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After a Wedding

Summary:

Someone got married today. Not Sansa. It's not remotely like that between her and Jon. They're a secret at her insistence. Still hasn't stopped her from showing up outside his door when he could very well have someone else inside.

Notes:

This is a prequel to "At a Funeral," a fic I wrote way back in June 2014. I'd always had this idea bouncing around my brain and decided to finally give it life. It's not strictly necessary to read both fics. This one and the other stand on their own. But they now exist here in a series, "the dance you did but scorn." The series title is taken from a nursery rhyme about weddings and funerals.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

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Sansa shouldn’t have come here. This is the very kind of pathetic she’s been avoiding since Petyr. It’s why she’s called all the shots and made all the unspoken rules about how this would go between her and Jon.

But she also can’t keep standing in the hall of his apartment in this trench and satin slip. It’s late, but the thought of one of his neighbors seeing her here like this brings her fist up to the door.

Three knocks, and then, she counts twice that without any answering sound from the other side. She feels every passing second in a sickening stretch. Maybe he’s not here. Might be he went home with one of those pretty bridesmaids she told him to dance with. Jon’s never made her feel insecure about their arrangement. He’s never given her reason to spiral. She’s done this to herself.

It’s been almost ten minutes since her text on the ride over. Last she checked, he hadn’t read it.

Her stomach flips. His hall always smells like cigarettes and weed. He’s got delinquent neighbors down the way. The smell is nauseating—that’s what this stomach-churning feeling is. That one reed skinny one would love to catch her here. Seems like a pervert. Looking sideways down the artificially lit hall, her skin prickles. She’s had enough of that for a lifetime.

Could be Jon brought a bridesmaid home, and here she is shifting on her heels in his hall about to ruin his night by showing up unannounced like a crazy person. He’s busy. Busy busy. Which is why he isn’t checking his phone for late-night messages from the girl he’s been hooking up with.

Tucking one wayward strand of hair behind her ear, she looks up at the peephole and back down just as quickly. Her hand drops to the pocket bulging with her phone, keys, and the pepper spray she grabbed in case it proved to be a monumentally bad idea to leave her apartment dressed like this.

Even if she doesn’t end up being catcalled at midnight alone, it was still a bad idea. Born of lingering self-doubt she’s tried to patch over with bravado and carefully established boundaries.

He never sleeps at her place. Ever.

She doesn’t call him back if she doesn’t catch it the first time.

Short texts only, and while flirty ones can be sent quickly, the other ones she waits a while to respond to. Because she’s busy sometimes. Even when she’s not.

She’s not always available.

She hasn’t deleted her online dating profile. He probably wouldn’t think to check, but if he did, it’s there.

He’s sweet, but she doesn’t praise him for it. Not too much.

She doesn’t do things for him. Doesn’t surprise him with cookies or offer to do his laundry. No errands. He’s not her boyfriend; she’s not his Tri-Delt dutiful girlfriend.

She doesn’t give him head, because no one is ever going to push on her head again.

She doesn’t say I love you.

Because she doesn’t. Even if she’s known Jon forever. It’s not what she would have expected from her brother’s best friend, but that’s what makes the sex so good and talking to him strangely easy—for all her boundaries, he’s the only one who knows about what happened with Joff. But it’s friendly what they have going on, it’s easy, it’s not love.

Besides, it’s better if a guy feels a little unbalanced. It’s a lot safer if he likes you more than you like him. She’s felt kind of powerful in the dynamic she has with Jon, which after what she’s been through, has been a real bonus. But tonight, she’s made herself weak. Despite all her boundaries and rules and her edge over him, she cried in the bathtub, imagining Alys Karstark pulling his face down to hers at that damn wedding.

Sansa doesn’t know for sure that Jon hooked up with her in college. But Robb’s made jokes in front of her about Alys that turned Jon’s ears red. Sansa can do the math.

Another two knocks—louder.

Bobbling, she crosses one foot over the other and brings her manicured nails up to her mouth. She taps her teeth. The heels she’s wearing are ridiculous.

It better not be Alys he’s fucking. Alys looks too much like Arya for it to be funny. Although, that’s the punchline of Robb’s joke: must be Jon holding a torch for Robb’s little sister, for their little sister, for him to go after Alys. Says it to make Jon squirm.

He always was really fond of her sister. Everyone in the family is more than aware of that. With them all being grown, if her mother uncovered something going on between Jon and Arya, she wouldn’t be surprised. It’d be inevitable in some ways.

No one, however, would ever say that he was super fond of Sansa. For the bulk of their acquaintance, they just existed in the same orbit, planets sharing a path that finely collided. Not even explosively. What they’ve got going on is like therapy without the bill. It’s affirming, fun. It’s not this pulse-strumming, racing up in her throat sort of feeling.

