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Title: Squared (2²)
Author: roseveare
Rating: NC-17
Length: 9,000 words approx
Summary: Jennifer Mason feels like an idiot who accidentally fell into a foursome.
Notes: Written for BlackEyedGirl, who requested Audrey/Duke/Jennifer/Nathan. Troublesfest 2014.
Notes #2: This is set in a fluffier, happier mid season 4, where when everyone got together, everyone got together. Wade and Jordan realised they were perfect for each other and ran off to Las Vegas, where they’re experimenting contentedly with masochism and rubber gloves.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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Squared(2²)
She did not sign up for this.
Oh, Jen may have cluelessly jumped at the idea of dating Duke Crocker. She may have stood somewhat stunned and absorbed the unexpected revelation that Duke used to have a three-way-thing going on with Audrey Parker and Nathan Wuornos, which for weird and Guy-Related Reasons fizzled into merely steadfast masculine friendship and Not Talking About It once Audrey was taken out of the equation. Jen may have witnessed the longing and loss on Duke's face when Audrey came back and was Audrey and hooked up with Nathan again. Jen may even have opened her mouth and said something very, very foolish and unlike herself, when she saw that expression. But she is sure that she did not sign up for this.
Jennifer Mason is a good girl. Four in a bed together sounds a lot like 'orgy', and Jen is not the kind of girl who takes part in orgies. Nuh-uh.
"Move up," Audrey tells Duke, climbing pretty much on top of him. "How the hell are Nathan and I supposed to fit if you’re all sprawled out like that?"
"Okay, okay," Duke says. “Give me a damn chance.”
"You know it could be pretty tricky when it was three in a bed, and there are four of us now."
"There's only three right now.” Duke points out.
“You need a bigger bed," Audrey asserts.
"You need a bigger bed," he counters. "I can't fit anything bigger than this onto the boat."
"My apartment's not as big as Nathan's place." Both of them look at Nathan.
Duke looks away. "Nathan has sulky neighbours."
Audrey huffs. She rolls up on her elbow and turns to Jen. "Hey. Are you doing all right?"
"I would rather sleep on the boat," Jennifer blurts. Stupidly. Why are they looking at her? Asking her? Nathan hasn't said anything yet, either.
Then again, perhaps that's not so unusual on his part.
"Um, okay," Audrey says. Duke reaches over and strokes his free hand along Jen's flank, ending down at her hip. He tweaks the angle of the bone there with his knuckles. His other hand is on Audrey's breast. Audrey arranges herself against the pillows with her knees bent wide and one leg hooked around the other side of Duke's crouched and equally naked form. Jen, still wearing her bra and panties, crouches on the very edge of the bed and wishes she had either of their sexual confidence.
"You sure you're up for this tonight, babe?" Duke asks. His face is anxious for her.
"I did kinda mean, are you all right?" Audrey adds.
"No," Jen says. "I mean, no, yes, I'm fine. And I am up for this. I'm sorry, but too many people are naked and words are working less well than usual."
A soft huff of laughter from Nathan, who is beyond the other side of the bed, still slowly undressing, and this marks his largest contribution to proceedings so far. Really, Nathan should be her ally in all of this, because he isn’t naked yet and she has to wonder if he also wishes he had Audrey and Duke's sexual confidence. And because she doesn't think that Nathan Wuornos is the kind of person who takes part in orgies, either. She's rather stunned to find out he took part in a threesome.
The truth is, though, that Nathan is a more daunting part of this than Audrey is.
Audrey is grinning. "Come and sit with me up here," she says. She pats the space between her open legs, and toes Duke uncompromisingly out of the way, prodding him until he curses her and rolls aside. Jen blinks rapidly. Then, she makes a decision and she scoots on her hands and knees up to the head of the bed, where she turns with a whump and flops on her butt with her back to Audrey, between Audrey's legs. Audrey leans over her shoulder and turns her face with gentle fingers, then kisses her, although the angle is awkward and she doesn't let the kiss linger too long.
Her lips feel soft and taste of lip balm. They taste inexplicably female. Well, that was easy. It's very new to Jen, who blinks some more and without really thinking about it places her hand on Audrey's thigh. She shivers in a good way as Audrey unhooks her bra. Duke dares venture in again and kisses both their feet, where they rest almost touching on the bed in front. Audrey wriggles. The inside of her legs press against the outside of Jen's along almost their whole length.
Jennifer hunches her shoulders and giggles, then claps her hand over her mouth because she's not fifteen, damn it. She is a grown woman whose sexuality can be taken seriously. It's just that she is in a bed with three people. Or, wait, two people -- the third hasn't strictly speaking got in the bed yet.
This isn't even the first date, for all it feels like it.
The first date was breakfast, all four of them together, and they talked about what they'd do. Audrey and Duke talked the most. Jennifer and Nathan mapped out a wary truce with their eyes, and with the important part out of the way, let Audrey and Duke do the talking.
The second date was the night of the same day, at Audrey's place above the Gull, the apartment Jen still misses a little bit and kind of grew to regard as her space. She and Audrey watched Duke and Nathan have sex. Audrey brought popcorn and called across instructions. It was a hitherto unimagined level of awesome and Jen's brain had almost melted. Her eyeballs still felt like they'd grown several sizes bigger the day after. Duke making love to Nathan had been really kind of weird, but then they'd done a little switch-over and Nathan on top of Duke had been all kinds of hot in ways Jen felt unequipped to describe.
The day after, they'd meant to have breakfast again and evaluate. Instead, there had been a Trouble and Jen spent most of the day passing time with the Teagues on a police cordon. Everyone had been really tired in the evening, so she had ended up with Duke to herself back on the Rouge while Nathan and Audrey went home together and they all left figuring out this four way relationship deal until the next day.
Which was now.
"If you want," Audrey says slowly, her hand on Jen's hip, "We can watch these guys again and put this part off to another time. I made score cards."
Jen knows she made score cards because Duke found them earlier and had a minor blow-out about Audrey's sense of humour ever since she became a little bit Lexie. "I really, really want to use the score cards," Jen admits, wriggling her toes and squirming as Duke tries to tickle them, and inadvertently almost clocking him in the face as he unwisely makes his next move leaning down to suck one of her toes. She regards him through one open eye, twisting the other shut and screwing up her face. People do that? Duke does that? "But I am okay."
She doesn't know what Audrey did with her bra, but fingernails are now sliding over her nipple. That is -- that's also unmistakably female, and very new, but it's not bad. It's... just fine, in fact.
Duke crawls between both their legs and presses his nose into just the right contour in the panties she's still wearing to make Jen gasp. He hooks his thumbs under the elastic at the top of the thin material. "May I?"
"Oh, yes," Jen says, hearing her voice shudder. Audrey's arms slide down to her waist and Duke's elbows slip under her knees. Jen rocks her hips upwards, and is lifted momentarily by both of them, as Duke slides her underwear down. He guides one of her knees up and out and hooks the garment under. He doesn't let her think too hard about being exposed before all of them for the first time. He leans in and starts licking, even while he's still sliding the last scrap of cloth down her remaining ankle.
"Nathan," Audrey says, with an odd fierceness, "get the fuck onto this bed, now."
Jennifer shuts her eyes and focuses on Duke between her legs. She feels the bed rock with the extra weight as Nathan obeys. He always obeys when it's Audrey. Duke would've had a fight on his hands. Other thoughts fly from her as Duke drives his tongue deeper and his nose prods a nice spot. Her hips rock back against what she realises is soft hair and moisture at the juncture between Audrey's thighs. Audrey vocalises a happy little noise.
Involuntarily, Jen opens her eyes and sees that Nathan is taking up a position behind Duke. Audrey signals him with her fingers and a sly smirk. Nathan's fingers shine slickly in the low lighting as he reaches behind Duke's raised butt. Audrey can just about poke him with a toe if she stretches, grinding tighter into Jen when she does. Nathan gasps. It's fascinating to watch him when feeling floods in. He goes from not-overly-erect to very responsive very quickly. Jen swallows hard. She reminds herself that it's Duke he's going to... to make love to right now. She likes that thought. She reminds herself that she and Nathan have a tacit Unspoken Agreement.
Of course, it's unspoken, so she only assumes that Nathan thinks it's the same agreement as she thinks...
When he slides his fingers into Duke, the automatic movement Duke makes pushes his face harder against Jen, and she gasps. A few minutes later, when Nathan lines up his hips and enters Duke, and the first thrust rocks Duke's body forward... it's even better. Audrey's hands are on Jen's breasts, and little kisses press the back of her neck and send shivers through her. There is very little about which she could complain.
***
Lying in bed after, with four people, is something of a dogpile. Jen still feels heroically brave for reaching behind herself and fingering Audrey to completion at the last, which is stupid, because this is sex, and it should not require courage. Still, she can't help but think how little her parents would have approved.
Duke has snagged Audrey... To be honest, Jennifer gets the feeling it's been a while coming, and the two of them are going from snuggling to some heavy petting pretty damn fast, for all that everyone swore they were used up ten minutes ago. That wouldn't be a problem... Jen's sure it's not (she agreed to this)... except that it leaves her with Nathan.
She doesn't really know what to do with Nathan.
Actually, he looks uncomfortable too, as she turns and blinks at him from a distance of less than inches, the sort of distance imposed by four people lying side by side in one bed, especially when two of those people are about to get extremely frisky.
Nathan says, "We don't need to do anything but watch them."
"All right." Relieved and grateful, Jen finds the courage to slide her hand in a quick caress over his hip. His face doesn't change, and by the time she's rolled over to watch Duke with Audrey, and is facing away from him, she has fully realised that he didn't feel the touch and hasn't registered she did it. She feels her face burn, but Nathan can't see it and Duke and Audrey are too absorbed in each other to notice. Nathan doesn't touch her at all.
She at least starts to feel safe, lying next to him, relaxing in the knowledge that there's no expectation there. He couldn't feel her anyway. So it's pointless, right? Then again, he seems to get on just fine with only Duke. But... but even if he wanted to touch her, he wouldn't, she tells herself in a rush, because he knows she doesn't want him to, and he is after all a good man, even if he's frustrating and freaky and has huge honking issues that made him get bikers to pay to beat him up for six months.
Even if she can't imagine ever loving him the way Audrey and Duke do.
Watching those two together, it's hard to regret her decision. Impossible to feel jealous in the presence of such tenderness and... and just downright fun. They're sheer joy and so much love. Jen wriggles down into the sheets and somehow manages to fall asleep with Duke and Audrey going full pelt in front of her and Nathan's presence, not touching, but still giving off radiator-like heat all along the back of her body.
***
Four in a bed and it's hardly surprising when they wake up crushed together. Jen blinks her eyes open, way too hot and surrounded by too many strong scents and too much loud breathing. The light level says it's still very early, but some sense of unease awoke her. Duke is curled against the front of her body, his arm around her waist, fingers on her hip, his face materialising out of the dimness slowly as she squints, big nose and long hair already tactile against her shoulder before she sort-of sees them. He's beautiful and sculpted, strong and lean. His presence comforts her. It's reassuring and normal, and everything she's become used to.
