Work Text:
It’s past midnight and the sky is gray, clouds hanging low over the city, by the time Carol walks Helen back to her apartment. It’s another one of those evenings that pass in a flash — Carol making snarky comments in the dim corners of a poetry reading, making Helen laugh, then tipping her chin up and raising her voice over the noise in a moderately shitty bar. But, like clockwork, as they buzz through the heavy door to Helen’s building they fall silent for the first time all night. Carol won’t meet her eye, keeps two steps behind her all the way up.
When Helen’s finally face to face with her own door she turns back and hovers and steps towards Carol, reaching for her elbow, but Carol jerks back. She seems to sort of freeze in place there in the flickering yellow light, and Helen would feel like an asshole if she tried again.
“Am I being an idiot, here?” she asks.
“What?”
“Am I-” Helen scrunches her face up as she searches for the right words. Her heart is suddenly loud enough in her chest to be a serious distraction. “I mean, are you just not into me? ‘Cause you can just say it. I’m not that thin-skinned.”
Carol is staring back, totally blank. Her lips have fallen just slightly open — those perky pink lips that press together when she hears something funny, that tug sideways when she’s embarrassed, the lips Helen’s watched sipping glasses of wine for months now and has never been allowed to touch.
Excruciating seconds pass and Carol doesn’t speak, doesn’t even move, and Helen figures that’s as good an answer as she’s going to get. She forces a smile and nods, lets it wash over her. She wishes she weren’t so embarrassed. Her cheeks shouldn’t be flushing right now, and her palms shouldn’t be sweating, and it’s her own fault for letting herself get in too deep, again, reading into signals just because she wants them to be there.
“You could’ve just said.” she says, and then she pivots on her heels and grabs her keys from her back pocket, her hands useless lumps of meat at the ends of her arms.
The lock on her apartment is old and temperamental at the best of times, and now she can’t even manage to jam the key in the hole before it slips through her fingers and clatters onto the tile. She crouches down to retrieve it, and it takes two tries to even pick it up properly, and Carol’s still just standing there, and her gaze is like a needle down Helen’s back, and she must be beetroot-red by now, with how stiflingly hot her skin feels.
Helen makes herself stand, but before she can try again with the key something catches her shoulder and turns her around and suddenly Carol’s lips are on hers, pressing her back into the door. She’s too startled to do anything but hold her lips there, firmly closed but solid and touching, and then it slips away.
When Carol pulls back she looks like she’s ready for a fight. It’s so endearing that Helen feels herself laugh, and then she leans forwards and grabs one of Carol’s clenched fists in her hand and she falls through the air and presses her lips to Carol’s again.
Carol moans — this deep sound that vibrates against Helen’s lips and stirs her insides like she’s striking a match right in her stomach. All Helen can do is kiss back, so she presses into Carol’s lips and kisses her again, and then her hands find purchase on Carol’s shoulders and she flips them around, pushing Carol back into the door. Carol grunts as her ribs land against the wood. The sound makes Helen smirk in the half-second they’re apart, and then she leans back in and re-makes their kiss again and again.
Carol kisses like she’s a starving animal, sucking at Helen’s bottom lip and then her tongue, and with every single breath she lets out a moan that clouds Helen’s hearing and pushes the whole rest of the world back until it’s fading into a fog behind her. When they come apart they’re both panting.
“D’you want to come in?” Helen asks, taking some effort to get the words out.
Carol tips her head back against the door, her eyes closed, and she nods.
Helen turns the key then, and as the door falls away behind her she walks Carol backwards, just about managing to kick it closed behind them before Carol’s kissing her again, alternating between sucking on Helen’s lip and nibbling at it in quick, jolting motions, like she’s trying to hold herself back from taking more. Helen’s never been much one for kissing, has usually found it to be more a means to an end, but she’s never been kissed like this before. She’s never been able to drink in the taste of a person and hear a whole symphony urging her on in response.
Carol tastes like spirits and it makes Helen hazy, makes the passage of time blur between kisses and stumbling backwards, waists grasped and flesh pressed against walls, tipping forwards onto the bed. Then Carol takes one of Helen’s hands and drags it lower, still not interrupting their kiss until that last shred of sense left in Helen’s mind forces her to pull back.