Still, the scratch of the chain on the door makes her jump. Teetering on her heels, she blinks at the peephole. He’s got to have seen her, and she didn’t think to compose herself. Too late she uncrosses her legs and drops her hand.

The lock clicks. The knob turns.

Jon.

He looks confused, not aggravated. Thrown? He’s still in his suit pants, and they’re rumpled. Curls eschew. Tie gone.

The bands around her heart make it hard to ask. “Am I interrupting?”

His hand slides down the door frame, paralleling the downward angle of his brows. “What time is it?” His sleep-roughened voice makes her toes instinctually curl, as he opens the door wide. “You all right?”

“Do you have someone over?”

The question bleeds out of her, high and strained, as her attention shifts to the sliver of his apartment showing behind his shoulder.

“What?” he asks, granting her entry with a backward step. His attention follows hers and then fixes back on her, settling on the hem of her trench and slowly dragging back up. “What are you wearing?”

It’s not coat weather. It’s hot and humid and hasn’t rained in a month. She looks as ridiculous as the opening premise of an old-school porno, as she steps through his door. It’s not her thing.

“Nothing.”

That’s about the truth.

He’s only just closed the door behind her with a rattling shove when he reaches for her. His fingers pluck at her lapel, peeling it back more than an inch, and seeing nothing but flesh, he swears.

“You weren’t kidding.”

Her heart climbs.

“Fuck,” he swears again, hand sliding over her ribcage, pulling the coat apart. His hand skates over her, pebbling her skin, until he meets the top scoop of the pale satin slip hidden underneath and loops a finger under the spaghetti strap. With a crook of his finger, he gives it a little tug. “Sweetheart.”

There’s a roundness to his speech. Appreciation. Like he’s got a mouth full of champagne he wants to swallow.

That should be enough to slow her galloping heart. It’s not.

Her eyes dart around him to the kitchen bar counter. There’s a beer bottle, uncapped. The lights are on.

There were other girls with Joff. He joked that Sansa should join them when she walked in that one time. It might not have been a joke. But she had more dignity than that. Not much. He’d made sure of that.

She’s afraid he’s done something that will hurt her, and yet, she wants to pet him, wants to feel his messy curls sliding through her fingers. He’s sleepy and confused and wants her. It’s almost enough to make her forget and forgive whatever she opened the door for him doing tonight.

She loops her arms up and around his neck. “You’re in your dress clothes.”

His head bows for her, always easily going where she directs. Her fingertips follow his collar, trailing the heated skin of his neck until they reach where the top button has been undone. They curl, dipping into the notch of his neck to thumb the pearly button. With his full lip caught between his teeth, he hooks his hand under her belt. Toying, he rocks her on her heels with a gentle push and pull.

“Guess I passed out on the couch,” he says, giving her knotted belt a firmer tug that rocks her right up into him.

She catches herself, hand splaying against the flat of his chest. It forces a sharp smile from her that he catches with a soft press of his lips to the corner of her mouth.

He’s warm. Her nails skim the cotton of his shirt. It’s starched and noisy with it. The bride wanted them all in grey. Jon looks good in grey. Matches those bedroom eyes of his that rove over her as his thumb arcs over her waist.

“You look nice.”

Buttoned up he probably looked handsome. All undone, he looks like sex. He might have shed the coat and tie to dance, and then, looked like fucking sex while dancing with girls just like she teased him he should.

“I probably smell like Bud Light,” he says, nosing at her cheek, as her breath starts to come in soft puffs, anticipating his kiss. “Let’s talk about what you’re wearing.”

“You wanna talk?”

“Come here,” he says, fingers digging into her hip as his mouth blessedly finds hers.

Their first kiss was a revelation. So lovely and gut-churningly good that it felt like confirmation she’d been kissing all the wrong people. Which is madness. She hasn’t allowed herself to think about it that way since.

If you’re too fond of something, losing it is so much worse.

The swoop of pain, the one that still sneaks up on her when she’s quiet, threatens to unseat the reassuring pleasure of his soft kisses and the swipe of his tongue, dragging over hers. To overwhelm the bad, bury it back under the warmth he stirs in her, she bites his lip, drawing that good sound from him, the low one that she’s grown intimately familiar with over the past few months.

Joff was so callous when her daddy died. It was like he didn’t even care. But at least she walked out, realizing for once and for all what she was settling for, what she didn’t deserve no matter how many faults he could find in her to justify the way he treated her.

Other people said they were sorry when they broke up. Even the ones she knew didn’t care for him said it was too bad it didn’t work out or they hoped she was okay, assuming she felt loss over the whole thing, no matter how distasteful they found him personally.