Gradually, enough details resolve for her to see that other lump beyond him in the bed is Audrey, a sprawl of kicked-out limbs taking up way more than her fair share of the limited space, blonde hair splayed just as broadly over the pillow, face buried in the sheets.
That leaves the warm presence behind Jennifer as still being Nathan.
She can't really explain the reaction of her body to tense up at this. It's not that she doesn't like him, or -- she doesn't love him, but then she doesn't love Audrey but she's willing to accept that love is something that can grow, and she would rather embrace this option and share Duke than see Duke miserable and pining.
She didn't actually intend to share herself. It was... something that grew out of talks and assumptions and her own tendency to say the wrong thing and to jump at anything that sounded like an implicit dare or suggestion that she couldn't or wouldn't do something.
Sometimes she has to wonder why words are meant to be her medium at all.
Her exact words, originally, had been, "You can still have them. It's okay." At Duke's questioning and rapidly shifting wide-eyed glance, she'd clarified to the point of, "Me. And them." Then she'd nodded and swallowed and smiled encouragingly, and told him, "You should go talk to them about it."
She'd kind of envisioned it like a custody timeshare: You have him Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Saturdays, and he's mine the rest of the week. Hell, Nathan and Audrey were supposed to be a solid couple themselves, they surely wouldn't want Duke around every day? So she'd thought.
So things had got weird. She wasn't entirely sure what had led her to not expect that.
With Audrey, though, she's starting to feel this sisterly vibe... like sisters with benefits, which sounds creepy but she really doesn't mean it that way. It's about how they'd both sat and giggled and snacked, talking commentary while Duke and Nathan went at it; about the idea of a female ally who would always be there, because Duke was... lovely, but he was still a guy, and, well.
But Nathan is--
Part of her can't deal with Nathan. She thinks he's broken: doesn't know if it happened that winter, with the oh-my-God-freakin'-BIKERS, or if it was before that. If it was all the years he's spent not being able to feel anything that did it, because oh God she can't even imagine. People need that. Functional people need that. Maybe he's starting to find his way back again, but he's still not there.
She feels cruel, with that in mind, that it should be part of her reason to want to reject him. The flaw's in her that she can't get past it. He's a policeman, and he chose a vocation to help people. He made mistakes, but he was ready to die to save the town... although that part does not really help in terms of Things She Can't Deal With About Nathan. She can deal with Duke's freaky blood power because it doesn't surface very often and it's pretty easy to not activate it, though she's going to have to be careful over getting her period. Somehow, she can deal with Audrey being four different people or more, because she doesn't wear it all the time the way Nathan seems to wear his issues.
Maybe she's just making excuses. She's sleeping next to a suicidally unstable bundle of can't-feel-anything who let bikers beat him up for six months, and that freaks her the hell out.
Her tense little movements in the bed have pushed her further into Duke. He curls his arm around her waist tighter and snorts in his sleep.
Movement behind her puts her every nerve on sudden alert. Then the bed shifts: she both hears and feels Nathan get up from the bed and pad out of the room. Duke's grip is too tight for her to sit up or even twist enough to see his progress, and her sudden desperate urge to protest the departure dies in the back of her throat.
Too late already, and she doesn't want to wake Audrey and Duke; doesn't want them to know about this.
She cuddles back down, expanding into the newly available space with uneasy guilt.
***
Nathan is already long gone by breakfast. Audrey left at the crack of dawn, too. Her phone rang -- a Trouble. Jennifer unhappily wonders if it really was a Trouble or just Nathan and a handy lie.
Almost the first thing Duke says upon her bleary arrival at the breakfast table, with just the two of them again, is, "You don't have to have sex with Nathan."
Jen stares at him. Her mouth works silently. After a pause, she says, with more force than necessary, "Good morning," making the polite greeting a bludgeon.
He half shakes his head, irritated. "I'm saying you don't have to sleep with Nathan. No-one will ever make -- no. No-one will even ask you to. He knows that. It's okay."
"I know that," Jen retorts, fiercely. "If I was feeling obligated, well, I wouldn't be, because I wouldn't be here. I'm just feeling... weird, because Nathan is a lot to absorb, okay?"
His face does that little moping thing that she's fairly sure he doesn't know he does, because it looks so very pathetic and undignified. "I'd have thought that Audrey--" he begins, with a note that's at least surprise rather than judgement, but she doesn't get to find out if his excuse is Audrey's sex or her multiple lives, because he stops anyway. That's something.
Jen takes a deep breath. They are just discussing this, like adults. As adults who sleep with whoever they damn well please, because they live in a town where people spontaneously combust or have murderous blood or hop between bodies, so convention can go fuck itself. "Audrey is sweet and funny, and I really kind of want the big sister thing, and I think I must be more bisexual than I ever realised, because I find that I am fine with that."
Duke grunts. "Nathan's not a people person."
Just because he gets it doesn't mean he likes it. Jen winces. "I know that sounds... bad. Look, Duke." She grabs his hands, which turns into a bit of a scuffle when he doesn't immediately realise what she's doing. "I want to love him. Both of them. I want to love both of them, and I think I can get there with Audrey."
He groans and thumps his head into the breakfast bar, next to the lump of their four joined hands. "I shouldn't have done this to you."
If she wasn't holding his hands, she'd hit him. "Hey! I suggested it! Duke, when I see you with Nathan, it's -- beautiful. I want that for you. I want you to be free to love him. But people... you know people search their whole lives for just one other person that they have that perfect connection with, okay? How lucky are you to find three?" She watches his eyebrows raise in surprise and tells him, "That doesn't mean it's going to happen again, for me. I haven't known you guys very long, and right now I feel... really, really new. We have to keep working at it and see what happens."
She pokes his face until he un-slumps and returns the clasp of their hands with a bit more dignity.
"You..." He kisses her forehead. "You’re so sensible."
"Yes," Jen snaps back, "that is so exactly what I look for my, uh, hot lovers... to tell me." She doesn't feel sensible. She feels like an idiot who accidentally fell into a foursome.
Duke moves the kiss down to her lips. He tastes of maple syrup. It reminds her that she's hungry. Last night was energetic. Maybe they should finish breakfast.
"It's not all about sex," he says, when he pulls back. "Of course it isn't. I'll talk to Audrey and Nathan. We'll make date night movie and pizza tomorrow."
"What about tonight?" Jen asks, feeling disappointed and very much like that is not really tackling any of the issues.
"Audrey already said they want to keep their own space tonight. That's okay, too, right?" The edge of Duke's thumb dances over the skin on the back of her hand.
"Of course." But Jen doesn't feel relieved. She just feels vaguely like she's failing a test.
***
They don't get a chance to have Movie Pizza Date Night, because a Trouble turns the whole town into something like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Jen wakes back to herself, more or less, to find she's on horseback wearing a big, frilly dress with a lean and warm body behind her. The arm of the person behind her is keeping her perched sideways on the saddle in her ridiculously floofy dress. Audrey still looks like a cop and is arguing with a very seedy cowboy!Duke on the ground, next to a camp fire, and there are a couple more horses nearby, one with an empty saddle, one stripped of gear and calmly grazing a distance away.
Jen shoots a nervous look over her shoulder to ascertain that, yes, it's Nathan behind her on the horse. She makes a noise and slides down off the saddle. The footwear she has on is even more ridiculous than the dress. She almost tumbles straight over, but Nathan snakes an arm down around her top half to steady her. He gets a handful of breast, but she reminds herself he doesn't know that, and just unpeels his fingers and mutters, "Thanks."
She risks a look up to study Nathan. He has a sheriff's star and looks like Jimmy Stewart. Actually, the garb looks really good on him. He's blinking and glancing down at himself, her, and around generally in confusion. Jen wonders if she has that sort of expression on her own face. She probably does, but she suspects that she merely looks ridiculous in the dress.
Very hazy memories of the past day drift back to her. "Audrey?" she asks, blankly, realising other people might have more answers. "...Duke?"
Audrey stops arguing with Duke to heave a relieved sigh. "Good. You're coming out of it at last. Help me talk to Duke, because he still thinks he's the scourge of the freakin' West."
"Hey!" Duke snaps. "That's Dab Hand Duke, fiercest gun in the West, and you should learn some damn respect, you britches-wearin' harridan!"
"Oh my God," Jen says. "He's a caveman."
Audrey snorts.
Behind Jen, Nathan slides down off the horse. She suddenly remembers propositioning him, a lot, and her face must turn the colour of a tomato.
After being away from him a moment, the nearness of Nathan brings the alcohol smell that's on him sharply to her attention, and then she remembers that part, too. The sheriff's shot and in hospital, and his down-and-out disgraced deputy is the only thing now keeping law in the town.
"You want to help me out here, too, Nathan?" Audrey prompts. Something a bit too achingly hopeful in her voice suggests she’s had some very frustrating conversations with their Trouble-addled selves.
Duke gets up. "I ain't hangin' around to smalltalk with the damn law."
"I'll arrest you." Nathan pulls out some handcuffs on his second suspiciously clumsy attempt.
Between words and threats of restraint, they manage to get Duke to sit back down, and then the rest of them join him around the fire. It takes a while, but Duke starts remembering that he's not an outlaw and Haven isn't the Wild West frontier. Jen's antics of the last day or so start to get hazier in her brain the more she returns to herself. She tries to rifle through them while they're still there, and decides she can be fairly sure that she didn't have sex with anyone that wasn't Duke, but from what she remembers, it was a very close thing.
Did this freakin' Trouble cast her as a whore because it was judging her for being part of a foursome?
Nathan takes out a hip flask and gets glared at by everyone. After his first swig, he grimaces and pushes it into the centre of their circle near the fire, where Audrey claims it, and then Duke snatches it from her.
"I'm not an alcoholic," Nathan complains. "I didn't even drink much when I was on the run with the Crazy Maze Tattoo gang -- I mean, the Guard trying to kill me."
Jen finds herself giving him a look of sympathy.
"Yeah, but you're definitely the best fit among Haven PD for the role this Trouble needed," Duke says. "Sorry, but you were pretty down and out a few weeks ago."
"I can't believe I'm a -- a whore!" Jen snaps. She hasn't said very much so far, and it makes them jump and blink a bit.
"If it helps," Audrey says, "there really aren't all that many proactive types of roles for women in this kind of movie."
Duke doesn't say anything about being a criminal and a rogue, but then he's not been left much wriggle-room, there.
***
They manage to disentangle themselves and the rest of Haven from old Lenny Richens' coma-induced fantasy world before he drags them all into death with him. All other plans are abandoned as they return to Audrey's place, worn and treading heavily in boots newly transformed back into ordinary modern footwear. Duke still seems slightly oilier than usual and occasionally drops endings from his words. Nathan still smells faintly of spirits. Jen, maybe, still has the urge to make a suggestive comment and grope whichever of the two men is nearer, but she holds herself determinedly back from doing any such thing.
Duke slings one arm around her and the other around Nathan as they fall through the door, nuzzling and kissing their faces in turn. He's tired, and Jen is too, because she's too hazy to complain when he hugs them harder and puts her in a three way embrace with Nathan, and she doesn't even think about it until they've already fallen apart to collapse on the sofa, with Nathan safely on the other side of Duke.
Jen remembers propositioning him a great deal today, but just because some Trouble had her do that, it isn't a reason to break the ice.
