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In the mansion’s kitchen, day in and day out, Remy and Rogue dance around each other, as flagrantly flirtatious as any two people who aren’t allowed to touch each other can possibly contrive to be. Rogue doesn’t half know if it’s because there’s something undeniably sexy about a man who can throw together a delicious damn étouffée without even glancing at a cookbook, or if it’s the language of food itself that gets her hot and bothered something terrible. Food, sex, it all melts together in Remy’s favorite innuendos: you after wanting a bite, chère? You like what you see? Close your eyes and have a taste o’ that, now. It’s desire, it’s consumption, it’s more than a dash of spice. And just like a single bite of maque choux aux crevettes or the first mouth-watering whiff of andouille sausage hitting the frying pan, it’s never quite enough for her.
And she didn’t realize quite how unsatisfied she was with the whole situation until he’s got her cornered beside the hot stove, waving a spoonful of steaming couche-couche under her nose. “Careful now, chère,” he cajoles. “She’s still hot, right out the pan. Some things worth getting burned for, mind. But a little patience never killed no one. Still count as a midnight snack if you wait till half past twelve, non?”
Rogue breathes through her mouth, trying not to smell it, trying not to smell him; there’s a sarcastic comeback in there somewhere if she digs down deep enough. But the neglected pan pops, demanding Remy’s attention back in a shower of hot oil. He winces, pulling an offended, pouty moue as if the pan, too, might be persuaded to cooperate if he just hits the right note of flirtation.
“You ninny,” Rogue says, as he shifts the pan to a cold burner, and she snatches a dishrag off the counter. “Only you would go swaggering around a panful of hot oil with your belly hanging out.”
“Hey, now.” He turns the wounded expression on her, which is even less effective than it was against the iron pan, and gestures to his bare midsection. “Ain’t nothing here hanging nowhere.”
“Don’t play. You know what I mean.” With the dishrag, she swipes at the side where the oil hit him. In spite of her best intentions, she pauses a moment, her hand slowing to a stop. Even through the glove and the towel, she feels the hard line of his hip—feels him go careful and still against her, too. “Damn it, Remy,” she says, and steps back, snapping the towel at that distracting stretch of bare skin. “Sometimes you make it downright impossible, not being able to touch you.”
That admission gathers them both up into stunned, silent surprise. Usually it’s him who’s reaching out for her, only for her to swat him away time and again. The distance is too great to bridge, but it makes her feel a little better just remarking on it. Mourning it. That’s something they can safely do together, at least.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Remy who recovers first, going back to turning the couche-couche in its pan. “Not as impossible as all that,” he says, with a bright, well-polished indifference. “You got Erik now, you need touchin’.”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes snap wide open. “Just because you grew up in the gutter don’t mean that’s where your mind’s always got to stay! Not every touch is—some kind of sex thing. It wasn’t anything more than—good lord, Remy, do you know how long it’s been since I could just hold someone else’s hand without wringing the ever-lovin’ life out of them?”
He shrugs one shoulder, keeping his eyes on the pan. “… Oui. I know dat. You right. No business of mine anyhow, what you two get up to together.”
That wasn’t exactly where she meant to lead the conversation, and it sure wasn't where she expected him to follow, and it knocks the wind right out of her sails. She watches him work: pulling plates out of a high cupboard, rattling around in the silverware drawer. Not every touch is a sex thing. When was the last time someone touched him, unless it was a fist to the face or an elbow to the side? No one’s been holding his hand lately, she would bet good money on that. “It’s different, anyhow,” she says to his back. “Can ain’t the same as—as need to.”
He goes still at that, leaning over the counter and the two steaming portions of cornmeal breakfast he’s ladled out. Over his shoulder, he casts her a look that she can’t begin to read. Something about those devil eyes of his—old Lucifer himself couldn’t have devised a pair better at inviting a girl into temptation.
Whatever he sees in her seems to set his resolve. He turns, and slides a step closer to her. Within reach. She doesn’t pull back when he takes her gloved hand and sets her palm against his chest. “You wanna touch me?” Guided by his hands, her fingers slide down his chest, along the firm line of muscle that bisects his stomach, to the front of his oil-spattered sweatpants. “All right, then. So touch me.”
Rogue’s face burns hotter than the bottom of the forgotten couche-couche. The sweatpants don’t leave a lot to the imagination, and her fingers tell her the whole rest of the story. Oh, lord, she feels as giddy as a blushing bride as she slides her hand deeper between his legs—then hesitates, retreating. “No—no, I’m sorry. What if—?”
