Chapter Text
"...and then I put my hand where?"
My greeting dies on my lips as I realize Peeta is on the phone in my study - his voice, puzzled and a little incredulous, echoes down the stairs. It's not his day with Dr. Aurelius, I think, and hitch the full game bag up over my shoulder, lifting my foot to kick the door shut.
His sudden, loud laughter has me closing the door quietly and edging to the foot of the stairs, too curious not to eavesdrop. "Jo. She's not going to let me do that." She? Me? What won't I let him do? "But..." A long pause. "Of course I want..." Johanna was clearly not letting him say much. "Have you met Katniss?"
Why are he and Johanna talking about me? Is this what he does when I'm gone? Call her up and--wait, what was he saying now?
"...am certainly not going to call and tell you about it, pervert...yes, I know I called you, but I..." Another long pause. "Jo." He sounds somber now, and maybe a little...defeated? "Jo, we've been sharing a bed again for four months, but we've only just started kissing again. I think maybe that's getting a little ahead--"
My stomach twists. He called Johanna to talk about--
"How many times are you going to ask me that? No, I've never touched her like that; I've never even seen her naked...yes, really. You knew that already, anyw--yes, it does ma--":
Peeta's eyes on her naked body. How many times had she imagined that?
"OH NO YOU ARE NOT GOING TO CALL HER," he bellows, and then sighs, low and long. "Yes, I am aware of my age and gender...okay. Okay, yes, I'll try that...I don't know; we don't talk about it. We just do it."
Sleep together?
"Okay, yeah. Okay. I'll call you in a couple of days...okay. Thanks Jo...okay...you are a pain in the ass, you know that? 'Bye."
His abrupt goodbye startles me and I sprint silently to the door, easing it open and then closing it with a bang. "Peeta?" I call, hoping my voice sounds normal. There's a crash--he must have dropped the phone receiver--then the scrabble and soft click as he grabs it up off the floor and puts it back on the desk. He is so hard to rattle that I stifle a laugh. "The snares caught three rabbits," I say as he descends the stairs, and I try not to notice that his face is flushed as he takes the game bag from my hands.
"Excellent," he says with cheer that might have been forced, or covering something up, but it was always hard to tell with Peeta.
"Were you on the phone?" I ask, following him into the kitchen.
"What? Oh...yeah. Johanna called." He upends the game bag on the table; gets a long knife from a drawer; hands it to me. I begin to skin the rabbits as he chops vegetables and assembles stew ingredients, and we work in silence for awhile.
"So...what did Jo want? Is she coming to visit yet?"
Peeta lets out a laugh that actually sounds a little nervous. What had they talked about? "Not yet...her therapist doesn't think she's quite ready. Soon, I hope. She was just calling to see how we were."
And how are we, Peeta? "Mmmm," I manage, noncommittally.
We work in silence for awhile, and I soon have a tidy pile of roughly cubed rabbit meat and a decidedly untidy pile of bones and skin (which I swept away into the trash) and entrails (which I put in a bowl on the floor, for Buttercup). I clean my hands at the sink and hang my game bag up in the corner. "Maybe I'll go take a shower?"
"The stew will be awhile, so you have time." He only meets my eyes briefly, and then turns back to his preparations. I actually make it halfway up the stairs before I let out a small sigh and return to the kitchen. We'd seen and done too much for me to back away from this conversation, even though I want nothing more than to run out the door and back into the woods instead.
"Peeta."
He looks up, and I can tell by the resigned look in his eyes that he knows. "You heard me."
I nod.
"Let me get the stew on, Katniss," he says quietly. "Wait for me in the living room?"
"I do need to shower," I say carefully. "I'll meet you upstairs?"
I flee without waiting for an answer.
--
I spend my entire (super speedy) shower wondering what he's going to tell me. It was obvious I was the subject of the conversation--or we were, I guess. Have they talked about this before? Was the entire purpose of the call to talk about our...relationship?
Our physical relationship? What there was of it, anyway?
I step out of the shower, towel off quickly and slip into a simple shirt and pants. I grab my comb off the counter and slip out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where Peeta waits. He's standing restlessly in front of the open window, hands in his pockets, staring across the lawn at the house he hasn't slept in for months.
"Hey," I say unnecessarily; I can tell by the stiffening in his shoulders that he heard the door open. He turns slowly to face me.
"I just called Johanna to say hello," he starts.
I wait for more, hearing the unspoken but at the end of the sentence. In the long silence I cross to the corner of the bed nearest to him and sit down, beginning to pull the comb through my hair. Patience has never been my strong suit, but Peeta has always been so patient with me, and I have been trying to be better since we returned to Twelve. So I sit and wait for him to gather his words, watching him return his gaze to the window, and then down at his feet, and finally to me.
"Can I?" he asks, surprising me, gesturing to the comb in my hands. I nod and he circles behind me, taking the comb and continuing the task I began. He's done this for me a few times before. I know it's just an excuse to touch me, but it's also an excuse for me to let him touch me. We've been cautious, yes; we've only just started sharing the occasional kiss. We share a bed but it's been chaste, and while I will admit that yes, I have begun to long for more, there hasn't seemed to be a reason to rush.
