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He steps out of the bathroom and into the open space of the motel room and realizes immediately that he isn’t alone.
“You,” Roy accuses and she melts out of the shadows on the far side of the room. She’s switched off all of the lights while he was in the shower, the blackout curtains drawn tight. The only light comes from the bathroom, spilling out from behind him. It cuts bright against the pale planes of Cheshire’s mask. He’s dressed only in the old sweats he usually sleeps in and he immediately hates how exposed that makes him feel.
“Long time no see, Arrow,” she says, strolling forward and leaning a hip against the dresser, arms folded. Her voice is smooth and dark. He wonders if she ever says anything that doesn’t sound mocking. “Are you ever going to show some initiative and give a girl a call?”
“What are you doing here?” he snaps, mentally cataloguing his options. His bow case is beneath the bed. He’d unstrung it earlier, intending to clean it before sleeping. Damn. He doesn’t even have his mask on either, he thinks, before recalling with some bitterness that that hardly ever mattered in the first place.
“Oh, just came to check in.” Cheshire tugs off her mask, tosses her hair back from her face with that lazy, wicked grin. Her hair is long and dark like spilled ink. Like shadows. She turns, examines the scattered belongings on the bureau beside the old TV, sets down the mask among them. She picks up a discarded fletch, rubs it between her fingers. “You know if you don’t want to be found you really ought to acquire a new alias or two. Make it a challenge.”
Of course she would know his aliases. The whole damn League of Shadows probably did. Roy was an idiot for not thinking of it before.
“If it will get rid of you,” he replies, as scathingly as he can. The handles of her twin sai protrude from either hip, unassuming but deadly. Her hips are slim but he knows her thighs are coiled with muscle. She’s pinned him twice. Roy’s stomach clenches, rebelliously. He hates that he remembers.
His bow is unstrung but his arrows are still sharp. If he’s quick, he could reach them. The trick is grabbing the right kind on the first go. He feels a droplet fall from his still damp hair, roll down the back of his neck. It only makes him feel more anxious. He wouldn’t want to grab a trick arrow and explode the whole room.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?” she asks, provokingly. He shifts his weight, angling his body towards where his arrows are stashed, striving for casualness. Presuming she hadn’t already found them and moved them while he was showering, of course.
“Whatever it is, you aren’t going to get it.”
She tilts her head back and laughs. It’s a throaty, appealing sound. Nothing about her should be appealing. A lot of things are anyway. Perhaps it’s something left over from before, something Miss Martian missed, part of the programming to be used against him, to use him, choking his will. The air feels choked, around her.
“You sound so certain,” Cheshire tells him. “So serious.”
“I am serious,” Roy says. “This isn’t a game.”
“Yes it is,” she says. She drops the fletching again, approaches him. He feels his body tighten, ready for movement. The sai handles bob at her hip. She doesn’t reach for them, she reaches from him, gloved fingertips grazing up the line of his chest. He starts, suddenly unsure. She smiles, the bathroom light making her dark eyes gleam, predatory. “Haven’t you heard of it? Cat and mouse.”
“Cheshire,” he growls. A cat. Temperamental and baffling. It fits.
“Welcome to Wonderland,” she says, dry. Then, coyly: “If I kiss you again, will you kiss me back this time?”
“No,” he grunts, nostrils flaring as alarm trills through him. Her hand presses flat against his chest; she steps closer. She doesn’t draw her sai. She’s close enough to smell and she smells clean, no perfume. An assassin wouldn’t wear perfume.
She smiles, lips curling hard. It reaches her eyes, genuine. Her voice dips.
“We’ll see about that,” she says. She curls her hand about the nape of his neck and pulls him down, tiptoeing to meet him halfway.
Before, she’d knocked him down, knocked the air clean from him. All he’d been able to do was think of Sportsmaster getting away, their mission failing, her blade at his cheek pinning him like a bug to a board as his target escaped. It wasn’t until later that he’d even remembered the weight of her body or the tuck of her thighs against his torso, and even then the memory had been colored by the frustration of an opportunity lost, the Justice League seeming eternally out of reach. He’d never liked failure.