Jon congratulated her. Good job. She closed herself up in the half-bath of her parent’s house right after and cried into a decorative hand towel. Good tears, relieved tears because someone saw, and he didn’t even know then about the things Joff did to her behind closed doors. Once he did, he offered to rearrange Joff’s face. Well, first he got really quiet, and then he said he’d fix his face for him. One of his sweeter gestures even if she couldn’t take him up on it.

He doesn’t smell like someone who would beat up your ex for you. Jon smells like Creed Aventus, worn off but lingering. He smells like a million bucks. Expensive taste despite the despicable neighbors and his overall minimalist needs. Rich uninvolved dad, Jon calls him Rhaegar.

Her chest hitches at the hot press of his kiss. He doesn’t smell like it, but he tastes like Bud.

He’s drunk. Or he was a couple of hours ago. At least a little.

She tips her head up, breaking the pull of his kiss that has her chest rising and falling. “Had fun?” she asks with a gasp, as his hand slides down over her ass.

He squeezes and her eyes flutter closed. “Sure. It was fine.”

She was not invited. The groom was a college buddy of Jon and Robb’s, so there’s no reason she would have been invited. Even if she had, it would have been weird if she and Jon had done much more than say hi to each other. They were never good friends, and now they’re a secret.

Secrecy saves this from complications, avoids unnecessary comments from her friends or his and her family, and it’s kind of hot too, sneaking around.

Until it’s not.

She was never going to this wedding with him. Never leaving with him either. That’s how this all got started to begin with, her and him—a shared ride, a few drinks, a short skirt, and those nice hands of his pushing her hem higher.

“Take this off,” he says, running his hand down her arm. His fingers encircle her wrist, so they overlap, and he lifts her arm up and away from her body. “Let me look at you.”

She complies. For all her rules and boundaries, he leads when they’re like this. She likes the feeling of him taking control, so she nods, and he ducks back in to kiss her once before letting her go. She picks at the knot, doing as she’s told.

It’s just a nude slip. Something she wears under flimsy summer sundresses that otherwise would show too much leg when the light is right. Not lingerie meant to titillate. She doesn’t have anything quite like that, although she has some matching sets he appreciates before he removes them with deft hands. One hand to unlatch a bra. One hand slipped inside her panties to make her come. He’s good with his hands.

It might be utilitarian, but he’s got that half smile she loves tugging at the corner of his mouth, as she drops one shoulder on her coat and then another and then lets it fall. Her phone and keys thud and she winces.

“Whoops,” she says on a bubble of a laugh, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“God,” he drawls, rocking her into his pelvis with that wide-spread hand palming her ass. “What’s got into you?”

Her cheeks flame.

Nothing sexy.

Jealousy, fear, a fraying grasp on the storyline.

How does it go? This is fun. It’s easy. She’s in charge, and Jon would never hurt her. He wouldn’t and she won’t let him.

But she encouraged and nursed this worry, she gave it life with her teasing. Dance with the prettiest one, she said, asking to be hurt, while pretending she wouldn’t mind. A night of anxiety-driven what-ifs and she knows: it would do more than sting if she discovered he wasn’t alone. It wouldn’t just be embarrassing. It would be worse than that. She’s losing her grip on this.

“There wasn’t some hot bridesmaid you wanted to bring home?” she says, her stupid mouth refusing to shut up.

Practically for reassurance.

The confusion on his handsome face is briefly obscured by the hand he runs over his mouth. His stubble rasps against his palm. Even if he shaved before the ceremony, it grows in quickly. Rubs her pink in delicate places.

“Are you drunk, sweetheart?”

“No.” Just one little glass of wine. Enough to start the tears. “You’re the one I’m worried about,” she says, trying for a smile, “performance-wise.”

For a beat, she’s worried he sees right through her. There’s something soft and searching in his gaze that makes her feel out of control, exposed and raw, but then he bends and his mouth is hot against her ear. “I’m not that drunk.”

He isn’t. It certainly doesn’t feel like he is when he hoists her up. Over her ass, around her thighs, his hands move purposefully, and for a moment, she just lets the feeling of him hard against her center sink in with her legs wrapped around him. It’s weirdly comforting. He wants her. He needs her like this.

She dips her forehead to his.

Not too drunk to carry her to his bedroom either, not even with his mouth busy moving over her neck, warmly pulling at her pulse. Sideways through the bedroom door, without fumbling over the threshold, he carries her to the bed.

It’s made. It always is. Jon’s particular about certain things. So many single guys his age are still hopeless.

It makes sleeping here nice. So does how he runs the water in the shower until it's warm for her in the morning. He’s got a bottle of her shampoo on the tiled shelf. Always has condoms and puts the right amount of sugar in her coffee, which is always waiting for her when she climbs out of the shower wrapped in one of his massive towels. He’s thoughtful.

She said something offhand to her mama about it. You know who’s surprisingly thoughtful? Jon Snow.

