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thejusticelounge2012-02-29 05:23 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2012-02-29 05:23 pm
never enter a mine without one
Whoever wanted to have a room on the Watchtower was allowed one — god knew there was more than enough space on the floating tin can — and it wasn’t like Ollie’d never been in Dinah’s. But staring at the sliding metal door with her name on it, the room looked like an impenetrable bulwark.
He was being stupid. This was just the woman he’d known for years and loved for the better part of them. What was there to be nervous about? Well, apart from everything.
She opened the door for him when he buzzed in to ID himself, and watched, standing against her desk and hugging herself, as he came in and sat down on her bed.
“Dinah,” he said. “I guess we need to talk. Properly.”
She nodded, sighing. “Yeah… I’d like that.” More than a little uncomfortable at the awkwardness between them, Dinah unfolded her arms, clasping them, before feeling stupid for that too. She moved quickly to the bed next to him, but she couldn’t yet meet his eyes. “Heh, it was always easier when we’d just ignore the talking part and get down to the action, huh?”
He grinned. There had been a split second when he’d considered whether or not sitting on Dinah’s bed would bring up the idea of a more horizontal conversation, and as usual, when it came to the physical stuff they were still on the same wavelength. But —
“When did we ever do anything easy, Pretty Bird?” The old pet name slipped out before he could stop it and they both went tense. Well, tenser. Dinah’s pretty eyelashes were fluttering like moths and Ollie felt their butterfly cousins were doing a jig and reel in his stomach.
“Okay,” he said. He turned on the bed so he could face her, taking her hands as she did the same. “Enough with all the weirdness and stepping easy. Neither of us is made of eggshells, right? Here —” he leaned in and wrapped his arms around her, digging his fingertips in under her shoulderblades the way he knew she liked. “No sense acting like we’re not more used to this, either.”
His touch wasn’t sexual, just familiar, and Ollie took the little sighing mmrff noise that Dinah made to be from her muscles relaxing, going smooth and warm under his fingers. She was stiff as hell.
And just like always, with one touch, she melted into his arms. If she didn’t feel that good from it, Dinah would have cursed herself for making it this easy… But she missed him, missed this. “Well, I’m not made of eggshells… not so sure about you yet.” She lightly poked his chest. After a moment, she met his eyes again. “Damn it, Oliver. Why can’t we just… get this right? What’s stopping us? Your ego? My pride? Both… I mean, there has to be a reason we keep getting back together after all these fights. Something we see in each other, right?”
“You can’t resist a challenge?” The weak joke didn’t get even a flicker of a smile from her. Not that Ollie could blame her; it was a shitty thing to do, reduce what they’d had … all that time, all that intimacy, all that friendship … to a flip remark. She — they both — deserved more than that. He regretted it as soon as he said it.
Sitting back and planting both feet back on the floor, he took a moment to think. To steel himself. To come to a solid, real conclusion instead of a stewpot of confusion and hope and resentment and fear.
“Dinah,” he finally said in a low voice. He trained his gaze on his clasped hands, propped between his spread knees. “I don’t think right now I can … promise you anything. I can’t do that to you.”
“Yeah, I know…” She tucked her head closer to his chest, his heart thumping rhythmically against her ear. She could hear every inhale and exhale and feel his warmth seeping through her cheek.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t have time. In fact, she had even more time than him to wait, so she let that thought calm her enough that she could pull back. She leaned back on the bed, propped up on her elbows.
“So no promises… Just two people who… care about each other a lot. So what now?”
He glanced back at her, twisting his fingers together. “I don’t know, Dinah. The last thing I want right now is to start something with you and then fuck it up. Not with … Connor and Mia, and everything.” Sighing, Ollie flung himself backwards, propping himself up with one elbow to regard her. “Too bad we’re kind of past the option of ‘friends with benefits’, huh?
‘Are we though?’ She wanted to ask, but couldn’t form the words. She knew they couldn’t stay flirting with each other with nothing between them. On the other hand, Oliver wasn’t at a point where he was ready for something permanent. So either they denied what was there, until they did something stupid, or find a happy medium.
“Forget what you can or can’t do right now. Forget Connor and Mia for just this moment… And tell me what you want. Tell me what you want to do, or not do, Ollie.” She tried to put all the love and acceptance for whatever his answer was into her eyes.
Jesus. He was already having a hard time keeping it together, and now here Dinah was giving him that look, that look, the one that was forthright and melting and encouraging all at once, and Ollie did the only thing he wanted to right at that moment. He put his hand to the back of her head and brought them crashing together, her body coming willingly to meet his, mouth warm and open as he rolled her onto her back. The taste of her … fuck, it did things to him.
