Triangle Challenge : due South : Fanfic : Triangle Tangle

[ride-4ever.livejournal.com]

Title : Triangle Tangle
Fandom : due South
Characters : Ray Kowalski, Stella Kowalski, Benton Fraser, Diefenbaker
Pairings : Ray Kowalski / Stella Kowalski ; potential Fraser / Ray Kowalski
Word Count : 3637
Rating : Mature Audiences

AN : a collaboration of bghostand ride_4ever. Kowalski POV's written by bghostand beta'ed by ride_4ever; Fraser POV written by ride_4everand beta'ed by old_grognard.

Summary : Love triangles and duets involving Fraser and the Kowalskis. Quoting T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets : "...and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."

Ray Kowalski POV

 

So, I’m sitting in the driver seat, and I gotta go home sometime soon. But I’m still shook up, and I gotta work this out.

 

This is gonna drive me mad. It’s not like…well, I know I’ve got feelings for Fraser. Course I do, guy’s my partner, he’s saved my neck how many times now? I mean, yeah, okay…it’s usually his fault I need saving in the first place. But you know, I trust the guy. Must do, why else would I keep nearly killing myself for him? Course I got feelings. Course I love him. Symbologically speaking.

 

Just, I got needs, you know? And I have only limited access at the moment to the Stella. ’Cause, I’m still, I dunno, faithful I suppose. I know she’s moved on, and I should too. But…everything I had was wrapped up in her. If I’m not with her anymore, then who am I? I used to look at other people, girls, guys, but it was always her for me, you know.

 

And she knows that. We’ve been together a few times since the divorce, a few times, well…more than a few. It’s…well, it’s not greatness, it’s fucking stupid is what it is. But it’s better than nothing. And she’s moved on, I know she has…so why do I feel so bad when I even think of it? Moving on. There’s gotta be a hundred people out there I could be with.

 

So, why am I hung up on this one guy I can’t have? He’s so damned untouchable they need to invent another word for it. Untouchable to the power of grrr. I dunno. And sexy as hell. God or the universe or something is fucking around with that. Or, you know, maybe he’s like a swan or something, and mates for life. So, even though she was a bitch, his one true fling, he can’t get over her either. Like me and Stella, only she never tried to frame me for murder and ruin my life.

 

So, yeah, I know I can’t have him. Maybe that’s why I keep thinking of him. I know it’s impossible, and as long as I’m fixed on him, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can lust away after him, and I know I won’t end up being unfaithful to the Stella. Well, unless you can be unfaithful with your fist. Not sure even Stella’s lawyer brain would think that counts.

 

Thing is though, just now, when I was with her, I wasn’t really…not really with her. Not the way I’m normally with her.

 

It was one of our furtive things, where she calls me, and pretends it’s about a case, and I go some place to “discuss it” with her. Sometimes her office after hours, and we can lock the door. Sometimes I’ll meet her at a quiet bar or restaurant, and we’ll end up getting a room…even then I don’t stay the night. And she always regrets it, no matter how damned good I make it. And I know every trick of the Stella, everything that makes her tick. It’s like I’m staking my claim, making sure that no matter who she’s with in the future, there will always be a bit of her that knows nobody ever got her as well as I do. Nobody ever did her as well as I do. As I did.

 

But yeah, afterward she’s sad, because for all the shit we put each other through, she still cares, and she knows it’s killing me. Our limited access thing. Makes her feel guilty. And yeah, I’m a bastard, because I like that look on her. And then I feel like shit too, for making her suffer, and we swear we’ll never do it again.

 

But this time wasn’t like that. We were at her office, and she was needy in my arms, and I’d unhooked her bra beneath her blouse, and was massaging her breasts through the silk, feeling those beautiful nipples of hers hardening, her skin getting warmer. And her legs were open, wrapped around me, and even through the lace of her fancy French panties I could feel her getting moist against me. (And why do I always end up more naked than her? That’s our whole marriage, right there.) It wouldn’t have been perfect, but it was the best I could get, and she’s still Stella, and I’m still me, and she’s still my golden girl, sweet as honey.