Raised by a single mom—that was her mama’s response. She wasn’t surprised apparently. She also couldn’t imagine a world where her daughter would be sneaking around with anyone, much less Jon, so Sansa broaching the topic of his unexpected qualities didn’t even raise any questions.

He could be thoughtful for some other girl, and it wouldn’t strictly be a betrayal. They’re not a thing. They’re just messing around. That’s all it is, all it’ll ever be. She’s said it enough to herself to know.

Still, when she kicks her heels off and works herself back on the bed, so her slip bunches around her hips, the look he gives her is absolutely possessive. She knows what that look heralds, as she smiles back at him, reaching. Her hands go to his buckle, as he crawls over her, a warm feeling unfurling in her belly. The clink of the buckle, as she yanks on the leather, floods her mouth.

“Off,” she commands. “Your shirt.”

He is, however, too drunk to unbutton his shirt one-handed while balancing himself over her. Especially when she gets his fly down and wraps a hand around him inside his boxers, pulling his attention to the lazy stroke of her hand. A lovely curl falls in front of his face, as he cranes his head to watch with a sibilant curse.

“I’m so damn glad you showed up,” he says, collapsing heavily onto his forearm.

The weight of him feels good, teasing where she needs him, but he’s got too many clothes on for what she wants.

“Me too. Now off,” she repeats with more urgency.

She wants to feel his skin against hers. Wants to feel the ridge of his muscles under the press of her thumb and the nip of her teeth.

He looks up, mouth parting.

“Take your shirt off, Jon.”

“Shit, fuck, let loose then, sweetheart,” he says, pushing back his hair.

That’s the real loss—saying goodbye to him hot in her hand and that pleasant pressure when he flops on his back with a sigh to follow her directive. His tongue peeks between his teeth, concentrating. He is drunk a little still. It’s fine. She wants to be on top anyway.

Some other girl would be thoughtful right back. Even if she wasn’t his girlfriend. Even if she was some girl he’d picked up after too many drinks at a bar with her brother and Theon. Theon is always trying to get everyone laid.

It’s an oily feeling.

She hauls herself up to straddle his thighs and hovering over him, she tugs, attempting to drag his pants and boxers down just far enough in one go.

“You’re exactly what I wanted,” he says, fumbling with the last stubborn button, as his dark eyes lift to meet hers.

Her heart feels like it’s going out of rhythm. She swallows hard. “Yeah? I texted and you didn’t answer.”

“Didn’t hear it, I guess,” he says with a dangerously rough tug on his shirt.

She does it for him, and cocks a brow at him, as he grabs her thighs. His fingers press ovals into her flesh as they slide higher until his thumbs tease almost where she wants him. She didn’t bother with a thong. He’s right there. She knows how he’d feel rubbing over her.

She bats his hand away. “No.”

Not yet.

His brows arch as his arms stretch above his head, knuckles hitting the leather upholstered headboard. “Bossy. You’re in a mood.”

She drags a nail over his abdominal muscles to watch them contract. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

That smile. That almost smile. She feels it in her gut.

“I’ve been thinking about you too.”

When? The timing matters. It’s different, depending. At the wedding? After he got home?

And it shouldn’t matter to her.

There’s a siren in her head she wants to silence, as she hunches low enough to kiss his hip, fingers tugging one more time for good measure on those hopelessly wrinkled suit pants to get them down another inch. No farther than that: he can stay trapped in them. A little bit confined isn’t all bad.

“I’m here. What did you have in mind?” she asks, sliding him between her index and middle finger.

He’s hard against his stomach. A guy’s cock doesn’t make her mental list of top three important things, not even aesthetically important things. But he has a nice one. She appreciates it. Especially what he does with it and how everything goes quiet in her head when he’s inside her.

“Not like that.”

“I promise you’ll like this,” she says with another kiss.

“No, I mean. Like that, but—”

He curses, whatever nonsense he is about to say silenced by another kiss. She wraps a hand around him.

“You’re cute a little drunk and confused.”

“Cute?” he says, voice curling with amusement.

“Mmhmm,” she says, as her hand slides, teasingly light, until her thumb skims over his head.

She breathes within a hairsbreadth of him. His breath hitches. She senses it, all his amusement gone, as he twitches in her loose grip. She certainly has his attention. He hangs there, his body visibly tensed, waiting.

“I have fond memories of you drunk and a little uninhibited— In a cab?” she finishes, voicing lifting, between two soft wet kisses, as though her memories are a little fuzzy when really, they’re crystal clear.

He curses again, and she stops her light attentions. His hand brushes at her hair. It scoops out her belly, and she looks up.

It’s dark, but the light from the main living area filters through the half-open door. His eyes are glassy and wide, but his touch is light. He fiddles, fingers toying with the swoop of a lock of hair that wants to fall across her face.

