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Seven months, two weeks, and five days had passed since Jemma’s first date with Fitz. The one whose reservation he'd saved for the six months prior, the one that she'd ruined by crying straight through. She thought about that when she awoke one night, lying next to him in her bed. They’d been doing this for a few months now, when they’d realized the ridiculousness of her sneaking into his bunk whenever she couldn’t sleep on her own - which had been nearly every night. (Every one that she spent apart from Fitz, she didn’t sleep, although she chose not to tell him this. She suspected that he knew anyway, judging by the extra-large mugs of tea he always brought into the lab the next morning, or the similarly-dark circles under his eyes.)
Sleeping together like this wasn’t sexual, not nearly, but Jemma found everything about sleeping next to Fitz romantic. The way he let her settle in around him, shifting when she did to accommodate her perfectly. (She realized one night that she had no idea how he liked to fall asleep on his own - which side, on his back or stomach, anything - because he was so focused on having her adjust him so she could sleep best.) The way he smoothed careful circles over her cotton-covered shoulder blades, or let his thumb glide over the back of her wrist. The kiss he pressed to the crown of her head before he said goodnight, the steady slow of his breathing. The wild sprawl of him over her once he was asleep, the pillow-patterns on his cheeks, the mess of his hair against the white pillowcase.
Sometimes she awoke with him curled around her back, arms wrapped tightly around her abdomen and forehead pressed against the top of her spine. He was always fast asleep when she woke like this, but she often wondered if he’d had a nightmare while sleeping and needed to pull her as close as possible. In the early days, when she’d so frequently awoken with a scream or tears, heart racing as she realized that she was home and didn’t have to fight for every breath anymore, Fitz had only woken with her a handful of times. (He’d always slept like a rock, even when they were on the noisy Bus.) The times he had, however, were probably her favorite nights. The terror and tears notwithstanding, the way he’d always pulled her into his chest had made her feel adored, his steady silence or murmured words warming her until she felt human again. Moments like that had also allowed her to test out things that she’d been too nervous to initiate otherwise, like seeing what would happen if she pressed her lips just beneath his jaw or slid one hand up the back of his shirt. (All such experiments had been met with shivery approval.)
Tonight, she blinked her eyes open, lying on her back and breathing heavily as she registered Fitz’s unconscious presence beside her. He lay along her side, one leg thrown over hers and his arm snugged around her stomach, and she reached down to trace the curve of his jaw.
The thing was that she hadn’t had a nightmare in weeks. Sleeping through the night had become routine again, rather than a rarity, and it could be argued that she didn’t need to sleep next to Fitz in order to sleep at all anymore. But she hadn’t told him this because she desperately wanted him to stay. She suspected he knew that she’d been sleeping well, anyway, judging by the way he’d occasionally urged her to head to bed before him when he needed to finish working on something.
A feeling-memory flashed into her head from the dream she’d been having before she awoke, and her cheeks warmed. The adrenaline zipping through her veins was definitely not born of fear this time, and she exhaled, her breath feathering the ruffled ends of his hair. Their relationship was exactly what she’d needed during her recovery, and although trauma like what she’d experienced was never truly gone, Jemma rather thought she was ready to move past this particular stage of it. To be more specific, to move past their tacit agreement to temporary celibacy. Recently, there had been some more interesting kissing and touching before bedtime, but one or the other of them had always halted things before they strayed too far into non-PG territory. But as Jemma felt him breathe against her now, in the stillness of the Playground’s witching hour, she was certain that she wanted to stray. More importantly, she was ready for it.
“Fitz,” she murmured, stretching down to nuzzle at his nose and brush their lips together. “Fitz, wake up.”
“What is it?” His voice was thick with sleep but instantly worried, eyes bleary as he struggled to focus on her face. “Wha’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she assured him quickly, scooting down so their faces were even. “Nothing, I just wanted you.”
“Oh,” he said, puffing out a relieved breath and pressing their foreheads together. “That’s alright then.”
She was worried he might slip back into sleep, but his eyes stayed fixed on hers, a half-smile working onto his face as he watched her. “Don’t you want to know why I wanted you?”
“If you wanna tell me. S’long as you want me, tha’s enough.”
