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the morning after
Light. Bright, bright morning light. Laser-like, skull-piercing morning light from hell. Jemma rolled over and buried her face in the pillows with a moan, and froze. Something was wrong. First of all, she was warm. Jemma was never warm, especially not in her ground-floor flat, and usually had to bury herself under a pile of quilts just to stop shivering. Second of all, these were definitely not her high-thread-count, tastefully blue sheets, and color-coordinated pillows. These felt like...flannel? Really cozy flannel, though, incredibly soft and warm and a nice shade of tartan. Maybe she could just snuggle back down into the sheets and fall back asleep for a few minutes—that was when Jemma realized the third thing that was wrong. There was someone asleep next to her.
Jemma rolled over, very, very carefully, and peered over at the man whose bed she was in. He had messy curly hair and a nicely muscled back (despite the scratches that—oh god—she was probably responsible for) and one of his hands was thrown out across the bed like it was reaching for hers. She'd grabbed that hand last night, she remembered suddenly, tugging him along behind her and out the door, spinning around suddenly to press him up against a wall, stretch up on her toes, and kiss him. He'd wrapped her up in his coat and buried one hand in her hair, the other hand slipping under the hem of her shirt to trace patterns against her bare skin and warm her from the inside out. They were really nice hands, with almost obscenely long fingers, and she was fairly sure that he'd been very nice about using them. He'd been nice about everything really and such a nice guy wouldn't mind her discreetly creeping out to avoid any kind of awkward morning after conversations, if she could just wriggle out from under the covers and—that was when he woke up.
“Good morning,” he mumbled and sleepily reached for her to pull her closer. Jemma went stiff against him and he backed away so quickly that he nearly fell off the bed. “Sorry,” he blurted out, sitting up and letting the sheet fall to his waist. His chest was just as nicely muscled, lean and firm, and Jemma had a sudden flash of her hands creeping under his shirt and skimming across his stomach before dipping down to tug at his belt buckle. She wasn't completely certain, but she thought that she might have torn his shirt off after that, too eager to bother with things like buttons. “I didn't mean to—I wasn't—sorry. Anyway. I can make you coffee if you want? Or tea? Or breakfast? I've been told that I make great blueberry pancakes.”
“No, no, that's fine.” Jemma said, her words muffled by the flannel sheet that she'd pulled up almost over her face. Rather pointless, really, considering that he'd seen it all last night (“god, you're gorgeous”, whispered in a Scottish accent and punctuated with kisses) but still... “I've got a brunch date, anyways.” It wasn't a lie. She had a standing brunch date with Skye on Sunday mornings at the Tahiti Cafe for banana pancakes and French toast with fruit. It was just that Skye wouldn't be awake for at least another two hours.
“Right. Yeah. Great. I, um, this is really embarrassing,” he sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair, making the curls stand up even more and sending a hot flare of attraction through Jemma. She could ask to use his shower, maybe, and invite him in with her—No. Bad Jemma. Something was clearly wrong with her. Jemma Simmons didn't go home with men she barely knew and she definitely didn't stay long enough to contemplate a second (third, actually, she realized) round, no matter how adorably rumpled they looked. “But I'm not actually sure where your clothes are. Or where any of our clothes are. Last night was a bit...frantic.”
“That's fine,” Jemma said briskly. “I'll go look for them, if you just...” She gestured awkwardly in the direction of the sheet and he let go, shoving it towards her until she'd wrapped it around herself twice. There was a pile of lace near the door that looked like her bra and underwear and if she just followed the trail a little further down the hallway...Well. That had once been her dress.
“Sorry about that,” he said from the doorway, plaid pajama pants now loosely hanging off his hips and eyes firmly focused on a spot somewhere above her head. His eyes kept on drifting downward and then suddenly veering back up, like it took every last inch of effort to keep from looking at her. It was entirely possible that Jemma had managed to sleep with the one person who was even worse at the morning after than she was. “I've got a shirt if you want it? Multiple options, even.”
Eventually, she managed to salvage a little black skirt from her little black dress, button up one of his shirts over it, and find her purse from where it had rolled under the couch. In the back of her head, a voice that sounded suspiciously like her aunt Peggy scolded her for not offering to help him clear up the mess they'd made of his living room but Jemma thought that there'd been enough blushing and stammering and skating around the subject of last night to last her for the rest of her life.
