Archive of Our Own

if it’s not forever, if it’s just tonight
oh, it’s still the greatest, the greatest, the greatest
and you, your sex is on fire
consumed with what’s to transpire

Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon

*

Amanda is the one who brings up the notion of rules. Amanda is the one who has the most to lose. Robin goes along with it, of course, because to not go along with it would be to lose all access and this he is unwilling to do.

“Never in Vancouver,” is the first rule she lays out for them. As soon as she says it, though, she knows that isn’t practical and makes a face as she thinks it through. He wants to lick her bottom lip where her teeth are working the soft, damp skin. “On set, of course, is different, but then, there are so many people... how about work time is work and we act like professionals?”

“Okay,” he says with a smirk. “Just like always.” She rolls her eyes.

Rule number two is a little more delicate.

“Nothing we couldn’t do in a movie theater,” she says, pleased with herself.

“What kind of movie theater?” he asks, waggling his eyebrows.

“A normal one, you pervert,” she says. “Clothes have to... they have to stay on, Robin. Otherwise it’s too...”

“Right,” he says. “Right, of course. This is just... preventative anyway, right? Because we’re not gonna do anything stupid.”

“Right,” she agrees. “We’re just being cautious.”

“Level-headed,” he adds.

“Responsible,” she says in a final, firm voice.

Robin thinks other actors don’t have to make rules about touching in order to maintain their day-to-day sanity, but he doesn’t mention it to her now.

They are in a limousine on the way to the airport. It’s convention season and they’re only halfway through. But with Comic Con and how close everything came to snapping in Atlanta, maybe she is smart to set some ground rules for Australia.

“Rule three,” she says. “Nothing can destroy the show or my family.” She says this softly, looking out at the passing highway and not at him.

And everything else is just window-dressing because they both know this is the only rule and it’s already been the only rule for a pretty long time.

oooo

They fly in on a nice first class to Melbourne (a blessing; it’s nearly 24-hours in the sky) and it’s only after they’ve settled in and the cabin has grown quiet for the night that she thinks maybe flying together wasn’t – hasn’t been – the best course of action if they’re really trying to be cautious about this thing.

She watches the inky blackness out of her window seat and thinks about how her daughter had been sleepy and warm in her bed when she’d sneaked in to say goodbye, and about how her husband had tucked a kiss right below her ear before she left home for the third time that month. She touches the spot with two fingers and Robin’s voice beside her pulls her out of her thoughts.

“Ready to do it all again?” he asks, and when she turns to look at him she sees his face all lit up because he’s Robin and he lives, thrives for all the attention he’ll get this weekend from the fans. It’s two AM their time and who knows what hour in the place they are headed but the little windows are dark as pitch and he’s still got his sunglasses on his head.

She laughs. It sounds tired. She wishes it didn’t. “Yeah,” she says. “Of course.”

When she turns to look out the window again she feels his hand on her leg.

“Hey. Everything’s gonna be fine.” He rubs little circles and even though it’s a comforting touch, a friendly touch, she leans her head back against the seat and lets out a deep breath.

“No unnecessary touching in public,” she says quietly. His hand stills but he doesn’t pull it away.

“Define unnecessary.”

She rolls her head over to look at him. “Listen, the fans will expect it, but right now let’s lay off. It’ll just make things harder.”

Robin sighs like she’d just told him he couldn’t have any dessert tonight and he wiggles around to get comfy in his seat. He knows the conversation is over and he gets this feeling like there are going to be so many addendums to the core rules laid out by the end of this thing he won’t be able to keep them straight. But then, he thinks, maybe that just means she won’t be able to blame him when he slips up and breaks them.

oooo

Amanda isn’t sure how it started, but she does remember the first time her brain had utterly betrayed her where Robin was concerned. Alan had taken Olivia to his parent’s house for four days and it had worked out because she’d been on night shoots anyway. She hated dragging home in the early dawn light and waking Alan and missing Olivia all together so it was best that they were gone.

They’d even taken George.

So the house had been quiet and she’d taken her clothes off and slipped into the big, empty bed. She’d fluffed her pillows and closed her eyes, ignoring the silver light trying to sneak in through the closed draperies. Eyes closed, face washed, bed soft.

Of course, though, her brain had chosen that moment to come alive. She thought about work, about the scenes left to shoot, about Robin flubbing his lines for an hour straight, long enough that Martin had called a break and Robin had stomped off to get some coffee and regroup and she’d followed him and pushed him into a dark corner and had held his hand and run the scene through with him until he’d gotten it all out.

And then he’d knocked it out of the park on the first take back. Though she’d known in the dailies, she’d be able to see his hand twitch every time he spoke, reaching for hers. They could edit around that, probably. Her own hand twitched when she thought of Robin’s fingers flinching and she realized her hand was resting low on her stomach.

She flexed her hand, palm sliding across smooth skin and she sighed. She was usually too tired for this, these days, but perhaps it would help put her to sleep.

Her brain turned her own fingers into Robin’s fingers without so much as even asking consent. And by the time she realized that it was really not okay to touch herself while thinking of A) not her husband and B) her co-star that she was going to have to face in a matter of hours, she was too far gone. She was already whimpering, pressing her hips into the mattress and then lifting them off again. Sighing as she she slipped one finger in and then two, touching herself roughly to mimic someone unfamiliar with her body.

Her legs kicked the blankets away and she spread her thighs wide, fingers of both hands working furiously. She thought of the way he’d squeezed her hand, of the stubble on his chin dragging across her face when they’d hugged at the wrap, the way he’d watched her get into her car and watched her drive away.

“Robin,” she moaned and the sound of her voice saying his name into the empty room was so visceral and so real that it made her come.

She gasped hard, rode it while she could and the collapsed against the bed, wiping her hands on her hips.

“Shit,” she mumbled. “Shit, shit, shit.”

But she fell asleep easily, sated and relieved.

Now when she touches herself, which still isn’t often because she so rarely finds herself alone, she doesn’t even kid herself. She thinks of Robin, his hands, his laughter, the way that he looks at her - like he wants to lap her up like a melting ice cream cone. It’s hard to resist that kind of adoration, that sort of blatant attraction. She can see it all over him when he looks at her. It’s in the shift of his hips, the way his mouth moves, how his eyes dilate in a well-lit room. He wants her and he’s bad at hiding it.

And though she can talk her brain out of wanting him back, it seems her body won’t be convinced.

So the rules are for her as much as for him. They’re more for her, really, because she wouldn’t even have to convince him at all. She’d say jump and he’d already have one foot off the ground.

If they’ve any feet left on the ground at all, that is.

oooo

They always stay in a separate hotel - Amanda prefers one that isn’t close to where the convention is being held because the con organizers always have a car on retainer for them, so it’s not hard to get around. The car that picks them up from the airport knows where they are staying and takes them there. Robin cracks the window and lets the air blow on his tired, scruffy face. He rolls it all the way down and yells, “HELLO MELBOURNE!” at the top of his lungs and she blushes even though the driver barely reacts at all.

“Sorry,” she says, and then, “Jesus, Robin.”

They’ve come a day early to sort of deal with the jet lag that comes with traveling halfway around the world but she’s strangely not tired. They’d napped on the plane, lulled to sleep by wine. Robin had pushed the arm up between their seats and she’d sort of melted into him, dozing against his side. As they’d boarded, she’d mentioned how she wished Agam had been on their flight and he’d said, “Really?”

“No,” she’d admitted after a moment. “I’m glad it’s just us.”

The hotel is just fine, pretty but not ostentatious and the staff is perfectly polite and have honored all their requests, like fresh flowers in Amanda’s room and put their rooms side by side. Robin lets someone else handle their bags even though they’re perfectly capable of carrying their own luggage.

“Yes but why should we?” he asks, looping her arm through his. “When we don’t have to?”

“Lazy,” she accuses.

“Not when it counts,” he says and waggles his eyebrows, his hip nudging hers as they wait for the elevator.

“All talk,” she says breezily. “No follow through.”

“Oh I have follow through,” he says. The doors ding and open and they step in. “I can go all night.”

When they’re alone in the elevator, he reaches out to push the button for their floor and, rather smoothly, slides his other hand down her arm and webs his fingers with hers.

“For as long as you want,” he says, squeezing her hand.

In a move that reminds him of Magnus - the fluid control she seems to have over her body - she swings around to face him, aligning their hips and keeping their hands joined. She sighs, meets his eyes for just a second, and then presses against him fully. She rests her chin on his shoulder, angling so her face is in his neck. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, the air moving hotly across his skin.

“Robin,” she sighs. “Why do you make this so difficult for me?”

“Me?” he squeaks and it is a squeak and that’s embarrassing and he’d care except he’s already snaking an arm around her waist and pressing their hips together. She presses back and nuzzles his jaw with the tip her nose.

“You,” she breathes. “I had a whole life before this.”

“Amanda,” he says, confused and upset and so, so aroused. “What-”

But the doors open and she steps away as smoothly as she had stepped in. He has to readjust his jeans a little and follows her down the hall.

They spend the day together, sightseeing. Amanda’s idea of sightseeing is shopping and museums, his is finding every dank pub he can find and stopping for a pint. In the spirit of fairness, they take turns. And it starts out okay - sandwiches and cold beer and their fingers brushing under the table and they do that all the time. And then walking down the narrow streets with the fancy shops full of art and jewelery and intricately blown glass, Amanda loops her arm through Robin’s arm and her fingers wrap around his bicep and squeeze and even that’s okay.