The fact he didn't take advantage of any of those opportunities might be. Then again, that could just have been him staying in character as the drunk but honourable fallen sheriff.
Jennifer makes a noise of frustration. Both men turn to her and she waggles her hands irritably and says, "Nothing!"
Audrey, who did not get mind-fucked today, walks easily past them and says, "I'm going to hit the shower."
Jen waits until the water starts running before she opines, "That's really, really, really annoying. Don't you guys find that's--"
Nathan and Duke grunt tired agreement. Nathan says, "I still feel like bathing is a once-a-month kind of exercise."
"Oh, God, yes," Duke groans. "Let's just go to bed."
If they had done this within the framework of the Wild West fantasy, which was a possibility narrowly avoided, then that bedroom encounter would probably have gone very differently. As it is, Jen watches Nathan perform oral sex on Duke, then giggles and pants happily as Duke turns his attentions to her, and Nathan bows out of any reciprocation because he can't feel it and his body is too tired to coax into responding. In bed with Nathan without Audrey is a weirdness anyway. He can't feel any of this.
It's... nice. It's good. She kind of starts to feel like Nathan is an ally, not a problem. It's okay if they never have sex, because they both love Duke, and Duke loves both of them. That can be... comfortable, in its own way.
They fall in on either side of Duke, and whisper conversation about the day, and Jen lets a little of her lingering Trouble-induced naughtiness slip out. "I would have loved to have slung your gun." To Duke. "Shined your sheriff's button." To Nathan.
When Audrey comes in they're still snickering together with their heads close. Audrey climbs in bed on the side next to Nathan, and Jen does detect a faint hesitation and wrinkling of her nose before she sighs and opts to just go for it, and join her three smelly and Trouble-hungover lovers anyway.
Her presence peels Nathan from Duke's side. Jen hears Nathan groan as he wraps his arms around Audrey and feeling returns to him. She thinks that maybe it's not always necessarily a good thing.
"Nathan," Audrey prods suspiciously, "are you still drunk?"
"He probably is," Duke says. "Actually, yeah. He's way too relaxed not to be."
"I thought the drink was a part of the Trouble," Jen says. "Can you get drunk on Troubled drink that ain't -- I mean, that's not even real?"
"Who knows what the gut-rot actually was," Duke says, "since Nathan doesn't carry around a flask. Um, do you?" He lifts his head abruptly from their snuggling. "Because after that winter, there are things I would no longer put past you."
"No, I don't," Nathan says, irritably. "And I'm not drunk. I'm just tired. Go to sleep."
Audrey says, "I feel like I need some sort of safety rope to make sure I stay in this bed."
So does Jen. The part about needing a bigger bed, somewhere, they are definitely agreed on.
"Push Nathan over to the edge," Duke suggests. "He won't care."
"No!" Audrey shoots back. "He can't feel himself falling off to catch himself."
"It's not like it would hurt," Nathan mutters. "I'd probably be okay anyway."
"No," Audrey says again, and Duke says, "I was joking, Nathan."
Jen thinks about the different ways they both take care of Nathan, and the ways he uses his Trouble to try place himself between danger and either of them. Thinking about it makes her feel warm and cosy and happy to be a part of them.
"Tomorrow," Audrey says, "we're going shopping for a bigger bed. And you are all going to shower."
***
Haven's not big and its stores are limited. The bigger bed is put on order, and for now they have to make do. Most of the urges to reach for sidearms or... booty... dissipate during the day after the Wild West Trouble, as Lenny Richens hangs on and then blinks out from his coma, and the tendencies just leave a faint embarrassment in their wake.
Nathan and Duke seem to have got good at burying things like that. Jen kind of has to ask herself again why she is staying in this town.
There used to be just one reason. Now there are two, and... there should be three, but that part is still a slightly limbo zone. Call it two-and-a-half.
"So Nathan went 'crazy'?" she repeats, having that conversation with them. Crazy is kind of a hot word for her, so she handles it carefully. She isn't entirely sure what it means in this particular story, as they're gathered around the table in Duke's galley talking Troubles past. "And you chained him up?" She is rather aghast at that.
"He was seriously mean-fighting crazy," Duke says, defensively. "It was safer than tranqing him."
Audrey holds up both hands. "Hey, I just asked Duke to look after him."
"You should have known full well he'd do something like that," Nathan says. Okay, Nathan and Duke are used to this, but he still doesn't look happy about this story. "There was the time when Duke was a pirate. An idiot pirate."
"I was an awesome pirate," Duke protests.
"From the perspective of any eight year olds watching, yes, I'm sure," Nathan snipes. "We all thought it was Christmas in July, once."
"That was the most freakish Trouble ever," Audrey says, and shudders hard.
Duke pops the cork on another bottle of wine. "I thought you got over your Santaphobia."
Nathan snorts, almost snorting the remnant of his glass of wine. He looks at Jen's gaping confusion and explains. Apparently, Duke was dressed as Santa for all of that Trouble, and say what?
Jen has never seen Nathan quite this vocal, but she's also seen Duke deliberately top up his glass a few times when he wasn't looking. Are they trying to get Nathan drunk?
She starts to look more suspiciously at the level in her own glass, after that, but can't figure out if it ever sneakily increases.
She corners Duke about it, though, when he goes up to do some checks on deck. They can still hear Nathan and Audrey talking and laughing together through the nearby open hatch. "Are you trying to get Nathan drunk for me?" Her suspicions turn her voice into the sharp little hiss she doesn't like.
"No, no. No." Duke may have had a few more glasses than his usual. The wine has been flowing thick and fast. "It's because he's a pudding." He places his hand on her shoulder.
"A... pudding?" she repeats blankly.
Duke nods, with absolute sincerity. "You need to see that he's a pudding. Because it gets hard to see, when he's tense, and lately he's always tense. Except yesterday. So."
Jen feels her brows twitch and remembers that Nathan had claimed he wasn't drunk yesterday. "What... kind of pudding?" she asks, kind of flailing around this particular description for Nathan Wuornos. "The feels-nothing-gets-punched-a-lot pudding?"
Duke doubles over silently, making wild gestures for relief, because Nathan and Audrey have fallen quiet down below. Jen reviews her words and then reviews the amount she's drank tonight, too. Duke straightens and pulls her close in to stage whisper, "A big, spongy, sappy, ridiculous pudding."
"...Um. That shoots people? And gets punched a lot." Jen waggles her eyebrows and nods and hopes that all this thoroughly communicates her epic sense of what the fuck? to Duke.
He buries his head in her shoulder and pats the other one rhythmically with his hand.
"Are you crying?" Jen asks, horrified.
Audrey's head pops up out of the hatch behind them. "Are you guys doing something naughty up here that we should be joining in with?"
"--No--" Duke wheezes.
"Audrey, is he there?" Nathan calls up from somewhere deeper below. "Ask him if I can open another bottle of -- Duke, can I open another bottle of wine?"
"Go ahead, buddy!" Duke hollers back, though his voice still sounds slightly constricted.
"Duke has been telling me about the 'pudding theory' of Nathan's secret nature," Jen informs Audrey, and can't help but giggle, especially when Audrey's eyebrows start to do acrobatics of their own.
"No, he is," Duke says, exasperated. "He's a massive sap. He's a marshmallow. He makes decoupage. He likes scents. He likes babies and kittens and..."
"Growling," Jen prompts. "He really likes growling."
Audrey grimaces. "Okay, I begin to see what this is about. Come back downstairs. Me and Mr. Growly-Marshmallow are missing you. And I'm pretty sure the wine we found in the back of your cupboard is the really good stuff you're always hiding from us, so you might not want to miss it."
Duke lets out a curse and flies past both of them to head back down into the boat. Audrey shares an evil grin with Jen. Who belatedly realises it's Audrey's Very Special Beloved she's been saying sour things about. "I'm sorry. I guess that was insensitive. I like Nathan. I do."
Audrey links her arm in Jennifer's. Her camisole top is very small, and she should be cold, but her skin feels very hot through the thin material of Jen's clothes. "It's okay. I know that Detective Wuornos is an acquired vintage." Her smile is a little twisted. "All this, tonight? It's a Duke Plan. For some reason those really often involve alcohol. I'm pretty sure I used to disapprove more..." She waves her free hand up next to her head. "But now that I'm a little bit Lexie, somehow it's much more okay." She pulls a face. "Anyway, yesterday he was relaxed, and he was better with you. Duke thought if he was relaxed again..."
She leaves that hanging.
It's the first time it hits Jen that this isn't just her problem. It's a double sided problem. At first she's relieved. Then she gets annoyed. Nathan has the audacity to have a problem with her?
"Why should Nathan have a problem with me?" she squeaks, indignant.
"Because you're not me or Duke," Audrey says wryly, "and his shell takes time to crack. Because you're new and different, and he doesn't deal well with that. Because he's sensitive and he... thinks... you don't like him."
Jennifer is a wordsmith, and she knows very well that 'thinks' has just been chosen as the kinder of the available words. Nathan does not think, Nathan knows. Because she has not taken any care to hide it. And actually, she herself knew the first parts of all of that -- it was obvious the first night it was even implicitly indicated that he might sexually interact with her, when it took fifteen minutes and Audrey's snapping at him to get him undressed and in bed with them.
"Oh," she says in a small voice.
"It's not your fault," Audrey says. "This is kind of an unusual situation, right? We'll work it through."
"I... thought it was getting better," Jen says, thinking of yesterday. Now with this new information, she's no longer sure. Nathan doesn't like her? Really, why would he not like her? She's nice, and... and sweet, and non-scary. It's definitely not like she's six-foot-plus of angst who needs a damn guidebook.
"It is getting better," Audrey agrees. "And we still need more wine."
Jen actually suspects that this was a Duke and Audrey Plan. She trudges back down the steps with Audrey, though she has to let go of her arm due to their steepness. She feels rather morose and like she's had the wind knocked out of her sails.
There's a little petting that night, which she manages to lift her mood for, but the actual outcome of the dreadful Duke and Audrey Plan is that they get Nathan too drunk to function. So he ends up falling asleep on a chair. That leaves Jen with Audrey and Duke, who she is comfortable with, in the bed which is now big enough. It would all be more comfortable, though, if both of them were not far drunker than she is.
Jen ends up being the one to come back, later, to cover Nathan with a blanket and bring him a glass of water. She pokes him until she realises that won't work, then cups her hands over his ear and talks loudly because she doesn't want to have to shout to wake him up. She makes him drink the water and tries to get him to go to bed, but instead he falls asleep again in the chair.
Jennifer is too tired by that time to wake him up and try again, so she retreats to bed where the snoring Duke and Audrey await. She thinks, her brows crunching together as she disapprovingly climbs into bed with them, that it is high time for a Jen Plan.
***
"Coffee?" Nathan says blankly at her, over breakfast. He looks a bit green, but seems more or less okay, if only because, of course, he can't feel his hangover.
"Yes," Jen says positively. "You and me and not them. We should, you know. Talk. Try to get to know each other without them. Because we are sleeping in the same bed along with two brazen idiots who think that getting someone drunk could ever actually solve anything."
