wesleynotponcy | Room 504, Thursday Evening

In that case, she would find it quicken under her fingers, as this evening's pattern of Wesley surprising himself with his own nerve continued.

Breaking the kiss for a moment and taking advantage of Katniss' arched back, Wesley leaned in to dot a straight line of kisses all the way down her neck, one directly below another. When the fabric of her shirt got in the way, he took a quick breath to psych himself up and then continued as if it wasn't there, gently kissing his way down. He wasn't going as far down as, say, where his hands had been just a moment ago, but he certainly covered more of her than his lips had previously touched.

She was -- warm, he realized, even through her shirt. Somehow he hadn't known what to expect, but he definitely liked that. Warmth was life and fire and all the things that Katniss had in spades -- and it was new, if not entirely unexpected, that she possessed those traits even in a physical capacity.

Edited 2011-10-28 22:18 (UTC)

Katniss' hands relaxed against his chest, skimming down his sides over his skin, and just focused on feeling. She was tingly and warm and his skin felt heated under her fingers.

She was not one for manners, ever Katniss got by on demands and actions, not requests. But not right now.

"Please," she breathed. She wasn't sure what she was pleading for, except for him to keep going. The feeling of his lips against her skin was electric, and it was sweeter than anything she'd ever had or wanted before.

Under normal circumstances, Wesley wouldn't know what to do with a directive like that, and would have needed clarification. But this was not a normal circumstance and he wasn't thinking in terms of clarifying and explaining and rationalizing. He wasn't even thinking of his books.

What he was doing was feeling, feeling Katniss' every twitch and breath and heartbeat, and that alone was enough to communicate her pleasure. That alone dictated that he should continue what he was doing, and it was so refreshing to be so sure of something without bothering with tedious words and analysis. He knew that she loved this with as much certainty as he knew anything.

So he continued lavishing her with kisses until he couldn't reach anymore, then changed his position so that he could continue. As comfortable as it had been to have her weight on him, he wriggled out from beneath her and let her lay flat so that he could reach all of her, kissing his way down her torso until he reached the hem of her shirt. Just as he slipped his thumbs underneath the light fabric, he glanced back up to gauge her response.

She watched him carefully, catching her breath even as she felt she might lift off the bed in sheer anticipation.

"Yes," she decided softly, though she lifted her brows at him as she reached to tug on his shirt, too. If he was going to be touching her bare skin, she wanted access to his, too. "Yes, please."

Well, that was only fair.

Her hands were already there, insistent and demanding, so he dropped her shirt for a moment and simply stretched up his arms so that she could remove his for him. The motion itself felt a bit silly, but it hardly mattered -- the sooner she got his shirt off, the sooner he could get to work removing hers, which was... not an unwelcome concept in the slightest.

Katniss pushed his shirt up and off and now her hands were sliding along his chest, and he was warm and there and she wanted to feel him against her.

She smiled, because even if she was used to half-naked boys, this was her half-naked boy. And now with him like that, it really did seem only fair to shyly reach to press a trail of soft kisses along his shoulder.

She wanted to let him take her shirt off, if he wanted to. Even if she wanted to feel her skin against his now.

Right, this moment felt oddly weighted and monumental. Which made sense, because he had never seen a topless girl ever, unless you counted films about prehistoric societies, and he certainly hadn't found those women attractive. But now... well. One might even say he found her a bit too attractive for comfort right now.

He was very, very gentle removing her shirt, fingers feather-light as he lifted it up and pulled it over her head. And then... oh. Oh. There were breasts right there and they were hers (and she was his!) and they were perfect and he couldn't stop himself reaching out his hand to rub a thumb over one nipple, fascinated.

She wanted to curl up away and hide. She was too exposed, there was all of him looking at all of her and the way he was looking at her kept her still, warming her from the inside.

She had never felt so wanted before.

When he touched her, Katniss arched up into his hand, craving more. She wanted to touch him and be held and forget where he started and she ended.

She settled for sliding her hands down his chest, eyes tracking them as she did so. There was so much of him to take in.