They wander through an art gallery and sit next to each other on a leather couching facing a huge photograph of a beach at sunset. Robin is mostly interested in the sitting on the couch and less interested in photography but Amanda looks hard at the print, her fingernail between her lips, tapping against the enamel of her teeth.

“I’ve had plenty of sex outdoors,” she says. “Even on beaches, but nothing like that.”

“Huh?” It’s all he can manage. He may have just imagined her saying that.

“If you and I were on a beach like that right now, would you fuck me?” she asks, glancing at him, the corners of her mouth curling up a bit.

“God,” he says. “Yes. Sure. Of course.”

“It just seems romantic,” she says.

“We’re in Australia,” he says. “We can walk like three feet and find that beach, let’s go.”

“Mmm,” she says. “I wish. But that would break a lot of rules.”

“Yeah, but-”

“But there’s no rule about thinking about it,” she sighs and then shifts a little on the couch, like she’s squirming.

“Amanda,” he groans. “I think... I think I need more beer.”

“Aye,” she says, and hefts herself up. “Me too.”

They find a bar, a pub, whatever, and he holds open the door for her, eases her into a chair with his hand on her back and she nuzzles against him.

“Are you already drunk?” he asks.

“No,” she says softly. “Not yet.”

“Not yet,” he mumbles. “God. This trip is gonna be the one that kills me.” He walks up to the bar to order instead of waiting to be served because he just needs to step away for a moment and remember the rules. Not at home, no actual nudity or sex, don’t hurt anyone.

When he thinks about it, it’s actually a lot of leeway.

He glances back at her and she smiles and licks her lips.

oooo

The bed in the hotel room this time around is bigger and plusher and softer-looking than others she can recall. She lays the black dress out on the downy comforter and hesitates, but in the end she reaches into her suitcase for the strappy silver Jimmy Choos and sets them right beside it. Robin bought them for her on a crazy and more-than-a-little irresponsible (inappropriate) whim when they were in Manhattan a few weeks ago and she still can’t believe she let it happen, that she tried them on for him at his insistence and didn’t even put up a fight when he said “Jesus, Amanda, yeah, do me a favor wear those forever” and hauled them up to the cash register. In the cab he’d leaned over the bag between them and asked in a low voice if she’d wear them for him, and she felt her face get hot and she mumbled some noncommittal thing she can’t even remember now.

When he sees her at the cocktail party that night (they arrive separately for once) it’s from across the room and she’s talking to someone else when he catches her eye. He grins and looks her up and down; his tongue darts out obscenely to lick his lips when they land on her ankles and she wants to smack his face because they’re in an intimate public setting and how dare he knock her off balance like that, especially tonight, right now, when they’re technically working. She stutters and blinks all the way to the end of the current sentence coming out of her mouth and it isn’t until the end of the next one that she feels like she’s regained composure. Sandy from New Zealand doesn’t seem to mind, but Amanda’s gaze darts in Robin’s general direction for the next twenty minutes and she isn’t sure when this turned into a competition but if it is, she knows she’s going to win. She doesn’t even know who she’s playing against, him or herself, but she made those rules and she’ll even play by them, but maybe tonight she’ll just be a little creative.

She saunters over to him right before she’s supposed to head to the next room over for photos and he’s still got the charm turned on from meeting and greeting. Somehow it softens and sharpens at the same time when he sees her coming.

“Hey,” she says with an easy smile. She’s had a glass of champagne and the con atmosphere feels so familiar, he feels so familiar and so playful, with that smile that always makes her insides tighten in something like one part fond annoyance, one part frustration, and one part desire. For a moment she forgets about the precarious perch she’s (they’re) on in favor of lingering in this amber-lit space a little longer, this brief space in which maybe she doesn’t need to be so careful all the time because it’s exhausting.

“Well hi, sexy.” He moves to slide his arm around her waist like he usually does and she welcomes it, like she usually does, and he thinks it doesn’t even feel like she’s just putting up with it even though she’d basically told him on the plane that the closeness was for the fans and not for him or her or them. Which stung a little but hey, things are just a little different since they laid out the whole rules groundwork.

“I just came over to ask you something,” she tells him. He raises a questioning brow and she leans in, not quite looking at him, keeping her eyes on the crowd. She’s made up nice, long hair curled and charcoal-lined eyes, pink shimmer on her lips. She lowers her voice and drags the toe of her shoe almost imperceptibly against the lower back of his right calf. “I already know you like the shoes, but if I told you I just took my underwear off in the bathroom, would you like that better?”

Just how much has she had to drink today? He can’t tell if this is the worst or best joke in the entire world as she walks away, and he knows she knows he’s watching her go, and she’s probably got some smug look on her face that the crowd will think is adorable. His fists tighten at his sides and he thinks about how everyone knows That Robin Dunne Guy is trouble but the thing people don’t know is that she’s trouble too, when she wants to be.

oooo

They get back to the room pretty damn late after the cocktail party and it’s not long before they’re sitting on the bathroom floor passing a whiskey bottle back and forth (Robin can always be counted on to procure alcohol when needed, and to make Amanda drink it even if she thinks she doesn’t want to). They’re sitting on the bathroom floor because they’d walked right through the doorway, Amanda swaying a little from a day of beer and a night of champagne and high heels and fatigue. She had caught Robin around the waist and they had locked eyes and agreed wordlessly that the bed would be too distracting and alluring and taunting and Amanda was still level-headed enough to think the cold hard tile might knock some sense into them. Except they’re still together; they didn’t even consider saying goodnight and separating off to their respective rooms. They’re high off the first night of the con and they’d taken the bottle in with them. So these things probably defeated the purpose altogether. Small oversights.

Amanda hasn’t taken those heels off; she’s just sitting up against the tub beside him with her long legs stretched all out and her black dress falling carelessly off one shoulder, one Barbie-pink bra strap and a sloping collarbone exposed, just staring at him, goading him on. Robin watches the silver shoe straps sparkle in the fluorescent light instead because he thinks she might chastise him if he looked anywhere else on her body, even though that’s really unfair because she started it tonight and she started it this morning and he’s waiting for the perfect, stinging moment to remind her of these facts. But anyway, he gets a perverse, warm, gushing satisfaction knowing that he bought her those shoes, that she let him buy them for her, that they were really fucking expensive and that she wore them tonight and people saw her wearing them. Like somehow he’s marked her in a tangible way. Because out of all of those people at the party that may have fantasized about it, he’s the one that actually has the best chance of ending up with those legs and heels wrapped around him later.

“We have to be up so damn early,” she says, a little whine thinning her voice. But she’s smiling, too, because he knows she loves being here as much as he does, even if maybe it’s for different reasons (he loves the fans and the attention, she just loves the fans).

When she thrusts the bottle out toward him again the liquid sloshes around inside and she’s pulling a face, bringing a wrist up to smear away the whiskey that’s threatening to slide glittering off her lips. He wishes he could have done it for her with his mouth instead.

He watches her stand up, wobble a little, move to the sink, start to take out her earrings and rub away the mascara from under her eyes. Her calves are right smack dab in the middle of his gaze now and he watches them flex as she adjusts her weight, as she takes a step forward and back for a washcloth.

“Wasn’t very fair what you did all day, darling,” he says, because he can’t understand her thought process about this thing and it’s getting confusing. He doesn’t know if he has a right to ask her about it but he’s been more confused in these last forty-eight hours than he has been in awhile. One minute she’s flirty and touchy and the next she’ll turn on him for being exactly the same way. “Getting public hard-ons isn’t something I want to make a habit of, if you know what I mean.”

The hem of her dress swishes as she twists to toss a tissue into the garbage. “Maybe you should watch your mouth,” she tells him. “Literally. That lip-licking thing was totally salacious, Robin, anybody could have seen you.”

“You were the only one who saw it and excuse me, Miss Thing, but you did the same to me. Besides it was totally within the rules and I think maybe that irks you for some weird reason. I mean I bought you those things, don’t I have the right to admire you in them?”

She makes a disgusted noise and rolls her eyes. Braces herself against the counter with two hands. “At a bar or an art gallery where we don’t know anyone is one thing but it’s entirely another when it’s at a cocktail party full of fans and press. I am subtle, you aren’t.”

“I don’t know if I would consider you asking me to fuck you on a beach and then casually telling me you’re not wearing any underwear subtle.”

She grits her teeth. “It is subtle because nobody hears and that means it stays between me and you. The touching has been okay but I’m worried now with the con starting because people watch us constantly, Robin, they see things and they tell their friends and that could definitely, definitely break the rules.”

“So? Let them think whatever they want to think. We’re not actually breaking them. I’m going to keep touching you and checking you out and you’re going to like it. Okay?”

She groans. “You’re unbelievable.”

He just grins and she watches him behind her in the mirror’s reflection, feeling some unsettling thing itching in the palms of her hands, in the pit of her stomach. Rarely does she have a completely clear mind around and about Robin even when she hasn’t been drinking, and she thinks maybe he does it on purpose. She wonders if it’s her fault for acquiescing, or his for coercing.

“So I’ve been told.”