Those particular thoughts are gone now, replaced with new regret and aching responsibility, but even those feelings aren’t strong enough to block out the press of her lips, still curving against his. She nips at his lower lip and he sucks in a breath. His palm finds her hip without consulting his mind first. He can feel the prongs of one of the blades against his wrist. Roy should take it, strip it from her and launch the first attack. He doesn’t.
“Better,” Cheshire murmurs, gloatingly. She kisses him again, draws that lip between hers and sucks hard. His eyes close against his better judgment. She kisses like she talks, teasing and mocking, hitting hard then pulling back. Her tongue grazes his mouth, slips back into the shadows between her teeth.
Shadows. She works for the League of Shadows.
The thought jars him back. Roy pulls away roughly. His breath comes harder than he’d care to acknowledge. “If you think I’m going to let myself be used again––”
“I was born into this too, you know,” she interrupts, unfazed. “Not like you, of course. The normal way. Criminal behavior happens to be something of a family tradition. Turns out it’s pretty hard to escape that sort of thing.”
“I’m sure you had the choice,” Roy says and his voice wears the bitterness like a cloak. She strokes a hand down his bare arm, chasing after a stray droplet. She captures it with her thumb, spreads it out against his skin.
“Maybe,” she agrees, then shrugs. “It didn’t seem that way at the time though.”
The look on her face is queer, like there’s a story there and Roy detests that he wants to ask her about it. This is asinine. He doesn’t want to know about it. He doesn’t want to know about her.
He twists himself away from her, moving at an angle so she’s always in the corner of his vision, and heads for his bed. The arrows are right underneath, just in case. He tells her, “You should go.”
She doesn’t move. He drops onto the bed and frowns at her.
Cheshire says, “I know what you want.”
Roy scowls harder. “No. You don’t.”
Her head tilts and her hair swings. It shouldn’t draw his gaze but it does, the fall thick and tantalizing. He directs his eyes back to her face. Her eyes narrow. Her eyelashes are thin but they cast a shadow. There are shadows all over his life where he never saw them before.
“I knew before,” she says, “and you didn’t believe me then either.” She steps over, tilts her body and leans on the wall by the bathroom door. She says again, “I know what you want, Arrow. Or should I call you Roy?”
He’s on his feet and in front of her in an instant, his fingers digging into her arms, pressing her against the wall. “Don’t,” Roy snarls, his voice harsh. His heart beats a fast tattoo in his ears, echoing her voice, that name over and over again. It was a lazy, obvious taunt, hardly up to her usual fare, but far more effective than any other she’s thrown his way yet. “Don’t you dare.”
“Call you by your name?” she asks. “Or is it his?”
Roy– if he can, indeed, call himself that– grits his teeth. “What do you want?”
Cheshire reaches up and suddenly, she’s twisted his wrist, twisted out of his grasp, twisted him around so his back hits the wall. She leans up against him, the tables turned again. She looks like she’s enjoying herself. He’s starting to think she always does. “A trade. I help you find what you want, I get something in return.” Her body is lithe and smaller than his, but Roy doesn’t fight against her. He goes still.
“You know where–”
“No,” she says. “But I have connections, know places, have ideas. The works.”
Roy broods on this, turning it over in his mind. His own efforts have gotten him nowhere. The League is conducting its own investigations into the events of that day, separately, but those aren’t getting far either. At least, not that they've told him. But with an inside source– a mole, he reminds himself sullenly– that could change the course of things entirely. It’s a dangerous thought. It’s also tempting.
He frowns at her, suspicious. “And your trade? What do you want from me?”
“Not information,” Cheshire says, drawing out the syllables goadingly. Her gloved hands run up his sides. He swallows hard, reflexively. “I’m interested in something a little more tangible.”