 

That’s normally enough…but this time it wasn’t. Her legs weren’t strong enough, and her chest was too soft, and her arms as she grasped me didn’t have enough muscle, and when I kissed her face, her skin was too smooth. Even when I closed my eyes she felt all wrong. She’s just so little. Her hands squeezed as tightly as ever, but they weren’t…big enough. I was thinking of big square hands, blunt fingers, square thumbed. And they’d be clever fingers, because I’ve seen him carve, and sketch, and play that damned guitar. And there’s poor Stella in my arms, and all I’m thinking is, why can’t he play me?

 

I felt myself soften in her, and she opened her eyes to look at me, almost reproachful. Normally, I’d have been embarrassed…what man wouldn’t? But then, her eyes are blue, and all of a sudden I could see his eyes instead, darkening as the pupils dilated, until all that was left would be a ring of blue around the black. And I was back so hard it damned  near made me dizzy. She felt it, and her hips hitched. Her eyes started to flutter closed and…

 

“Keep your eyes open, ” I whispered, and she did, lay back over the desk, and grasped me as hard as those fine legs of hers could, while I just sank myself into those blue eyes. My body just started pumping and pounding, and it was like I wasn’t even there. I was somewhere else. She was someone else. My body was just along for the ride.

 

She came first, and I came after, biting down before I could call out the wrong name. All she heard was “ffff”. And then, yeah, I felt like a total shit, so I went down, and licked her out, sucking and suckling and teasing her, tongue flicking in and out, fluttering against her lips, gliding over her clit till she came, flooding my mouth with our mingled come, and then she came again so hard she cried.

 

So, I’m sitting here, looking at myself in the rearview mirror, feeling like a real prince, with the taste of our come in my mouth, and normally I’d rinse it out, but…that semen taste, I keep imagining that it’s his.

 

She said to me, when I left, “We’ve got to stop doing this, promise me, we won’t do this again.” And I said “yeah” again, just like normal. “Yeah, last time.”

 

Damn. I turn the key in the ignition, start the car, pull out. Move on.

 

Last time. Because I realize now. Whether he’ll ever have me or not, it doesn’t even matter. Stella and me, we’re done. This time, when I said it was over…I meant it.

 

 

 

Stella Kowalski POV

 

You know it’s going to be special the first time. The whole world teaches you to expect it. You always know it was the first time, too. You never expect there to be a last time. In retrospect you might look back on it, and think, that was the day, the hour, the minute…I’ve had a few of those last times.

 

With Ray it was different. I knew, right as I crested on the last orgasm, that this was it for us. We were, as he might say, “doneski”.

 

I’m ashamed of myself, but I cried. Right as the pleasure spiked through me, almost painful in my clit, softening as it flowed. Out to the petals of my labia, spreading in a pool of heat, up my torso, through my clenching thighs, my breasts warm and my nipples tingling. At that moment I flooded into his mouth, and broke, not just with the crashing wave as I came, but with tears. Because this was the last time. I knew it as clearly as I had recognized the first time.

 

The first time, we were seventeen. Daddy was on a business trip, and Mother was…well, unavailable. I’d thought about it, increasingly often for over a year before it happened, wondering how, when, where. They were very teenage fantasies, now that I remember them. Sometimes I’d wake up, and my hand would be resting over my pubic triangle, and there was always a sense of confusion. You would have thought, with Mother the way she was…is, that I would have been a more knowledgeable child. But Daddy always protected me, just as he always forgave her. Sometimes I felt like Rapunzel in her castle, and Ray…well, he may not have been a prince, but he was certainly my ragged knight. A troubadour.

 

Poor Ray. I wonder, if I had told him that I knew all along his accident in the bank was just an accident, would he have felt better? Less like a phoney perhaps? No wonder he spent so much time undercover. After a while the face-saving lie I had invented for him became too big a secret between us, and neither of us could say a word about it. Perhaps things could have been different. He might not have been a policeman, if he hadn’t felt the need to live up to my expectations. But then, I can’t imagine Ray as anything other than a policeman.

 

But yes, our first time.