Dinah groaned, tilting her head back while simultaneously fisting her hands in Ollie’s hair. Her tongue pushed against his, sliding back to dance with his. Slowly, she released his hair, letting her hands wander lower, across his muscular back and down to grab at his ass. She swallowed the laugh that escaped his throat. God, how she’d missed this.
Ollie nipped at Dinah’s chin on the way down to kissing her neck, her collarbone, her breasts, as he laid her clothes open like Christmas wrapping. Back in the day before they’d gotten together, his main jerk-off fantasties about Black Canary had involved unzipping leather and tearing into fishnets, but this was what he liked better. Dinah in jeans or tights or shorts, button-up shirts and old cut-up sweatshirts and soft jerseys, not the black leather stuff that every other yahoo with a box of tissue and the late night news got off to.
He cupped one of her breasts with his hand, stroking her nipple, as he slid the other hand between them and down into her panties. It was mildly awkward, but the kind of awkward Ollie liked, the kind that sex was all about. Fitting together in puzzle pieces. That noise Dinah made, low and stuttered as he pressed his thumb between her legs to feel how wet she was? That was what he’d been missing. That noise went straight to his dick. He dropped his head between her breasts, inhaling the rising warm damp smell of her skin.
Dinah couldn’t lift her hips up far enough to meet his hand. What was only several months apart, seemed like way too long for this. Her hands clawed at his shirt, trying to pull it up over his body but his arms were in the way.
She gasped, stopping her movements when his fingers slipped further inside her. “Aahn,” she whimpered as he moved them. Her breathing became shallow, her toes curling. “O-Ollie… Fuck!”
“mmmmm, that’s my girl.” He twisted his fingers, watching Dinah’s skin flush pink as her hands roamed over his body, sliding up under his shirt to briefly rake her fingernails along his sides, finally settling on his hips to grab him closer to her. Ollie gasped as his cock (already straining in his jeans) bumped hard against Dinah’s spread legs.
“All right — Dinah, jesus, gimme a chance here, honey —” he pulled his hand out from her panties, unbuckled, unzipped, stuck out his tongue right back at her when she gave a happy, incredulous laugh at realizing he actually was carrying a condom with him, kissed her hard just once, then pressed his nose against the side of her throat as he pushed into her. She made a noise Maybe he did. He probably did. It was hard to keep track in all that blood-hot sweat-sticky euphoria.
Her body tensed up beneath him. “AH FUCK, OLLIE!” Dinah planted her feet on the bed, lifting her hips into every thrust. She clung to his shirt, pulling enough of it towards her to bite down. Dinah took a few deep breaths to calm down. There was no sense in screaming at Ollie.
When she was calmed down a little, she wrapped herself more around him, her lips pressed against his ear for every moan and cry. His thrusts became more sporadic, but he hit the mark every time. Dinah’s head fell back in a choked moan as she came around him.
… And here was Dinah coming apart, the clutching spasms of her orgasm sending Ollie over the edge too (and man, that was one of the really really really good things about knowing how fucking worked for her, just as well as he knew how to get himself off). She was gasping against the side of his face, her panting mouth dragging damp circles along his skin as he pressed his thumb against her clit and sank all the way into her, holding it, grinding out every last shudder and throb and jolt of sensation.
They sprawled in the cooling, slowing heartbeat aftermath for a while, sticking to each other in the places they touched, reluctant to pull apart. When they finally dealt with the cleanup and came back to Dinah’s bed, sleepy and softened, Ollie was starting to feel panic nibbling at the edges of his conscience. Goddammit. Wasn’t this always his downfall?
It had been too long for her, but now things were just beginning to feel right again… Except for the tension she felt in Ollie as he held her. She knew that feeling all too well. “Stay if you want, leave if you don’t.” She didn’t want him to, but she’d agreed to no promises. If Dinah ever wanted this to happen again, she couldn’t push him.
Dinah rolled away from him, pulling the blankets up around her shoulders. She’d try to get some sleep, even if she could feel him getting up off the bed. She wouldn’t cry. Not anymore.
Cold air rushed in between them as Dinah turned, taking most of the blankets with her. It was such a familiar move; Ollie tended to run hot, especially at night, and since he’d stick his feet and arms out of the covers Dinah would help herself to most of them. The old stirrings rose up in him again, that sureness and familiarity, that feeling of waking up with somebody beside you and knowing that you’d go to sleep with them back in their place again. He almost, almost let it pull him back in.
But things couldn’t be like that, he knew. Relationships for Ollie Queen inevetably meant an expiry date, and if he wanted to ever change that, change himself, he needed time to shake it all down and sort it back out again.
Ollie got up and got dressed, already switching his focus to the project he’d been concocting; he needed some advice, run it past somebody who’d have a good grip on this kind of thing, and that Kate Spencer seemed like just the ticket. He’d go see her later and maybe they could get this thing off the ground together.