“Oui, oui, j’arrive. You don’ wanna risk losing control.” Remy’s eyes crinkle at the corners: discretion is the better part of valor, and his expression is the better part of a smile. “Pas de problème. Then you just watch while I take care of the touchin’ my own self.”
“You…” It can’t be that easy. Nothing is ever that easy. She can’t meet his eyes, not under those lowered lashes, not with the heat in his body rising to match what’s already afire in her traitorous cheeks. Instead she addresses his left ear. “And you want me to believe that’d be good enough for you? That’s all you want?”
“Chère. There ain’t world enough and time for me to list off all what I want.” He leans over her, both hands on the counter on either side of her. His face, his neck, are too close to her for comfort—but then, it’s not comfort either of them is seeking right now, is it? He palms himself, the back of his hand against the inside of her thigh. “Gambit sum it up real short: what I want is you.”
Warm breath, smelling of cornbread and brown liquor, rolls down her cheek, and how the hell does he manage to keep his abs looking that way on a diet of deep-fried carbohydrates and booze? Now that’s a nice easy surface-level question for Rogue to occupy herself with, but what she really needs to ask herself is: girl, how are you ever going to bounce back from this if you love him and lose him? First person who ever knew what she was and wanted her anyway. Loved her anyway; he’s been clear enough on that account before. She knows he’s loved other women before, though, and he’ll surely do it again after her heart’s good and broken. But if she goes and gives in now, oh, she’s a lost cause.
“Knock it off, swamp rat!” she scolds, trying to recover some footing on what’s left of her certainty. She grabs his waist and pushes him back to arm’s length. “We’re in the middle of the kitchen—anyone could stroll on in and see you pawing yourself right out in the open.”
He grins, putting his hands over hers. “Now that a funny way of askin’: your place or mine?”
Well. She did say it was impossible to keep herself off him, and her folks didn't raise a liar.
Rogue’s room is marginally closer to the kitchen, so that’s one easy decision made. She forgets, until she slams opens the door—damn it anyway, girl, could she look just a little less desperate?—that the place is downright trashed: piles of dirty laundry and clean unfolded clothes sagging into one another, forgotten dishes, empty takeout containers. By the time Remy follows her inside and shuts the door softly behind his back, her face is flushed for a whole new set of reasons. “Sorry. Wasn’t exactly expecting guests, and I guess I’ve never really been the domestic type.”
“So?” He grins and picks up a pizza box wedged halfway under a dresser. “I already do the cooking, no big deal I take care of the dishes too.” An infusion of energy, and the greasy box explodes into powdery cardboard dust that snows lightly onto the floor. “Hmm. Well, already maybe someone oughta run the vacuum in here.”
“Remy!” Outrage is familiar ground to fall back on, and Rogue retreats to it a little too gladly. “This look like the Danger Room to you?”
“Moving too fast for you? Sure, we take it slower.” He raises one hand, peels off his gloves one finger at a time. Then his too-short shirt goes over his head, giving her the whole movie behind the preview she already got—that narrow waist, those sturdy shoulders—and he lets his hair spill long and loose down his neck and into his face.
She sits down hard on the edge of her bed. “That your idea of slower?” she scoffs, because she’s too scared to say oh, lord, yes, faster, and she lets her jacket slide teasingly down off one shoulder.
“Been years, chère.” He lifts his chin, smirks, slides his hand inside those godforsaken sweatpants. “Don’ get much slower than dat, now, hein?”
Her heartbeat has gotten so noisy she wonders if he can hear it, too, halfway across the room as he is. She’s not as practiced as he is when it comes to smirking, but she gives it her best shot and she thinks it doesn’t come out half bad. Where’s the confidence she wears with pride when she’s flipping a Sentinel over her head? But this feels dangerous in a whole new, different way. “I bet you do that all the time, sugar, thinking of me.”
“More than I should, maybe so. You think a man get arms like this from doin’ only just push-ups?” He raises one eyebrow, his hand still working where she can’t see it. “And, what? You never think of Gambit and put hands on yourself?”
“A lady never tells,” she says, so quick she might as well have ‘fessed up faster than a thief in church. “And anyway, I was askin’ for a reason. M-maybe I could—” His gaze sharpens, and if it doesn’t lend her confidence, exactly, it heats her up so fast the words boil right over and out of her. “Maybe you wanted to try somethin’ different for once, that’s all.” She folds her arms and adds: “But you’re gonna need to get rid of those mangy old sweats, first!”