 

He obviously knew a lot more than I did. Not that he had ever had any practice before…he was refreshingly honest. Other boys who had tried to “get into my pants” had bragged of their expertise. Ray confessed that all he knew about it was from reading at the library. The Joy of Sex hidden in a physics textbook. For months and months we “experimented” as he called it, when he didn’t get the seventeen-year-old giggles and call it “sexperimenting” instead. “We’re doing our homework,” I’d call downstairs, and at the time I thought my parents believed me. Ray studied me with far more enthusiasm than he ever exhibited for actual schoolwork, trying out different methods of fellatio, and telling me that my vagina was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. I’d seen it myself, looking at it in a hand mirror, and I’d been horrified. I told him I thought it looked like a wound. He told me it looked like a flower, or a pink seashell, and proceeded to lick me out, rising for breath every now and then, flushed and panting, telling me what it was doing to him. “You taste like the ocean,” he said. “I could swim in you.” He loved it so much I came to love it myself. “Cherry blossom,” he murmured, one time, “golden,” he whispered against my pubic hair, “who’da thought you were golden all over?”

 

He played with my breasts as well, loving my nipples, my aureoles. His fingers looked like they belonged to a pianist, or a master sculptor, as he stroked and kneaded my skin. I could track where he had touched by the pink flush that followed them, by the electric fizz. I told him once that my breasts were too small. He told me they were perfect, “peaches and cream,” he said, kissing my pink nipples, and groaned, making them rise in his mouth, just like inverted strawberries. I could see the mound of each breast swell beneath his touch, the blue veins darkening, the paleness blushing to pink.

 

It got that I wanted him inside me so much it hurt.

 

The first time, he was as scared as I was. It was a good scared, for me. It made everything more intense. He begged me not to touch his erection, because he didn’t want to finish too soon. I watched him roll the condom on, his fingers trembling. Then he dipped his head down, and started kissing me again. He’d learned so much already…how to scoop his tongue in and out, and I couldn’t help but buck against his face. “Please,” I asked him, gripping the sheets in my fists. “Please….”

 

He nudged in, slowly, then came up against my hymen. I didn’t know what it was at the time, and felt pressure, then a little rip. I cried out, and he stopped. He’d warned me it might hurt but I hadn’t expected it to feel so sharp. Even then he knew the difference between a cry of pleasure and a cry of pain. “What,” he whispered, and stroked the hair from my face. “Hurts,” I whispered back.

 

I don’t know what it cost him, a teenager as he was, but he controlled himself, and started to pull out. I wasn’t having that.  My hands reached out and grabbed his buttocks, and I pulled him hard, all the way in. And yes, it hurt. But I was so turned on at that point that even the hurt helped, in the end. “Keep, keep, keep going,” I gasped, and he started to move again. He came suddenly, and fell on me, then pushed up on his elbows, looking guilty. “You didn’t,” he said, “you haven’t finished yet.” I shook my head. “It’s all right,” I told him, and honestly, it was. But he shook his head, slid out, and removed the condom. He told me he’d been “practicing” with condoms at home, so he wouldn’t make a mess on his bed sheets. Even so, he wasn’t nearly as adept as he would later become, when he tied the thing off, and wrapped it in a tissue.

 

At the time I considered it completely normal that he rose again to the challenge. Teenagers and their resilience, I suppose. He was about two-thirds of the way hard already, and slid back down to kiss me, teasing me terribly, not letting me come. I was right on the edge of it, and I could feel his cheeks curving in a smile against my thighs, his breath gusting against me as he laughed against my cunt.

 

When he slid back in, it still hurt, but it was so far beneath the warmth of expectation and readiness that I barely registered it. The things that man could do, can do, with his mouth. When I felt him in me the second time, such a strange full feeling, I convulsed around him, and came before he’d even started. He wrapped his arms around me, and kissed, and kept on kissing as he began to move up and down, in and out, sliding like an angel. I came three times in total before he had finished. And when we were done he lay on top of me, his long lean body a blanket of protection against the world.

 

Back then, I thought we were forever. I thought it would never, ever end.

 

Our last time, we were in my office. I’d locked the door, and he was stripping. We were so used to it now. Something that would have taken hours when we were younger, whittled down to a…Pavlovian response, I suppose. I felt guilty, I always did. I’d phone, and he’d come to me, always. Always so open, so eager for…self-exposure. Immolation. Honest, my Ray was. Is. Never had anything to hide. Until….

 

He was hiding something now. I knew it. He knew it. I wondered who she was. He hadn’t been with her yet, I knew that much. If he had, he would never have slept with me. He should have had “semper fidelis”  tattooed on his thigh. Even when he fantasized about other people, he felt guilty, though I told him there was no need for shame. And I’d let him share those fantasies with me, whisper them in my ear.