For the thousandth time since she’d returned from hell, Fitz had stunned Jemma into silence. That now-familiar feeling for him zinged from her chest through to her toes, and she leaned in to give him an achingly slow kiss. When she pulled back, though, her brain stuttered at how to tell him what she wanted. What words should she use? Sex seemed too clinical, and “making love” seemed too florid.
After a few, very long seconds, she inhaled, catching his gaze again and scratching her fingers through the curls at the back of his neck. “You know that line we haven’t been crossing? In bed.” A brief frown crossed his face before he nodded in understanding. “I’d like to cross it.”
“What, now?” The nod she gave him in return only seemed to upset him, and he dropped away from her onto his back. “Jemma….”
“I’m ready, Fitz -“
“Have you talked about it in therapy?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Fitz -“
“There,” he said, voice a shade too triumphant as she leaned up on an elbow over him. “It’s too soon.”
“Three weeks ago, we talked about what I most wanted to experience now that my body has readjusted to the Earth’s atmosphere. I said sex.” In truth, her first response had been scuba-diving, because they’d been discussing facing her fears not long before - but that wasn’t the salient point at the moment. His eyes tracked her as she scooted closer and reached out to press one hand against his chest. “I know you want this, too -“
“That’s just it, Jemma,” he exhaled, turning to stare up at the ceiling. “You think - I dunno, you think that’s all I want now that we’re like this -“
“I know it’s not -“
“I don’t want you to just be doing it because you think it’s what I want, or that you need to, or something -“
“I want it for me.” He turned to her, eyes dark but clearly searching hers. “I want….” Her voice failed her again, words churning through her head without a clear path. “I want you. For me. For you. I just want, Fitz. I know you do, too.”
Before she could even take a breath, he’d twisted over her, air catching in her lungs as he pressed his hips to hers and she felt the length of him hardening against her. He waited to speak, watching her carefully to see if she was going to panic. But the deep breaths she gulped and her racing pulse were accompanied only by arousal twining tightly in her belly. When she stretched up to capture his lips, though, he pulled back.
“Is this really what you want, Jemma? Because it’s not… it’s not just… for us, it’s not just that, y’know.”
“Not just sex,” she murmured, drawing in a shaky breath. “I know.”
Silence stretched between them again, and Fitz shifted so that he could cup her cheek with one hand, smoothing his thumb along her skin. “Promise me that you’re not just -“
“I promise,” she interrupted. “I want this.”
His lips opened slightly in surprise, and a light chuckle worked out of his throat as he glanced to the side. “We’re sort of missing a, um….”
“First drawer,” she said, pointing to her bedside table. “I bought them a month ago, but I… I wasn’t ready.”
The way he looked at her then, stunned with a hint of sadness and a large dose of adoration, reminded her of why she’d spent so long fighting to live. The fight, the nightmares, the blood and the pain, had all brought her here, to Fitz’s arms, and she’d never been so glad.
The beginning was clumsy and a little awkward, and she couldn’t bring herself to ask but she wondered if this was his first time. Not because he’d done anything wrong, but because everything he did was just too right. His lips were sweet, touch reverent, hands meandering and gentle and so, so careful. The way he’d flipped her over to prove a point earlier had made her wonder, but when he pressed kisses through the cotton of her nightshirt she knew he was telling her that she was in charge. (At least, this time.)
It hurt at first, her body eager but unused to the intrusion. The expression on Fitz’s face once their hips were pressed flush together, him fully inside, was something she’d never forget. His lips were parted, brows pulled taught, jaw working silently as he was completely distracted from her care by pure feeling, and his eyes kept fluttering halfway closed, as if he couldn’t quite stop himself from getting lost in her.
As he began to move under her encouragement, she was struck by his slimness, by the strength behind his thrusts, by the grace of his body as it moved inside hers. Once her muscles adjusted, the sensation of him filling her so fully made her shudder and moan in a way she had never thought she’d be. Every time she did so, his eyes were drawn immediately to hers, and she loved seeing him watch her. This was the only kind of losing control she’d ever love, Jemma decided then, arousal tightening as he worked faster between her thighs. Her fingers dug into his arms, his shoulders, and he buried his face in her neck, chanting a litany of curses and adulations into her skin.