It has struck her, lying awake last night and again this morning, that Nathan should be her ally in this. Because despite that recent Trouble's casting of him, Nathan is actually sober and serious and somewhat sensible of character, once you get away from the punching, the temper, and the suicidal impulses. Which, okay, are hard to get away from. But she's willing to bet he never drinks at eight in the morning.
...Jennifer glares across the galley at Audrey, who's found a stray bottle-end from last night. Nathan shakes his head minimally and rolls his eyes in a silent, subtle warning of, don't.
"I can't believe I drank that much on a work night," he says, aloud.
Duke wanders into the galley wearing not a single scrap and sticks two slices of bread in the toaster. "I can't believe you fell asleep."
"Shut up," Nathan returns with some force. "You sabotaged me."
Jen pats his hair and pours him another orange juice, and declares that she is in a foursome with three idiots.
"...Okay," says Duke. "Do you want toast? I'd cook, but I'm not sure my head can handle it safely this morning."
"You are burning your toast," Jen points out acerbically, pointing.
Duke curses and dives for the toaster, which he's accidentally whammed up onto its highest setting while leaning on it.
"Naked cooking's not safe, or hygienic," Nathan says.
Jen nods along with him.
"I don't know..." Audrey leans back against the counter, tipping her head and ogling appreciatively. "He can strut around my kitchen like that any day."
Jen a bit plaintively suggests, "How about a naughty apron?"
***
Lunchtime comes around too fast. By that time, she's had chance to think about the prospect a bit more and get nervous, because what the hell is she supposed to talk about with Nathan? Also, the Teagues found out about the lunch meeting and instructed her to pump him for information about the HPD's morning activities for the Haven Herald, which she doesn't feel like doing, and will definitely complicate everything, and yet she'll be failing at her duties if she doesn't! Agh! It's enough to make her... crazy.
Or not.
Anyway, she doesn't make it to the coffee house. This, she's learning, is a feature of prearranged appointments in Haven. Nathan could have warned her.
Vince and Dave might at least be happy that she'll bring back a story for the newspaper, although then again perhaps not, because by the look of things, this will end up being just another Gas Leak Incident.
It's a shame, because Jennifer would really, really like to write the article 'Giant Robot Lays Waste To Main Street'. She finds herself drifting helplessly into the small crowd of people gawping up, which is... stupid, frankly, because hello?! Giant robot! That, and falling debris, besides! But it's like there's this Haven Effect, which leaves her unable to help herself. It's all just mesmerising.
"Shit." She hears the gravelly curse and turns to find that Nathan's drifted into place at her elbow.
"That..." she stutters. "That is a big Transformer."
"Hunh," Nathan says. He shuts his jaw with a snap and changes his gawp into a glare, like he's really offended that the Trouble made him gawp at all. Jen has noticed that he has this look, this particular look, that he saves especially for the Troubles. It's a look that says there's a very rational mind in there somewhere that really wants to get a chance, sometime, to get to explore a normal world. He's definitely wearing it now. To Jen, right now, it's super-endearing.
"I'm pretty sure that's an actual Transformer," she says. "I played with boys' toys when I was seven. Are we going to get slapped with copyright infringement? What are we supposed to do about it?"
Nathan's noncommittal grunt gets diverted to his phone as it starts to ring. He lifts it to his ear. "Audrey?"
"We need to get near the kid." Jennifer hears Audrey's voice, small and tinny. "That means I need Duke to distract it."
"Is Jennifer okay?" Duke's voice yells, equally small and tinny. "Keep her out of the way. Nate, I... could really use some Troubled blood over here, right now."
“Where are you?” Nathan asks, craning his head and stretching up on his feet.
"What--?" Jen is looking for them, and she finally spots Audrey and Duke, far in front of them on the other side of the crowd, both in a far too exposed position in the street, both crouching down in form of hiding that doesn’t go much better than any hapless ostrich, Audrey looking forward toward something unseen, Duke looking up at the robot.
"There." Nathan grabs Jen's arm. She sees what he's seen -- the kid sitting, oblivious to the giant robot overhead, playing on a roadside expanse of grass surrounded by a scatter of mechanical toys. "It must be that kid who's Troubled. Duke's -- damn it!"
Duke is the idiot who just ran out into the street, waving his arms and yelling at the giant robot to draw it away from the kid and Audrey.
"I'm coming, Audrey." But Nathan's already putting away the phone as he says that, and Jen isn't convinced that Audrey's still holding hers.
"Blood," Jen blurts, suddenly getting it -- and suddenly being extremely annoyed. "Duke needs blood! Because he gets stronger and faster, and the robot--"
"Yeah, I need to get over--"
She grabs Nathan's arm as he starts moving. "I have Troubled blood, too!" She has just as much Troubled blood as Nathan, but Duke only asked Nathan to keep her away.
He doesn't stop to argue, just pulls her along with him, and amends his words. "One of us needs to get to him." They start running, pushing through the press of people in the crowd. It's difficult because the crowd surges, variously, as the robot moves.
"Don't these people think it would be safer to be elsewhere!" Jen yells, appalled. They're... they're crazy. This town is crazy, and its people are crazy, and Duke, running out yelling insults at a giant frickin' robot, is so totally crazy.
Then again, she is running to fight a giant robot alongside her three lovers. So perhaps she doesn't get a say on that. Perhaps crazy isn't all bad.
"Here." Nathan tosses something into her hands as they break out of the press of people and start to sprint across the danger zone. Duke is there, and the robot's feet are... shit, that was close. Jen did not appreciate watching that. Audrey, though, has almost reached the kid.
The object in Jen's hands is a knife. The palm of Nathan's hand already carries a line of red. She squeaks more from the expectation of pain and her own daring as she drags the blade across her palm. She accidentally drops the knife but ignores its fall. Her hand is bleeding. Duke is about to get flattened to paste by the car-sized foot of a giant robot.
"Split and try to reach him!" Nathan gasps.
Jen squeals again as she runs around the opposite giant metal leg from the one Nathan chooses. She remembers, suddenly, that the most daunting thing about today used to be joining Nathan for coffee.
***
Later, they pick their way between piles of residual debris that got left behind when the bulk of the robot disappeared. It took a while for Audrey to talk the kid down, and Duke did some hardcore demolition in the meantime.
Jen's hand is bandaged. Duke is very wild-eyed but his physical injuries are mostly bruises, apart from a scrape where his face hit the pavement one time. Audrey and Nathan are over with the HPD officers. Nathan's hand is also bandaged. Jen holds hers up and asks Duke uncertainly, "Does this make us, uh... blood brothers, or something?" But then she spies Nathan's knife on the ground a short distance away, and scampers to retrieve it before it gets kicked away by one of the gawpers still milling around. She returns breathlessly to Duke.
When she does, he is massaging his forehead with his fingers. "You'd have been safer--" he starts to say.
She darts out her hand, finger pointing. "Shush." Realizes that the knife is also in that hand, pointing, and awkwardly lowers it.
Duke sighs and changes the subject. "I sure am glad Dwight is back at work today." The big Police Chief has just climbed slowly out of his SUV, and they watch him stroll across to the rest of his officers. His movements still speak of pain. "This should be right up his alley. He used to, uh, clean stuff up. Gonna be fun with the size of this audience."
"Oh." Jen nods. "Yes. Good." She looks back toward Nathan and Audrey again, hoping Nathan's okay. There was a lot of running. Her, and Duke, and Nathan, and a really big giant killer robot, and the whole thing had turned into a kind of tag team spectacular. The effect of the blood doesn't last very long, which seems inconvenient, if that part of Duke's Trouble had ever really been meant to be helpful. But Jen's Trouble doesn't give her any superpowers; nor does Nathan's give him any, not really, and she doesn't feel like she's properly recovered her breath yet. Her heart is still pounding. "I absolutely need to join a gym," she tells Duke.
He frowns at her.
She pulls on his arm. He definitely looks spacey, and maybe he's still up on some weird blood high, so perhaps the best thing would be to feed him something and see if that helps him come down. "Come on," she wheedles, teasing his steps along, a few at a time, toward the cafe where she'd originally intended to meet Nathan.
Nathan finally joins them, with Audrey, over an hour later.
The Jen Plan did not work, but she blames that casualty on Haven, and honestly, right now she's too tired and sore and hurting to care.
***
Jennifer has another plan, which she actually meant to run concurrent to the first; increasing contact and stakes by increments over their next several encounters. The first goal, written on a bright yellow mental post-it note and pinned firmly to the front of the inside of her forehead, is 'kiss Nathan'.
She is determined, after the events of the day, determined and fully intending to go through with it. Yet somehow that night, when they're in bed together -- not the big bed, because the big bed is still pending -- she stops thinking about things quite the same way.
She stops taking notice of whose hands are on her with quite the same near-paranoid focus, which she had to have, before, because one pair of hands meant safety and familiarity, while another meant excitement and newness, while the last meant a sort of growling unease.
They're together. Together is enough. It's not like she doesn't notice who's where, and everyone is very different and of course she can tell, but it's not... Well. It's okay to lose track. It’s okay to not be absolutely sure, at every moment, who is where and who the next touch is going to come from.
So when she turns around in the midst of the touching and it's Nathan's face that meets her, Nathan's mouth closing on hers, she barely registers that she actually just ticked off her mental post-it note and the first stage of the Plan. There's no urge for her to pull back, no sense of wrongness in the contact. Nathan's hands touch her face briefly, then he's the one who starts to pull away.
Jen abruptly does wonder if he had the same sort of post-it note.
Before he can break the kiss, Audrey reaches over Jen to rest her hands on Nathan's shoulders, and Jen feels it. She feels Nathan come to life against her lips, how his movements change as his skin registers hers; stop being mechanical, driven by calculation and effort, and imbue with passion instead. It's... it’s remarkable. He melts, and she feels him melt. That whole stony, angry, Nathan-y of him... it just falls away.
Duke was right. Totally, absolutely right. He's pudding.
It's addictive, and slightly evil. Jen wants to touch more, to make him unravel. Audrey's movements encourage her, pushing her in closer to him. And then Audrey slips over to Nathan's other side, so that she's not in their way, but can still slide her hands up and down over the skin of Nathan's thighs, can still weave a foot between Jennifer's to maintain their own contact.
Jen moves her legs without thinking. She's just responding to all of this, like the four separate people of them have suddenly become one organic whole. Duke sets a hand on her hip, moving in from behind. Nathan's hips surge upwards as Audrey touches him again, and Jen sinks down to meet him. She is already wet and slick from some attention Audrey gave her a short while earlier, and before she knows it, Nathan is inside her, giving a long groan as he slides in.
Jen makes a noise which is kind of surprised and inconclusive, for a moment, but only because she was supposed to have a slow, careful plan and so she's very startled to find herself leaping forward to step ten.
She rocks her hips against Nathan, taking him deeper. Slides her hands over his chest, between their bodies, and deepens their kiss. Duke, warm and solid against her back, trails kisses down the back of her neck. She can feel his arousal hard against her thigh, but he is waiting for Nathan, and not about to ask anything of her that she's not ready for. Audrey ducks in from the side to turn Jennifer's and Nathan's kiss into an awkward three-way affair. There's no room whatsoever for Duke to move up there, too, but he tries anyway, creating mostly a shambles.
Jen just... stops worrying, and enjoys.