It might've been easy to forget, looking at all Katniss and all her open, unmarked skin, that every square inch of her had at one point been home to scars and burns and stings. It might've been easy to forget, if Wesley hadn't known her the way he did, hadn't watched every second of what she'd gone through with bated breath and very nearly felt the injuries as she sustained them. But he knew what had happened to her, and even if he'd never seen her like this before, he knew all too well where it was that she'd been hurt, both the places where the injuries remained and the places where they didn't.

So every spot of her that had been hurt, visible or not, Wesley resolved to mark with a tender kiss. The near-faded marks from the burns on her shoulders. The tiny scar on her stomach from being shot. The now-invisible tracker jacker stings that he still knew exactly where to find. The mark Johanna had left on her forearm. The long-healed slash above her eyebrow. Each one earned a kiss, soft and adoring as Wesley set out to give her body these new memories, to shower her with the affection she'd been deprived of for so long. Her body -- her beautiful body, always beautiful -- had known pain for so long, and even if he couldn't take that away, he could at least try to write over the darker memories with this.

It didn't take Katniss long to figure out the trajectory of his kisses. Her mind immediately wondered at his memory, when he sought out the places that no longer had scars, that the Capitol had erased from her skin. In a way, she wished they'd left her scars -- her history, etched into her skin.

There were still a few, and he found all the notable ones, but the fact that he remembered where the tracker jackers had nearly made her lose her mind. He found where her skin had nearly melted away from her, when they'd lost Mags. Clove's knife's touch to her lips, long-erased, received a kiss.

"They took away my scars and you found them anyway," Katniss said softly, because it made her forget how to breathe, a little, for some reason. "They, um -- they wanted to augment me, too. Haymitch wouldn't let them."

In the middle of kissing his way from the scar Clove had left on her lips to the shell of her left ear where her own bomb had left her deaf, Wesley heard that and changed directions. Now his lips were traveling down her torso, and despite blushing fiercely at the very idea of it, he proceeded to adorn the circumference of first one breast and then the other with a thousand tiny kisses. He reached one hand up (shaking at first, then still) to hold her breast in place as he kissed it, feeling and tasting and smelling what was pure Katniss.

On his way from the left breast to the right, he murmured against her skin, "You're beautiful. Just right."

And his nervousness made her feel a little more comfortable -- she wasn't alone in her confusion, and in just sort of...feeling her way through this. He was, too. Katniss had sort of abandoned thought as soon as his lips touched the curve of her breast -- she'd been told she was beautiful, sure, by adoring Capitol fans who didn't understand, and by Peeta for the cameras, and it had never meant anything. She believed it, right now, because that was the only word appropriate for how exquisite she felt right now.

She was shy, still, but ignoring that part of her because everything he was doing felt so wonderful. It wasn't just physical, either. Wesley's ministrations warmed Katniss through, and for the first time since Prim's death, she felt loved.

"I'm just me," was her soft reply to that, because she never knew what to say to people when they said that sort of thing. Least of all Wesley, who believed it. She could tell.

Well, Wesley didn't know about that -- he doubted he would ever be able to look at Katniss and think just her. She would always be a larger-than-life figure for him, the beautiful, strong girl who spearheaded a revolution and ignited firestorms wherever she went and somehow, for whatever reason, seemed to love him.

"I love you," he breathed, lips close enough to tickle her skin. In between kisses, he murmured it again and again, until finally he'd covered every square inch of each breast with a thousand tiny kisses and slid up the length of her body to kiss her lips.

It felt trite to say 'I love you too' but she did, with every inch of her. For months, Katniss had been consumed by how much she hurt. Tonight -- and often, lately, distractingly often -- she was filled with how much she loved him. And life, in general, and warmth (though not fire) and simple things like food and fresh air and smiling, but mostly, her thoughts tended to wander to Wesley when she was feeling warm and sweet.

And so, as he kissed her, she didn't say, 'I love you too,' because that wasn't it, she realized. This felt entirely different from her affection towards others, and her initial declaration had been fueled by a cold acceptance of her death, and the last remnants of fear about leaving him behind.

This was more.

