quietude.
Wasn’t working. Her eyes snapped open, and she decided to talk to him instead as he slowly removed her boots and discarded them behind him. “They meant well, didn’t they?” she asked—her throat was raw too. Barney looked up at her, nodded. He brushed his lips against her now-bare knee. She pushed on: “Lily, she wants everyone to be happy, but it’s just so simple to her that she doesn’t see, well . . . the rest of it.” More nodding. Barney slid his hands up under the hem of her skirt and down the sensitive skin on the backs of her thighs, behind her knees. Robin was still shaking but lightly, faintly. He could probably feel it in his fingertips. “She doesn’t see how much you have to tear down before you can even try or how much you have to rebuild after—just to make all that destruction worthwhile.” She looked down, finally, between her opened ribs and into the cavity. He looked too, and for a moment they watched her heart beating and her lungs pulling in oxygen and pushing it back out. And she looked at the strange man before her, watching her (and was he a stranger, after all?), and she decided that maybe he could stay. Certainly the time for formalities was over. If she could just get back into her skin, maybe they could . . . well, they would figure it out when they got there.
She nodded him down to the zipper at the side of her waist. “Maybe she’s forgotten,” Robin continued, “with Marshall, after all, it’s been so long. She may have forgotten.” Barney tugged, and she raised her hips just off the seat so he could ease the skirt down to the floor. “Then again, maybe it was never like this for her, for them. Can it really be that easy?” She was sitting, now, in panties and her tailored shirt, and Barney placed a tentative kiss on the inside of one thigh, watching her as he did so.
“Maybe,” he told her, and kissed again, an inch farther along. His lips rested on her skin, and he seemed to think. “No, yes it can, it can, just not . . . .”
“For us,” Robin concluded. To herself she concluded that she ought to feel a bit chilled with all that air against her bare legs, but she couldn’t tell if she was. “I suppose what they had—have—is a template, don’t they? A model. Easier to start when you know what you want to build. But this . . . .”
Barney stopped the progress of his mouth to chuckle into her thigh: “No maps, no floorplans . . . heh . . . no fairytales. We are starting from scratch, aren’t we?”
“Yeah . . . we are.” She said it thoughtfully, but in her head she heard the suggestive echo of their group’s usual intonations—yeah, you are!—and she had to laugh out loud. The laugh lapped out across her chest and suddenly she could feel her breathing again. The tightness eased. Barney smiled to see a sign of life (hello, stranger), and sliding an arm under her leg, ran his palm from hipbone to knee, guiding it over his shoulder.
She watched him string a few more kisses down the same thigh, and then, eyes locked on hers, he blew a long, fevered breath through the fabric between her legs.
Warmth blossomed deep in her abdomen, spreading out, and Robin poured back into her body to meet it with a stumbling gasp. The world rushed back in around her, and suddenly every one of her senses was a torrent of life: washing over her, overwhelming her. She felt the muscles moving under his shirt against the back of her calf. Heard at once the blood pulsing in her ears and the trailing whisper of Barney’s exhaled breath. There was honeyed light through her half-closed eyelids and then, as they snapped back open, dust motes swimming in the slanting, afternoon rays. Robin realized her head had fallen back in the surge, and the stretch down her throat and into her breastbone was amazing—she took a second, gasping breath just to feel her chest expand. Her every limb was goose bumped; her mouth tasted dry and dusty . . . .
And she hurt—every muscle in her ached from the months of building tension, the crippling stresses of the past hour. She had never thought it was possible to taste pain, but the burning dredges of so much adrenaline, so much bile, soaked and scorched her in their bitterness. She was acutely aware of a sharp cramp between her shoulders, of the numbness in her hands and forearms. How long had she been tied up? The back of the chair dug into her spine, and the ropes prickled her skin.
She hurt. She felt good.
She rolled her head around to her shoulder to look sideways at Barney. He must have felt her reaction because he gently squeezed her thigh and gave her a grin so broad his entire face crinkled in pleasure. He reached a hand up to brush the back of his fingers against her cheek and then hurriedly pushed the fabric of her panties aside to press his mouth, full and open, against her clit.
Again he breathed on her, and the flow of air against her now-moistened skin set her shuddering once more. The feeling was considerably different this time, though, and Robin savored the contrast between the sharp chill on her skin and the swelling, viscous warmth in her core. She smiled at her trembling, grateful to be back in her body, and sent out a whimper of thanks.
Barney’s tongue began making slow circles, and as a sweet haze crept in from all sides, a thought slipped, unbidden, into Robin’s mind:
The people who do the most to avoid commitment are the ones who care about it most deeply.
It was a sentiment she had heard once, long ago, and she had clung to it, hidden it away, saved it up for she didn’t know what. She hadn’t understood it, wasn’t sure why it was important, but now here it was—insistent, inevitable—hovering over her and Barney as their bodies moved steadily together.
She curved her spine to give him a better angle, gazed down at the crown of his head, and thought about it as best she could, given the circumstances.
She didn’t know that she actually believed it—didn’t want to rank anyone’s capacities or desires for connection, for that kind of meaning. Certainly she couldn’t bring herself to lessen what Lily and Marshall had, what Ted wanted, wouldn’t build herself up at their expense, and yet . . .
Behind the words, behind the judgment of them, was something that rang true—she felt it there even if she could not explain it. And as she looked at Barney now, it settled over them in a forgiving silence, so she took the words to her as fumbled benediction of their fumbled lives.
And watching him now, crouched between her legs in the shadow of her body, the sunlight scattered around, she wanted nothing more than to see him bathed in it, glowing above her in the dripping amber of the afternoon. She wanted her hands in his hair and down his back. She wanted to taste honey and spice. She wanted his skin, his warmth, his substance, and she wanted his stillness to spread across the barriers between them, to enfold them both with a weight and a quiet she hadn’t know before, hadn’t imagined. She wanted—
“Barney?”
He looked up.
“Untie me?”
He kissed her leg once more: “of course.” And he slid out of his spot, standing, and moved around behind her to let her loose.
She took him by the hand and pulled him in a rush towards the bedroom. Her arms, her hands began to tingle as the blood finally flowed back into them. She felt giddy and stumbled picking her way past the hanging sheets, around the piled furniture and towards her door. Once they passed over the threshold, however, she slowed. She slipped her fingers under his collar to hold the back of his neck and draw him in for a kiss. She did it patiently, deliberately, because this needed to be a choice. His hands rose to just graze her elbows, and that gentlest of holds was a choice.
She moved her eyes to his buttons and undid them one after another: choice, choice, choice . . .
He pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed its shell—a choice.
And she shuffled backwards to the bed, bringing him with her, guiding him over her, settling him into her . . . and she made the choices. They began to move without hurry. They made a slow, savory exploration. They kept eye contact. They dared each other to leave.
Choices.
And it was what she’d wanted—the light and the honey, the stillness . . . the weight. Later there would be time for tangled limbs and heated, animal longing. There would be hurried, quivering encounters against walls and stalls and wobbling furniture. Time for words, cries, and panted oaths. Ropes—yes—but not those ropes (those were finished), and the wrestled, sweat-soaked sheets. All of that would come, but here, now, this needed to be a choice, so she raised her knees a fraction higher and guided him a fraction deeper, and together they rocked and hummed and breathed.
When it came, her climax welled up out of a yawning recess he touched in her core, and it spread in pools of liquid warmth through the spaces of her body. And the warmth flowed away through her fingers and hair—seeped out through her skin—and it ran off in rivers over their twisted bodies and it trickled off through the furrowed sheets. And the ache and the vinegar washed away with it and flowed clean from her flesh and returned to the ground.
