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“Your Sauvignon Blanc, ma’am.” A waitress carefully set down the glass in front of Rachel.
“Thank you,” she told the woman gratefully, fingering the stem nervously and glancing around the half-occupied hotel dining room.
She checked her iPhone for the fifth time since she had been shown to the table and reminded herself that she had been early and Victoria was, if anything, very punctual. She began to readjust her dress before she could stop herself. If she were still wearing a gold band on her left hand, she was sure she would have been fiddling with it, too.
For a moment, Rachel paused and appreciated that she was even able to go to a restaurant with lights and heat, where she could enjoy a meal that wasn’t based on a severely limited larder.
“Rachel.” The throaty alto called out from behind her and Rachel swung around just in time to see Agent Victoria Hand sauntering up to their reserved table. She was wearing a decidedly unprofessional version of her usual pantsuit, complete with a silky camisole peeking out. Rachel slid out of her chair and stood to clasp the other woman’s shoulders. She had always been a tall woman, but even in her heels, it was an odd thing to look up into Victoria’s face as she bent her face close and brushed her cheek against Victoria’s in greeting.
Their waiter pulled Victoria’s chair out for her and Rachel re-settled herself. “You look happy,” Victoria remarked.
She was happy, Rachel realized. All those years in the Black, deprived, missing her children growing up…all that seemed like a bad dream. “That would be because I am. You look like the cat that caught the canary, yourself.” Victoria only demurred coyly.
“I’ll have the Merlot, please.” She told the hovering waiter, dismissing him with a nod before focusing her attention on Rachel. “How is graduate school treating you?”
Rachel let out a shaky laugh. “I love it. I don’t know how I manage some days with two kids while divorced and working on my doctorate, but it’s…exhilarating.”
Listening to Rachel talk animatedly about her research, and seeing the way she brightened with passion, Victoria couldn’t help but remember the day she had met Rachel Matheson, née Porter. She had walked into SHIELD HQ in Chicago, claiming to know how the world was going to end. She’d been six months pregnant with her son Danny at the time, and far too young to have such a haunted look in her eyes.
Victoria had been brought in, and in retrospect, it had been a very good thing for Rachel’s safety that she had. But the sheer amount of information she had shared…regarding Randall Flynn and Jack Davis, the Tower in Colorado that she shouldn’t have known anything about…SHIELD could not dismiss her claims, not when HYDRA was involved. Victoria herself had worked closely with Rachel to avert the horrific fate that had been in store for them.
And frankly, Victoria could be honest and say her interest in Rachel Porter was not entirely platonic. The dark navy dress that skimmed over her figure before flaring out around her knees showed her long, toned legs to great effect and dipped below the line of her cleavage enticingly. The arrival of Victoria’s wine seemed to shake Rachel out of her laser-focus.
“Oh listen to me, prattling on about energy systems." She sighed, face reddening with embarrassment. "I did want to ask you how your work was going. I figured since you weren’t in touch often that it was keeping you busier than usual.”
Victoria deliberated how much to reveal. SHIELD had helped Rachel escape from under Flynn’s thumb and enabled her to start studying for her Ph.D, recognizing that her brilliant mind and life experience would come in handy to them. She might not have the appropriate clearance, but there were plenty of things she was owed, considering.
“Quite. Unfortunately, HYDRA has infiltrated SHIELD fairly deeply; weeding out all the traitors has taken its toll. But if you hadn’t pointed us in the right direction, we would have been caught with our pants down, so to speak.”
Rachel's eyebrows rose as she processed that news. "Some days it still feels like this can't be real. In the alternate timeline, I spent sixteen years wrestling with the guilt, even over the things I rationally know I was not directly responsible for." A range of emotions flitted across her face, dulling her previous enthusiasm.
Victoria reached around their wineglasses and took Rachel's hand in hers, thumb swiping over knuckles. Rachel didn't jerk away, to Victoria's great relief. "This is real," Victoria told her, and she didn't just mean this life in general. "What happened to you may defy sense, and nothing is a guarantee, but this is the gift we've been given and we should appreciate it while we can."
Both women shared a commiserative look, not letting go of each other's hand. Their waiter strolled back up to the table, interrupting the moment to politely ask if they knew what they would like to order. And then, with the heavy topics behind them, they turned the conversation to lighter things.
Victoria was forty years old, and she had been around long enough to understand that sexuality was a very fluid category. Rachel had once referred to her free-spirited and troublemaking youth, describing her tendency to have questionable partners. Partners, not just boyfriends. That, and Victoria had eyes in front of her head.