END
Author: roseveare
Rating: NC-17
Length: 9,000 words approx
Summary: Jennifer Mason feels like an idiot who accidentally fell into a foursome.
Notes: Written for BlackEyedGirl, who requested Audrey/Duke/Jennifer/Nathan. Troublesfest 2014.
Notes #2: This is set in a fluffier, happier mid season 4, where when everyone got together, everyone got together. Wade and Jordan realised they were perfect for each other and ran off to Las Vegas, where they’re experimenting contentedly with masochism and rubber gloves.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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Squared(2²)
She did not sign up for this.
Oh, Jen may have cluelessly jumped at the idea of dating Duke Crocker. She may have stood somewhat stunned and absorbed the unexpected revelation that Duke used to have a three-way-thing going on with Audrey Parker and Nathan Wuornos, which for weird and Guy-Related Reasons fizzled into merely steadfast masculine friendship and Not Talking About It once Audrey was taken out of the equation. Jen may have witnessed the longing and loss on Duke's face when Audrey came back and was Audrey and hooked up with Nathan again. Jen may even have opened her mouth and said something very, very foolish and unlike herself, when she saw that expression. But she is sure that she did not sign up for this.
Jennifer Mason is a good girl. Four in a bed together sounds a lot like 'orgy', and Jen is not the kind of girl who takes part in orgies. Nuh-uh.
"Move up," Audrey tells Duke, climbing pretty much on top of him. "How the hell are Nathan and I supposed to fit if you’re all sprawled out like that?"
"Okay, okay," Duke says. “Give me a damn chance.”
"You know it could be pretty tricky when it was three in a bed, and there are four of us now."
"There's only three right now.” Duke points out.
“You need a bigger bed," Audrey asserts.
"You need a bigger bed," he counters. "I can't fit anything bigger than this onto the boat."
"My apartment's not as big as Nathan's place." Both of them look at Nathan.
Duke looks away. "Nathan has sulky neighbours."
Audrey huffs. She rolls up on her elbow and turns to Jen. "Hey. Are you doing all right?"
"I would rather sleep on the boat," Jennifer blurts. Stupidly. Why are they looking at her? Asking her? Nathan hasn't said anything yet, either.
Then again, perhaps that's not so unusual on his part.
"Um, okay," Audrey says. Duke reaches over and strokes his free hand along Jen's flank, ending down at her hip. He tweaks the angle of the bone there with his knuckles. His other hand is on Audrey's breast. Audrey arranges herself against the pillows with her knees bent wide and one leg hooked around the other side of Duke's crouched and equally naked form. Jen, still wearing her bra and panties, crouches on the very edge of the bed and wishes she had either of their sexual confidence.
"You sure you're up for this tonight, babe?" Duke asks. His face is anxious for her.
"I did kinda mean, are you all right?" Audrey adds.
"No," Jen says. "I mean, no, yes, I'm fine. And I am up for this. I'm sorry, but too many people are naked and words are working less well than usual."
A soft huff of laughter from Nathan, who is beyond the other side of the bed, still slowly undressing, and this marks his largest contribution to proceedings so far. Really, Nathan should be her ally in all of this, because he isn’t naked yet and she has to wonder if he also wishes he had Audrey and Duke's sexual confidence. And because she doesn't think that Nathan Wuornos is the kind of person who takes part in orgies, either. She's rather stunned to find out he took part in a threesome.
The truth is, though, that Nathan is a more daunting part of this than Audrey is.
Audrey is grinning. "Come and sit with me up here," she says. She pats the space between her open legs, and toes Duke uncompromisingly out of the way, prodding him until he curses her and rolls aside. Jen blinks rapidly. Then, she makes a decision and she scoots on her hands and knees up to the head of the bed, where she turns with a whump and flops on her butt with her back to Audrey, between Audrey's legs. Audrey leans over her shoulder and turns her face with gentle fingers, then kisses her, although the angle is awkward and she doesn't let the kiss linger too long.
Her lips feel soft and taste of lip balm. They taste inexplicably female. Well, that was easy. It's very new to Jen, who blinks some more and without really thinking about it places her hand on Audrey's thigh. She shivers in a good way as Audrey unhooks her bra. Duke dares venture in again and kisses both their feet, where they rest almost touching on the bed in front. Audrey wriggles. The inside of her legs press against the outside of Jen's along almost their whole length.
Jennifer hunches her shoulders and giggles, then claps her hand over her mouth because she's not fifteen, damn it. She is a grown woman whose sexuality can be taken seriously. It's just that she is in a bed with three people. Or, wait, two people -- the third hasn't strictly speaking got in the bed yet.
This isn't even the first date, for all it feels like it.
The first date was breakfast, all four of them together, and they talked about what they'd do. Audrey and Duke talked the most. Jennifer and Nathan mapped out a wary truce with their eyes, and with the important part out of the way, let Audrey and Duke do the talking.
The second date was the night of the same day, at Audrey's place above the Gull, the apartment Jen still misses a little bit and kind of grew to regard as her space. She and Audrey watched Duke and Nathan have sex. Audrey brought popcorn and called across instructions. It was a hitherto unimagined level of awesome and Jen's brain had almost melted. Her eyeballs still felt like they'd grown several sizes bigger the day after. Duke making love to Nathan had been really kind of weird, but then they'd done a little switch-over and Nathan on top of Duke had been all kinds of hot in ways Jen felt unequipped to describe.
The day after, they'd meant to have breakfast again and evaluate. Instead, there had been a Trouble and Jen spent most of the day passing time with the Teagues on a police cordon. Everyone had been really tired in the evening, so she had ended up with Duke to herself back on the Rouge while Nathan and Audrey went home together and they all left figuring out this four way relationship deal until the next day.
Which was now.
"If you want," Audrey says slowly, her hand on Jen's hip, "We can watch these guys again and put this part off to another time. I made score cards."
Jen knows she made score cards because Duke found them earlier and had a minor blow-out about Audrey's sense of humour ever since she became a little bit Lexie. "I really, really want to use the score cards," Jen admits, wriggling her toes and squirming as Duke tries to tickle them, and inadvertently almost clocking him in the face as he unwisely makes his next move leaning down to suck one of her toes. She regards him through one open eye, twisting the other shut and screwing up her face. People do that? Duke does that? "But I am okay."
She doesn't know what Audrey did with her bra, but fingernails are now sliding over her nipple. That is -- that's also unmistakably female, and very new, but it's not bad. It's... just fine, in fact.
Duke crawls between both their legs and presses his nose into just the right contour in the panties she's still wearing to make Jen gasp. He hooks his thumbs under the elastic at the top of the thin material. "May I?"
"Oh, yes," Jen says, hearing her voice shudder. Audrey's arms slide down to her waist and Duke's elbows slip under her knees. Jen rocks her hips upwards, and is lifted momentarily by both of them, as Duke slides her underwear down. He guides one of her knees up and out and hooks the garment under. He doesn't let her think too hard about being exposed before all of them for the first time. He leans in and starts licking, even while he's still sliding the last scrap of cloth down her remaining ankle.
"Nathan," Audrey says, with an odd fierceness, "get the fuck onto this bed, now."
Jennifer shuts her eyes and focuses on Duke between her legs. She feels the bed rock with the extra weight as Nathan obeys. He always obeys when it's Audrey. Duke would've had a fight on his hands. Other thoughts fly from her as Duke drives his tongue deeper and his nose prods a nice spot. Her hips rock back against what she realises is soft hair and moisture at the juncture between Audrey's thighs. Audrey vocalises a happy little noise.
Involuntarily, Jen opens her eyes and sees that Nathan is taking up a position behind Duke. Audrey signals him with her fingers and a sly smirk. Nathan's fingers shine slickly in the low lighting as he reaches behind Duke's raised butt. Audrey can just about poke him with a toe if she stretches, grinding tighter into Jen when she does. Nathan gasps. It's fascinating to watch him when feeling floods in. He goes from not-overly-erect to very responsive very quickly. Jen swallows hard. She reminds herself that it's Duke he's going to... to make love to right now. She likes that thought. She reminds herself that she and Nathan have a tacit Unspoken Agreement.
Of course, it's unspoken, so she only assumes that Nathan thinks it's the same agreement as she thinks...
When he slides his fingers into Duke, the automatic movement Duke makes pushes his face harder against Jen, and she gasps. A few minutes later, when Nathan lines up his hips and enters Duke, and the first thrust rocks Duke's body forward... it's even better. Audrey's hands are on Jen's breasts, and little kisses press the back of her neck and send shivers through her. There is very little about which she could complain.
***
Lying in bed after, with four people, is something of a dogpile. Jen still feels heroically brave for reaching behind herself and fingering Audrey to completion at the last, which is stupid, because this is sex, and it should not require courage. Still, she can't help but think how little her parents would have approved.
Duke has snagged Audrey... To be honest, Jennifer gets the feeling it's been a while coming, and the two of them are going from snuggling to some heavy petting pretty damn fast, for all that everyone swore they were used up ten minutes ago. That wouldn't be a problem... Jen's sure it's not (she agreed to this)... except that it leaves her with Nathan.
She doesn't really know what to do with Nathan.
Actually, he looks uncomfortable too, as she turns and blinks at him from a distance of less than inches, the sort of distance imposed by four people lying side by side in one bed, especially when two of those people are about to get extremely frisky.
Nathan says, "We don't need to do anything but watch them."
"All right." Relieved and grateful, Jen finds the courage to slide her hand in a quick caress over his hip. His face doesn't change, and by the time she's rolled over to watch Duke with Audrey, and is facing away from him, she has fully realised that he didn't feel the touch and hasn't registered she did it. She feels her face burn, but Nathan can't see it and Duke and Audrey are too absorbed in each other to notice. Nathan doesn't touch her at all.
She at least starts to feel safe, lying next to him, relaxing in the knowledge that there's no expectation there. He couldn't feel her anyway. So it's pointless, right? Then again, he seems to get on just fine with only Duke. But... but even if he wanted to touch her, he wouldn't, she tells herself in a rush, because he knows she doesn't want him to, and he is after all a good man, even if he's frustrating and freaky and has huge honking issues that made him get bikers to pay to beat him up for six months.
Even if she can't imagine ever loving him the way Audrey and Duke do.
Watching those two together, it's hard to regret her decision. Impossible to feel jealous in the presence of such tenderness and... and just downright fun. They're sheer joy and so much love. Jen wriggles down into the sheets and somehow manages to fall asleep with Duke and Audrey going full pelt in front of her and Nathan's presence, not touching, but still giving off radiator-like heat all along the back of her body.
***
Four in a bed and it's hardly surprising when they wake up crushed together. Jen blinks her eyes open, way too hot and surrounded by too many strong scents and too much loud breathing. The light level says it's still very early, but some sense of unease awoke her. Duke is curled against the front of her body, his arm around her waist, fingers on her hip, his face materialising out of the dimness slowly as she squints, big nose and long hair already tactile against her shoulder before she sort-of sees them. He's beautiful and sculpted, strong and lean. His presence comforts her. It's reassuring and normal, and everything she's become used to.
Gradually, enough details resolve for her to see that other lump beyond him in the bed is Audrey, a sprawl of kicked-out limbs taking up way more than her fair share of the limited space, blonde hair splayed just as broadly over the pillow, face buried in the sheets.