“We don’t have to,” she says, her voice coming out a heaving whisper. “We can keep going slow.”
Carol’s only response is to tip her chin up like a child who hasn’t got her way. She grabs at Helen’s wrist again and pulls her back down to where she wants her, and this time Helen lands so she’s pretty much cupping Carol through her pants and Carol lets out this startled, whimpering sound.
“Yeah?” Helen asks.
Carol doesn’t actually answer in words. She just scrunches her face up and whines, even higher-pitched and more desperate than before, and she presses her hips up urgently into Helen’s hand.
Helen gives her what she wants — how could she not? — and as her index finger slides through Carol’s folds she cries out, digging her grip into Helen’s shoulders and jerking her whole body towards her. It takes Helen by surprise. She’s not bad in bed by a long stretch, but she’s never had a girl reacting quite like this, not when she’s hardly been touched at all.
Helen thinks, as she works her up towards the edge in what’s surely a record time, that Carol might be like a precious gemstone — but no, not so tough. She is something organic, like a rose bud not yet opened, too delicate to crush underfoot, or even a porcupine. Yes, she’s skittish and prickly with a tender underbelly that’s almost melted over Helen’s fingers after just a few kisses, and somehow the responsibility to not startle that porcupine, to not send her quills flying through the air in a panic, is one that’s landed on Helen’s shoulders.
When Carol’s come down enough to shift her focus to Helen, she asks a soft can I? and watches Helen closely, as if she’s seriously afraid she’ll hear a no. It’s not inexperience — not with the expert way she works Helen’s nipples while pressing her thigh into the one spot Helen really needs her. It’s not a lack of desire either, if Carol’s continued moans are anything to go off, constantly vibrating against wherever Carol’s mouth is on her skin. Still, there’s a hesitancy there.
“Are you okay?” Helen asks, pulling herself back. Carol’s hands go still while cool air rudely rushes in between them, and Helen has to steady herself with a long, shaky breath as the sensations fade. “We can stop here if you want?”
When she meets Carol’s gaze, she finds her expression horrified.
“No?” she asks, holding back a laugh.
“No.” Carol says decidedly. She tightens her grip on Helen’s waist, and Helen smiles as she moves to straddle Carol’s lap, taking her hand and opening two of Carol’s fingers out, holding them in place as she eases herself onto them.
“Is that okay?” she asks, rocking back and forth a little on Carol’s fingers, enjoying the slight stretch while she adjusts to the feeling.
Carol’s jaw is hanging slack, and she stares up at Helen like she’s the sun. She doesn’t reply in words, just a shaky nod and a long, low moan as she holds her fingers steady and lets Helen fuck herself on them. When she’s ready she adds a third, grazes at Helen’s clit with her thumb, and then it’s not long before Helen’s tumbling over the edge and clutching onto Carol’s shoulders like her life depends on it, and it really might, because it’s ridiculous and it’s all too soon but the thought of not being able to do this again is already one that horrifies her.
Afterwards, Helen feels herself laid down clumsily onto the mattress. It’s only as her breathing steadies that she becomes aware of Carol watching, seemingly frozen in place, and so she rolls onto her side and pulls Carol’s arm around her. She half expects a fuss, half expects Carol to turn back into a pumpkin at any moment, but she just molds herself against Helen and lets out a contented hum right at the back of her neck, and it feels warm as it ripples all the way down her spine.
The next story Helen writes is about a porcupine. By the time it’s finished, Carol is a permanent enough fixture in her bed that she can pass the pages to her one evening, and they read together in the quiet. Carol says she likes it, says she wants to steal Helen’s head for character and implant it in her own description-addled brain. Either she doesn’t pick up on the parallel, or she’s too polite to say, and Helen’s not sure she’s ever been too polite to say anything in her life.
Helen fucks her that night, one hand buried inside her and the other pressed over her mouth and nose, trying to stifle her moans before the neighbors start knocking on the wall, and when Carol comes apart, whimpering and writhing atop the sheets, Helen understands all over again just how precious a thing she holds in her hands. She kisses her porcupine on the back of her head and holds her until brassy sunlight slips through the cracks in the blinds, turning all her quills to gold.