Comfortable Old Boots

Note: Apologies for inconsistent formatting. I've been having  a bit of trouble with the Rich Text option.

"Comfortable Old Boots"

Chapter Five: Tiebreaker

 

Somewhere around the reality of breasts waved under his nose and the fact that no man alive would be able to fly a ship in his position, Garrus was seized by an odd, calm certainty that he'd seen a courtship play out this way in the past. Airborne, just taking a break from responsibilities and letting words lead them on-

 

So, there they were, talking about chances and painful betrayals. They spoke of tension and war while he pretended not to notice he was already in a much better mood than he'd been on Omega, even considering all the talk of relays and suicide missions. They joked, spoke seriously, smirked a bit before the conversation came full circle. Death. War. Preparations.

They'd crawled through mud and hauled themselves through the ruins of Ilos together. He'd seen the bright crackle and the momentary flash of madness in her eyes when she'd first heard the voice of the Prothean beacon. She'd dropped down next to him, the knees of her armor stained with what had probably been bits of his face at one time. After all that, it was hard for him not to see the truth of her, right down to her long held grudges, her vices and her wide mean streak.

What he didn't see coming was the way she tilted her head toward him, looked down the length of her strong, patrician nose and smiled sidelong. It was a smile that said 'come hither' and might as well have punched him in the gut the way he felt it knock the wind out of him. “It sounds like you're carrying your tension. Maybe I could help you get rid of it.”

In hindsight, he really should have suspected. Every soldier had a certain someone on every spaceport in the galaxy. Neither of them found any reason to deny themselves simply because Death loomed on the horizon. “I, ah, didn't think you'd feel like sparring, Commander.”

“What if we skipped right to the tiebreaker? We could test your reach... and my flexibility-”

 

 

“Fuck,” Garrus hissed out. “I won't argue with that-” He preferred other four-letter words, but that one fit the situation all too well. He couldn't see straight for a moment, blinking several times until the shadows that had flickered before his eyes were gone. I'll worry about my sanity after I've worked off this stress- He heard the rustle of her hand over camouflage shorts, brushing over her lap before settling on his thigh. Her palm was warm and her fingers long and slightly sinewy, digging in hard enough to hurt a human man but just enough a thrill shot down Garrus' spine to settle in his groin.

 

Plates began to shift down between his legs, meant to allow his growing erection to escape his carapace. His pants had other ideas, keeping him compressed and almost in pain if he moved the wrong way. He wondered if he'd trimmed his talons enough, if he'd chosen gloves of the appropriate thickness.

 

“Pull over,” she ordered, deep and urgent, as if the fate of the galaxy rested on the two of them getting out of their clothes right then.

 

The pupils of his eyes contracted to small, dark pinpricks as he scanned the nav coordinates for an acceptable place to land. Normally, Garrus drove the way he tried to live- controlled, careful and precise. That evening, with the rain pouring down in a bizarre skyscape of storm and twilight, he nearly crashed the shuttle along the downward slope of a hill. They slid forward in their seats, the bag flying off of Tess' lap and to the floor. He cursed a second time, even as he fumbled for the clasps on his pants. Damages paperwork would be dealt with at Urdnot. Later.

 

“Nice,” she grunted as she yanked at the buckle of her arms belt. He smirked in spite of himself, ripping his own seat belt away and freeing himself from his pants almost simultaneously. His erection sprang free as she slithered across the passenger side and toward him, so close he could already feel the heat from her tanned, naked skin.

 

Her nipples brushed against his arm, then his chest. He'd left his shirt on, but he was hyper aware of every shift of her sleekly muscled waist and of the contrasting softness of her breasts when she pressed against him. All at once, Garrus wasn't worried about doing the wrong thing. “Hn. Only a turian could have managed to pull off a dangerous landing like that-” He grabbed her shoulders, bared his teeth in a sharp snarl to match her own and hauled her the rest of the way over to his side of the car. It hurt her, but she only smiled, biting at the rough skin along his jawline.

 

“We'll see about that.” She struggled to right herself, seemingly giddy with laughter as the two of them found an odd, but comfortable position around shuttle parts, knee spurs and firearms. Between the two of them, they were likely breaking a minimum of ten safety regulations.