“God, do you ever shut up?” There’s amusement lingering somewhere underneath the surface of her words, of her face, but the only thing that’s apparent is the irritation. The moment turns a shade tense and she closes her eyes, tries to take in a calming breath. Except then that’s shot to hell because when her eyes snap open again it’s because there are warm hands pressing into her calves. Sloping around the backs of her knees.

“Cut it out,” she breathes, but her voice is already trembling and betraying her like it always does. She’s a fine actress but context matters, and right now she’s having trouble just breathing because even these light touches are so incredibly promising.

“No,” he says. He’s kneeling, hands on her hips at his eye level, nudging her around to face him. “That was a dirty thing you did tonight and I want you to tell me why you did it.” He wants to know why she’s okay talking about it and getting him all riled up by it if she’s not okay with where it might lead.

She manages a laugh. She lets him turn her around, eyes closed. His skin back against hers now, palms sliding up her thighs, shucking the dress up with them. “Come on Robin, I was just being a smartass,” she lies.

“I just want to check and see if you were really telling me the truth, Mandy.”

“Rules,” she hisses, reaching her hands to still his. She finally opens her eyes and looks down, meets his gaze and her chest is heaving a little, she knows it is. She’s digging her fingernails into the backs of his hands where they rest high up on her legs, dangerously high up. “I wasn’t lying.”

“Show me,” he says, and the words rasp out of his throat like he really needs more, this time, and badly. More than yesterday, more than today, more than any of the millions of moments in the five years they’ve known each other. Right now, in this moment, he’s wound more tightly than he can handle and she’s right here in front of him, shaking with the effort of wanting to do the right thing. But the rules are a contingency plan and fuck all if this isn’t just such a contingency.

He needs more.

She steels herself and she physically shakes her head back and forth, back and forth in quick little tugs because she’s trying to convince herself that she doesn’t. That she doesn’t need more, that fantasizing and talking is enough to satiate whatever screwed up, unfair, baffling thing it is that’s strung out between them. But she does. She needs more too, as much as he does, and she thinks, all in one hot burst of frustrated, smothered desire, that if she doesn’t let Robin give her an orgasm tonight she might actually go crazy.

“Hand me my clutch and turn around,” she tells him, surprised by how steady and demanding her voice sounds.

He moves quickly, unwilling to argue, and a moment later she’s pulling her underwear out of the handbag and slipping them back on while she watches his turned back tense up with every passing second. She’s trying so hard not to drown in a flood of how wrong she knows what they’re about to do is, how it won’t technically break the rules, but how it will feel exactly like it. How it will feel like they’re bending them into such unrecognizable shapes that maybe it’d be more honorable to chuck them altogether.

But she won’t, she won’t chuck them, because there is safety in the delusion that she’s within the confines of her own restrictions. Often these days she wars between needing and wanting to be a good person and then on the other hand needing and wanting so badly to light it all up in a blaze of irresponsible defiance. The former wins out every time and it’s starting to wear on her.

She orders him between her legs, and he’s still kneeling at the perfect height for her lean back against the counter while she crooks one over his shoulder.

“Clothes stay on,” she huffs. “And no touching.”

He reaches immediately to curl his hands beneath her thighs but she slaps them away and repeats herself.

“Fine,” he growls, and moves to grip the counter ledge instead.

He leans in and nudges her open with a cheek and a chin that feel rough against the inside of her thigh. She hisses, thinking that’s one rule broken but then he’s covering her with a hot, wet, open mouth and her whole body seizes up, breath caught and tangled somewhere between her lungs and throat, and she thinks this is a hell of a lot worse.

The touch is satisfying enough at first but then they both start to damn the fabric in the way because she wants to feel him, and he thinks this is the most frustrating thing, like he’s a skilled potter with heavy gloves tied to his hands. Her fingernails slip against the smooth counter top and her hands scramble a little because she won’t allow them their first instinct, which is to rake through his hair.

He swirls his tongue and sucks and nips hard with his lips and soft with this teeth; she bucks her hips and the counter is so hard and the ledge is so sharp beneath her. It digs into her skin and she whimpers because it grounds her, it reminds her and it reminds him that this is the way it has to be. The slip of underwear is soaking through quickly on both sides and the friction is delicious but it’s also incredibly infuriating.

It doesn’t matter though because he feels like he needs to win this to prove something to her, something he’s not even sure of. He moves his mouth relentlessly, trying to make up for every aspect of this situation that is lacking, but still when he finally gives her that orgasm she wanted it’s too fast and too short and it leaves such a hollow ache pulsing all over her body and deep inside her bones in the aftermath that she has a hard time not feeling immediately resentful.

All Robin wants is to kiss her now, to take her to the bed outside the door and fuck her dirty at first if that’s really what she wants but then to definitely, definitely make love to her second. He wants to press every inch of himself against her, close as possible without breaking the skin. Hell, break the skin, he wouldn’t care, he just wants to feel her wrapped around every single one of his moments. He wants to breathe her into his lungs and he wants her playing against his skin like sunlight and he’s wanted it all for so, so long. He wants her present with him, focused only on him, saying his name in his ear, saying god, that feels good, you feel so good, Robin. He wants all of that but they’ve got these rules and contrary to popular belief he’s a gentleman and he keeps to his agreements. So all he’s got instead is her shaking breath shattering the fluorescent silence like glass and a fistful of smooth marble as he leans his temple against the inside of her knee (he’ll move it soon, he promises).

“Oh,” he sighs. “Shit.” He looks up at her and she’s still breathing hard, a flush creeping across her cheeks and chest, dark hair falling across makeup smeared eyes. He looks away quickly because if he stares at what a tempting picture she makes much longer he’ll be pulling those wet panties aside and using his tongue again so fast and so deeply that neither of them will even have time to even remember let alone think about the goddamn rules.

She puts her leg down a nanosecond later like she’s reading his mind, trying to keep it in check. The heel clicks hard onto the floor and the sound it makes is startling.

“If we were clever and careful we totally could have done that in a movie theater,” he says, winded, trying to make light, trying to make a joke, trying to make it all okay because he’s Robin. She laughs and he can’t tell if she’s relieved for the break and the reassurance or if she’s just responding the way she thinks he wants her to so that she can shut this situation down as soon as possible.

He watches her bite at her lips, and her jaw moves in a funny way. She covers her face with her hand but the sob slips through her fingers and out into to the empty bathroom anyway, and he doesn’t really know what to do anymore. He’s still kneeling in front of her and he’s so hard it hurts, so hard that when she runs a hand briefly through his hair and steps away he groans lightly both at the touch and again at the withdrawal.

She bends for the whiskey bottle and swallows a mouthful down. When she holds it out for him she’s got some pretty intense pain and longing in her eyes and he takes it from her slowly; he tries to brush his finger against hers but she lets go too soon.

She looks away and a beat passes like maybe she’s going to say something, but then she walks out, taking the heels off as she goes.

Robin stays and finishes off most of the bottle on the bathroom floor. Before he leaves he slinks up next to her bed, watches her outline in the darkness. He thinks she might be asleep but when he turns to go she holds out a hand and gives him the contact he’d sought earlier, fingers against fingers, palms against palms. She doesn’t say anything but when she takes her hand back after he doesn’t even know how long, he understands, and without a word heads back to his own room and away from her.

oooo

It’s like she’s in heat.

She’s not actually crazy, but the hormones flooding her body are sure making her appear so. Maybe that’s a lazy excuse because she’s not sixteen and Robin is not the guy who sits in front of her in geometry class. In fact, when she was sixteen, Robin was - whoops, best not to think about that.

She sleeps in small fits and has these dreams that she would swear are real, but things are all wrong. In one dream, she’s actually Helen - the notion of Amanda so far gone it doesn’t occur to her once that she isn’t an immortal British lady - and all through the dream she’s running next to Robin, or Will, and they’re searching for Ashley. Except Damian is there giving them notes and every time she catches sight of Ashley, it’s a little girl and it’s Olivia and Robin, no Will, keeps trying to hold her back, keeps trying to press her into walls and put his mouth on her but only where there is clothing and never on her skin, where she wants it.

She wakes up gasping and cold, the blanket kicked to the floor.

She pulls the blanket from the ground and realizes she’s still dressed and worse than that, still sticky between her thighs. Still half horny, still unsatisfied and it would be so easy to just go knock on his door. He’d let her in. He’d touch her all over, he’d fill all of the empty spaces she’s been carrying around lately, all those spaces that seem to do nothing but grow and grow.

She slips into sleep again, but she wakes up every hour until the sun comes up.

Finally, she gives up and punches his room number into the phone and she knows he’s awake already because he answers so quickly.

“There’s a Starbucks a couple blocks from here,” she says. Her voice sounds tired and a little hoarse to her own ears.

“I’ll meet you downstairs in half an hour,” he says.

“We can do this,” she says.

“We already are,” he promises.

A black sweater with long sleeves and for a moment she closes her eyes and thinks about how many days of her life she’s pulled on a long sleeved black shirt. She thinks about Sam, about how that lady lived her whole life loving someone she couldn’t have and that compared to that, this is peanuts.

Of course, none of that was real.

And it’s not like she’s in love with Robin.

She brushes her teeth, puts dangly earrings in, buttons her jeans, steps into her shoes.

He’s already there when she appears, long hair like a curtain down her back.