Yes, this morning had soared to the top of her Most Awkward Moments ever list. But the good thing about a one-night stand, Jemma reasoned, was that you simply never saw them again.
the night of
Fitz stared mournfully at the remains of his drink and surreptitiously checked his phone with one hand. Nearly eleven—give it another ten minutes, and he'd be free and clear, able to claim a headache or a stomachache or a bad case of food poisoning (anything, really, as long as it got him out) and head home to eat late night pizza and watch Battlestar Galactica for the tenth time. That had been his plan until Hunter, Mack, and Trip showed up on his doorstep and announced that they were throwing Hunter a bachelor party. A “congratulations your divorce went through” bachelor party. It hadn't made any sense before they started drinking.
Trip, who was a total lightweight and disgustingly in love with his girlfriend, had started rambling about the best way to ask her to move in with him one and a half beers in, Hunter'd tried to call Bobbi after three shots and had to have his phone taken away from him, Mack had just sat there and chuckled quietly to himself, and Fitz had been trying to get the bartender's attention for the past twenty minutes. “Hey,” he finally called. “Look, I'm willing to pay for another glass of this overpriced craft beer, but that would require me to actually be able to get another glass of this overpriced craft beer.” The bartender ignored him. “Maybe this is overpriced craft beer purgatory,” Fitz said, more to himself than to the bartender, who seemed intent on hitting on a pretty dark-haired girl at the other end of the bar. “I'll just be stuck here forever, unable to get a beer, unable to leave because there's always the hope that I might be able to--”
“Could I get a frozen daiquiri please? And one of the overpriced craft beers,” a voice beside him said and Fitz turned to see possibly the prettiest girl he'd ever met, leaning over the bar just enough that the neckline of her dress slipped down an extra inch and smiling more at him than at the bartender.
“You're magic,” he told her. “How did you do that?”
“Miles is just scared of me, ever since he screwed my best friend over.” She shrugged and slid the beer over to him, taking a sip of her own drink. Fitz tried very hard not to notice how pink her lips were and the way that they curved around the straw.
“Here, let me pay you back,” he fumbled blindly for his wallet as he said it because he couldn't stop looking at the fine lines of her face.
“You can buy me my next drink,” she said easily. “Don't tell anyone, but I'm hiding over here from my best friend. I love her, but she keeps on trying to set me up with people that her boyfriend knows so we can double date and I just...She eats all the bread sticks when we go out to dinner anyway.”
“That's happened to me too. Only my friend eats all the cheese fries.” He grimaced, she giggled, and on an impulse, he stuck out his hand. “I'm Fitz.”
“Jemma.”
three hours after the morning after
“Tell me everything,” Skye leaned forward eagerly across the table, maple syrup already dripping off her fork, and fixed Jemma with a laser stare.
“I met a guy. We talked, we kissed, we both drank a bit, I ended up going home with him, and the kind of things that happen in that situation...happened,” Jemma said primly. Truthfully, Jemma could outdrink a man twice her size and two frozen daquiris, a glass of white wine, three shots, and half of Fitz's overpriced craft beer had been enough to make her talk to him but not enough to make her kiss him. No, the kiss had been all her, perched on the edge of a couch in a dark corner by then so she could lean down and topple into his lap as she pressed her lips to his.
“That bad?” Skye winced in sympathy and took another sip of her mimosa.
“No!” Jemma protested. “Not bad at all. Really good. Really, really good.” She stuffed half a waffle into her mouth so she wouldn't have to say anything else, but she could already feel herself turning bright red. Back in seventh grade, she'd read her way through a series of dense medical manuals and overly cheerful books with titles like Your Changing Body just to avoid a supremely awkward birds and the bees talk from her mum, and she'd been averse to talking about it ever since. It was a natural process, she knew that, and she could talk about other people's sex lives for hours on end, especially since Skye wasn't the kind of person to skimp on the details, but when it came to her own, well...Jemma always had the sinking suspicion that she was doing it all wrong, despite her extensive knowledge of the scientific particulars and subscription to a noted journal of sexuality. That she was too quiet or too loud, too enthusiastic or not enthusiastic enough, unable to live up to the elaborate set of standards that she'd never quite been able to decipher. But last night, he'd looked at her in a way that made the confidence she faked seem awfully real, like he just wanted her, whatever way she happened to be, and for a few hours at least, she'd been too caught up in the moment to even try to analyze it all.