 

“Seems so-” Once they'd properly settled, Garrus was a little surprised by the way she was on him all at once, strong thighs legs straddling him. She rolled her hips, rolled them just enough to trap his length between them and keep it delicately pinned there. “Spirits, Tess,” he hissed into her shoulder, releasing his hold on her arms to yank at tough, military-grade cloth. At that moment, he'd never hated an enemy the way he hated her shorts. She kissed his neck, his jawline, not at all hesitant like the women in the vids he'd watched the night before. Be careful. It's different with humans-

 

Well. Who cares if it plays out like a bad prom date? No harm in trying to have good sex in the front seat of a car. We're doing the galaxy a favor trying to figure it out. She arched enough the tip of him pressed against her navel, felt the moisture that had gathered at the dark, gray head seeping in. Her skin prickled slightly, leaving her glad of the antihistamine gel stashed away in her bag.“I read on hotturiansnow.galaxy.zeta that turian men have a baculum.” Just unzip my- unzip them n-

 

He went rigid all over as she rolled herself back up, weight precariously balanced on her knees. Nonetheless, careful, but inexperienced fingers kept right on navigating numerous hooks and buttons. “I don't even know what that is,” he gasped, jerking his hips helplessly after her and getting little more than an accidental brush along her lower stomach for his efforts. Fluid continued to build up at the tip of him, only to swiped away at the last moment with the pad of her thumb. He jerked again, then drew out a long hiss of a breath as she drew a line of pre-ejaculate along her sharp hipbone.

 

“We'll make do without-”

 

Garrus didn't give her a chance to finish, lurching to one side so he could grab the melee blade attachment anchored beneath the steering wheel beside his emergency pistol. It was her turn to tense, though the wariness faded from her face as quickly as it had sparked to life. He tapped the flat of the knife along her hip, warned her raggedly: “Don't move. I don't want to slip and hurt you-”

She quirked a corner of her mouth, steadied herself and grabbed on to his shoulders. “You cut me with that and it's your ass.”

 

He came too damned close to cutting himself. There wasn't enough base to the attachment to keep a steady grip, and he was slicing away from her. It was worth it when he was able to toss the scrap of metal aside, take two handfuls of surprisingly sturdy cloth and tear with all his strength. “Worth the risk-” he lied to her as the sharp rip of fabric met their ears. He breathed in deeply, took in the musky, human smell of her and did exactly what every turian in every adult vid on the extranet did at this point: He opened his mouth to say-



“I took an antihistamine in case I was allergic to your spit.”

 

-something he'd already forgotten. He faltered, hands lingering at the band of faded white cotton underwear he'd left in place for some minimal protection between them. Just in case any potential allergic reactions might be more intense than they'd thought. His erection flagged slightly, something she was unable to miss. “It's a little too late to be having this talk-”

 

Her eyes narrowed. Oh, hell, not this time- Garrus rallied valiantly to save the mood, shoving his hand beneath the scraps of her pants and damp, white material. The gloves where thick enough to protect her from his talons. Some small mercy. Heavy-lidded eyes rolled upward then, her hips following suit.

 

Oh thank god he has someideaofwheretheclitorisis- The V of two enterprising fingers slid between her legs, the tips rolling over wet folds and then pressing harder until they found the small knot of flesh nestled between all that skin. “Goddammit, did you take th- hhhhah, oh, God, Garrus, hold your fingers like that-” She shook her head hard, tried again and only wound up gasping garbled words into what she hoped was his ear. There was a lot of spiking on a turian, on the head, on the knees, right down to a slight ridging along his sex that made it obvious why the porn vids used all those oils to make it easier with protective gloves and ridges. Yeah, no, not going to need those, oh, fuck, oh fuckoh-

 

“God, careful, not so hard-” The shuttle seats creaked a little with each clumsy, hurried motion. There was no real room to thrash, to buck or to well and truly screw properly unless either one of them felt like relocating to the back or even to the passenger's seat. Neither of them did. What they were doing was clumsy, rushed and utterly graceless. While they'd have no hope of explaining it to anyone, much less each other, the grinding and the licking and the biting seemed a long overdue 'hello, how have you been? Long time no see.'

 

His paint was smearing over the deep gray of his skin, tinting his sweat blue and leaving bright marks over her face. Most of it was exertion, but the rest was caused by the unpracticed nudging of foreheads and kisses given to a mouth that had little idea of how to handle rather aggressive human lips that kept pressing along the corners of his own. “Hhhhah-” he hissed, pushing his hips up each time her five-fingered hand slid down. “You be careful, you'll tearyourmouth-”

 

“Idon'tcare,” she gasped, inhaling strange, hitched breaths that let Garrus know she was close, that he was doing this right. He fought the very turian instinct to sink his teeth into the soft place where Tess' neck met her shoulder, hidden somewhere beneath all that hair human women seemed to have on their heads. 'Not so hard,' she'd said just a second ago, and while they weren't gentle with one another, the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. “It's just blood-”

 

Garrus called her by all of the names he could remember- Tess Shepard Something-Something-McKay, holding on to the 'Tess' and the 'Shepard' before the many others flew from his increasingly narrow reality. She ran her tongue along the side of his face, velvety insides gripping his third finger with a strange rhythm that fascinated him. The taste of the paint on her tongue caused her to sputter, though she rallied and leaned in enough she could fasten her lips to the side of a crest spike and suck.