Throughout dinner, she took careful note of the way Rachel’s eyes would drift down to her lips while she talked, the unconscious way she would trace her fingertips over her collarbone, making her pupils dilate in response. Rachel was interested and whether she realized it or not, she was seducing Victoria.
After their plates had been cleared away, Rachel placed her forearms on the table and leaned over, the action pushing her breasts closer together. And from the twinkle in her eyes, Rachel had caught Victoria's speculative glance downwards. Time to put her cards on the table.
"I was thinking of having dessert and a bottle of whiskey sent to my room as a nightcap, if you'd like to join me." She posited.
A beat. Rachel chewed her bottom lip in between her teeth.
"Sure."
Their poor waiter had wide eyes as the two women strolled past him, probably having a fair idea why they were cutting out early like that. She left her dessert and drink order with him with explicit instructions to have them delivered to her room.
"We don't need to pay?" Rachel asked as they collected her coat.
"The hotel will put it on my tab," Victoria explained as she placed a hand on the small of Rachel's back and led the other woman to the bank of elevators. Rachel gave a wry laugh.
"Should I feel like a kept woman?"
"If you wanted, I could work with that." Oh yes, from the way Rachel's eyes darkened, Victoria knew she was in for a very enjoyable night.
The bell rang as the doors opened and Rachel stepped inside first, clutching her coat and purse in front of her body as Victoria pushed the button for the seventh floor. When she turned around, she was being gradually crowded back against the wall by a blonde whose eyes were challenging her own.
Victoria, as a female agent in a government agency, had always had to be in absolute control and on-point in a way not demanded of her male colleagues. But for Rachel, who as a woman in science did understand on some level, she conceded her ground and allowed herself to be pressed up against the moving elevator. The perfume Rachel wore was heavy and rich, filling her senses along with the merest brush of her breasts against Victoria's ribcage.
This was the Rachel that made Victoria's heart race- with the hint of a smirk and the knowing eyes, bold as you pleased.
Lips brushed against her own, scraping along the sensitive flesh until she wanted to shiver. A change of angle, then more pressure. Warm and wet as Rachel darted her tongue along the seam in Victoria's lips. Hands combed through her bright red extensions and Victoria resisted the urge to shiver. Rachel stroked her tongue against Victoria’s one more time and sighed, pulling away a fraction.
Victoria caught her surreptitious glance upwards to the back corner of the elevator and smiled. “Don’t worry, I have my ways. The security tapes will be deleted and all hotel employees have been extensively debriefed about how important discretion is to their continued health and well-being.”
Rachel gave an impressed whistle. “Is it horrible of me to find that a turn-on?”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” The elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open with a chime.
“Come on,” she prompted and reached out to her. Rachel took the proffered hand and let Victoria guide her down the hallway to her room.
“I’m not bothered by people seeing us, just so you know.” Rachel wanted to make sure she knew that. She’d known since her teens that she wasn’t exclusively attracted to men, and she’d had more-than-friendships with a few women before she’d met Ben. But she hadn’t been brave enough, then, to be open about it with most of her friends, let alone her parents.
"I didn't think you were," Victoria said as she slid her keycard through the slot. "But the sentiment is appreciated, all the same."
She was physically twenty-eight, but she had the memories of a forty-five year old woman. And after everything she remembered going through, she wasn’t in the mood to do anything but grasp life by the horns.
“Oh. My. God.” She found herself moaning a scant two minutes later as she lay sprawled on the down mattress. This hotel room was infinitely more luxurious than anything she had ever stayed in all her life. The only exception being hers and Ben's honeymoon in the Blue Ridge Mountains that had been overshadowed by her morning sickness. The king-sized bed had an attractive floral pattern on the covers that she found surprisingly pleasing to the eye.
“That’ll be all, thank you Helen,” Victoria told the departing Concierge as she shooed the stammering woman out the door, leaving her alone with Rachel, two chocolate tortes, and a nice whiskey from Kentucky. "The good stuff," Victoria told her, pouring two glasses and perching herself on a chair next to the table. Rachel pushed herself off the bed, then, choosing to do something about the thrum of arousal coursing through her body.
They both had kicked off their heels, neither one of them wanting to postpone comfort. Rachel straddled Victoria's thighs and lowered herself into her lap, refusing all the while to be self-conscious of how the hem of her skirt hiked up in the process.
“You were wrong, by the way.” Rachel reached over and scooped a forkful of chocolate torte up to her mouth before holding another bite up to Victoria's lips.
“When?” She asked, after savoring the dessert and sliding an appreciative hand along the back of one thigh. Rachel couldn't help arching her back into the touch and rubbing herself against the solidity of the legs beneath her. She swiped her thumb over a smear of chocolate at the corner of Victoria's mouth before answering.