That same old insouciant grin lights his face, but there’s a flush to his face and chest too that wasn’t there before. He bends down to unlace his shoes, and lord help her, but there is something practically indecent about that man’s bare hands: the long graceful lines, the fine bones of the wrists. She wants those fingers on her, inside her, and she’s so focused on what her hungry hands can’t have that she blinks once and misses a feast for her eyes. Before she knows it he’s nudging a pile of crumpled-up cotton into one corner, naked as a jaybird and already halfway to hard. “This meet your expectations, chère?”
Instead of answering, she beckons him closer. He obeys, standing over her. And oh, sure, maybe she who hesitates is lost, but that doesn’t matter because Rogue is already long, long gone. Her gloves are supple kid leather, practically as warm and soft from long use as living skin would be, and he shivers as she slides her hands up the muscles of his thighs, the tense lines of his hips. She traces one finger around the head of his cock, slides her circled fingers down the shaft, and he takes a deep breath through his teeth. “Sure looks like you’re happy with this arrangement,” she observes slyly, and he gives her a laugh, adjusts her grip. He moves his hand over hers a few times, showing her what he likes, what he wants, before easing back and letting her take over.
That aching empty space stays stretched out between them as she strokes him—it’d be too easy, otherwise, to lay her head against his bare stomach; too tempting to stand and stretch to press her lips to that sweet little hollow beneath his neck. But he narrows the gap where he can: hands ghosting inside her jacket and down across her back, over her hair, along the outside curve of her breasts. He finds and traces the outline of her nipples through the uniform fabric that has never kept a secret a day in its whole god-damned life.
But when he squeezes her shoulders, he does it with a whispered plea to stop, which she does at once. “Sorry, chère,” he says, the soft words incinerated almost beyond hearing by the bonfire of her embarrassment. “It’s not happening like so.”
“Oh, my God.” She shoots to her feet, puts a solid five feet of empty air between them. No woman has ever been as mortified as she is right now. If she had Kurt’s power, she would disappear in a heartbeat and never show her face in the mansion again for the rest of her godforsaken life. “I’m—I’ve never done this before, I thought—hell, I don’t know what I thought! Shit.” She scrubs her hands through her hair. He must be disappointed; she’s devastated. What was she thinking? How could she have let it go this far? Or this wrong? “This was a mistake, Remy, I’m so sorry.”
“Dis pas ça!” Half-worried, half-amused, he wags a scolding finger in her face. “No apologies. Sure as hell no mistake. Not for me.” His expression shifts into inscrutability. "Maybe for you, though?”
She wants to believe him so hard that she halfway convinces herself he means it. “...I was enjoying myself. Should we go back to what you said before? I can just watch.”
“Let’s call that plan B, maybe.” He lets one finger drift down the front of her body, neck to navel. “Listen, it’s too much friction, that’s all. You got more of them gloves? How you feel ‘bout ruining a pair?”
“Uh,” says Rogue, bumping around this unexpected curve in the conversation. She glances down at her hands. “I have a few I could spare, I s’pose. Remy, what—hey, what are you doing?!”
Two steps across the room and he’s already reaching for the door, like he intends to walk out into the hall bare-ass naked for anyone to see. “I come right back, d’accord?”
How can she be so fond of a person and so utterly bewildered at the same time? “Remy. I don’t know how they do things in Louisiana, but you cannot walk around the mansion with your ass out! Not to mention the rest of you.”
“I s’pose there are children present, now you mention it.” He fishes a towel out of her laundry pile (dirty or clean? A mystery) and wraps it around his waist. “See? Won’ be long now.” And as cheerful as you please, he strolls right on out in the hall.
When the door opens, Jean happens to be walking toward Rogue’s room from the opposite direction. She stares straight ahead of her, not flicking a glance at the half-naked man walking straight at her. More willpower than Rogue has ever had, that’s for sure.
“Evenin’, Jean!” carols Remy brightly. “Laundry day! You want I throw in your uniform with mine? That Spandex sure do hang onto sweat, don’ it? Logan say he can smell me coming a mile away.”
“No, that’s all right,” says Jean, not quite hiding her amusement. “Thanks for offering.” She glances into Rogue’s room as she passes, catches Rogue’s aghast expression, and, to Rogue's horror, winks. Rogue puts her hands over her flaming face and contemplates flying off to Genosha to take up permanent residence before Remy gets back.
He will come back, won’t he? God, how mortifying it would be if that was how he excused himself permanently. Oh, chérie, it just Gambit wasn’t after expecting no friction burns on his manhood, excuse-moi for this confusion.
He’s gone just long enough for her to start mentally kicking herself for letting things go this far and this awkwardly before he saunters back in, towel intact, and closes the door behind himself. Jean, mercifully, is nowhere to be seen this time. “Well, chère, I disappear so long you start to get cold?” he says, tossing a bag down on the bed beside her. “We see if we can warm you up again drette-là.” He takes her hand and turns it upward, pouring from a small bottle into her cupped palm.