 

The gesture was messy and executed with all the skill of a turian female taking a mate to bed for the first time. It didn't matter. She made the effort and because she had, he responded. Garrus pulled his fingers from her and tried to roll them both. He wanted to be on top of her, pushing inside and-

 

His elbow slammed hard into the window. Her ass hit the car horn, sending a loud honk into the stormy evening. They cursed simultaneously- Garrus twice, as one of her breasts smacked him right in the face when she lunged as far from the steering wheel as she could get. He fell back against his seat from the sheer surprise of impact, suddenly all too aware of what might have happened if her own hand had twisted just the wrong way at just the wrong moment.

 

Wide-eyed, she stared at him before laughing, the sound shaky. “We'll plant your flag on the Normandy when we're on level terrain.”

 

He tipped his head back, managed a laugh of his own when she grabbed his wrist with her free hand and shoved it right back between her legs. “You can't blame me for trying.”

 

“I sure as hell can't-”

 

The rasp of cloth between them was growing more uncomfortable, but as she pushed herself harder and harder into the apex of his fingers, he cared less and less. Timeless darkness and hot, throbbing pressure edged out rational thought. His world narrowed to the cramped, overheated car with its steamed windows and stink of sex. Consciousness was limited to the need to thrust, rub, to take the human hand braced at the back of his neck and to slide it atop his own where he played with her, wet and hot and ready and Spirits he was going to-

 

Garrus came in a short, sudden spurt beneath the arch of her body, catching her on the side of the face, and her coarse, wiry hair. The sight was intensely, viciously satisfying, enough so that he'd have smeared it into her skin if not for the dull realization she hadn't come. “Shit,” he managed, hardly able to get the word out. “Shit, let me-” She didn't hear his almost incoherent apology as she shifted on his lap, her fingers still twined with his, and deep lines of concentration etched on her face. Dazed, he began to saw the third digit of his hand in and out of her once more, barely aware of the erratic flutter of muscle or the shudders that wracked her body.

 

She wailed when she climaxed, cried as if the world was collapsing all around them. He barely managed to catch her as her knees gave out, didn't notice her curse as her hip knocked solidly against some part of the shuttle he didn't care about. There was a long, watery smear from her palm on the window, reminiscent of something he'd seen in some human vid made when her race traveled almost entirely on water and all of them had worn hats. Later on, he'd probably find the comparison pretty damned funny. Right now, the sight made him feel like patting himself on the back for a job well done.

 

“God,” she gasped heavily, and he didn't know how to react when she grabbed his face in both hands and shoved her tongue into his mouth, navigating the two rows of dangerously sharp teeth through the gap at the front. “ You smell like a pine forest and taste like a barbecue, you beautiful turian son of a bitch.”

 

“The fleet's happy to be of service,” he mumbled right back, thinking himself clever as could be while caught up in the first moments of emotion that so often followed a good, hard orgasm. I walked away from a ship crash, Garrus recalled through the bright candle haze of afterglow, though he why he remembered now, he didn't know. He smiled to himself, the expression all sharp teeth and bittersweet. “It's a damned fine night to be alive.”

 

She shot him a quizzical look, but laughed again, her head falling forward against his shoulder. “It's good,” she agreed drowsily.

 

Neither one of them spoke for a while after that, struggling to cling to the warm haze in their bellies. It was unfortunate and inevitable that they weren't able to enjoy the damp quiet for long. After all, they were locked in a position in the driver's seat that was so cramped and uncomfortable, neither one of them wanted to find out how much worse it would get once they tried to move.

 

Tess was the first of them to face facts, puffing a noisy breath along his shoulder.“My leg's stuck,” she announced unceremoniously. He roused himself enough to squint blearily at her right calf, wedged solidly between the door and the driver's seat. She grimaced, then gasped in a manner he found far less attractive than the sounds she'd been making earlier. They sounded a little like a cross between a dying krogan and an asari matriarch trying to cover the signs of her indigestion.