He’s never aggressive. Gratifyingly intense though. Like there’s no room for him to think of anyone else when they’re together. Like he loves everything about what they’re doing, what she’s doing, and what she feels like. He tells her as much. He talks more than she would have expected. She’s usually reserved, while he’s all dirty compliments and sweetly filthy promises. A pretty reversal of what they’re like outside of bed and this little world she never expected to exist of flannel sheets and his hand stroking over her hair.

“I think about that a lot,” he says, voice already rough.

Maybe they’re both just busy thinking of each other. Sansa would have melted once, thinking like that. Judging by the flutter in her chest, she still does at least a little.

He always makes her feel so good. She wants him to feel just as good. They’re different and it’ll be okay.

Her tongue trails the underside of him. He twitches again and she closes her grip more tightly only to let loose again.

Sliding her hand down the length of him, her lips brush the tip of him just as lightly as his index finger traces the shell of her ear. His pelvis shifts and she leans into him with her forearm, pushing him into the mattress.

The skin by his hip is smooth, soft. She presses her thumb into the bone, following its arch. She’d like to crawl inside of him, carve out a place inside his chest. Sometimes it feels like there’s no way she can satisfy the need to be close to him.

Back down again, up, and around, less teasing with each slow stroke of her hand, it’s still more breath than anything. His fingers twine in her hair without force. He doesn’t pull, doesn’t push.

She didn’t need this boundary at all. Not with Jon.

“You’re so damn pretty. I could look at you all fucking day.”

“Like this?” she teases.

Whatever he was going to say, it’s strangled in his throat, when she takes him in her mouth and swirls her tongue over his head.

The flat of his stomach retreats in a hard pull. She twists her hand and sucks. The low sound he makes vibrates in his chest. She hums back.

He calls her his girl—that’s my girl—and maybe she is. Maybe she’s his and as good as he says between all those mumbled fucks. Such a good girl.

The way he talks always makes her squirm, but in this position, she can’t do anything to soothe the empty ache. All she can do is focus on him—his fingers on her scalp, the taste of him as her tongue lathes his head, the thickness of him in her hand.

He locks eyes with her, looking handsomely desperate with his chest rising and falling. A little drunk, not so confused anymore, and cranked up to a ten under her attentions, he’s definitely more than just cute to her. He’s the promise of something so deeply satisfying that it ought to belong in a different category than anything she’s experienced before.

Her mouth gives a wet pop. She smiles at him, biting her lower lip.

His fingers trail her scalp, and she bends again, kissing his hip to work her way back slowly. His groan draws another smile, one she presses right where her fingers loop low around him.

His hand flexes against her head, and then slides underneath her arm, softly tugging.

“Sansa, sweetheart, baby girl, come up here.”

“I won’t tease anymore,” she says, pressing a deceptively chaste kiss to the side of him. “Let me finish,” she says with a long lick. He huffs and shifts, sitting up and forcing her back on her heels. Her tongue chases the wetness on her lips with a swallow. “You don’t like it?”

A stab of anxiety makes her sound as pathetic as she felt in the hallway. All that confidence leaking out of her like a deflating balloon.

He cups her face. “Yeah, I like it. Too much.” His hands, such nice damn hands—make her feel small. He makes her feel small and safe with him. He kisses her sweet and slow, fingers spanning her jaw. “I like everything you do.” His arm belts around her back, pulling her square into his lap. “You keep doing that, you’re going to make me come in like two minutes.”

“Yeah?” she says, as he twists and yanks open his bedside table, hand fumbling for the box of condoms he keeps in there. “That’s okay though.”

Foreplay was her intention when she started, but if he liked it, he could come in her mouth. Whatever he wants. She bites her lip.

“I need hours.” A little frisson of pleasure zips up her spine at that. She rocks in his lap, and he holds her tighter with that arm wound around her back. “Slow down there. I’ve been thinking about you for hours,” he says, straightening up without bothering to close the drawer. “I’ve got plenty of notions and none of them end with you not getting off.”

He scissors a foil packet out of the ripped box with the fingers she likes so well on her and in her. He tosses the box on the bed. Condoms spill out in a silver arc. It’s going to look like a minor storm ripped through here.

Her lips quirk. “It’s a little late to start a marathon.”

They do sometimes, go to bed insanely early, just to fuck around for hours. She doesn’t know whether she likes those nights or the ones where he watches her dumb shows with her, rubbing her legs and feet, while she hides under the blanket he keeps in the coat closet before they ever start messing around.

“Even better reason to get to it then,” he says, fingertips making dimples in her ass. “I want to make you come.”

She takes the packet from his pinched fingers, as he bunches her slip in his fist. She takes the hint, lifting her arms. He disappears for a moment in a whisper of satin, and then it’s forgotten, thrown on the floor, all his tidy standards elapsed by his eagerness. His warm hand squares up against her back and presses her breasts into his chest.