“Do I just—?” She turns her hand and slides a slick, slippery layer down the length of his cock, which perks up immediately at this renewed attention.
“Ahh, merde.” His hips push toward her. “Yes, please, chère. Go on; hold me tighter.”
“No.” She wilts a little under his surprised look. “I mean to say, wait a dang second. Can you—I want you to lie down here on the bed. So I can see that dumb face of yours.” Even if she can’t touch it, even if she can’t kiss the hollows of his eyes, the place where his ear meets his neck, all the places she's imagined. Let her eyes go where her bare hands can’t, at least. There’s plenty she can’t have, but that’s no reason to skip out on enjoying everything she can.
He does what she says, and slides his palms up her thighs as she straddles him. She takes her time, getting back to the rhythm they’d found before—like he already said, it’s been years, it won’t hurt the Cajun to wait a little longer. And she wants to savor this, to remember it. In case it’s the last time. In case it’s the only time she does it with her heart intact.
If she expected dirty talk from him in bed, she doesn’t get it. Or maybe she does, but he slips into uninterrupted French as his fingers dig into the muscles of her legs, as she leans forward and strokes him against her own pelvis. She really is going to have to have an honest-to-God laundry day tomorrow, and she hopes to hell that lube washes out of uniform fabric without leaving a mark.
“Ma belle,” he says, jaw tight, eyes closed, head back, and she knows what that means, at least. “Ahh—n’arrête pas. Oui—comme ça—comme ça—” It’s not much warning, or hell, who knows, maybe it’s plenty and she just wasn’t picking up on the receiving end, but he shudders hard and his cock jerks in her hand. He comes all over himself, droplets pooling in his navel, the eye-catching topography of his stomach. A split second later, still gasping for breath, he opens one eye and says: “Now your turn, chère.”
If only. There’s an ache between Rogue’s legs only made worse with every time she rubbed herself against that cock of his, felt the heat and knew she couldn’t have it. “Oh, sugar, I don’t think so,” Rogue says reluctantly. She slides out of her jacket and tosses it over him, giving him a rough wipe-down. “Those stupid two-finger gloves of yours are just too damn risky. Maybe you could just watch, like we said before—”
He reaches up and cups her breast through the unresisting fabric of her uniform once more. “Nah. Not gloves I had in mind. Hold real still a second now.” Deftly, delicately, his fingers staying on the safe side from her skin, he unseals the seam of her suit. She doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, as he parts the fabric and exposes her neck, her breastbone, a soft expanse of belly. “Be careful!” she cries, and he pulls back his hands in surrender.
“I’m always careful wit’ you, chère.” He nods at her. “Get yourself clear, then, not far past your hips, and you lie down right there.” He reaches into the bag and comes up with something that looks almost like a scrap of someone’s old uniform: a rectangle of stretchy green latex, thin enough that the light slides clean through it. “You put some gloves back on, hold this right in place, and you let Gambit do the rest, hear?”
Her heart is thundering in her ears louder than an August rainstorm. Suddenly clumsy, she fumbles the top of uniform into place—or out of place, rather—and covers herself, the hot wet driving ache at the center of her, with the latex. “Be careful,” she tells him again. But it’s not just her skin she means, this time.
His mouth presses against her, so hot she barely believes there’s still a layer between them, and with both her gloved hands holding the latex in place, there’s nothing to stifle the positively obscene noise she makes. She wanted him inside her, sure enough, she wanted all of him, but not many people in this world get every last little thing their heart desires and she’ll gladly take his tongue pressing up and parting her, his hand squeezing her thigh like he wants the reminder that she’s the real thing. His other fingers join his tongue, adding pressure, the latex always in the way, but if she closes her eyes it’s just her, just him, the smell of his sweat and the rhythm of her hips. And maybe it’s not quite how she always fantasized it, but, she finds, the reality burns brighter than even the most scandalous scenes that she’s always been left to act out on her own. She’s no innocent little lamb, she’s hardly a stranger to giving herself pleasure now and then—but it’s different with him. Her own hand is serviceable enough, but it’s never exactly been the object of her desire. This man, though. This man. Even if she wanted to hold something back, she doesn’t know how she could. Too soon, she’s singing his name and riding his eager mouth all the way to the oblivion of pleasure.
When she comes back to her tingling senses, he’s sitting beside the bed, resting his chin on one hand. Smirking again. Doesn’t a man get tired of smirking all the time? “Seems to me you been planning this a while,” she accuses, and why does she keep talking like that? Like she wasn’t right there alongside him every step of the way. Like she wasn’t begging for it herself. There’s more kinds of distance to keep than the physical.