His jeans hang low on his hips and his jacket collar is popped. It’s early enough that it’s cool out but later, he probably won’t need it but it adds to his undercover look, sloppy and nondescript except for he’s wearing sunglasses inside and he’s so, so handsome.

“You sleep okay?” he asks.

“Nope,” she says. “We gotta... we gotta talk about this.”

“Nah,” he says and she is surprised that he can appear to be as cool and collected as he does. “We’re fine.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s you and me,” he says. “We’re us. It’s gonna be fine.”

And damned if she doesn’t feel better, hearing him say it.

“You’re buying me coffee, though,” he adds.

“Why?”

“Well, obviously you owe me one,” he smirks.

Her face flushes, she feels it across her chest, up her neck and to her cheeks.

“You’ll get yours,” she promises. She doesn’t know when or how, exactly, but at this point it’s inevitable. Isn’t it?

oooo

In front of an audience, they’re fine. They get along amazingly, whether they’re chatting about the work, play bickering, or hugging fans. But the moment they don’t have a thousand eyes on them, it’s like someone has cranked up the heat. She actually feels faint when she sees him and they get hot and itchy and can’t seem to stop touching, no matter what.

Her feet are tired and sore and she is starving but instead of getting ready for dinner or heading out to find a restaurant, she and Robin are standing in his room, torturing one another. They got just far enough in the room for the door to close and now her back is against the wall and she has Robin in her arms, one hand on his neck, holding his forehead against her own.

Their lips don’t touch, rules, but his breath is hot against her bottom lip and they just keep breathing in and out. Her hand tightens on his neck, his hand tightens on her waist. She can feel his sweaty palm through the thin fabric.

He tilts his head so that their bottom lips are almost touching. So close.

He bends, eases his knee between her legs.

“Kiss me,” he begs.

“No,” she says, but it doesn’t stop her her from lowering until she can feel his thigh between her legs. She gives herself a little pressure, searching for relief but it just makes more heat shoot up her spine and settle between her eyes. “God.”

“Okay,” he breathes. “Okay. Well, well, what can we do instead?”

“Robin,” she moans.

“We can’t stay like this, come on, gotta bend some rules,” he says, and hitches up his knee. She moans. Such delicious contact.

“Okay, okay,” she says, shuddering. “Yeah.”

“Tell me what to do,” he pleads.

“I can’t touch you and you can’t touch me,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t touch ourselves.”

“Oh fuck,” he says. “That is so hot.”

“Separate beds does not break the rule about being in bed together,” she says, pulling off her scarf and dropping it to the floor. She loses the jacket next and unbuckles her belt. She has just enough sexual frustration and momentum to keep this going without embarrassment and she is not going to stall and miss out now. Robin, of course, is right behind her, his own hands on his pants. She climbs on the bed closest to the window and he sits on the side of the one by the door. She flicks open the buttons of her jeans.

Her fingers are cool against her warm belly and he watches them disappear.

“Are you wet?” he asks.

She whimpers. She’s drenched, her finger coated before she even hits the promised land. It should feel weird to be doing this while he stares but it isn’t. She just needs stimulation, gratification and no price is too high. But all he’s doing is staring, hands limply at his sides even though she can see him straining through his jeans.

“Robin,” she manages. “Two way street.”

She wants to see him. Wants to get a peek at what’s behind that zipper. He undoes his belt buckle and she sinks a finger inside of herself.

She might go blind with desire. She has to close her eyes against it, has to let the mattress carry more of her weight as she strains against her own hand.

“Hey,” he says. Her eyes open again, such heavy lids, and she can see him staring, his hand moving inside his open jeans. All she can see is denim and blue boxers and the same, repetitive motion. She groans. “Hey, stay with me. Watch me.”

“I am,” she gasps. She watches his crotch, not his face, loses herself in the rhythm of it, matches it with her own fingers. Up and down and across and around and Robin makes this noise in his throat and then starts swearing up a storm, fumbling to free himself so he can come across the bedspread and not the inside of his shorts.

Something snaps inside, an ignition, and she curls in on herself, pulsing and raw and dizzy.

This isn’t their first mistake but it’s their most memorable to date.

“Damn it,” she says, her chin still tucked low, her thighs burning and wrist sore.

Robin just breathes and breathes from across the room.

oooo

When Robin was directing his first episode Amanda was almost worried they’d attract the wrong kind of attention because he’d taken complete advantage of it at the most inopportune moments. He did silly things like make her repeat lines in various accents or as various historical figures and she’d just rolled her eyes at that and humored him. But then there were other times, like the time he walked right up to her before a take and started messing with the gun strap on her thigh, his fingers pressing into places that had nothing to do with the Velcro.

“Listen, I just want you looking perfect,” he told her with a grin that she couldn’t bring herself to be annoyed at.

They blocked the last scene during lunch, when everyone was over at the food trailers and Jeff, one of the cameramen, was messing with some equipment but not really paying attention. She was in full Magnus attire and makeup and hair but he was in jeans and a t-shirt and he’d only barely abandoned the baseball cap so that they could run through the scene.

“How would you feel about putting a little flirty spin on this beat?” he asked, looking down at the script in his hand.

She fixed him with a look and it was Magnus, not Amanda, that quirked her head and said “All right, let’s try it”, because she’d already decided weeks ago that she was going to let Robin have this one. She wanted not to stifle his creative atmosphere and maybe on some level she wanted to be open to it when Robin inevitably pushed her boundaries.

They ran the four or five lines of dialogue over lunch and Robin had given her this Will look, this adoring smile, and when they went to shoot an actual take it was all she could remember. Every time she got close to his face with the ophthalmoscope, she couldn’t stop grinning. It was as bad as when she got the giggles.

Robin watched the raw footage on the monitors and Amanda smiled at him from across the floor and that’s when he realized that the face she was giving him for the scene wasn’t really Helen’s face for Will. It was Amanda’s face for Robin, over and over and over again. His heart did a funny flip in his chest as he locked eyes with her again and he decided, fuck it. He’d use this take, this one right here.

oooo

Damian leaned over to her during the dailies and said, “Kid’s got a great eye,” and she just smiled and nodded but her eyes didn’t break from the screen. “Especially for you,” he added a moment later in a quieter voice. That got her attention. She turned to glance at him and he met her with a pointed look. Be careful, is what that look said.

She felt her face flush with something like defiance, but it was the sort that came on much too quickly and far too strong.

She and Ryan gave him his ‘directing gift’ the next day and it was the most hilarious thing she’d ever seen. She laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe and Robin dropped his pants again and she gave him that familiar, exasperated grin and it turned out to be the best workday they’d had in awhile, so much so that when they wrapped for the evening, Amanda found that for once in her life she didn’t want to go home.

She found Robin in his trailer and she slid her hand into his and watched him with her big, eager eyes. It was an invitation. They said goodnight to everyone but when they got to the parking lot they both got into her car.

They drove and drove and when they finally got out of the car again it was 3 AM and Vancouver was laid out before them in a gorgeous tapestry of light. The harbor was dark and comforting and she couldn’t help feeling that it was kind of romantic, in an adolescent, carefree sort of way.

She’d always felt younger than she actually was, like time had always favored her, but when Robin came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist she could have sworn that time had really stopped and she couldn’t bring herself to think about how irresponsible she was being.

“Such a good day,” she’d said. “We are the luckiest.”

“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” he told her, and he meant with mentors like her and Damian and Martin and the whole Sanctuary family but he meant something else, too.

“Yeah,” she agreed, because she got it but she didn’t want to talk about the something else part. “Same here.”

oooo

The first time they actually went too far with that something else part was quick and messy and it stands out incredibly vividly in her mind even though they were both drunk at the time. It was one of those surreal moments when her belly felt full of fire and she knew the feeling was something she’d remember for the rest of her life because it wasn’t pleasure and it wasn’t pain but it was somewhere in the middle, something tense and longing and sharp. It was wrong in the most delicious way imaginable.

They’d gone out after shooting to a local bar, nice enough to have ample seating but not so nice that the staff didn’t ignore them. Alone with him at their big table, she’d gripped the back of his neck with rigid fingers and their faces were so close they could feel each other’s breath against their skin, quick huffs that matched their heartbeats.

“I want you,” she’d whispered, finally, and the words came out shaky, nearly a sob, and they tumbled to Robin’s ears and for a second he thought he must have been dreaming. But no, he wasn’t, because when he ran the pad of his thumb along the inside of her thigh, right along the seam of her underwear, she just groaned and bit her lip and spread her legs wider for him underneath the table. Her dress rode up on both sides and she could feel the stickiness of the leather-covered booth on her skin but she didn’t care, she didn’t fucking care.

She just wanted him so much all the time and she’d long since accepted that when she touched herself, it felt better when she did it with the thought of him grasped firmly in her mind, but this was the first time she’d ever said it out loud. It was the first time she’d said it to him, and it felt like a burden lessened and a burden gained both at the same time.

Neither of them could bring themselves to stop so they just kept going. Robin slid his fingers, just slightly, beneath the fabric. He’d only barely skimmed his fingertips but he could already tell she was so ready and he whimpered right out loud because he knew it was all because of him, and he couldn’t withdraw now, even with the sounds of bar chatter all around them, not with how incredible he knew she’d feel and the way she was trying so hard to master herself and not squirm and not make a scene, the way she was trying so hard to pretend she didn’t want him to keep going. She tilted her hips back slightly and—

They locked eyes and something bent between them, something folded in on itself that could not be smoothed out again. It was some sort of recognition and in that moment neither of them shied away and it cemented something previously so elusive.