She pulled back a bit, reaching a hand up to touch his cheek, and chose her words carefully. She could feel the heat of his skin against hers, and the shakiness of their mixed breaths, and the way her heart was thumping so near his. She memorized it all as she whispered, "Wesley, I think I'm in love with you."

There was a distinction, she thought.

Wesley's breath hitched for a moment, his body realizing before he did the significance of what she'd just said. Then the words made sense and he drew in a quick breath, surprised.

Except that... it wasn't that surprising, if he gave it a moment. He loved books and his mum and helping Angel and that one stake that he nearly always hit the target with. But none of those things were in league with Katniss and the way he felt about her. She was... different. Special. Vital.

"I -- I think so too," he breathed, eyes wide and earnest. "I mean. I think I am as well. In love with you."

Edited 2011-10-29 21:28 (UTC)

"I've never done this before," she murmured, blushing lightly but also beaming from ear to ear. "I mean, I wouldn't know what to look for, but I...have never felt like this before, about anyone."

She shrugged, trailing her hand down his chest hesitantly, curiously. "But I love you so much. And not just because you've been making me feel incredible lately."

"I have?" Wesley wondered, caught by surprise, then blushed faintly. "I mean. You... you have too. And I -- I'm not accustomed to feeling this way either. About anyone." His chest tingled where her hand lay, encouraging him to admit, "I -- that is -- you make me see things differently. Like Faith and the Capitol and vampires and demons aren't -- aren't everything, I suppose. That there's more."

He searched for words for a moment, words that would even come close to approximating what it was about her, then added earnestly, "And how I feel about you, it feels -- just as powerful as anything else. More, even."

"It's bigger than my grief," Katniss said softly, and as she said it aloud, she realized it was true. It wasn't that she'd forgotten how much everything ached, or the isolation she'd felt. It was that this was bigger and brighter than that. "Or my guilt. There's more to life than Prim's death, or Finnick never seeing his child, or reliving the Games in my head. You're helping me remember that."

At that, Wesley leaned in to softly kiss her cheek. Then, deciding he'd have countless more opportunities to resume his exploration of her body, he rolled over to lay on his back beside her.

"I'm glad," he said softly as he settled into a comfortable position. "And you -- it seems silly, compared to everything that's happened to you, but you truly helped me the other night, when I came back. It wasn't -- that is to say, it's not comparable, but -- I appreciated having you here. You helped. You're still helping."

"Good," she said firmly. "And it's -- everyone has their own pain. Mine's just...very loud and explosive. And I've never gone through...what you went through, so I'm glad I'm helping," she added, more quietly. "They never got me. Just Peeta and Johanna and Annie, and I was never good at helping them...after."

"I've read about it," Wesley said quietly. "I used to study some of the more vicious vampires, who made a sport of it. Somehow being tested on their methods isn't quite the same as experiencing it firsthand."

He paused, searching for words, then finally settled on: "But... I thought of you. And how strong you are. It made it easier to get through."

Katniss curled against him. "I'm not strong. I'm just lucky," she said quietly, draping an arm around him. "And I didn't have to...to watch you. I think I'd go insane if I did. Having to watch someone hurt you, while I couldn't do anything about it...I couldn't do it. You're strong, Wesley, because you can do that and I couldn't. You watched both of my Games and lived through it. I'd probably still be stuck in my own head if our positions had been reversed."

"Well," he said, ducking his head a bit at the praise. "It's only thanks to Karla and Professor Skywalker and Professor Cabot that I'm not. They were immeasurably helpful. Before their help, at the end of your second Games, I was... not really all that functional."

Try "drunk on the floor surrounded by books."

"You all thought I was dead, didn't you?" she asked softly, because she knew the districts had thought so. She wasn't sure about Fandom. "I wish I could have sent you a message, or something, when they pulled me out, to tell you I was just paralyzed."

"Yes, it... it certainly seemed that way," he admitted, glancing down at his hands because the memory still hurt to think about. "But then that propaganda segment aired, and we realized what had happened, and after that we were all rather anxious to come see you. Firekeeper and I made a point of suggesting it.

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