“Yay!” Skye cheered. “Want me to buy you another mimosa to celebrate the sex? Or not,” she added when Jemma scowled at her. “Speaking of which, did I tell you about my latest client? Wants me to hack into her husband's email to find out if he's having an affair and if he is, to help her steal his mistress for herself. It's their thing.” Skye worked as a freelancer, but mostly for the May-Hill private detective agency, and technically, she assured Jemma, nothing she did was illegal. “Which means that we can probably afford to get our sink fixed soon.”
“Skye...”
“I'm pretty sure the water isn't supposed to stop working on alternate Tuesdays” Skye shrugged. “I thought about asking Trip to get his engineer friend to fix it but after hearing about the drone thing, I decided that his friend would probably turn our water blue instead.”
“Turn the water blue?” Jemma teased. “I don't think that's quite how it works.” Skye stuck out her tongue at her and threatened to eat all the bacon until her phone buzzed and she leaped up from her seat.
“That's Trip. We're picking out a couch after the last one fell victim to his friend's bachelor party. The pre-wedding bachelor party, not the post-divorce bachelor party,” she explained. “And because I know how to do Ikea the right way. Lots and lots of Swedish meatballs.”
“You're helping him pick out a couch? Sounds serious...” Jemma's voice died in her throat as Trip walked through the door, talking to the guy whose apartment she had fled a few hours before. The guy—Fitz, his name was definitely Fitz—turned bright red at the sight of her, stopping in his tracks and barely keeping his mouth from dropping open.
“Jemma?” Skye asked slowly. “Fitz? Do you two...know each other?”
“Only in the biblical sense,” Jemma blurted out.
the night of (part 2)
Jemma Simmons was too perfect to be real, Fitz decided. Because not only was she heart-stoppingly pretty, all curls and big brown eyes and creamy skin, but brilliant and sweet and sharp and capable of talking about string theory, neurotoxins, and Doctor Who at the same time and, most amazingly of all, still talking to him. Because pretty girls just didn't talk to him. And even if they did, Fitz couldn't talk to them back. But he'd been talking to her nonstop for almost an hour now, talking over and around and with her, finishing her sentences as she finished his, laughing and shouting and arguing and agreeing, and nearly forgetting that anyone else in the bar existed. Fitz pinched himself, just to make sure he hadn't fallen asleep waiting for his beer and started dreaming. Nope (ouch), definitely not.
“What are you doing?” she asked, giggling. They'd moved over to one of the couches after Fitz had knocked someone's drink over in the midst of an impassioned argument over whether Nine or Ten was the better doctor and now Jemma was perched on the arm of a couch, dress sliding up over her thighs as she crossed her legs and balanced her drink on one knee. Fitz told himself that he wouldn't look.
“Checking that you're really here,” he said. “There's got to be a scientific theory that states you're too good to be true.” Inwardly, Fitz winced. There was a reason that Trip had banned him from coming up with his own pickup lines.
“I'm very real.” Jemma tilted her head to one side and fixed him with an assessing look. “Want me to prove it?” And then she was leaning over and kissing him, practically tumbling into his lap, all warmth and curves and soft skin in his arms, and she made the most interesting sounds when he kissed a certain spot on her neck, and her hands were cold but he didn't mind at all when they pulled him closer, and Fitz's brain was short-circuiting, overloading on touch and breath and her, and he didn't care at all.
two days after
It made sense, looking back on her track record, that Jemma couldn't even have a one-night stand right. She'd fled the diner almost immediately after she'd made that ill-considered remark about the Biblical sense and currently, as she waited in line at the dry cleaner's, she was calculating the chances of never seeing him again. They weren't good.
It wasn't that she was embarrassed about having slept with him. She was rather proud of that bit. It was more the things they'd told each other afterward, whispering fears back and forth in a darkened room, or the way that he'd made her moan out his name into his sheets, or just the fact that she'd let down all her walls for him. No nubile young prodigy with an above-average fashion sense, no Hermione Granger imitation always ready with the right answer, just her. Messy, complicated, pretending that she knew what she was doing even when she didn't. And he'd kissed her worry away until after a while, she forgot that she'd ever been anything else than herself. Only now, Jemma wasn't sure if she was ready for someone to see her like that permanently. Or for anything permanent at the moment--her last few relationships had gone down in flames in a spectacular fashion, one when he'd said someone else's name during sex, and every time she had been left wondering how much of it had been them and how much of it had been her.