He paused after tugging on his shirt, knowing from Dinah’s slow regular breaths that she was still awake. “There’s nobody like you, Pretty Bird. No matter how this ends up.”
Dinah’s door slid shut behind him with barely a sound.
He was being stupid. This was just the woman he’d known for years and loved for the better part of them. What was there to be nervous about? Well, apart from everything.
She opened the door for him when he buzzed in to ID himself, and watched, standing against her desk and hugging herself, as he came in and sat down on her bed.
“Dinah,” he said. “I guess we need to talk. Properly.”
She nodded, sighing. “Yeah… I’d like that.” More than a little uncomfortable at the awkwardness between them, Dinah unfolded her arms, clasping them, before feeling stupid for that too. She moved quickly to the bed next to him, but she couldn’t yet meet his eyes. “Heh, it was always easier when we’d just ignore the talking part and get down to the action, huh?”
He grinned. There had been a split second when he’d considered whether or not sitting on Dinah’s bed would bring up the idea of a more horizontal conversation, and as usual, when it came to the physical stuff they were still on the same wavelength. But —
“When did we ever do anything easy, Pretty Bird?” The old pet name slipped out before he could stop it and they both went tense. Well, tenser. Dinah’s pretty eyelashes were fluttering like moths and Ollie felt their butterfly cousins were doing a jig and reel in his stomach.
“Okay,” he said. He turned on the bed so he could face her, taking her hands as she did the same. “Enough with all the weirdness and stepping easy. Neither of us is made of eggshells, right? Here —” he leaned in and wrapped his arms around her, digging his fingertips in under her shoulderblades the way he knew she liked. “No sense acting like we’re not more used to this, either.”
His touch wasn’t sexual, just familiar, and Ollie took the little sighing mmrff noise that Dinah made to be from her muscles relaxing, going smooth and warm under his fingers. She was stiff as hell.
And just like always, with one touch, she melted into his arms. If she didn’t feel that good from it, Dinah would have cursed herself for making it this easy… But she missed him, missed this. “Well, I’m not made of eggshells… not so sure about you yet.” She lightly poked his chest. After a moment, she met his eyes again. “Damn it, Oliver. Why can’t we just… get this right? What’s stopping us? Your ego? My pride? Both… I mean, there has to be a reason we keep getting back together after all these fights. Something we see in each other, right?”
“You can’t resist a challenge?” The weak joke didn’t get even a flicker of a smile from her. Not that Ollie could blame her; it was a shitty thing to do, reduce what they’d had … all that time, all that intimacy, all that friendship … to a flip remark. She — they both — deserved more than that. He regretted it as soon as he said it.
Sitting back and planting both feet back on the floor, he took a moment to think. To steel himself. To come to a solid, real conclusion instead of a stewpot of confusion and hope and resentment and fear.
“Dinah,” he finally said in a low voice. He trained his gaze on his clasped hands, propped between his spread knees. “I don’t think right now I can … promise you anything. I can’t do that to you.”
“Yeah, I know…” She tucked her head closer to his chest, his heart thumping rhythmically against her ear. She could hear every inhale and exhale and feel his warmth seeping through her cheek.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t have time. In fact, she had even more time than him to wait, so she let that thought calm her enough that she could pull back. She leaned back on the bed, propped up on her elbows.
“So no promises… Just two people who… care about each other a lot. So what now?”
He glanced back at her, twisting his fingers together. “I don’t know, Dinah. The last thing I want right now is to start something with you and then fuck it up. Not with … Connor and Mia, and everything.” Sighing, Ollie flung himself backwards, propping himself up with one elbow to regard her. “Too bad we’re kind of past the option of ‘friends with benefits’, huh?
‘Are we though?’ She wanted to ask, but couldn’t form the words. She knew they couldn’t stay flirting with each other with nothing between them. On the other hand, Oliver wasn’t at a point where he was ready for something permanent. So either they denied what was there, until they did something stupid, or find a happy medium.
“Forget what you can or can’t do right now. Forget Connor and Mia for just this moment… And tell me what you want. Tell me what you want to do, or not do, Ollie.” She tried to put all the love and acceptance for whatever his answer was into her eyes.
Jesus. He was already having a hard time keeping it together, and now here Dinah was giving him that look, that look, the one that was forthright and melting and encouraging all at once, and Ollie did the only thing he wanted to right at that moment. He put his hand to the back of her head and brought them crashing together, her body coming willingly to meet his, mouth warm and open as he rolled her onto her back. The taste of her … fuck, it did things to him.
Dinah groaned, tilting her head back while simultaneously fisting her hands in Ollie’s hair. Her tongue pushed against his, sliding back to dance with his. Slowly, she released his hair, letting her hands wander lower, across his muscular back and down to grab at his ass. She swallowed the laugh that escaped his throat. God, how she’d missed this.