When Chris and Ryan and Damian barged into the back room from their pool game it was lucky because she’d already moved her hand from his neck and so from the doorway it probably looked like they were just sitting side by side, right where they’d left them. It was easy for Robin to slide his fingers away slowly, move them over to grip his own thigh instead while Amanda flushed pink, barely noticeable in the dark light of the bar, and welcomed them back. She chattered at them and laughed a laugh that sounded only a tiny bit forced (nobody noticed except Robin, and that was only because he knew why she was strained).

The relief was palpable when the three of them went back out to grab another game and a few more pitchers. Amanda seemed to relax and tense at the same time beside him and as soon as they were gone she turned to him, still flushed, her hair falling tousled in a ridiculously attractive way across her forehead.

Maybe it was because he was really drunk or maybe it was for a million and a half other reasons but he started to laugh. He started to laugh and so she started to laugh, too, and maybe this was what spurred her to reach underneath the table and bring his fingers to her mouth.

This was the first time they’d done anything actually terrible, crossed a definite line, and he sat for a long, long time after she went up to go to the bathroom thinking about how this thing would go down later after they’d sobered up. He thought about accountability and how uncomfortable his jeans were and how soft her skin was, the noises she’d made, the way her face looked when he touched her and how these memories were absolutely going to torture him for a long time to come.

Four days later they’d left for Melbourne and made the rules. Just in case.

oooo

The photo shoot is a last minute addition to their itinerary. Ryan vouches for the photographer and the photographer’s enthusiasm at the very idea of taking her picture is so infectious that she and Robin both agree to give him a day.

“What could possibly go wrong?” she murmurs to herself, packing up the rest of her things. She sees her shoes, her expensive ones - the gift from Robin - and holds one in her hand. They glitter in the light. Biting her lip, she packs them in the bag for the shoot instead. Robin, a camera to flirt for, and a team of people to make her look beautiful. Yeah. Nothing at all will go wrong.

Robin is a little fidgety in the car. Amanda has decided to be zen if it kills her. She’s drinking tea instead of coffee, the string dangling from the side of the cup. Robin’s fingers tap against the leather seat between them, though he is unusually quiet. There’s a lot to process. Amanda doesn’t take off her sunglasses and watches the landscape as it passes by.

It’s not an awkward silence, though. Their eyes meet and Robin’s mouth quirks into a smile and she just wants to kiss it. Just wants to lean in and taste every bit of him, wants to kiss him until they are slobbery, sweaty, out of breath messes, until their lips are chapped and raw, until he begs her to stop because any more will kill them both.

“Ryro says he likes to film everything,” Robin says, a casual air to his voice. His sunglasses sit low on his nose at he looks at her over them.

“Is that so?” she asks. Sip of tea. Air of nonchalance. Just like acting. “Well, we’ll have to be very well behaved then, won’t we?”

“We excel at that,” Robin says. “I can’t see how it would be a problem.”

She has to laugh. He joins in, giggling like a boy.

oooo

Robin keeps disappearing. One moment he’s hanging off to the side, watching the shoot and then he’s gone and then he’s back, hanging out on her peripheral, sipping coffee and hiding behind his sunglasses still.

She changes clothes again and catches him by the arm, pushing him into an empty corner.

“Where do you keep going?” she hisses.

“I can’t,” he says. “I can’t keep...”

“Are you okay?” she asks, concerned.

“No, I’m not fucking okay,” he says. One of the guys on lighting glances over and away when she catches him staring.

“What’s the matter,” she says, her voice calm. It’s the voice she uses when Olivia is upset, on the edge of tears, her little lip wobbling out of control. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s hard to watch, okay?” he says. “This is hard for me. To watch you like this and not... not be able to... you aren’t something... there are rules.”

“Oh,” she says.

“You can’t have it both ways,” he says quietly.

“It hurts me too,” she says. “You know that, right?”

He doesn’t say anything and then Dennys calls for her across the room and she has to leave again.

She stares into the lens of his camera and hopes to whatever God is listening that it can’t see her secrets, too.

They break for lunch and Amanda slips away, finds an empty room and shuts the door behind her and sinks down into a wooden chair. She’s tired of people looking at her, tired of smiling, tired of trying to be pretty, tired of having her boobs hiked up so high in this ridiculous push-up bra, tired of looking up and not seeing Robin, tired of looking up only to find his expression devastating.

It’s only been a couple moments when the door opens again and she sighs.

“I’d just like a moment, please,” she says, and then, “Oh.”

“Hey,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry about before.”

“Before when? When you freaked out? Or before when you got me off in the bathroom or before when you touched me in the bar or before when you kissed me on set or before when what, exactly, Robin?” she says, something aching so deeply in her chest. “What do you want me to say?”

His face, oh god, his face, how far it falls. He takes a step back toward the door.

“Don’t leave,” she says.

“We shouldn’t do this here,” he says, sounding wounded and young. “Too many people.”

“Shut the door,” she says. “Just shut it.”

He does and he locks it too; the button clicks as he pushes it with his thumb.

She’s on her feet before she has made any rational, upper brain decision and walking toward him at a surprising speed. He has just enough time to open his arms before she is there. But she’s not here for comfort. At no point today has Robin been a comfort to her. No, she’s here for something else and he makes a little noise of surprise as she presses her mouth to his.

But Robin is adaptable and knows better than to complain about a gift and his arms slide right around her. He kisses her back. She feels his stubble, his hot mouth, his warm skin, his wet, spicy tongue as it slides across her taste buds. She groans and she doesn’t even realize his hands are between them until the first big button of the coat has come undone. He undoes them all - how many broken rules in the last thirty seconds? - and slides his hands in. Only then does he pull his mouth away with a ragged gasp.

“Shit,” he says, looking down. She doesn’t have anything on under the coat except for the ridiculous pink push-up bra and she doesn’t usually see her breasts presented quite this way. Robin looks like it’s Christmas morning. “Holy shit, oh my god, oh god,” he says, putting hands on both breasts.

“You aren’t supposed to...”

“It’s a fucking coat,” he says. “I thought it was fair...”

He squeezes and she groans and then they are kissing again, sloppy and lustful and how aroused she is in this moment is making her dizzy. She has a very real fear of passing out as Robin spins them and pushes her against the wall.

She at least has a little pair of cotton shorts over her underwear but those are going to get soaked too if she doesn’t stop this. His mouth moves down her neck and it’s fire, it burns. And when did her hands weasel under his shirt, anyway? His stomach is so toned and hard and she digs her nails into his abs as he catches one earlobe between his teeth and she’s never spontaneously orgasmed from necking before but she feels like if his hands even get anywhere near those shorts, she’s gonna fly apart.

Someone on the other side of the door, walking down the hall, makes them both freeze. Robin’s hand is still inside the coat on the curve of her lower back, pushing her against him and their mouths are still together, open, but they freeze and wait and listen hard.

“Five minutes!” the voice calls and then, “Anyone know where Tapping is?”

Robin resumes the kiss, sucking her bottom lip into his mouth and nipping at it with his teeth before letting it go with a wet pop. She puts her chin on his shoulder and tries to breathe.

“I’m too hard to go out there,” he says and then she laughs and he laughs and it’s okay again, for right now. Giving the finger to their rules has seemed to right their balance once more. The dark, wounded Robin of the last couple days is gone and instead he beams at her when she straightens up and holds her coat closed with one hand.

“Do I look okay?” she asks, her trembling fingers trying to push the buttons through the buttonholes.

“You look like you want to fuck me,” he says, using the heel of his hand to adjust himself. “Fuck.”

“How am I getting through the rest of this day?” she moans, reaching into her coat to adjust her boobs back into a more comfortable, manageable position. Robin’s hand has gone from adjusting to rubbing as he watches her. Someone knocks.

“Amanda?”

“I’m coming,” she calls. Robin’s eyes roll back into his head a little and he whimpers. She rolls her eyes.

“Please try to hold it together,” she says, pushing him out of the way so she can open the door.

“You kissed me,” he says as she heads out of the little room.

“Both are in Germany, Will,” she calls, slamming the door closed. She can hear his laughter all the way down the hall.

oooo

The next few weeks are already carefully planned out, scheduled (like much of her life): Amanda will go to New Zealand and Robin will go to France and then it’s back home to Vancouver for a week before they both head to Saskatchewan’s capital to film this crazy little movie they’d decided to lend themselves to in the off season of the show.

It means a while apart and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it will mean she’ll be able to concentrate on other, more important things that don’t have anything to do with how badly she wants Robin’s hands on her again and maybe the time away from him will help her screw her head back on straight because she’s starting to wonder with a vengeance when exactly they became so reckless.

Their flights leave a few hours apart and so she takes the first cab to the airport alone, but he lingers and helps her load all her luggage into the trunk. She isn’t sure how to say goodbye so she just goes to hug him, and his arms go around her, squeezing just a little too tightly.

“See you in a week,” she says, beginning to pull away.

“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “You will.” The smile widens and then out of nowhere he catches her chin and kisses her mouth. Nobody is around and it’s not anything they haven’t done in public before but she still thinks he should not have done that. Not only is it wrong but it is painful to have to turn her face away so quickly.