 

“Cramp?” he asked, resigned. He felt along her leg,finding muscles there bunched in a hard lump. He reached down further, grunted a bit when she unintentionally drove her heel into his wrist. Cramp.

 

“I-” she wheezed, as if trying to dismiss a muscle spasm as something ridiculous to brush off, “- have had plenty of shuttle sex. Just never in the driver's seat. Hold on, don't fall over-”

 

“Sorry for the bad manners.” Shift. Twist. A careful flex of a toe in his civilian boots. No cramps. “But every time I try to come up with something to say, I keep getting stuck on jokes about you in the driver's seat-” It seemed all too easy to say that to her, less easy not to look like an idiot when whatever he'd been 'holding on' for proved to be her finding the switch to put the seat back using her big toe.

 

The seat folded back. In spite of her vague warning, Garrus was unprepared. They smacked foreheads on the way down, while his penis damned near became a last minute casualty of vehicular warfare.

“Huh. That wasn't much in the way of a warning.”

 

He felt her smile against his neck, leaving further traces of red, human blood, war paint and sticky fluids. That, too, was familiar, right down to the slight press of her teeth when the corners of her mouth twisted upward.

They remained as they were, waiting until their respective bits and pieces stopped sending up spasms at the slightest movement. It gave them each time to realize how quick they'd been, less than ten minutes in the air before they'd parked at the nearest convenient point so they could feel each other up. It certainly wasn't the best “first time” either of them had had, particularly with their bodies reminding them of why there were unspoken rules about how to have sex in the front seat.

 

“You're hanging out of your pants,” Tess eventually pointed out, her eyes closed and bits of her hair in his mouth. She reached up, plucking out a few strands that had become woven around his own teeth as if they were a comb. Her body burned in where they'd rubbed together, nipples honest to God scraped from the friction between them even with his shirt on. Right now, she itched just enough to make her want to scratch, caring less about the scrapes and the bleeding. She didn't mind too much. No one decided to wake up next to a turian without knowing it would play out like an unintentional BDSM session. That was what why she'd brought medi-gel and watched vids.

 

“Maybe. But we finally broke the ice.”

 

Damned if that didn't strike her as the funniest thing she'd heard all day, because she'd just been laid for the first time in a month and the world was now a beautiful place. She couldn't help the cackle of laughter, beginning the slow, rubber-kneed crawl back to the passenger's side of the shuttle. All three feet of it. Her knee smacked the gear shift, but that was better than landing on it with her legs spread. “If that was the ice breaker you'd been looking for all this time, you should have asked.”

 

Garrus stretched an oddly bony arm toward her, toyed with a strand of her hair with its brown roots and his come that was drying there. The bastard was probably entirely too pleased with himself for that one. She let him have that satisfaction, particularly because 'the wet spot' was currently his lap. He drew out a slow and satisfied, “Well. About that. I didn't need to do much in the way of-”

 

She eyed him narrowly, letting only a little of her amusement show. Then she pinched the inside of his wrist, chipping a fingernail in the process. “Something you want to say, Garrus?” He flexed his long fingers, still sticky from sex. She could see them handling a rifle very easily, thought one, single word that didn't reference firearms as much as she'd prefer: Click. That was it- just click.

 

I could be in some real trouble here. The smart thing to do would be tell him to put the car right-the-fuck back in the air and fly them back to the Stand, where everyone would know she'd had turian fingers inside of her less than a week after blowing up Kai Lin's Mako Firebird. This was often the part where she'd wait for her partner to fall asleep and then climb out his window.

 

The captain chuckled, almost to himself. His eyes were warm, which struck her as odd because they were completely inhuman. She liked the color of them- very pale blue, though she'd initially thought they were baby blue. His carapace seemed as if it should have been closer to slate gray, like the stones decorating Kelly Daniels' front yard. He was darker than that, more like steel when it wasn't catching light.

 

Shit, Tess thought again. I could be in some real trouble here. The sooner he's off of Normandy, the better.

 

In spite of how unsettled she found herself, sprawled out beside him and the odor of sex making them smell like an animal cage, she had trouble staying awake. Her lids were heavy and the quiet welcome instead of stifling now that they'd worked 'it' out of their systems. She didn't always fall asleep easily, prone to dreaming and restless nights. She'd also been raised by a man prone to waking her up for emergency drills by the time she was five. 'Here's a gun. A krogan battlemaster's outside ready to blow your brains out. What are you going to do, Shepard?'



Most of the McKay children were insomniacs.