She taps his clavicle with the condom, trying for unimpressed boredom despite how he’s insistently pressing into the slickness of her. “You could come first, you know. It wouldn’t kill you.”

His hand on her ass encourages her to rock.

Even that first time when she didn’t think she’d come at all—because what girl comes the first time when guys usually act like they need a treasure map?—she came first. Not by accident either. Jon’s determined as well as thoughtful.

“How do you know?” he says, rolling her hip into him.

With a purse of her lips, she tears the packet open and plucks it out. “Experience.”

Tortured anticipation twists his features as she rolls the condom down over him.

“The wrong kind,” he says, reversing their positions with the kind of display of his athleticism that always makes her heart swoop.

He was the catcher on his college baseball team, D1. It gave him nice legs, better than most, good arms too, and very quick reflexes. And he was a walk-on; he didn’t get slotted the way Robb did, because no one had ever given him the playing time he deserved in high school and the scouts overlooked him.

Determined.

He gets his pants off pretty handily too, as he shrugs out of his open shirt, adding to the growing pile on the floor.

“You’re ridiculous,” she just manages to get out before he takes himself in hand and he’s right there, spreading her legs with a hand on her thigh and one on himself, pushing into her in that slow sure way of his.

Ridiculous—because she’s right as always and he’s wrong—but perfect too.

Her hand floats up to pet his side. That warm feeling spreads through her chest, looking up at him framed in the ambient light.

He bottoms out in her, once, twice, hitting something good. Her head arcs back.

No one is perfect. Men especially. Still, he feels right for her. Like this and maybe other ways too.

“You’re so wet,” he says, voice coiling with pride.

She’ll let him have it. She can hear how right he is about that at least, which should be mortifying but isn’t with him. His hand fits into the back of her knee, drawing it up, as he slides in and out of her without any resistance.

Steady, unhurried, like he’s done this a million times, every night fucking her in his dark flannel sheets, he thrusts, bringing his body against her in a slow rub. And because he knows exactly what she needs, he slides his arm underneath her lower back, hauling her bowed body up into his. The angle changes, the rub of him intensifies, and she starts babbling.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.”

A litany, a prayer not fit for Sunday mass.

He shushes her gently, grabs her wrist, and pulls it high above her head. Stretching himself over her, he pins her in place. She whines his name, frantic with the thought he might change his glacial pace, which has her spiraling.

“I got you,” he tells her with his thumb pressing into her palm.

Her fingers spread, reaching for the anchor of the headboard. She pushes up and bares down on him, aching.

“I won’t stop,” he promises. His stubble scratches along her neck, dropping soft kisses along her neckline and jaw, up to the place below her ear that makes her leg pull up higher. “You know I take care of you,” he says, as his hand skates down her arm, over her chest, until his hand finds her breast and his thumb drags slowly around her nipple.

She grabs his bicep and squeezes hard for purchase, to ground herself. She arches up into him, mimicking the pace he’s set, deepening it with the rock of her hips.

“There you go,” he says just before the flat of his tongue licks up the slope of her breast.

His mouth closes wet and hot around her nipple. She loves his mouth. It’s obscene. She feels it in a throb where he’s thick and moving inside her. Her nails dig half-moons into the hard muscle of his bicep, whining as his teeth graze her.

He can’t stop. Her hand latches onto the back of his neck, holding him in place. She feels the puff of his laugh against her wet breast. And his tongue is back, dragging over her again and again.

Her fingernails scrape, dragging through where his dark hair is thick and dense. He likes that too. She knows he does, but just in case she wasn’t sure, his hips snap hard. It jars her teeth. It feels like she’s sinking through the pillow, through the mattress, like she’s turning to water under the assault of his steady thrusts. His pelvis hits her and his cock does the same, and if he stops she’s going to scream.

She can’t catch her breath.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he mouths against her. “You’re so close.”

She is. Her world is so small. Just his body and hers and everything spiraling tighter in a dark pull.

As Robb’s little sister, she unwittingly knew a silly amount about his best friend, Jon Snow—he was just always there. He probably did about her as well. Now he just knows how to make her come too. Every time. Like it’s easy.

Her eyes screw shut and her thighs grip him hard. They go numb. Her whole body goes numb as the wave knocks her out, tipping her chin up and making blood rush in her ears. And then euphoria. Leg shaking euphoria.

He’s saying things, soft encouraging things, between kisses to her breast and then up, moving along her neck. She hears them in a distant way. It’s like falling, except when you land you’re completely unspooled, not shattered, loose-boned, and warm.

“Oh my God,” she says, exhaling hard as her hand follows the strain of the tendons in his neck.

He’s been holding back, fighting an impulse to drive into her.

“Good?”

She buries her hands in his hair and angles his head with the press of her fingers. “Yes.”