The time she spends in New Zealand is good for her even though she’s a little lonely. She talks to Liv and Alan every single day but just when she starts to feel herself regaining some balance, Robin texts her. He’ll text something so sweet it makes her chest ache or something so absolutely filthy that she has to push a cool palm to her flushed face and catch her breath. The contrast nearly gives her whiplash. She doesn’t delete any of the texts though, she just lets them stay catalogued in her phone right below those from her husband and she wonders again if she has some sort of latent death wish.

The long flight back to Canada feels boring without him there, without the little game of bickering married couple they play in public (and often continue in private). She orders a glass of wine and puts in earphones and tries to sleep, tries not to think too hard. It almost works.

She’s home in time to take Olivia trick or treating. She pins up her daughter’s blonde hair and she helps her sprinkle sparkle dust across her cheeks and she helps her arrange the frilly pink fairy wings against her tiny shoulders. Amanda calls Liv her little changeling the entire night and holds one of her hands, the other in Alan’s, as they walk through the neighborhood. By the time they get home, Amanda’s heart aches for so many reasons and for the first time she can’t tell whether or not she deserves this sort of happiness.

Damian throws a casual dinner party a few days after Halloween and it’s mostly Sanctuary people, which means close friends and family, but Amanda’s family stays home because Alan needs to work.

When Robin comes through the door with a bottle of Crown Royal, he catches her eye and winks. She should ask him how the French con was but all she really wants to do is to suck that smirk from his lips.

He and Damian and Martin and a few of the tech guys all take shots but she refuses even though they keep bugging her to because she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to separate the taste of whiskey from memories of a hotel bathroom in Melbourne and the feeling of Robin’s stubble against the inside of her thigh.

Later, when everyone is drinking and laughing in the other room, she’s at Damian’s sink washing some of the plates by hand. It’s a nice domestic, productive, repetitive task that she can focus on instead of everything else. Robin comes up behind her and he doesn’t slide his arms around her but he might as well have, the way his eyes feel against her back.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “I missed you.”

Amanda rinses soap bubbles from her fingers and keeps the faucet running, doesn’t look at him. Maybe she’s being paranoid but the noise and the lack of eye contact helps. “I missed you,” she breathes. She feels a lump start to grow in her throat because the reply is so immediate and honest and maybe that scares her a little.

“Excited about this weekend?” he asks, and a moment later she feels his finger trail softly down her arm.

She breathes in deeply. Damian’s house smells endlessly familiar and she’s about to leave every other familiar thing behind again pretty soon. She’s so confused about how she feels about everything these days and so she just lets her first impulse guide her, whether it’s the correct response or not. Whether it tips her off balance once more, or not. “God, yes.”

She doesn’t see Robin again for another week and she takes that whole time to be with her family, every moment of every day. She showers them with kisses and hugs and tells them she’ll call every day, and that she’ll see them in seven days, exactly. She tries to keep her heartbeat steady as she steps onto the porch with her luggage and closes the front door behind her, but she fails miserably.

It’s another flight together, the latest in a long string, but this one feels different than the others, somehow. Maybe it’s that they’re not leaving the country this time or maybe it’s that this isn’t Sanctuary business or maybe it’s because they’ve just spent so much time apart or because things between them have shifted so dramatically over these last few weeks. She isn’t entirely sure. But she threads her fingers with Robin’s as they sit side by side and she doesn’t let go until they’ve landed in Regina.

oooo

They’re put up in this hotel, but it’s more like an Extended Stay because it has a bedroom and a little sitting room and a tiny kitchen. An oven and two burners and a microwave on top of that and the fridge reminds her of living in a dorm - small and grungy enough that what was once white is now a sort of unpleasantly gray. She doesn’t bring a lot with her. Two of her larger suitcases and it’s all clothes - heavy sweaters and warm pants and boots for snow. All the filming is indoors but the cast and crew is small enough that they’ll be able to go out after work.

Robin and Billy are on one floor and she and Kristin are on the floor above but the first thing she and Robin do is get an extra key from the front desk and give it to each other.

“Just in case of emergencies,” Robin says to Billy, like they’re being responsible, like it’s the opposite of playing with fire.

“Should we exchange keys?” Billy asks Kristin.

“Bite me,” is Kristin’s response.

“Don’t worry about it,” Amanda says, sounding matronly and in charge. “Robin is mine from another life. Ignore us.”

“Yeah,” Kristin says, looking longingly at the elevators. They’re all tired and it’s late. “Don’t you two get sick of each other?”

“Constantly,” Robin says at the exact moment Amanda says, “All the time.” They both giggle.

“I see,” says Kristin.

“Actually, no,” Robin says, tucking Amanda’s key into his back pocket. “I never get tired of her.”

“Suck up,” Amanda says, dropping an arm around his shoulder. “And liar. I haven’t seen you in days.”

“Sometimes we take breaks for other people’s sake,” Robin explains. “I vaguely remember that you have a family, right?”

“And they vaguely remember me, too,” she says. “Anyway, I’m beat. I’m off.”

Robin looks like he wants to invite himself right along with her, but has no graceful way of doing it, so he squeezes her arm and he and Billy watch the girls walk down the hall.

“He’s an eager beaver,” Kristin says when they’re alone in the elevator.

“He’s good people,” she says, feeling a little wary. “He’s a night owl.”

“It’s me,” Kristin says. “Travel always makes me irritable.”

“Snow doesn’t help,” Amanda says. “I’ve been freezing all night.”

“Me too,” she agrees. “In the morning will be better?”

“It’ll be fun!” Amanda agrees. The doors open. “Well, goodnight.”

In her room, she reaches for her phone but the text comes before she even has a chance to think about texting him something first.

Billy and I are in the bar if you want to come back down.

She does, she wants to go down into that dinky hotel bar and sit next to Robin and sip the foam off of his dark, Irish beer and let him rest his hand high upon her knee. But she’s tired, and tomorrow is the first day of filming and it’s too soon to start this all now.

Goodnight, Robin. She texts him back. She waits up for a couple minutes for a response, but nothing ever comes.

oooo

On the third night, a wave of homesickness so intense hits her that she finds herself in the elevator before she even really makes a choice. It’s late, after midnight which is late for them with an early call time, and so she doesn’t knock, just puts in her key and waits for the green light. These door machines are never quiet and she pushes in the door slowly, giving him plenty of time to stop her should she catch him doing anything untoward. But the lights are off and the room is freezing. Robin likes a cold room and a ton of blankets, likes to nest deep down into a bed like a bear in a cave for winter.

Robin is a lump on the left side of the bed. It’s what marriage does to you, even a short one. It teaches you that the middle of a mattress is a no man’s land. She steps quietly over a pile of his clothes, one snow boot, an empty beer bottle and arrives at the other side of the bed.

Turn around, she tells herself but she misses her house, misses her husband, misses her daughter and her car and her regular job and she feels trapped here, like Regina is more than just a thousand miles away. Like she’s on another planet entirely.

She lifts the covers and slips in, leaving her ballet flats on the floor.

Robin rolls over, opens his eyes to see the intruder, but closes them quickly and opens his arms.

“Come on, baby,” he says and she shifts right into his warm embrace. He smells a little like beer, but he’s so warm and dry and firm against her that she burrows right in, fighting the urge to start crying. He rubs a hand up and down her back, a soothing sensation, something she often does for Olivia when she’s upset but something no one does for her, anymore. “It’s okay.”

She doesn’t know how he knows, but he does. She closes her eyes, breathes him in and before she knows it, the horrible feeling has melted away and she falls asleep.

In the morning, when his cell phone is bleeping quietly and they are both trying to blink away their grogginess, Robin says, “You know, I could be happy with just this.”

“Hmm?” she says.

“If this is all I ever got,” he says. “The occasional snowy morning alone, I could be a happy man.”

She sighs softly, but they both hear it in the empty room. He reaches for his phone and silences it and looks at her.

“I need to take a shower,” she says.

“Want to shower together?” he asks. It breaks the tension, at least.

“Yes,” she says honestly. “But rules are rules.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure sharing a bed was a rule,” he points out. “Just saying.”

“That rule was about sex,” she says. “Not...”

“Sure, sure,” he says. “I see who makes the rules about... these... rules.” He trails off awkwardly and she giggles her little chipmunk giggle and he laughs too and she rolls out of bed and runs her hand through her hair as she puts on her shoes again. “See you in the car?”

“You bet,” she says.

The next night, they go out after the shoot. Not to the crappy hotel bar but to one in town, a little dive with a fantastic jukebox and three pool tables. Amanda is tired, yawning on the car ride over and wishing she was home - not just at the hotel, but home. If Robin notices she’s quiet, he doesn’t comment, but he doesn’t let her too far out of sight. If she manages to wander, he appears at her side, a hand at her elbow.

“Hey,” he says, when they’ve all found a seat in the back of the bar. “Can I get you a drink?”

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “Maybe just a soda.”

“A soda,” he deadpans. “Yep. That’s what I’ll get you. A soda.”

When he comes back, he hands her a Long Island ice tea.

“Robin!”

“Splash of soda,” he says. “Drink up.”

“You might feel better, Debbie Downer,” Billy says.

“Hey!” she says. “Offensive.”