He reached the precipice before her, and she could feel him begin to pull back, trying to hold out, but she only redoubled her own efforts in response. Watching him let go, she discovered, was something she wanted more than her own pleasure in that moment. It was this unique form of frantic intimacy that she’d so needed upon waking up, that she’d wanted to race towards entangled with Fitz. So she widened the spread of her legs, letting him thrust even deeper, and when he let out a surprised, aroused grunt she just wrapped him more tightly in her arms. A slight nip of her teeth against his stubbled jaw and he came with a strangled shout, his hips bucking sharply against hers and only eking her closer to her own completion.
When he finally relaxed over her, he muttered something that sounded rather like, “bloody fantastic,” but Jemma wasn’t sure as she was too busy kissing as much of his face as she could reach. The shivers of his aftermath shook through her whole body, too, and she kept him held against her, reveling in finding all the different reactions she could elicit just with her lips and fingers.
“You didn’t come.” His voice was muffled against her neck, but she didn’t miss the flat note beneath the words. Her slow head shake was enough of an answer, and he let out a short groan of disappointment. Before she could say anything to soothe him, though, he separated their hips and rolled briefly to the side. She worried that he was about to sulk, but the sound of tissues being pulled from their box assuaged her that he was just being hygienic - which he often was, the permanently laundry-covered state of his floor notwithstanding. Seconds later and he was lying over her again, capturing her lips with his and pressing in for kiss after kiss after kiss.
“I’m gonna fix it,” he murmured against her lips, one hand snaking up underneath her shirt to caress her breast. A part of her wanted to ask what he meant, but Jemma wasn’t totally sure she cared as his mouth and fingers drove her to distraction. When they’d begun, she’d wanted the shirt on, removing it feeling like one level of exposure too far, but as he slid down the bed, the shirt clung too tightly and she needed it gone. Once she’d dropped the sweaty material somewhere over the side of the bed, she caught Fitz staring dazedly down at her, and a breathless smile spread across her face. This was the first time he’d seen her completely naked, and it showed plain as day on his face, in the way his eyes lingered over her breasts and his breath noticeably sped up.
After a few seconds of distraction, he gave his head a quick shake and returned to his task. Jemma wondered briefly if he should even bother, but then he slicked his tongue over the sensitive bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and she let out a shocked, shivery cry. One hand tangled into his mess of curls and she tried, oh she tried not to rock up against his mouth, but it was impossible to resist. Her moans were even louder now, heat suffusing her body and arousal coiling tightly as Fitz managed to drive her rapidly towards the edge. For someone who had always been good with his hands, the skill of his lips felt like a revelation. Her wordless cries turned into chants of his name, pleas to keep going, to go faster, until everything became fuzzy and bright and her release broke over her in a strong wave. Through it all, she could feel him holding her, keeping her grounded as his mouth drove her just that much higher.
Eventually, it became too much, her body worn and spun out, and she lifted his head away. Her hands grasped weakly at his shoulders to try to bring him up to her, and at last he seemed to understand what she wanted, covering her with his own body as he had before and nuzzling against her neck as she drew in ragged breaths.
“Alright?” he murmured, and she let out a brief, answering whimper. Fitz’s lips continued to trail over her cheeks, her lips, her neck as the tremors slowed and she caught her breath.
Unbidden and to her horror, a couple tears eked out of the corner of her eyes, and she tried to stop herself - no matter what she’d been through, Jemma Simmons would not be that girl. But it was too late, and a strangled laugh burst out of her throat, drawing Fitz’s eyes up. The terror on his face only made her laugh harder. She’d just had sex with her best friend and she was laugh-crying, and, oh God, there was really something wrong with her but she was so happy that she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“I love you,” she said quickly, a giggle still hanging around her voice. “I really, really do.” She could see it in his eyes, that he was torn between having just heard her say that for the first time and his need to figure out what he’d done wrong. “They’re happy tears, I promise,” she murmured against his lips, pressing in for gentle kisses and twining one leg around his.
“As long as you’re sure I didn’t -“
“I’m sure. That was wonderful. Everything."
“Alright,” he breathed, his muscles finally relaxing as he lay down along her side. “I love you, too, Jemma.”
“I know.” He made an indignant little noise as he nuzzled against her temple, and she laughed. “We’ll have to do this again. Soon.”
Humming his agreement, his eyes slipped closed and she tilted her head to watch him drift off. “Might want to request a bigger bed though.”
“Anything you want,” she whispered, feeling the slow of his breaths and smoothing her hands along his skin. As long as Jemma was allowed to continue falling asleep next to Fitz, she would happily sleep anywhere.