 

We’d stopped talking during sex, long ago. No more cherry blossom, no more ocean, no more strawberries. Not even “oh, fuck, yeah”. Our sex talk had always been about love, and without that, there was nothing to talk about.

 

Only this time he did say something. “Keep your eyes open,” he whispered, and I did. Already I knew something was changing. He had softened in me, and that had never happened before. As I looked at him though he went hard again, and jerked up against my pelvis. I thrust against him…and his eyes went wide. Intense, and staring right at me. Right through me even. I don’t know what he saw, but he had never looked at me like that before. Eyes pale before they darkened, and something desperate and shiny behind them.

 

I clasped him, arms and legs and cunt as tight as I could, and he fucked me so hard I slid nearly the length of the desk, my head hanging over the edge, barely able to breathe. I came in a long convulsion, and a few thrusts later he came too. Like the first time, he fell on top of me, but this time he felt like…a fallen soldier. Like something had flown out of him. I began to gather myself, and he lifted his head. His eyelashes were spiky, as though he had been crying, but I saw no tears.

 

He hooked his arms around me, slid toward me, went down on his knees. Opened my legs, and started kissing. “Coming in for seconds,” he used to say, or “thirds,” or “damn, I’m a pig, can I dig for truffles?” I can’t begin to say how often I laughed and came at the same time. There was a time when just the sound of me laughing was enough to make him hard.

 

This time I was nearly crying, even before I came. I’d seen it in his face, and I knew what it meant.

 

“We’ve got to stop doing this,” I said, afterward. “Promise me we won’t do this again.” It’s what we always say to each other…no, what we said. What we used to say.

 

“Yeah,” he replied, and he couldn’t even look at me, his face like a bruise. “Last time.” He touched me then, long fingers brushing my cheek. He blinked hard, then kissed me. “Love you, Stella,” he said, and normally I would have told him off for that. But this time…I wanted to tell him I love him too. My throat sealed up, and there was nothing to do but nod.

 

When the door clicked shut behind him I sat back on the desk. The desk on which we said goodbye. And it shouldn’t hurt so much. I was the one who wanted the divorce, after all, and I’d been saying for months “never again”. But…it’s a strange thing.

 

I never really expected it to end. Not really.

 

You never expect there to be a last time.

 

 

 

Fraser POV

 

My acute hearing informs me that the lock on the Consulate’s front door has just been slipped open with a credit card – Ray, no doubt. And if there were any doubt, that would be banished by Diefenbaker’s happy whuff; he is fond of Ray…and also hopeful of snacks that Ray sometimes brings when he comes here after-hours.

 

Dief and I step into the hallway to greet Ray – and as Dief twitches his nose and whines, I damn my own acute olfactory abilities for the information brought to me – Ray smells of his ex-wife and he smells of sexual intercourse. The former provokes in me a pang of jealousy and the latter stirs my hidden desires for this man whose own desires are directed elsewhere; my senses tell me the extent to which he is not done – or as he would say “doneski” – with Stella Kowalski. They are divorced, yes, but the effect of this on their relationship is clearly one which puts some limits on their access to each other but not an end to that access…and that in turn tells me the limits of my own access to the possibility of a more intimate relationship with Ray.

 

“Hey Frase,” Ray murmurs, his demeanor unusually subdued; normally the man is action-and-reaction personified, but now there is an alarming stillness about him – the stillness of the proverbial “calm before the storm”. Has he come here to tell me something about himself and his Stella – has he come here to tell me that they have…oh dear lord…that they have effected a reconciliation?

 

What Ray says is this : “You ever feel like you don’t know who you are? Like if you weren’t around somebody or that somebody wasn’t around you, that you wouldn’t be you, or at least not the you that you think you are? You ever feel like that?” I make no reply; though worded as an interrogative, it has the ring of self-examination.

 

Then Ray appears to shake off his subdued and contemplative mood…and I am put to mind of Diefenbaker coming in from a rainstorm, shaking it off. What stormy thoughts might Ray be shaking off? Who might he be shaking off? Will I learn that it is I? Dare I hope that it is she?

 

But nothing more will be forthcoming from Ray at this juncture. He mumbles, “Havin’ some fucked-up thoughts tonight, Fraser. Felt like I needed to stop here on the way home…but now I think I better go, before I…oh hell….” and then he is gone out the door again, mercurial Ray, without finishing that sentence.