“Factual,” says Kristin. “Perk up, Mom.”

“Fine,” Amanda says. “Fine. Fine.” And she drinks up.

oooo

Robin does the right thing and walks Amanda safely to her room. She is as drunk as he has ever seen her, giggly and unsteady on her feet. She doesn’t stop touching him and though it’s tempting to take advantage of this, he’s not a bad guy so he plucks her out of her seat and tells everyone, “She’s cooked. I’ll get her home.”

“I bet you will,” Kristin says, rippling her fingers into a little wave. Robin likes her well enough now that he’s had a couple days to get to know her, but she’s tightly wound at work and dry enough that she comes off a little cold, a little mean. He doesn’t take her words to heart, though.

“Shut up,” he says.

“I can hear you,” Amanda offers. “All of you.”

“Nothing you’ll remember,” Kristin says.

In the cab, Robin takes her phone and puts it in his pocket.

“Gimme,” Amanda whines but he shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “No drunk tweets. You have too many followers.”

“You used to like to drunk tweet with me,” she pouts. He’s saved an argument when she puts her head on his shoulder and twines their fingers together. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, babe,” he says. “Which is why I’m taking you home.”

He secures an arm around her waist through the lobby, opens her door with his key, helps her onto the bed.

“Don’t go,” she mumbles.

“You’re drunk,” he says. “Sleep it off.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Not as drunk as you,” he says. She pouts. “Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry I let you get like this.”

“I’m a grown up,” she says. “At least I play one on TV.”

“I’ll come check on you in the morning,” he says.

“Robin,” she sighs. “Please stay. I’ll be on my best behavior.”

“And what’s that, exactly?” he asks. He’s already easing one shoe off with the toe of another.

“We’ll sleep like brother and sister,” she promises. She reaches up and pulls two bobby pins from her hair. Her bangs fall down in front of her eyes. She starts to unbutton her coat.

“I’m gonna pee,” he says. In her bathroom, he does pee and then washes his hands and then thinks about just using her toothbrush but in the end, brushes his teeth with his finger. He stalls a bit longer, picking up a pair of sparkling earrings, a tube of lipstick, her hand lotion and sniffing it, which just makes staying with her seem like not such a bad idea after all.

They slept together before and it was fine.

“Fuck it,” he says when he goes back into the room. “I’ll stay.”

But she’s already asleep.

She sleeps through him undressing down to a t-shirt and boxers, sleeps through him easing off her boots, her belt, and her coat. Mildly stirs when he gets her under the covers, but by the time he kills the light, she’s snoring softly.

Her bed feels just like his, but better, and just as he’s drowsing off, the heating unit kicks on, blowing warm, dry air across their bodies.

He falls right to sleep.

He dreams of home. Not his apartment, a two-bedroom bachelor pad on the second floor fifteen minutes from their studio, but home, his parent’s house. He’s in his bedroom there, the blue walls, the little league trophies, his twin bed with the comforter worn down soft by so many washes.

The room doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been redone into a more generic guest room but Robin isn’t concerned about this, because the room is here now, just as he remembers it and he’s in his twin bed and he knows exactly what night this, it’s the night that Cynthia Porter climbed in his window and spent the whole night. It’s the night he first watched a girl’s slim wrist slip past the fly of his boxers and find the promised land.

In his dream, he unlocks the window and cracks it, frigid air washing over his bare torso. She’ll be here any minute. He hears her boots on the grass and when her face pops in the window, it isn’t Cynthia, but Helen in her high boots and her leather and he’s confused for a moment, like he’s not sure if he’s supposed to be Will or Robin but then she breaks character and grins.

“Can I come in?”

And then they are in his bed. It’s a tight squeeze but it’s kind of just like how it happened with Cynthia Porter. He decides to brave the hem of her shirt and off it goes, and then her thin wrist easing into his shorts and Robin gasps and everything feels like the first time.

But Cynthia Porter never bent her head over him, never eased him out into the night air, never ran the tip of his penis along her lips like that and oh Jesus, oh fuck-

Robin wakes up but it’s too late. The head of his penis slides past her lips and he feels her tongue swirl around and her mouth is so hot, so hot and he can’t see her face for all the hair and...

“Amanda,” he says. “What... what...”

She doesn’t stop, but looks up enough that the change of angle makes him gasp and then she’s smirking around his cock and he groans because it’s the hottest thing he has ever seen in his whole damn life.

He should stop her because she’s obviously still drunk but she just licks him and says, “Shhhh” and then proceeds to give him the most amazing head of his life. It doesn’t last long because he can’t stop thinking about how much he wants her, how this is Amanda, how beautiful she is and it gets overwhelming and then he’s holding her head trying to warn her but she’s determined and she swallows what he offers and then sits up and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Yeah,” she says. “I still got it.”

He’s about to say something, crack a joke about how he’s never done that with his sister before, but her expression changes and then she bolts for the bathroom.

He can hear her throwing up.

It’s an ego bruiser for sure.

He follows after a bit, gathers her hair off her sweaty neck and flushes the toilet for her. She puts her forehead against his bare knees.

“How much did I drink?” she asks, her voice hoarse. He rubs her back, the ridges of her spine as it curves.

“Enough for a blow job,” he says.

“Shit,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” There are tears in her voice.

He just rubs until she stops crying and lets his fingers rest in the grooves, like her body had been designed to cradle him in just this way.

oooo

Amanda is resting her head on Alan’s chest with her reading glasses on when she hears her phone vibrate. She slides an index finger in-between the pages of the paperback and reaches under the pillow to check the message.

“Babe,” Alan says. “Thought we weren’t doing the technology thing tonight.”

Amanda checks the name but not the text.

“It’s Robin,” she says and bites her lip. Four weeks ago she would have said ‘it’s just Robin’ and shoved the phone back under the pillow.

“Dude has had you for the last week slash three months, tell him to shove off tonight,” Alan tells her, and he sounds amused but he sounds sharp, too. “Tell him to go bug someone else’s wife.”

Amanda feels something heavy drop in her chest and it’s equal parts defensive and equal parts guilty. He’s my best friend, she wants to say. Yeah, I’ll tell him and I’ll make sure he never bugs us ever again, she wants to say.

Instead she slides the phone underneath her right bra strap and kisses her husband, settles back in against his body, but when she opens her book again she doesn’t read any of the words.

oooo

Just checking on you, wanted to make sure you got home safe and sound

Amanda is making peanut butter and banana sandwiches for Olivia and Penny, her friend Mary’s daughter, because she and Alan are watching them both today in exchange for Mary and Peter watching them tomorrow. She can hear the girlish squealing coming from the other room over the excitement of a prospective beading project and Alan’s deep laughter.

Home now, everything’s fine, Robin. Thanks.

She presses ‘send’ and licks some peanut butter off her thumb and she has a reply before she even picks the knife back up.

Miss me?

She stares down at the message and taps the knife against the counter, thinking.

In the end she tucks the phone into her back pocket and carries the sandwiches into the living room and concentrates on anything but the image of his face in her mind and the hazy memory of four nights ago in the hotel bed.

“Robin again?” Alan asks later in the evening when they’re perched on bar stools in the kitchen, glasses of wine in hand, and her phone buzzes against the counter top. Olivia has been asleep for hours.

“Probably,” Amanda says.

“He’s single, right?”

The question is unexpected enough that she jerks her head sideways but she covers by shaking it up and down afterward, swallowing a mouthful of wine.

“Yeah, he’s been single since his divorce.”

Alan ‘hmmms’ and says something about how he must get a lot of fangirl attention and Amanda grins, slowly, because she’s buzzed and she can pretend this is funny right now.

“Is there work stuff you guys need to talk about or something? I can go run the bath if you need to make a few phone calls.”

“Nu-uh,” Amanda purrs. She slides closer and curls her arms around his neck. “Just me and you tonight, my love.” When he kisses her she’s still trying to be coy but she can’t hold it together and melts instead, half a sob creaking from her throat.

Alan pulls away to ask if everything is alright and Amanda pulls him in again, fingers pressing tight against his skin.

“Just missed you.”

oooo

So did you hook up with anyone in Marseille?

Amanda sends the text the next morning like it’s the most casual thing in the world, like she’s just picking up where their last conversation left off.

Where did that come from? is Robin’s reply and Amanda rolls her eyes as she stands in her empty kitchen. Alan is at work until three and Olivia is with Mary and Peter. Robin is still in Regina.

Just a blithe inquiry from one friend to another. She leans back against the table and sips at her second mug of tea, acts like she couldn’t care less how fast he replies, or what he says, or what the real answer is.

One advantage to being young, appallingly handsome and slightly famous is that you never have to worry about where your next lay is coming from.

Amanda rolls her eyes again. She sets her mouth into a thin line and stares out the window into the back yard. It’s like Robin can tell what her silence means, can tell exactly what she’s thinking, as if he were standing here beside her, because he sends another text a few tense moments later.

Plenty of girls, Mandy, but none of them are you.

She wants to reply even though she has no idea what to say but her hands are shaking so she just sets her mug in the sink and braces her arms against the counter. She places a palm to her forehead and closes her eyes.

oooo

“All right, let’s do this one more time,” Armen yells out into the tiny studio from behind the camera. A few of the tekkies adjust some equipment and the noise echoes a little.