That leaves the warm presence behind Jennifer as still being Nathan.
She can't really explain the reaction of her body to tense up at this. It's not that she doesn't like him, or -- she doesn't love him, but then she doesn't love Audrey but she's willing to accept that love is something that can grow, and she would rather embrace this option and share Duke than see Duke miserable and pining.
She didn't actually intend to share herself. It was... something that grew out of talks and assumptions and her own tendency to say the wrong thing and to jump at anything that sounded like an implicit dare or suggestion that she couldn't or wouldn't do something.
Sometimes she has to wonder why words are meant to be her medium at all.
Her exact words, originally, had been, "You can still have them. It's okay." At Duke's questioning and rapidly shifting wide-eyed glance, she'd clarified to the point of, "Me. And them." Then she'd nodded and swallowed and smiled encouragingly, and told him, "You should go talk to them about it."
She'd kind of envisioned it like a custody timeshare: You have him Tuesdays, Thursdays and alternate Saturdays, and he's mine the rest of the week. Hell, Nathan and Audrey were supposed to be a solid couple themselves, they surely wouldn't want Duke around every day? So she'd thought.
So things had got weird. She wasn't entirely sure what had led her to not expect that.
With Audrey, though, she's starting to feel this sisterly vibe... like sisters with benefits, which sounds creepy but she really doesn't mean it that way. It's about how they'd both sat and giggled and snacked, talking commentary while Duke and Nathan went at it; about the idea of a female ally who would always be there, because Duke was... lovely, but he was still a guy, and, well.
But Nathan is--
Part of her can't deal with Nathan. She thinks he's broken: doesn't know if it happened that winter, with the oh-my-God-freakin'-BIKERS, or if it was before that. If it was all the years he's spent not being able to feel anything that did it, because oh God she can't even imagine. People need that. Functional people need that. Maybe he's starting to find his way back again, but he's still not there.
She feels cruel, with that in mind, that it should be part of her reason to want to reject him. The flaw's in her that she can't get past it. He's a policeman, and he chose a vocation to help people. He made mistakes, but he was ready to die to save the town... although that part does not really help in terms of Things She Can't Deal With About Nathan. She can deal with Duke's freaky blood power because it doesn't surface very often and it's pretty easy to not activate it, though she's going to have to be careful over getting her period. Somehow, she can deal with Audrey being four different people or more, because she doesn't wear it all the time the way Nathan seems to wear his issues.
Maybe she's just making excuses. She's sleeping next to a suicidally unstable bundle of can't-feel-anything who let bikers beat him up for six months, and that freaks her the hell out.
Her tense little movements in the bed have pushed her further into Duke. He curls his arm around her waist tighter and snorts in his sleep.
Movement behind her puts her every nerve on sudden alert. Then the bed shifts: she both hears and feels Nathan get up from the bed and pad out of the room. Duke's grip is too tight for her to sit up or even twist enough to see his progress, and her sudden desperate urge to protest the departure dies in the back of her throat.
Too late already, and she doesn't want to wake Audrey and Duke; doesn't want them to know about this.
She cuddles back down, expanding into the newly available space with uneasy guilt.
***
Nathan is already long gone by breakfast. Audrey left at the crack of dawn, too. Her phone rang -- a Trouble. Jennifer unhappily wonders if it really was a Trouble or just Nathan and a handy lie.
Almost the first thing Duke says upon her bleary arrival at the breakfast table, with just the two of them again, is, "You don't have to have sex with Nathan."
Jen stares at him. Her mouth works silently. After a pause, she says, with more force than necessary, "Good morning," making the polite greeting a bludgeon.
He half shakes his head, irritated. "I'm saying you don't have to sleep with Nathan. No-one will ever make -- no. No-one will even ask you to. He knows that. It's okay."
"I know that," Jen retorts, fiercely. "If I was feeling obligated, well, I wouldn't be, because I wouldn't be here. I'm just feeling... weird, because Nathan is a lot to absorb, okay?"
His face does that little moping thing that she's fairly sure he doesn't know he does, because it looks so very pathetic and undignified. "I'd have thought that Audrey--" he begins, with a note that's at least surprise rather than judgement, but she doesn't get to find out if his excuse is Audrey's sex or her multiple lives, because he stops anyway. That's something.
Jen takes a deep breath. They are just discussing this, like adults. As adults who sleep with whoever they damn well please, because they live in a town where people spontaneously combust or have murderous blood or hop between bodies, so convention can go fuck itself. "Audrey is sweet and funny, and I really kind of want the big sister thing, and I think I must be more bisexual than I ever realised, because I find that I am fine with that."
Duke grunts. "Nathan's not a people person."
Just because he gets it doesn't mean he likes it. Jen winces. "I know that sounds... bad. Look, Duke." She grabs his hands, which turns into a bit of a scuffle when he doesn't immediately realise what she's doing. "I want to love him. Both of them. I want to love both of them, and I think I can get there with Audrey."
He groans and thumps his head into the breakfast bar, next to the lump of their four joined hands. "I shouldn't have done this to you."
If she wasn't holding his hands, she'd hit him. "Hey! I suggested it! Duke, when I see you with Nathan, it's -- beautiful. I want that for you. I want you to be free to love him. But people... you know people search their whole lives for just one other person that they have that perfect connection with, okay? How lucky are you to find three?" She watches his eyebrows raise in surprise and tells him, "That doesn't mean it's going to happen again, for me. I haven't known you guys very long, and right now I feel... really, really new. We have to keep working at it and see what happens."
She pokes his face until he un-slumps and returns the clasp of their hands with a bit more dignity.
"You..." He kisses her forehead. "You’re so sensible."
"Yes," Jen snaps back, "that is so exactly what I look for my, uh, hot lovers... to tell me." She doesn't feel sensible. She feels like an idiot who accidentally fell into a foursome.
Duke moves the kiss down to her lips. He tastes of maple syrup. It reminds her that she's hungry. Last night was energetic. Maybe they should finish breakfast.
"It's not all about sex," he says, when he pulls back. "Of course it isn't. I'll talk to Audrey and Nathan. We'll make date night movie and pizza tomorrow."
"What about tonight?" Jen asks, feeling disappointed and very much like that is not really tackling any of the issues.
"Audrey already said they want to keep their own space tonight. That's okay, too, right?" The edge of Duke's thumb dances over the skin on the back of her hand.
"Of course." But Jen doesn't feel relieved. She just feels vaguely like she's failing a test.
***
They don't get a chance to have Movie Pizza Date Night, because a Trouble turns the whole town into something like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Jen wakes back to herself, more or less, to find she's on horseback wearing a big, frilly dress with a lean and warm body behind her. The arm of the person behind her is keeping her perched sideways on the saddle in her ridiculously floofy dress. Audrey still looks like a cop and is arguing with a very seedy cowboy!Duke on the ground, next to a camp fire, and there are a couple more horses nearby, one with an empty saddle, one stripped of gear and calmly grazing a distance away.
Jen shoots a nervous look over her shoulder to ascertain that, yes, it's Nathan behind her on the horse. She makes a noise and slides down off the saddle. The footwear she has on is even more ridiculous than the dress. She almost tumbles straight over, but Nathan snakes an arm down around her top half to steady her. He gets a handful of breast, but she reminds herself he doesn't know that, and just unpeels his fingers and mutters, "Thanks."
She risks a look up to study Nathan. He has a sheriff's star and looks like Jimmy Stewart. Actually, the garb looks really good on him. He's blinking and glancing down at himself, her, and around generally in confusion. Jen wonders if she has that sort of expression on her own face. She probably does, but she suspects that she merely looks ridiculous in the dress.
Very hazy memories of the past day drift back to her. "Audrey?" she asks, blankly, realising other people might have more answers. "...Duke?"
Audrey stops arguing with Duke to heave a relieved sigh. "Good. You're coming out of it at last. Help me talk to Duke, because he still thinks he's the scourge of the freakin' West."
"Hey!" Duke snaps. "That's Dab Hand Duke, fiercest gun in the West, and you should learn some damn respect, you britches-wearin' harridan!"
"Oh my God," Jen says. "He's a caveman."
Audrey snorts.
Behind Jen, Nathan slides down off the horse. She suddenly remembers propositioning him, a lot, and her face must turn the colour of a tomato.
After being away from him a moment, the nearness of Nathan brings the alcohol smell that's on him sharply to her attention, and then she remembers that part, too. The sheriff's shot and in hospital, and his down-and-out disgraced deputy is the only thing now keeping law in the town.
"You want to help me out here, too, Nathan?" Audrey prompts. Something a bit too achingly hopeful in her voice suggests she’s had some very frustrating conversations with their Trouble-addled selves.
Duke gets up. "I ain't hangin' around to smalltalk with the damn law."
"I'll arrest you." Nathan pulls out some handcuffs on his second suspiciously clumsy attempt.
Between words and threats of restraint, they manage to get Duke to sit back down, and then the rest of them join him around the fire. It takes a while, but Duke starts remembering that he's not an outlaw and Haven isn't the Wild West frontier. Jen's antics of the last day or so start to get hazier in her brain the more she returns to herself. She tries to rifle through them while they're still there, and decides she can be fairly sure that she didn't have sex with anyone that wasn't Duke, but from what she remembers, it was a very close thing.
Did this freakin' Trouble cast her as a whore because it was judging her for being part of a foursome?
Nathan takes out a hip flask and gets glared at by everyone. After his first swig, he grimaces and pushes it into the centre of their circle near the fire, where Audrey claims it, and then Duke snatches it from her.
"I'm not an alcoholic," Nathan complains. "I didn't even drink much when I was on the run with the Crazy Maze Tattoo gang -- I mean, the Guard trying to kill me."
Jen finds herself giving him a look of sympathy.
"Yeah, but you're definitely the best fit among Haven PD for the role this Trouble needed," Duke says. "Sorry, but you were pretty down and out a few weeks ago."
"I can't believe I'm a -- a whore!" Jen snaps. She hasn't said very much so far, and it makes them jump and blink a bit.
"If it helps," Audrey says, "there really aren't all that many proactive types of roles for women in this kind of movie."
Duke doesn't say anything about being a criminal and a rogue, but then he's not been left much wriggle-room, there.
***
They manage to disentangle themselves and the rest of Haven from old Lenny Richens' coma-induced fantasy world before he drags them all into death with him. All other plans are abandoned as they return to Audrey's place, worn and treading heavily in boots newly transformed back into ordinary modern footwear. Duke still seems slightly oilier than usual and occasionally drops endings from his words. Nathan still smells faintly of spirits. Jen, maybe, still has the urge to make a suggestive comment and grope whichever of the two men is nearer, but she holds herself determinedly back from doing any such thing.
Duke slings one arm around her and the other around Nathan as they fall through the door, nuzzling and kissing their faces in turn. He's tired, and Jen is too, because she's too hazy to complain when he hugs them harder and puts her in a three way embrace with Nathan, and she doesn't even think about it until they've already fallen apart to collapse on the sofa, with Nathan safely on the other side of Duke.
Jen remembers propositioning him a great deal today, but just because some Trouble had her do that, it isn't a reason to break the ice.
