Chapter Text
'Can't Feel My Face' by The Weeknd pours from Gendry's Wharfedale speakers and fills his ears like water. The beat hums in his chest and he doesn't care how big and goofy his grin is right now. He drains the dregs of the Corona in his hand, proud that he outdrank one of his best friends, Robb, who was probably passed out in the cab with Jon and Ygritte right now. What did he do again? Gendry searches the fog in his head, he remembers it was funny but the memory of exactly what it was that Robb did evades him.
His lips and fingers are numb with drink, and it feels so weird rubbing his thumb along his fingertips, like all five digits belong to someone else. Who cares, he's warm and relaxed and though it kind of feels like moving underwater, this huge mass that is his body has never been so light.
A bottle cap pops and falls to the floor, followed by another as Arya sets the bottle opener on the kitchen bench. She slinks over to him on a slight arc, like his apartment isn't steel, brick and concrete securely attached to the earth, but maybe a small boat out at sea, the floor of the open plan living space rocking with the ebb and flow of the ocean.
'You're wasted.' He hoots, taking the bottle of beer and clinking it with hers.
'Am not.' She holds a finger up, saving her place in the conversation while she downs down a quarter of her beer. How on earth a woman as small as Arya managed to keep up with him, drink for drink while her brothers had to call it a night, is beyond him. 'Look, watch me make this shot.' She sets her drink down to pick up her cue, hooded steel grey eyes locked on his while her tongue darts, teasingly to the corner of her sly smile. The fingertips of her free hand brush along his arm as she makes her way past. The moves of the game they're really playing. Not the game of eight ball, on a table far too big for his small apartment, but the game they'd been playing for months now. A lingering look over a cup of coffee. Easy smiles that become shy ones. A feather light caress of fingertips as they watch Netflix, slouched together on the couch. A tongue moistening dry lips, preparing for words that neither could seem to find the courage to confess. Countless drinks in, Gendry found himself wondering why they were still dancing around the elephant in the room. It was time.
Arya lines up the white ball to the cushion two-thirds down the table that is his most prized possession. It's full sized, and he got it for a steal when their favourite hangout, Bronn's 8 Ball closed a month ago. The thing took up the entire dining area, and you couldn't make a shot from the left, by the door unless you held the cue at a ridiculous angle. That hadn't stopped Arya from sinking every ball and kicking everyone's ass all night, his especially. Gendry set his own bottle down and crept up behind her, his footsteps drowned out by the stereo. I can't feel my face when I'm with you. She's bent low and that cute little, round ass of hers, snug in her jeans, sits up nicely in the air while she stretches across the table on tippy toes. Gendry cradles her body with his as she pulls the cue back. His fingertips tingle as he runs them up just under the hem of her faded Pixies tee, something her mom, Catelyn handed down to her. His fingers skim her side as he breathes the next line of the song in her ear, 'But, I love it.' just as she pops the cue, sending the white ball off the side of the table and bouncing along the tiled floor.