She came hard; he knows it was good.

She used to think of Jon as sullen, somber, and kind of quick to take offense—all a product of a lack of confidence in certain areas as a non-starter in a small town which resented the fact that Rhaegar had a wife when Jon was born. But he doesn’t lack confidence in this arena—he shouldn’t—and he’s not sullen with her. When they’re alone, he makes her laugh even if his humor is more than a little sarcastic. And that stuff Margaery used to say about baseball players? It’s not true with Jon, former catcher or not.

“I’ll fuck you whenever you want. Every night, sweetheart.”

She hums.

It’s a good offer.

She likes him. She really fucking likes him.

Her heart starts to speed again, and she bites her lower lip hard, focusing on the sting.

“I miss you so goddamn much when you’re gone,” he says, panting. “You know that?”

There’s a sheen of sweat on his brow she can just make out in the slanting light. He glows with it. She likes him sweaty because he got that way fucking her. She likes the sounds of them together, the taste of his skin, the slick feel of his precum on her thumb, the rub of his stubble against her thighs making her crazy. She likes the way his pillow smells when she wakes up in the morning. She’s contemplated stealing the damn thing even though her sheets are Egyptian cotton and she uses a satin pillow for her hair.

She cups his cheek, swipes through the sweat on his forehead with her thumbs, and draws him down for another off-center, fumbling kiss.

“I didn’t go anywhere,” she says, wrapping her leg behind his ass, holding him in.

His thrusts become short, quick, and uneven. She rocks back, trying to meet his irregular movements, encouraging him, but what he needs is her mouth. She kisses him—hard.

Sex with Jon isn’t antiseptic. They’re not Ken and Barbie frustratingly cast in molded plastic. It’s real and hot and when she touches herself at home, these moments with him are what she replays in her head. It’s the best sex of her life.

He almost always comes when she’s kissing him. She doesn’t think about what that’s about either. She can’t let herself.

She watches him, infused with the warmth of affection she won’t fixate on for now. His face pinches. He breathes out against her mouth, brows harshly angled, and she smooths her hand down his spine until her fingers dig into his ass, following the shallow thrusts of his impending orgasm. His back arches.

When he comes, she feels it inside. The pulse of him. It feels good, knowing she’s made him come. Because he’s hers in this moment and she did this, she made him like this. She’s come already, but it’s arousing. It makes her want to grind back on him, rake her nails down his back, and start all over again.

Even if it is late.

His head droops, crunching the feathers in the pillow beside the crook of her neck. For a blissful moment, his weight is heavy, pushing her hips down into the bed. She’s wanted. She’s secure and safe. She kisses his temple, and licks the salt from her lips, as her hand slides up his back. Her breath leaves her in a long exhale.

He groans. “I don’t want to move.”

“Then don’t.”

“Condom,” he says, pushing back enough to pull out of her with one hand around himself.

He’s always careful, no accidents, no complaining either. Condoms are good policy. Proper condom usage is essential. Especially when you’re— whatever they are.

She watches him pull it off, knot it, so it won’t make a mess. She doesn’t mind any of this either, doesn’t feel the need to curl into her side or grab for the sheets, much less look away from him, and he doesn’t ever seem to mind her watching him.

“Just stay for a second,” she says, hand snaking out as he stretches for the wastebasket under his bedside table.

He’s lean, kneeling in the sheets. She likes the look of him, towering over her. It’s more intimate, not less with him softening.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, peeling back the sheets. He tilts his head. “Get under.”

She slides her butt over, and pulls her feet up and under, as he whips the sheets back over her. In a moment she’d be chilled from the sheen of perspiration he’s left on her and the blast of the AC. It might be warm out, but it feels nice to snuggle down under the sheets with him. He slides in alongside her, dark lashes shadowing his face before he presses his fingers hard into them, rubbing. He yawns.

“That was good. You felt good.”

His bedroom stare is less desperate and more pleasantly worn out and lazily appreciative of what peeks out from underneath the sheets.

She nods. “Always.”

For all his talk of messing around all night, he’s been playing groomsman all day and has who knows how many beers in him. It’s more likely that he’s on the verge of passing out again.

This part, though, where they talk, tangled up together is one of the good parts. It might be the best part.

“Tell me about the wedding.”

“Uh,” his arm goes up over his head, bent on the pillow. It’s her opening, her invitation to curl in. She takes it, scooting.

“It was okay,” he says, as she settles against him, hand on chest, knee overlapping his thigh, tucked just so. This is her place.

She has a side of the bed too. There are a multitude of ways she’s established here at his place. Even at hers too where she doesn’t bother to keep shampoo for him or an extra toothbrush.

She might be failing at casual.

“The bride wore white.” He cricks his head to look down at her. “Would’ve been better if you were there.”