The fact he didn't take advantage of any of those opportunities might be. Then again, that could just have been him staying in character as the drunk but honourable fallen sheriff.
Jennifer makes a noise of frustration. Both men turn to her and she waggles her hands irritably and says, "Nothing!"
Audrey, who did not get mind-fucked today, walks easily past them and says, "I'm going to hit the shower."
Jen waits until the water starts running before she opines, "That's really, really, really annoying. Don't you guys find that's--"
Nathan and Duke grunt tired agreement. Nathan says, "I still feel like bathing is a once-a-month kind of exercise."
"Oh, God, yes," Duke groans. "Let's just go to bed."
If they had done this within the framework of the Wild West fantasy, which was a possibility narrowly avoided, then that bedroom encounter would probably have gone very differently. As it is, Jen watches Nathan perform oral sex on Duke, then giggles and pants happily as Duke turns his attentions to her, and Nathan bows out of any reciprocation because he can't feel it and his body is too tired to coax into responding. In bed with Nathan without Audrey is a weirdness anyway. He can't feel any of this.
It's... nice. It's good. She kind of starts to feel like Nathan is an ally, not a problem. It's okay if they never have sex, because they both love Duke, and Duke loves both of them. That can be... comfortable, in its own way.
They fall in on either side of Duke, and whisper conversation about the day, and Jen lets a little of her lingering Trouble-induced naughtiness slip out. "I would have loved to have slung your gun." To Duke. "Shined your sheriff's button." To Nathan.
When Audrey comes in they're still snickering together with their heads close. Audrey climbs in bed on the side next to Nathan, and Jen does detect a faint hesitation and wrinkling of her nose before she sighs and opts to just go for it, and join her three smelly and Trouble-hungover lovers anyway.
Her presence peels Nathan from Duke's side. Jen hears Nathan groan as he wraps his arms around Audrey and feeling returns to him. She thinks that maybe it's not always necessarily a good thing.
"Nathan," Audrey prods suspiciously, "are you still drunk?"
"He probably is," Duke says. "Actually, yeah. He's way too relaxed not to be."
"I thought the drink was a part of the Trouble," Jen says. "Can you get drunk on Troubled drink that ain't -- I mean, that's not even real?"
"Who knows what the gut-rot actually was," Duke says, "since Nathan doesn't carry around a flask. Um, do you?" He lifts his head abruptly from their snuggling. "Because after that winter, there are things I would no longer put past you."
"No, I don't," Nathan says, irritably. "And I'm not drunk. I'm just tired. Go to sleep."
Audrey says, "I feel like I need some sort of safety rope to make sure I stay in this bed."
So does Jen. The part about needing a bigger bed, somewhere, they are definitely agreed on.
"Push Nathan over to the edge," Duke suggests. "He won't care."
"No!" Audrey shoots back. "He can't feel himself falling off to catch himself."
"It's not like it would hurt," Nathan mutters. "I'd probably be okay anyway."
"No," Audrey says again, and Duke says, "I was joking, Nathan."
Jen thinks about the different ways they both take care of Nathan, and the ways he uses his Trouble to try place himself between danger and either of them. Thinking about it makes her feel warm and cosy and happy to be a part of them.
"Tomorrow," Audrey says, "we're going shopping for a bigger bed. And you are all going to shower."
***
Haven's not big and its stores are limited. The bigger bed is put on order, and for now they have to make do. Most of the urges to reach for sidearms or... booty... dissipate during the day after the Wild West Trouble, as Lenny Richens hangs on and then blinks out from his coma, and the tendencies just leave a faint embarrassment in their wake.
Nathan and Duke seem to have got good at burying things like that. Jen kind of has to ask herself again why she is staying in this town.
There used to be just one reason. Now there are two, and... there should be three, but that part is still a slightly limbo zone. Call it two-and-a-half.
"So Nathan went 'crazy'?" she repeats, having that conversation with them. Crazy is kind of a hot word for her, so she handles it carefully. She isn't entirely sure what it means in this particular story, as they're gathered around the table in Duke's galley talking Troubles past. "And you chained him up?" She is rather aghast at that.
"He was seriously mean-fighting crazy," Duke says, defensively. "It was safer than tranqing him."
Audrey holds up both hands. "Hey, I just asked Duke to look after him."
"You should have known full well he'd do something like that," Nathan says. Okay, Nathan and Duke are used to this, but he still doesn't look happy about this story. "There was the time when Duke was a pirate. An idiot pirate."
"I was an awesome pirate," Duke protests.
"From the perspective of any eight year olds watching, yes, I'm sure," Nathan snipes. "We all thought it was Christmas in July, once."
"That was the most freakish Trouble ever," Audrey says, and shudders hard.
Duke pops the cork on another bottle of wine. "I thought you got over your Santaphobia."
Nathan snorts, almost snorting the remnant of his glass of wine. He looks at Jen's gaping confusion and explains. Apparently, Duke was dressed as Santa for all of that Trouble, and say what?
Jen has never seen Nathan quite this vocal, but she's also seen Duke deliberately top up his glass a few times when he wasn't looking. Are they trying to get Nathan drunk?
She starts to look more suspiciously at the level in her own glass, after that, but can't figure out if it ever sneakily increases.
She corners Duke about it, though, when he goes up to do some checks on deck. They can still hear Nathan and Audrey talking and laughing together through the nearby open hatch. "Are you trying to get Nathan drunk for me?" Her suspicions turn her voice into the sharp little hiss she doesn't like.
"No, no. No." Duke may have had a few more glasses than his usual. The wine has been flowing thick and fast. "It's because he's a pudding." He places his hand on her shoulder.
"A... pudding?" she repeats blankly.
Duke nods, with absolute sincerity. "You need to see that he's a pudding. Because it gets hard to see, when he's tense, and lately he's always tense. Except yesterday. So."
Jen feels her brows twitch and remembers that Nathan had claimed he wasn't drunk yesterday. "What... kind of pudding?" she asks, kind of flailing around this particular description for Nathan Wuornos. "The feels-nothing-gets-punched-a-lot pudding?"
Duke doubles over silently, making wild gestures for relief, because Nathan and Audrey have fallen quiet down below. Jen reviews her words and then reviews the amount she's drank tonight, too. Duke straightens and pulls her close in to stage whisper, "A big, spongy, sappy, ridiculous pudding."
"...Um. That shoots people? And gets punched a lot." Jen waggles her eyebrows and nods and hopes that all this thoroughly communicates her epic sense of what the fuck? to Duke.
He buries his head in her shoulder and pats the other one rhythmically with his hand.
"Are you crying?" Jen asks, horrified.
Audrey's head pops up out of the hatch behind them. "Are you guys doing something naughty up here that we should be joining in with?"
"--No--" Duke wheezes.
"Audrey, is he there?" Nathan calls up from somewhere deeper below. "Ask him if I can open another bottle of -- Duke, can I open another bottle of wine?"
"Go ahead, buddy!" Duke hollers back, though his voice still sounds slightly constricted.
"Duke has been telling me about the 'pudding theory' of Nathan's secret nature," Jen informs Audrey, and can't help but giggle, especially when Audrey's eyebrows start to do acrobatics of their own.
"No, he is," Duke says, exasperated. "He's a massive sap. He's a marshmallow. He makes decoupage. He likes scents. He likes babies and kittens and..."
"Growling," Jen prompts. "He really likes growling."
Audrey grimaces. "Okay, I begin to see what this is about. Come back downstairs. Me and Mr. Growly-Marshmallow are missing you. And I'm pretty sure the wine we found in the back of your cupboard is the really good stuff you're always hiding from us, so you might not want to miss it."
Duke lets out a curse and flies past both of them to head back down into the boat. Audrey shares an evil grin with Jen. Who belatedly realises it's Audrey's Very Special Beloved she's been saying sour things about. "I'm sorry. I guess that was insensitive. I like Nathan. I do."
Audrey links her arm in Jennifer's. Her camisole top is very small, and she should be cold, but her skin feels very hot through the thin material of Jen's clothes. "It's okay. I know that Detective Wuornos is an acquired vintage." Her smile is a little twisted. "All this, tonight? It's a Duke Plan. For some reason those really often involve alcohol. I'm pretty sure I used to disapprove more..." She waves her free hand up next to her head. "But now that I'm a little bit Lexie, somehow it's much more okay." She pulls a face. "Anyway, yesterday he was relaxed, and he was better with you. Duke thought if he was relaxed again..."
She leaves that hanging.
It's the first time it hits Jen that this isn't just her problem. It's a double sided problem. At first she's relieved. Then she gets annoyed. Nathan has the audacity to have a problem with her?
"Why should Nathan have a problem with me?" she squeaks, indignant.
"Because you're not me or Duke," Audrey says wryly, "and his shell takes time to crack. Because you're new and different, and he doesn't deal well with that. Because he's sensitive and he... thinks... you don't like him."
Jennifer is a wordsmith, and she knows very well that 'thinks' has just been chosen as the kinder of the available words. Nathan does not think, Nathan knows. Because she has not taken any care to hide it. And actually, she herself knew the first parts of all of that -- it was obvious the first night it was even implicitly indicated that he might sexually interact with her, when it took fifteen minutes and Audrey's snapping at him to get him undressed and in bed with them.
"Oh," she says in a small voice.
"It's not your fault," Audrey says. "This is kind of an unusual situation, right? We'll work it through."
"I... thought it was getting better," Jen says, thinking of yesterday. Now with this new information, she's no longer sure. Nathan doesn't like her? Really, why would he not like her? She's nice, and... and sweet, and non-scary. It's definitely not like she's six-foot-plus of angst who needs a damn guidebook.
"It is getting better," Audrey agrees. "And we still need more wine."
Jen actually suspects that this was a Duke and Audrey Plan. She trudges back down the steps with Audrey, though she has to let go of her arm due to their steepness. She feels rather morose and like she's had the wind knocked out of her sails.
There's a little petting that night, which she manages to lift her mood for, but the actual outcome of the dreadful Duke and Audrey Plan is that they get Nathan too drunk to function. So he ends up falling asleep on a chair. That leaves Jen with Audrey and Duke, who she is comfortable with, in the bed which is now big enough. It would all be more comfortable, though, if both of them were not far drunker than she is.
Jen ends up being the one to come back, later, to cover Nathan with a blanket and bring him a glass of water. She pokes him until she realises that won't work, then cups her hands over his ear and talks loudly because she doesn't want to have to shout to wake him up. She makes him drink the water and tries to get him to go to bed, but instead he falls asleep again in the chair.
Jennifer is too tired by that time to wake him up and try again, so she retreats to bed where the snoring Duke and Audrey await. She thinks, her brows crunching together as she disapprovingly climbs into bed with them, that it is high time for a Jen Plan.
***
"Coffee?" Nathan says blankly at her, over breakfast. He looks a bit green, but seems more or less okay, if only because, of course, he can't feel his hangover.
"Yes," Jen says positively. "You and me and not them. We should, you know. Talk. Try to get to know each other without them. Because we are sleeping in the same bed along with two brazen idiots who think that getting someone drunk could ever actually solve anything."