He takes her jab better than she takes it herself, and waves a vague dismissal. “Ehh, you know, Gambit got a vivid imagination.” The smirk broadens into a grin. “Always good to be ready for anything.”
“Ready and then some.” She sits up, and, with some effort, works her sweaty arms back into her uniform, seals it all the way back up to her neck. Remy makes a disappointed noise, but she pats the bed beside her. “I ain’t kicking you out just yet, Cajun. Get yourself halfway decent, first, just to be safe.” She snorts. “As decent as you can be, in a shirt like that.”
He stretches first, and there’s nothing decent at all about that; but he gets up, retrieves clothing from where it’s been cast aside, and dresses again before slinking up beside her like a barn cat that knows he’s not supposed to be in the house but means to stay there exactly as long as he can get away with. She lies down, and he slides in alongside her, his head in the curve of her arm. While she plays with his loose hair, he stares at her face, and she pretends she doesn’t notice. He’s waiting for something, and she can’t begin to guess what. She picks up his hand, just for something to do, and he threads his fingers between hers as their arms come to rest on the mattress between them.
“Chère,” he says finally, and his voice is different now. The playful lightness has dropped away, and what’s left behind falls on her heavy—not like a boulder, but like a blanket she doesn’t want to wriggle out from under on a cold winter morning. “What you say to a good night kiss?”
Not this again. Can’t they just have a moment before he gets back to acting crazy? “Remy, you’re not serious.”
“Dead serious.” He holds her hand tight when she goes to sit up. Not as if she couldn’t shake him off like a gnat if she wanted to, but, well, she doesn’t want to. “Not asking to lock lips, mind. Just only barely, enough to put me out for a good solid eight hours. Could use a night’s beauty sleep, non?” He sobers. “Always wanted to know what it feel like, anyhow. Fallin’ asleep, knowing you was right there with me.”
“Remy….” He pulls the back of her hand against his lips, forestalling her protests. She laughs, and brushes the hair away from his face. “Who knew you were such a romantic under that horndog exterior?”
“Wasn’t lying when I said I want it all wit’ you chère.” Red-black eyes, devil eyes, selling her her own soul back for a future she still can’t quite believe in. “Not lyin’ neither when I say I’m happy to take what I get.”
Sometimes it’s downright impossible, not being able to touch him. If he trusts her this much, can’t she spare a little trust for herself, too?
“Don’t move,” she says, stern as she can manage, and he doesn’t, not a millimeter, as she bends her neck. Her lips brush against his, the faintest touch; the cursed beauty kissing Prince Charming to sleep, even if there’s a whole lot more of charming to him than there is prince. An electric spark, and his lids stutter shut, his head sags into her side. His breathing goes slow and even, and his heartbeat is strong and regular when she gropes worriedly along the underside of his jaw. Not enough contact for her to sap his powers or siphon off whatever deep, dark secrets he’s keeping. But a single feather-light thought scrapes loose from the surface when she brushes past: I make a woman like her look at me like that? Maybe I done one right thing in my life after all.
“Damn fool,” she says, and doesn’t know if she means him or her. Both, maybe, since it seems like even put together they don’t have the good sense God gave a goose.
But she does know he’s not the only one who’s wondered what it would be like to lie down for the night, side by side. Won’t be safe to let herself go to sleep here—who knows how much either of them toss and turn in the middle of the night? No sense risking tragedy just because the man apparently shops for t-shirts in the children’s department—but she doesn’t need the totality of sleep to accept a good hearty serving of satisfaction. She pulls his hand tight against her side, counts his breaths, counts his eyelashes. Wrestles her own weariness to a stand-still, for as long as she can. She does like he says, and finds her way to happy. Happy to take what she’s been given. Even if it’s smaller than she wanted; even if it winds up being shorter than she hopes. When she can’t keep her eyes open any longer, she slides out from under him, throws a rumpled blanket over his shoulders, and slips out the door. There’s two untouched bowls of gone-cold couche-couche waiting on the counter; she dumps milk and syrup into the bigger one and devours the whole thing on the way back to her room, where she curls up in the overstuffed chair by herself in the dark. Her chin sinks down to her chest. Going to have a hell of a crick in her neck if she sleeps like this all night; and just imagine making a habit of it. God, what if he snores? What if she does?
Well—and so what if they do? Going, going, gone. Oh, girl, you knew all along you never had a chance. She smiles in the dark, with no one to see her.
Some things are worth getting burned for.