Her inhale is shaky. During the wedding—that’s when he thought about her, wishing she was there. That’s what she hoped for too, and she’s gotten it. She had it all along. Even when she was sipping wine in the bath and feeling sorry for herself, she had him. Jon wasn’t going home with someone else because he wanted her.

But what would they do in this fictional world where they might exist beyond these walls? Would they dance? Jon’s a terrible dancer, honestly. Would they talk and laugh as easily as they do with their bones heavy from sex and lips swollen from kissing? They didn’t before.

And if they didn’t work out, if he ended things because she’s not his type after all, where would that leave her? She doesn’t want to spend nights crying alone, brokenhearted.

She moves her hand over his heart. If she put her ear to him, she’d hear its beat.

“Yeah, but Robb was there.”

He palms the crown of her head. “He might not have noticed.”

“Right.”

“Well, not noticing is probably too much to hope for, but I was practically a choir boy by comparison. Sam would have killed me. Your brother got a hell of a lot more drunk than me.”

Jon’s performance tonight was A . Based on that alone, she’d never even guess he was intoxicated, not even a little. Good hustle, great game.

She tucks her smile into his chest where he won’t see it.

Her lips move over him as her nails trail his chest. “Jeyne won’t like that.”

“She’s plenty fucked up too.”

“Oh no,” she says, laughing. “She cries when she’s drunk.”

“There might have been some of that.”

Sansa thinks Robb might marry Jeyne. Maybe even soon. She and Jon would be at that wedding together. But not together. They’d just be the sister of the groom and probably the Best Man, pretending not to be sleeping together while fulfilling their roles for the happy couple.

She pulls her leg up higher over him, curling tight. He catches it in the bend of her knee. His hand scuffs around her thigh, near where she’s still sensitive. He gives her a pat she feels other places.

“You should come with me next time.”

Her gaze fixes on the dark hair on his chest. “Sam’s going to get married a second time?”

“You know what I mean. Doesn’t have to be a big thing. Come with me to a Phillies game.”

Her throat feels thick. She’s out over thin ice. Casual is at stake.

“Baseball?” she asks, too high. She props herself up on his chest with her thumbnail caught between her teeth. “What are you going on about?”

His mouth pulls flat.

Her purposefully dim act isn’t what he was hoping for.

He’s not sullen but he is guarded. Sometimes. Just not as much recently.

There’s a stretch of silence that ends up being just this side of uncomfortable, and her eyes dip back south of his face.

But Jon’s no coward. He clears his throat. “We should just tell him. Robb. Worst he’ll do is call me a motherfucker.”

“Mmm— He’d break your face.”

Robb wouldn’t like to know his best friend, his oldest friend, has been fucking his little sister for months. He wouldn’t like that they’re just messing around. He’d think it was dumb and reckless. And if the truth was out there, if they confessed and she had to stand firm and defend her choices, it would stop being easy, it would stop being light, it would stop being no big thing. It’d be real, and it could go up in flames, could end up in tears with her weak and sobbing.

It would ruin her if she let it. Burn her right up from the inside. She got a taste of how it would wreck her tonight.

“And I like this face,” she says, bopping his nose with her index finger.

He chases it, trying to bite the tip.

“Might give me character.”

His lashes tickle her palm, as she swipes her hand down his face. “Character is overrated.”

Before she runs out of real estate, he catches her wrist. “We come clean,” he says with a kiss to her fingertips, “I could take you somewhere to eat other than my kitchen.”

There’s a twinkle in his eyes that knifes through her because it could so easily go away. He could stop looking at her like that. If not tonight, then months from now. That’s why it can’t be like that.

She presses her lips together. “I like your kitchen.”

“Is that a hint?” he asks, cocking his head. “Hungry? I’ll get you something.”

He buys the good bagels, the ones she would never let herself get because she knows the fat and carb count. He also happens to put lots of cream cheese on there for her, so she can’t feel bad, because he’s just being nice and to refuse or scrape it off would be rude. She’s a lot of things, but she isn’t rude.

He comes fully stocked with bagels, condoms, her shampoo. He doesn’t realize she needs conditioner too, but she’s not going to say. A girlfriend would bring a bottle and leave it alongside the other bottle.

But she doesn’t want him dragging himself to his kitchen. Doesn’t want him to turn on a light and toss her his college baseball t-shirt, even if she likes wearing it. Sometimes it feels like it might be the last time, and she wants to wait for as long as she can before she has to give it up.

“Yeah, I could eat,” she says, slipping her hand beneath the covers, “but not yet.”

Notes:

It is my annual tradition to post fic during the liminal space between the holidays and the new year. It's my thank you to fandom, to my readers, to those who have crafted fic I have enjoyed and art I have cherished. Participation in fandom is one of my joys in life. Thank you for being a part of that.

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