It has struck her, lying awake last night and again this morning, that Nathan should be her ally in this. Because despite that recent Trouble's casting of him, Nathan is actually sober and serious and somewhat sensible of character, once you get away from the punching, the temper, and the suicidal impulses. Which, okay, are hard to get away from. But she's willing to bet he never drinks at eight in the morning.
...Jennifer glares across the galley at Audrey, who's found a stray bottle-end from last night. Nathan shakes his head minimally and rolls his eyes in a silent, subtle warning of, don't.
"I can't believe I drank that much on a work night," he says, aloud.
Duke wanders into the galley wearing not a single scrap and sticks two slices of bread in the toaster. "I can't believe you fell asleep."
"Shut up," Nathan returns with some force. "You sabotaged me."
Jen pats his hair and pours him another orange juice, and declares that she is in a foursome with three idiots.
"...Okay," says Duke. "Do you want toast? I'd cook, but I'm not sure my head can handle it safely this morning."
"You are burning your toast," Jen points out acerbically, pointing.
Duke curses and dives for the toaster, which he's accidentally whammed up onto its highest setting while leaning on it.
"Naked cooking's not safe, or hygienic," Nathan says.
Jen nods along with him.
"I don't know..." Audrey leans back against the counter, tipping her head and ogling appreciatively. "He can strut around my kitchen like that any day."
Jen a bit plaintively suggests, "How about a naughty apron?"
***
Lunchtime comes around too fast. By that time, she's had chance to think about the prospect a bit more and get nervous, because what the hell is she supposed to talk about with Nathan? Also, the Teagues found out about the lunch meeting and instructed her to pump him for information about the HPD's morning activities for the Haven Herald, which she doesn't feel like doing, and will definitely complicate everything, and yet she'll be failing at her duties if she doesn't! Agh! It's enough to make her... crazy.
Or not.
Anyway, she doesn't make it to the coffee house. This, she's learning, is a feature of prearranged appointments in Haven. Nathan could have warned her.
Vince and Dave might at least be happy that she'll bring back a story for the newspaper, although then again perhaps not, because by the look of things, this will end up being just another Gas Leak Incident.
It's a shame, because Jennifer would really, really like to write the article 'Giant Robot Lays Waste To Main Street'. She finds herself drifting helplessly into the small crowd of people gawping up, which is... stupid, frankly, because hello?! Giant robot! That, and falling debris, besides! But it's like there's this Haven Effect, which leaves her unable to help herself. It's all just mesmerising.
"Shit." She hears the gravelly curse and turns to find that Nathan's drifted into place at her elbow.
"That..." she stutters. "That is a big Transformer."
"Hunh," Nathan says. He shuts his jaw with a snap and changes his gawp into a glare, like he's really offended that the Trouble made him gawp at all. Jen has noticed that he has this look, this particular look, that he saves especially for the Troubles. It's a look that says there's a very rational mind in there somewhere that really wants to get a chance, sometime, to get to explore a normal world. He's definitely wearing it now. To Jen, right now, it's super-endearing.
"I'm pretty sure that's an actual Transformer," she says. "I played with boys' toys when I was seven. Are we going to get slapped with copyright infringement? What are we supposed to do about it?"
Nathan's noncommittal grunt gets diverted to his phone as it starts to ring. He lifts it to his ear. "Audrey?"
"We need to get near the kid." Jennifer hears Audrey's voice, small and tinny. "That means I need Duke to distract it."
"Is Jennifer okay?" Duke's voice yells, equally small and tinny. "Keep her out of the way. Nate, I... could really use some Troubled blood over here, right now."
“Where are you?” Nathan asks, craning his head and stretching up on his feet.
"What--?" Jen is looking for them, and she finally spots Audrey and Duke, far in front of them on the other side of the crowd, both in a far too exposed position in the street, both crouching down in form of hiding that doesn’t go much better than any hapless ostrich, Audrey looking forward toward something unseen, Duke looking up at the robot.
"There." Nathan grabs Jen's arm. She sees what he's seen -- the kid sitting, oblivious to the giant robot overhead, playing on a roadside expanse of grass surrounded by a scatter of mechanical toys. "It must be that kid who's Troubled. Duke's -- damn it!"
Duke is the idiot who just ran out into the street, waving his arms and yelling at the giant robot to draw it away from the kid and Audrey.
"I'm coming, Audrey." But Nathan's already putting away the phone as he says that, and Jen isn't convinced that Audrey's still holding hers.
"Blood," Jen blurts, suddenly getting it -- and suddenly being extremely annoyed. "Duke needs blood! Because he gets stronger and faster, and the robot--"
"Yeah, I need to get over--"
She grabs Nathan's arm as he starts moving. "I have Troubled blood, too!" She has just as much Troubled blood as Nathan, but Duke only asked Nathan to keep her away.
He doesn't stop to argue, just pulls her along with him, and amends his words. "One of us needs to get to him." They start running, pushing through the press of people in the crowd. It's difficult because the crowd surges, variously, as the robot moves.
"Don't these people think it would be safer to be elsewhere!" Jen yells, appalled. They're... they're crazy. This town is crazy, and its people are crazy, and Duke, running out yelling insults at a giant frickin' robot, is so totally crazy.
Then again, she is running to fight a giant robot alongside her three lovers. So perhaps she doesn't get a say on that. Perhaps crazy isn't all bad.
"Here." Nathan tosses something into her hands as they break out of the press of people and start to sprint across the danger zone. Duke is there, and the robot's feet are... shit, that was close. Jen did not appreciate watching that. Audrey, though, has almost reached the kid.
The object in Jen's hands is a knife. The palm of Nathan's hand already carries a line of red. She squeaks more from the expectation of pain and her own daring as she drags the blade across her palm. She accidentally drops the knife but ignores its fall. Her hand is bleeding. Duke is about to get flattened to paste by the car-sized foot of a giant robot.
"Split and try to reach him!" Nathan gasps.
Jen squeals again as she runs around the opposite giant metal leg from the one Nathan chooses. She remembers, suddenly, that the most daunting thing about today used to be joining Nathan for coffee.
***
Later, they pick their way between piles of residual debris that got left behind when the bulk of the robot disappeared. It took a while for Audrey to talk the kid down, and Duke did some hardcore demolition in the meantime.
Jen's hand is bandaged. Duke is very wild-eyed but his physical injuries are mostly bruises, apart from a scrape where his face hit the pavement one time. Audrey and Nathan are over with the HPD officers. Nathan's hand is also bandaged. Jen holds hers up and asks Duke uncertainly, "Does this make us, uh... blood brothers, or something?" But then she spies Nathan's knife on the ground a short distance away, and scampers to retrieve it before it gets kicked away by one of the gawpers still milling around. She returns breathlessly to Duke.
When she does, he is massaging his forehead with his fingers. "You'd have been safer--" he starts to say.
She darts out her hand, finger pointing. "Shush." Realizes that the knife is also in that hand, pointing, and awkwardly lowers it.
Duke sighs and changes the subject. "I sure am glad Dwight is back at work today." The big Police Chief has just climbed slowly out of his SUV, and they watch him stroll across to the rest of his officers. His movements still speak of pain. "This should be right up his alley. He used to, uh, clean stuff up. Gonna be fun with the size of this audience."
"Oh." Jen nods. "Yes. Good." She looks back toward Nathan and Audrey again, hoping Nathan's okay. There was a lot of running. Her, and Duke, and Nathan, and a really big giant killer robot, and the whole thing had turned into a kind of tag team spectacular. The effect of the blood doesn't last very long, which seems inconvenient, if that part of Duke's Trouble had ever really been meant to be helpful. But Jen's Trouble doesn't give her any superpowers; nor does Nathan's give him any, not really, and she doesn't feel like she's properly recovered her breath yet. Her heart is still pounding. "I absolutely need to join a gym," she tells Duke.
He frowns at her.
She pulls on his arm. He definitely looks spacey, and maybe he's still up on some weird blood high, so perhaps the best thing would be to feed him something and see if that helps him come down. "Come on," she wheedles, teasing his steps along, a few at a time, toward the cafe where she'd originally intended to meet Nathan.
Nathan finally joins them, with Audrey, over an hour later.
The Jen Plan did not work, but she blames that casualty on Haven, and honestly, right now she's too tired and sore and hurting to care.
***
Jennifer has another plan, which she actually meant to run concurrent to the first; increasing contact and stakes by increments over their next several encounters. The first goal, written on a bright yellow mental post-it note and pinned firmly to the front of the inside of her forehead, is 'kiss Nathan'.
She is determined, after the events of the day, determined and fully intending to go through with it. Yet somehow that night, when they're in bed together -- not the big bed, because the big bed is still pending -- she stops thinking about things quite the same way.
She stops taking notice of whose hands are on her with quite the same near-paranoid focus, which she had to have, before, because one pair of hands meant safety and familiarity, while another meant excitement and newness, while the last meant a sort of growling unease.
They're together. Together is enough. It's not like she doesn't notice who's where, and everyone is very different and of course she can tell, but it's not... Well. It's okay to lose track. It’s okay to not be absolutely sure, at every moment, who is where and who the next touch is going to come from.
So when she turns around in the midst of the touching and it's Nathan's face that meets her, Nathan's mouth closing on hers, she barely registers that she actually just ticked off her mental post-it note and the first stage of the Plan. There's no urge for her to pull back, no sense of wrongness in the contact. Nathan's hands touch her face briefly, then he's the one who starts to pull away.
Jen abruptly does wonder if he had the same sort of post-it note.
Before he can break the kiss, Audrey reaches over Jen to rest her hands on Nathan's shoulders, and Jen feels it. She feels Nathan come to life against her lips, how his movements change as his skin registers hers; stop being mechanical, driven by calculation and effort, and imbue with passion instead. It's... it’s remarkable. He melts, and she feels him melt. That whole stony, angry, Nathan-y of him... it just falls away.
Duke was right. Totally, absolutely right. He's pudding.
It's addictive, and slightly evil. Jen wants to touch more, to make him unravel. Audrey's movements encourage her, pushing her in closer to him. And then Audrey slips over to Nathan's other side, so that she's not in their way, but can still slide her hands up and down over the skin of Nathan's thighs, can still weave a foot between Jennifer's to maintain their own contact.
Jen moves her legs without thinking. She's just responding to all of this, like the four separate people of them have suddenly become one organic whole. Duke sets a hand on her hip, moving in from behind. Nathan's hips surge upwards as Audrey touches him again, and Jen sinks down to meet him. She is already wet and slick from some attention Audrey gave her a short while earlier, and before she knows it, Nathan is inside her, giving a long groan as he slides in.
Jen makes a noise which is kind of surprised and inconclusive, for a moment, but only because she was supposed to have a slow, careful plan and so she's very startled to find herself leaping forward to step ten.
She rocks her hips against Nathan, taking him deeper. Slides her hands over his chest, between their bodies, and deepens their kiss. Duke, warm and solid against her back, trails kisses down the back of her neck. She can feel his arousal hard against her thigh, but he is waiting for Nathan, and not about to ask anything of her that she's not ready for. Audrey ducks in from the side to turn Jennifer's and Nathan's kiss into an awkward three-way affair. There's no room whatsoever for Duke to move up there, too, but he tries anyway, creating mostly a shambles.
Jen just... stops worrying, and enjoys.
END