“What?” he prompts.
She smiles and it is wicked, wicked like her sai, her teeth gleaming like her blades. She kisses him and it is far wickeder than before, tongue and teeth and her hands stroking fire down his torso. He’s gasping for breath at the end of it. He wonders what it’d been like if he’d had the mind to kiss her back, before.
“You mean––”
“Did you think that I was just doing it to screw with you?”
He had. He’d been sure she was. He’d been sure of a lot of things.
“Weren’t you?” he asks.
She shrugs, the movement loose, unworried. She’s good at seeming that way, imperturbable. Roy wonders, suddenly, how much of it is just an act. He shouldn’t wonder about her, not about Cheshire. He finds himself doing it anyway.
“Maybe some of it,” she says. “Not all.” She looks at him, brow raised. Her lashes cast long shadows on her cheeks. “Is it a deal or not, Arrow?”
He’d been in bed with the enemy before, so to speak, but that had been unwitting. This would be knowing. Flagrant. She’s an assassin, a criminal. Shadows, she’d said. She isn’t to be trusted.
Cheshire slides her hand down his stomach, pressing her thumb along the rib of his ab. There’s a spike of heat behind his navel that leads straight to his growing erection.
He wants this. The deal. The information.
Wants her. He shouldn’t, but he does.
“What do you know?” Roy asks, and she laughs again, husky.
“That comes later,” Cheshire admonishes. She takes him by the ears and pulls him to her mouth. He comes to her far more readily than he’d expect, surrendering to the call of her lips, her tongue. She licks his upper lip, between his teeth, forceful, taunting him to keep up, to back down. Roy bends to her, palm sliding to the small of her back above the belt. Her fingers scrape through the close crop of his hair. He pulls back.
“Why?” he asks, breathing hard through his mouth. She’s knocked the breath from him again, as it were.
“Do I need a reason?” Her tongue laves a path from his chin and along his jaw, her teeth following. His fingers curl into the fabric of her gi. She moves to his throat and sucks hard. He groans, choking on the sound. “Or were you having second thoughts?”
“No,” he snaps. And to prove his point, he drags her closer, her body pressing against his, her hips against his arousal. Her smile is villainous. She’s a villainess. The damned sai handles jut into his stomach but he ignores the discomfort, twists his other hand in her hair, so dark between his fingers, and crushes his mouth to hers. Her hands pull at his shoulders.
She twists them about again. A moment later she’s pushed him over, falling to his back on the bed, mattress groaning.
She crawls over him, settles over his stomach. Her bare skin above the legs of her outfit is warm; her knees press against his ribs. He realizes with a start that she isn’t wearing anything else above them, beneath the gi.
“You––” he splutters.
“Jade,” she corrects, eyes flashing. Everything about her is mischievous. “I had a plan.”
She reaches for her belt tie, undoes the pale green knot. Both of her sai sheaths are attached and Roy feels a sudden moment of panic. Of betrayal. But then Cheshire– Jade– tosses them aside with a flick of her wrist. They fall to the floor. She watches his face, openly amused.
“I think this qualifies as a truce,” she clarifies. Jade bends to kiss him again, smirking against his mouth. She never stops smirking at him. Roy rests his palms just above the backs of her knees, slides them higher. She makes an encouraging sound around his tongue. He goes higher.
Her buttocks are smooth in his hands, as muscled as her thighs. She’s an excellent fighter, agile and quick. Roy wonders how she’s trained, when she started. He dips one hand to the inside of her thigh, then hesitates. His eyes open. She notices.
She bites at his upper lip. “Go on,” she urges. He glowers at her, eyebrows puckered, and she snorts. “What? Haven’t you ever pleased a woman before?”
“It’s been a while,” he snaps. Three years, to be precise. Three years and not ever. He remembers breaking up with his girlfriend (not his girlfriend, his), a gregarious, clever girl named Melissa. He’d decided he wanted to focus more on his goals, on fighting for justice. The memory bites like acid. He bites back at Jade’s lip, presses his fingers between her legs, searching. She moans.