“Jemma, what did you do to this dress?” Samantha, the grad student who worked at the dry cleaner's on weekends and who had struck up a friendship with Jemma based on the sheer difficulty of getting sample stains out of clothes, asked with a horrified look on her face.
“I, ah...it got snagged on something?” Jemma said weakly.
“And tore off all the buttons at once?” Samantha arched an eyebrow at her. “Just tell me it got ruined for a good cause.”
Behind her in line, there was a loud, hacking series of coughs. Jemma turned around to offer whoever it was a cough drop and froze. It was Fitz and he was turning bright red.
the night of (part 3)
“Too many buttons,” Fitz panted. “Why do they make dresses with this many buttons?” They'd barely made it into his apartment before they started kissing again and despite the marvelous things that the dress did for Jemma's legs and chest and everything, he'd decided that it'd look even better off her.
“Women's fashion. Why did you stop?” Jemma demanded and brought his lips back to hers, promptly deciding to let the wall and Fitz hold her up. It felt like they'd been kissing for hours and her knees had gone weak ages ago, undone by the deliberate slide of his mouth against hers and his teeth teasing at her lower lip and his tongue mapping out patterns against her collarbone, so Jemma pressed herself against him and hoped that he'd get the hint. He did (she'd known she was smart) and promptly lifted her up so she could wrap her legs around his waist and roll her hips against his.
“Trying...to...get...the bloody...dress...off,” he managed between kisses. “Who makes buttons this tiny?”
“Fuck the buttons,” Jemma gasped. Fitz actually groaned—Jemma filed that away for later—and tugged on the lace of her dress. Buttons went flying everywhere, one of them soaring through the air to land on his coffee table with a soft plink, and Jemma couldn't help giggling. Another button nearly hit Fitz in the nose and then they were both laughing, hard enough that she could feel his chest shaking against hers, and Jemma grinned widely at him.
“Right then. Bedroom,” he said firmly and turned her away from the wall to carry her into the hallway. “Let's get out of the button casualty zone. They made a brave sacrifice but they'll have to left behind.” She kept on laughing as he carried her down the hallway, swung her down onto his bed, and stopped stock-still when he caught sight of her lace bra.
“They're just breasts, Fitz,” she finally said when he showed no sign of stopping. “Genetically designed to be attractive, yes, but hardly the be-all, end-all of--”
“They're perfect,” he breathed and reached out to skim his hands along the undersides of her breasts. Jemma went still, her eyes fluttering shut, and then her mouth fell open in a silent sigh as he slid his hands upward to cup her breasts fully and tease at her nipples. He bent down to wrap his lips around one and she moaned something that sounded suspiciously like his name.
“I like that sound,” he informed her. “I'm going to make you say it again.”
five days after
“A chai latte and a chocolate chip cookie, please,” Jemma said politely.
“The chai will be out in a minute but it looks like we just ran out of cookies, unfortunately.” The barista winced in sympathy. Lola's toffee chocolate chip cookies were legendary. “We should have another batch out of the oven in fifteen minutes or so.”
“She can have mine,” a voice volunteered from the other register. Somehow, Jemma knew that it would be Fitz before she even turned to face him.
“You really don't have to do that,” Jemma said firmly.
“I don't mind waiting.” Fitz grinned shyly at her and for a moment, Jemma had to grip the counter for support, remembering the way he'd said the exact same words in a very different context. Damn him for being so charming, and so sweet, and for showing up everywhere she went, with that smile and that hopeful look in his eyes that he didn't even seem to be aware of--
“Let me buy your coffee, then,” she replied before she could think better of it. “We could, er, we could talk for a while? Wait for the next batch of cookies to come out?”
“I...I'd really like that,” he was beaming at her now, as he grabbed both of their drinks and navigated through the maze of tables to a spot by the window. “Can't let you keep on thinking that Nine is better than Ten now, can I?”
the night of (part 4)
“Are you sure? Men...that is to say, the men I've dated previously, don't seem to be very interested in—that. They tend to want to skip to the...the main event, so to speak.” Jemma was trying very hard to use her words, and to express herself in an articulate, adult fashion but Fitz was leaving a trail of kisses along her inner thighs and she suspected that the closer he got, the less coherent thought would be an option. She could probably test that in her spare time, investigate the link between levels of foreplay and cognitive abil—Fitz slid a (long, amazingly talented, gift from the heavens above) finger inside her and Jemma bid a fond goodbye to her coherent thoughts.