Ollie nipped at Dinah’s chin on the way down to kissing her neck, her collarbone, her breasts, as he laid her clothes open like Christmas wrapping. Back in the day before they’d gotten together, his main jerk-off fantasties about Black Canary had involved unzipping leather and tearing into fishnets, but this was what he liked better. Dinah in jeans or tights or shorts, button-up shirts and old cut-up sweatshirts and soft jerseys, not the black leather stuff that every other yahoo with a box of tissue and the late night news got off to.
He cupped one of her breasts with his hand, stroking her nipple, as he slid the other hand between them and down into her panties. It was mildly awkward, but the kind of awkward Ollie liked, the kind that sex was all about. Fitting together in puzzle pieces. That noise Dinah made, low and stuttered as he pressed his thumb between her legs to feel how wet she was? That was what he’d been missing. That noise went straight to his dick. He dropped his head between her breasts, inhaling the rising warm damp smell of her skin.
Dinah couldn’t lift her hips up far enough to meet his hand. What was only several months apart, seemed like way too long for this. Her hands clawed at his shirt, trying to pull it up over his body but his arms were in the way.
She gasped, stopping her movements when his fingers slipped further inside her. “Aahn,” she whimpered as he moved them. Her breathing became shallow, her toes curling. “O-Ollie… Fuck!”
“mmmmm, that’s my girl.” He twisted his fingers, watching Dinah’s skin flush pink as her hands roamed over his body, sliding up under his shirt to briefly rake her fingernails along his sides, finally settling on his hips to grab him closer to her. Ollie gasped as his cock (already straining in his jeans) bumped hard against Dinah’s spread legs.
“All right — Dinah, jesus, gimme a chance here, honey —” he pulled his hand out from her panties, unbuckled, unzipped, stuck out his tongue right back at her when she gave a happy, incredulous laugh at realizing he actually was carrying a condom with him, kissed her hard just once, then pressed his nose against the side of her throat as he pushed into her. She made a noise Maybe he did. He probably did. It was hard to keep track in all that blood-hot sweat-sticky euphoria.
Her body tensed up beneath him. “AH FUCK, OLLIE!” Dinah planted her feet on the bed, lifting her hips into every thrust. She clung to his shirt, pulling enough of it towards her to bite down. Dinah took a few deep breaths to calm down. There was no sense in screaming at Ollie.
When she was calmed down a little, she wrapped herself more around him, her lips pressed against his ear for every moan and cry. His thrusts became more sporadic, but he hit the mark every time. Dinah’s head fell back in a choked moan as she came around him.
… And here was Dinah coming apart, the clutching spasms of her orgasm sending Ollie over the edge too (and man, that was one of the really really really good things about knowing how fucking worked for her, just as well as he knew how to get himself off). She was gasping against the side of his face, her panting mouth dragging damp circles along his skin as he pressed his thumb against her clit and sank all the way into her, holding it, grinding out every last shudder and throb and jolt of sensation.
They sprawled in the cooling, slowing heartbeat aftermath for a while, sticking to each other in the places they touched, reluctant to pull apart. When they finally dealt with the cleanup and came back to Dinah’s bed, sleepy and softened, Ollie was starting to feel panic nibbling at the edges of his conscience. Goddammit. Wasn’t this always his downfall?
It had been too long for her, but now things were just beginning to feel right again… Except for the tension she felt in Ollie as he held her. She knew that feeling all too well. “Stay if you want, leave if you don’t.” She didn’t want him to, but she’d agreed to no promises. If Dinah ever wanted this to happen again, she couldn’t push him.
Dinah rolled away from him, pulling the blankets up around her shoulders. She’d try to get some sleep, even if she could feel him getting up off the bed. She wouldn’t cry. Not anymore.
Cold air rushed in between them as Dinah turned, taking most of the blankets with her. It was such a familiar move; Ollie tended to run hot, especially at night, and since he’d stick his feet and arms out of the covers Dinah would help herself to most of them. The old stirrings rose up in him again, that sureness and familiarity, that feeling of waking up with somebody beside you and knowing that you’d go to sleep with them back in their place again. He almost, almost let it pull him back in.
But things couldn’t be like that, he knew. Relationships for Ollie Queen inevetably meant an expiry date, and if he wanted to ever change that, change himself, he needed time to shake it all down and sort it back out again.
Ollie got up and got dressed, already switching his focus to the project he’d been concocting; he needed some advice, run it past somebody who’d have a good grip on this kind of thing, and that Kate Spencer seemed like just the ticket. He’d go see her later and maybe they could get this thing off the ground together.
He paused after tugging on his shirt, knowing from Dinah’s slow regular breaths that she was still awake. “There’s nobody like you, Pretty Bird. No matter how this ends up.”
Dinah’s door slid shut behind him with barely a sound.