He doesn’t want to remember any of that now, not when Cheshire, when Jade is balanced over him, one hand clutching at his hair, the other on the bed beside him, propping her up. Her hair spills over them like a curtain. There are brown highlights in places, where the light catches. Her eyes are open yet, half-lidded and watching him. She looks at him like she’s still the one in control.
Roy realizes he doesn’t want her to be in control. Not right now.
“Come here,” he snaps, dropping his hand to her thigh and pulling her further up his body. She makes a undignified, disgruntled sound, half toppling forward before she regains purchase. It’s close enough. He tugs the green fabric of her gi aside, and tilts his head forward, touches her with fingers and next with his tongue.
“Fuck,” she says, drags herself further up the bed, closer to him. His hand pulls at her hip, guiding her over him, against him, against his mouth. She is wet and the taste of her is sharp, pungent. His mouth makes her wetter. He likes it, likes the feel of her. The fabric of her clothes falls back down, across his face. Everything is suddenly dark and faintly green and he can see nothing.
“Take off your shirt,” he says, pulling away.
She tries to push him back to her, to angle him closer. “No,” she says, half a gasp.
Roy turns his head, bites her inner thigh hard. “Do it.”
Jade groans in frustration and then a moment later it’s cast off, thrown to the floor. She’s still got on her tight undershirt, a kevlar fabric, Roy thinks, but now at least he can see her face. He can see the way she bites her lip and tilts her chin up as he laps at her, when he presses his finger deeper into her. Roy wants to make her groan. He tongues her, sucks, and she does, body curling in towards him. Her hand twists in the duvet.
“Faster,” she says, and there’s no teasing in her now. Everything is sharp, pointed and demanding. “Your teeth,” she says.
He does as she asks, scraping his teeth against her, shallowly at first and then harder when her hips jerk against his face. He presses another finger into her, slow, one knuckle at a time. Even if she’s lying to him, if everything she’s told him, offered him, is a trick, it’d almost be worth it for the sight of pleasure in her face, the desire pulsing strong through him now. It makes him ache for want of her. Roy suckles at her again, follows it with a bite and it doesn’t take long till she moans aloud, thighs trembling around him as she comes.
She rolls off a moment later, still fighting for breath, and finally looks back down at him. Her smile now is lazy. Catlike. A cheshire smile. “Not bad, Arrow,” Jade says.
Roy says nothing, only licks his lips clean, waiting. He’s not quite sure what to expect of her still, and it’s difficult to think straight at the moment besides. Her eyes focus sharply on his mouth and he can see the little hitch in her breathing. She recovers a moment later.
“So do you want to know now then?” Jade asks, settling back against the pillows, utterly composed. That mocking lilt has returned to her voice, her eyes narrowed and sly. “You seem like the sort who’d want to get straight down to business.”
Roy sets his jaw, stifles the unexpected flash of disappointment. “So I’ve met the terms of your bargain adequately, then?”
“I didn’t drive a particularly hard one,” she says. And then slowly, obviously, she lets her eyes wander down his naked torso, over the waistband of his sweats to his crotch. The humour is plain in her tone when she adds, “Or did I?”
Roy decides commenting would be a bad idea. His tongue feels thick in his mouth.
She shifts back towards him on the bed, stretches her hand to him. The fabric of her gloves is rough against his belly. He wishes then that she were touching him with her bare skin instead and the thought makes him feel a little hazy. He’s already half-drunk on desire like he hasn’t felt in–– desire he–– he just desires her.
Jade wets her lips. “We could always continue, you know. To be honest I’ve always been a pleasure before business kind of girl.”
He shouldn’t trust her. He shouldn’t wait. Get all of the information now and investigate immediately. Cut his losses.
Her eyes are dark, her lips an invitation.
He wants her.
Roy swallows hard. He decides.
“Yes,” he says. "We could."