“Very sure. Unless you want me to stop?” Fitz glanced up at her, waiting until she met his eyes.
“God no,” Jemma breathed. “I've just never...I'm not sure exactly how to...what the proper reaction would be.”
“Lie back,” he pressed a kiss to the very top of her hip. “Let me do all the work.” He curled a finger deeper inside her, tongue tracing a slow circle around her center that already had her trembling and gasping. “Because, trust me, I don't mind waiting if I can make you do that again.”
a week after
There he was again, picking up an order of takeout from her and Skye's favorite Thai place and trying to balance five boxes and his wallet at once. Jemma tapped him on the shoulder and deftly plucked three of the boxes from his hands. When he turned around to look at her, Fitz nearly dropped the other two.
“I'm not following you, I swear,” he blurted out. “It's just that Skye told Trip about this place and now he gets these weird cravings for their tofu-- “no junk in the temple”--and they also do these great spring rolls and I have the car so I'm always the one sent on take-out duty. Not that I don't enjoy running into you—it's really nice, actually—I just didn't want you to think that I was some kind of creeper.”
“They do make good spring rolls here. Although,” she added, smirk creeping across her face. “I would have thought that an accomplished chef such as yourself could make his own spring rolls.” He'd baked a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough brownies for her at two in the morning when she'd complained that she was hungry, measured out sugar and flour in a self-assured way that she'd found strangely attractive, tried to teach her how to crack an egg correctly (they'd gone through half a carton before she'd finally succeeded), and swung her up onto the counter to kiss her after they'd put the brownies in the oven. And the brownies hadn't even burnt when they got distracted.
“We can't all live off beer and sriracha,” he countered before turning to pay. “I still can't believe that Skye's dad actually cooked you guys dinner.”
“That was one time!” Jemma protested. “And in Mr. Coulson's defense, he makes a really good steak. The last time Skye and I tried to cook meat, it kind of looked like charcoal when we were done.” She winced at the memory: she'd even offered to take the steak in to her lab to see if it shared any of the properties of charcoal. Skye had declined, tossing the steak right into the trash and calling for pizza, although Jemma couldn't fathom why.
“And to think you once lectured me about eating vegetables...” Fitz was smirking at her now. It was a disturbingly good look on him. Over the past week, Jemma had discovered that he looked just as good as daylight as he did at night. And was the only person she'd ever met who was able to keep up with her when she went off on a scientific tangent, and sweet, and generous, and...Screw the social conventions of one-night stands, Jemma decided and leaned forward to kiss him.
Fitz gasped, dropped the Thai food, and kissed her back.
the morning after (second time around)
Light. Bright, bright morning light. Laser-like, skull-piercing morning light from hell. Jemma rolled over and buried her face against Fitz's shoulder with a moan. “I'm not a pillow,” he mumbled and yawned.
“Yes, you are. You're a great pillow.” She groped behind her for the covers and pulled the sheet further up over both of them.
“Aren't you supposed to be meeting Skye for brunch soon?” he asked absent-mindedly, combing a hand through her hair.
“Theoretically, yes. Do you want me to go?”
“No. No, no, no,” he said vehemently. “Stay. Stay for as long as you want.” Jemma snuggled further into him, letting her eyes drift closed, until he spoke again. “Jemma...is this...are we...what are we? Because I'll be whatever you want me to, if you just tell me what it is.”
“I...I'm not entirely sure. I haven't exactly had the best history with relationships. Any kind of them, really. But you make me want to see if we can figure it out what it is together. You make me want things.” She shifted off his chest and propped herself up on one elbow to meet his eyes properly and lace her fingers with his. “Like pancakes and kissing and going on coffee dates that last for three hours while you eat your weight in cookies and getting to tease you about it later and...just you. To get the chance to find out what we add up to ”
“Well, luckily enough," Fitz said solemnly, trying and failing to hide his huge grin. "I think we're both very good at arithmetic.” Fitz was true to his word: they wrote the equation out later, on one of his massive whiteboards.
(Fitz + Jemma) + (2 Nights) + (4 Random Meetings) = The universe is trying to tell us something. Something good.