And I'm afraid. Of course I'm afraid, and I think he is too. Of what, I'm not sure--but I can feel it.
As if he can read my mind, he says quietly, "Jo called yesterday to see if we were okay, since we haven't called in awhile, but you were in the woods and I was late to meet Thom, so I told her I would call her back today." It was true, we hadn't called in awhile--we'd both been busy helping with the rebuilding, and continuing to recover, and dodging phone calls from the Capitol. I'm sure we'd also been inadvertently dodging phone calls from Jo, and probably from my mother and Annie as well.
"I guess all those calls weren't just from Plutarch," I say, and I can feel him smile a little.
"Guess not. She did intimate that if we weren't going to pick up the phone, it'd be nice if we called her once in awhile."
"That's not what she said."
"Well, no; what she said used the word "fuck" a lot more, but I figured you could read between the lines."
Now it was my turn to smile. "What else did she say?"
He laughs a little. "Well, most of that used the word "fuck" as well."
I turn to look at him, my mouth open slightly in shock, and laugh a little myself to cover it. I just stare at him for a moment, watching a faint pink tinge his cheeks, before falling back on my best Effie impression. "Peeta Mellark. Your language!"
He laughs too, and the pink in his cheeks deepens a little. "I don't know if I can talk about this if you're looking at me." I nod, understanding completely--I'm not sure I can talk about this at all--and turn back around. His hands move back to my hair, and he combs quietly for awhile.
"She asked how I was sleeping; I told her much better. She guessed why, but assumed we'd...advanced our relationship. Actually, she assumed we'd done that a long, long time ago. So I set her straight, and she asked me what we were waiting for." He lets out a short sigh--almost a huff. "When I didn't answer, she started asking...other questions. Which is how she ended up finding out...well, basically the extent of what we've done."
Kiss, I thought. And Peeta's hands had sometimes wandered in his sleep, and she hadn't moved them away. But they'd always been in the Games, or preparing for the Games, or not speaking, or mentally disoriented or hijacked or on trial or recovering. When the hell did Johanna expect them to have time to...
"Okay," I say, stalling for time. I still wasn't sure how I felt about he and Johanna having this conversation. I wasn't mad; after everything we'd been through with Jo, our boundaries were pretty nonexistent. It would be hard to get mad at Peeta for talking to Jo about our physical relationship when she'd listened to him being tortured for weeks, and she and I had a history of being blunt with one another.
"She made some suggestions," he blurts out, interrupting my thoughts, and heat spreads unexpectedly through me.
"What kind of suggestions?" I manage.
"She pointed out that we were both still teenagers," he says. The comb is running through my hair easily now, and he lays it next to me on the bed. The mattress shifts as he sits down behind my shoulder, and then his hands move back to my hair, smoothing over the waves, twisting strands around his fingers and letting them go. I close my eyes and listen to his voice.
"We haven't had much of anything normal, Katniss. Sometimes I dream about what life might have been like if we'd never been Reaped...and I'd actually gotten up the nerve to talk to you. If I might have walked you home from school, and eventually gotten up the courage to kiss you. If I'd been able to court you here at home, instead of in the Arena. If...everything hadn't happened.
"But it did happen, and all we can do is make the most of the life we've been given. And we have time now. To...be teenagers, I guess. At least in whatever ways we can, considering that I know I at least feel about fifty years old most days." I nod at that, the corners of my mouth lifting a little. "So while I rejected Jo's more...immediate...ideas, because I think we have nothing but time now and should take some of it, she did make a suggestion that I thought...might be good."
Then he's quiet for a long time, long enough that I turn slightly to look at him. He lifts a hand to my cheek, strokes it softly. "What was it?" I ask him, my voice coming out a little more strained than I'd intended--but the look in his eyes is one I hadn't seen since our night on the beach during the Quell.
"'Everything but'," he says.
"Everything but..." I repeat, trailing off questioningly, although I know what he means. I just...want to hear him say it.
He gnaws on his lip just for a second, and it is completely endearing. "Everything but sex," he says quietly. "I told her I wasn't ready, and I didn't think you were either. And she asked me how we would ever be ready if we never did anything at all, and then gave me some...ideas...of where to start."
We look at each other for a long time; I know he's waiting for me to say something. So I think about it. I think about the cave and the beach and the nights on the train; about the primroses and the bread and his fingers folded around mine. About the day on the roof and the hours we'd spent wrapped around each other in this bed, trying to rediscover whatever peace we could find in this life. About how I know that as long as I had choices in this world, I would choose Peeta, and I wasn't sure if he knew that--although he probably did, because he's much smarter about me than I am about him.
And so I lay my hand on top of his, and say, "Well, where did she suggest we start?"
Warmth floods into his eyes, and he brings his other hand up to cradle the right side of my face. "Here," he breathes, and fits his mouth gently to mine.