“Earlier, when you said my mental time-travel via tesseract made no sense. I’ve thought about it very carefully and concluded that at a quantum level, I make perfect sense.”
“I hope you’ll elaborate.” Both of them reached for a glass of whiskey, savoring the burn and the slight caramel taste on their tongues. Rachel thought back to the extensive analysis she had subjected herself to, especially after her and Ben had accepted that they were effectively strangers to one other. So she explains quantum theory to Victoria in between bites of rich torte and sips of the amber liquid, neither of which are solely responsible for the warmth spreading from her belly, radiating outward.
“I’m like two entangled particles of light, I was measured in the future and it made me the same here.” She concluded after the first slice of cake was gone. Okay, perhaps the alcohol was effecting her ability to express herself; it might be time to stop talking.
She rocked herself against Victoria’s lap while nails softly scraped along her spine and against the nape of her neck. Rachel shivered and nipped at Victoria’s top lip. After another drugging kiss, Rachel whispered against red lips, “let’s move to the bed.”
By the time half the pillows were strewn across the floor, Rachel had been divested of her dress and her thigh-highs. She had eagerly tugged off Victoria's jacket and camisole. As the dark-haired woman made economical work of her trousers, Rachel felt her mouth go dry as she admired the toned body and expensive European lingerie that remained. She'd worn her nicest underwear, but that had come from Macy's rather than a boutique.
"Shh."
And then Victoria was there, covering her body, weighing her down into the thick comforter. Rachel let out a moan and wrapped her legs around Victoria's waist, seeking her mouth with her own. Their hands went everywhere, it seemed. A thigh pressed in between her own and Rachel was made acutely aware of the wetness sticking to the front panel of her panties.
"Hmmpf. Oh, keep doing that." She sighed as she canted her hips against Victoria's leg. Thoughts, equations, schedules went flying out of her head and Rachel let herself focus entirely on the bloom of pleasure that suffused her limbs.
Everything came in flashes after that. Victoria placing her glasses on the bedside table. Fumbling fingers toying with the clasp of Victoria's bra, asking permission. Both of them, naked nipples and slick vulvas meeting.
Wanting to explore but being pushed back down by an insistent hand. "How long has it been since someone spoiled you, Rachel?" The timbre of her voice vibrating down Rachel's spine.
Too long. A lot of darkness lay in her memories, things that won't happen. Miles. What Bass and Strausser had done. It had truly been a very long time since she had trusted anyone enough to move beyond all that. She wants it all.
She thinks she pleaded with Victoria, then.
Dark eyes and a smug smile before Victoria moved her lips against Rachel's breastbone, down her sternum, over her belly past the still-red Cesarean scar, and-
"Oh, god."
When Victoria dipped her mouth down between Rachel's spread thighs and dragged her tongue over the quivering flesh there, Rachel let out a heavy exhale. On and on it went for minutes, her clutching at Victoria's hands, her hair, the pillow still behind her on the bed. And then her mouth closed around Rachel's clitoris and applied a gentle suctioning motion. Rachel's torso lifted nearly clear off the bed and that was when the first finger slid into her vagina.
After the second, she clenched around the digits and began to rock against the tongue flicking over her greedy clitoris. Side-by-side, until Rachel was wound up tighter than a coiled spring. So close, so warm, so...so..so-
She thinks she was noisy when she climaxed. It's hard to tell when she was wholly focused on the contractions in her muscles as pleasure and relief coursed through her ligaments. Eventually, she stopped angling her bottom up into Victoria's mouth. Meeting her warm brown eyes, Rachel could only groan uncontrollably at the expression of utter satisfaction she found there.
It wasn't until now that Rachel had realized that there were things about her undeveloped future that had haunted her every step. In the pleasant haze that accompanied her orgasm and the comfort she drew from Victoria's arms as she crawled back up the bed and pulled Rachel close, it allowed her to truly go blank for minutes.
When the sweat on the nape of her neck had cooled, Rachel raised her head and kissed Victoria softly, thoroughly. There was the sharp taste of chocolate, the antiseptic bite of alcohol, and a tang that Rachel knew was entirely hers. "I'm a scientist," she said as she borne the brunette onto her back. Victoria only arched an eyebrow.
"And?"
Rachel teased her bottom lip in between her teeth playfully. "That means I'm going to thoroughly test my various hypotheses about what will get you off." A wink and she was nipping her way down to a raspberry-colored nipple. Rachel was rewarded with a shudder when she gently bit down on the nubbin. In her post-orgasmic high, the thrill of power was all the more satisfying.
"Trust me." She rumbled against the softness of one breast.
"I do."