Amanda nods and scratches beneath her collarbone where the material of her outfit is rubbing too harshly, irritating the skin. Billy smiles at her and winks. She giggles because it’s probably the response he’s expecting.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Robin saunter (brood) on in with his sunglasses on and a styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in hand. She hasn’t seen him or talked to him since she flew back in from Vancouver yesterday.

Armen calls places and Amanda clears her throat.

During lunch, Amanda slides her arm around Billy’s waist as they wait in line by the food trailer.

“I can think of a few worse ways to spend a workday,” Billy says, because today he got to make out with Amanda twice on camera and he’s getting paid for it.

She bumps her hip into his. “Cheeky.”

Robin is staring at her but the moment she decides to stare back he looks away.

Kristin is chewing on the end of her smoothie straw. “I’m going for another cup of coffee. Anyone want anything?”

“I’ll come,” Robin says.

As Kristin pours some sugar into her cup she looks at Robin and catches him staring over at Amanda again, who is still talking animatedly to Billy.

“That’s an intense look, brother,” she notes.

He tears his eyes away. “What?”

“It’s not innocent wanting, the way you look at her,” she says. “It’s heavy. You feel like she’s actually yours.”

“Shut it,” he tells her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m just saying that you’ll get your turn,” she says, voice light, and gives him a pointed look before she walks away.

oooo

They wrap for the day and Amanda is all too aware that she hasn’t really spoken with Robin at all. She’s been hanging around Billy today mostly because they’d had those scenes together and he’s a funny guy, charming, easy to hang around. Maybe Amanda needed that today. Maybe she flirted, too, because she can’t help flirting and maybe she flirted harder today because she’s been going insane lately.

Maybe she thought it would feel like a break from all the drama, but it just made her dislike herself and it made her want Robin even more.

She leans against the door frame in the hallway and she watches Robin shrug his coat on. Almost everyone has already left the studio but Amanda stuck around because she couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Wanna grab a beer?” she asks, and she hopes her casual voice masks the thrumming in her chest. For some reason she feels uneasy, apprehensive, like she’s asking Matt Wilson out on a date for the first time in high school and she thinks he might say no. Like Robin is no longer her best friend. Like she did something wrong and she doesn’t know what, or worse, she does.

“I actually made plans with Caroline,” Robin says. To his credit, he meets her gaze, but it is a cold gaze.

“Caroline the hairdresser?”

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

“No…”

“I figured you’d want to grab that beer with Billy.”

Amanda narrows her eyes. “Aha. There it is.”

Robin pops his collar and moves toward the door. “Whatever, Amanda. You do what you want. Go ahead, barely talk to me at all the week after you give me a drunk blow job and then randomly jealous-text me. Come back to the movie we’re both filming and then suddenly ignore me for whoever else. It’s not like you’re mine and it’s not like I’m yours.”

Amanda sets her teeth together, flares her nostrils. The muscles in her jaw work furiously.

“You know what else?” he says, pushing past her on his way out the door. “I’ve had it with the goddamn fucking rules.”

After he’s gone Amanda realizes that she can’t tell whether it was the same familiar pain or if it was brand new anger in his voice.

oooo

Robin and Caroline come to set together the next day, flaunting it, and Amanda feels like she’s dealing with a child, but she’s not sure whether the child is Robin or herself. Either way, she already has one of those. She doesn’t need another.

Her face feels hot all day and Robin ignores her for pretty much any other woman on set (kind of; she catches him watching her every so often and even more often he catches her staring first) so she ignores him, too. They both get really frustrated during filming and it rubs off on everyone else, so for a while, it’s a bad day. Nobody’s timing is quite right and the funny scenes keep falling flat. At eight or nine that evening some crew people show up with donuts and lattes from a local bakery and the environment cheers up significantly. It doesn’t cheer Amanda up, though. She slips quietly outside while everyone is on break, laughing around the catering table.

Robin follows, not long after.

Amanda is leaning against the brick wall outside the building, looking out toward the parking lot, up at the stars. She’s wearing a puffy black jacket because it’s freezing, and her hair, reddish tinted, is down and swirling about her face. She looks so beautiful and sad that Robin almost forgets to be upset at her.

He starts walking over to her, speaking before he’s even within ten feet of where she’s standing. “Do you want to keep torturing yourself over all of this, or do you want me to tell you she doesn’t mean anything? That none of them have ever meant anything? Do you want me to remind you that I’m in love with you but that I can’t ever have you?”

Amanda starts shaking her head. She wishes she could retort, self-righteous, tell him that this has nothing to do with them, that she’s just tired from working so hard these past few years. She wants to be vicious, wants to make him feel like an embarrassed jackass for diving right in. But that wouldn’t fool either of them. “Shut up, Robin.”

“Because sometimes I think maybe you need to be reminded. You’re the one who’s married.”

“Christ, you think I’m not painfully aware of that?”

“What is this about then, between us? Seriously. I don’t understand and I’ve never understood.” Robin is close up to her, now. She can see the rings under his eyes. “I mean, do you love me or do you even care about me or is this just about sex, or what? I’m sick of not knowing and I’m sick of this emotional whiplash, I’m sick of fucking girls and always, always wishing they were you.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m sick of not being able to get you out of my head when I’m with Alan. I’m sick to death of feeling this way. I have no right to be jealous over anything you do.”

Robin is breathing hard. “No. You don’t. But you are.”

Amanda grits her teeth.

“I can fuck whoever I want and you’re jealous of that.”

“You can’t fuck me,” Amanda says, brazenly.

“You can’t fuck me either,” Robin snaps. “And if you did, you’d be the one cheating, not me.“

She slaps him hard across the face. When he looks back at her, cheek stinging, she has tears in her eyes.

He grabs her neck and kisses her, urges her mouth open, and she’s ready when he does. She winds her fingers into the thick hair behind his ears and pulls them through while he shoves her hips back into the brick, knee between her thighs. She’s making these sharp, desperate noises and he swallows them all up, soothes them down with his tongue.

“I hate you,” she breathes, and he swallows that up, too. “I hate me, I hate this.”

His hand is up her shirt beneath her jacket, cold skin on cold skin, and the other is flicking the button of her jeans open so he can slide his fingers inside.

They don’t know what they’re doing any more than they ever have, but they keep going like they’re not about to stop, and if the stage door didn’t swing wide open a moment later, they probably wouldn’t have. For once.

It’s Anthony, one of the grips, coming outside for a smoke. Robin and Amanda, tangled around each other and breathing heavily, is the first thing he sees.

He grins, unlit cigarette bobbing between his lips as he speaks. “Don’t stop on my account. I can head to the end of the parking lot.”

They’ve broken quickly apart and Robin looks like he wants to punch the wall for a second but then he ends up laughing, a big, bright Robin laugh.

“Sorry man,” Robin says. “They starting up again in there?”

“Nah,” Anthony waves a hand. “You’ve got a few minutes. It’s a beautiful night. Enjoy.”

After he leaves, Robin turns back to Amanda. She has her face in her hands and she’s saying “shit, shit, shit” over and over again like a mantra. She feels the same way she did the night that they almost got caught at the bar in Vancouver, only worse. Everything is spinning so fast, too fast, and she can’t make it stop. It’s out of her reach now. It’s making her dizzy, sick to her stomach.

“Hey,” he says, quietly. He tries to put his hand on her shoulder but she shrugs him off roughly. “It’s not a big deal. Anthony’s cool. Doesn’t matter.”

“Jesus, Robin. It matters to me!”

Robin scrubs a hand through his hair, over his chin and down his jaw. It’s still freezing outside and the silence between them now makes it seem even colder.

Amanda pushes herself up off the wall in an angry rustle of fabric. Her fingers move to her waist to rebutton her jeans and she moves toward the door, but before she gets there, she stops and looks Robin full in the face. He looks back, unblinking. He wants to reach out for her again so badly.

“Don’t touch me right now,” she says. “Don’t talk to me.”

The wrap party is two days later and Robin obeys her orders. Amanda shows up long enough to have a glass of wine and say goodbye to everyone. Robin doesn’t come at all. She knows this movie is supposed to be a ridiculous comedy but it feels like a goddamn tragedy.

oooo

Robin shows up at her house which breaks every rule ever. Maybe just shatters the last rule all together. She opens the door and her face falls and he holds up both hands and says, “No, wait.”

“Robin,” she hisses. “What the hell?”

Alan and Olivia are both home. It’s a Friday afternoon. Olivia has been home from school for about an hour and Alan has to work in the morning, so they’re just staying in tonight. Alan has the grill going in the backyard because it’s finally not raining.

“I brought this for Olivia,” he says, holding up a little pink bag. “I saw it and I thought of her and I know I should have called but I just missed you and I missed her and hell, I even missed him. I just thought I’d drop this off and, you know what? Whatever, I’ll just give this to you and go, okay?”

“You bought her a present?” she asks, taking the bag. “Why?”

“Look at it,” he says. “It just screamed Liv.”

She peers in and sees a fairy princess coloring book and a set of markers. Olivia will like it.

“Aww,” she says and then sighs. “Okay, come on. Stay for dinner.”

“No, Amanda, I...”

“Yeah, get in here,” she says. “Just... this is my life, so don’t screw it up, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “I was just... lonely.”

Robin doesn’t really have anyone except her, she knows this. His family is far away and while he has friends, he tends not to mix them with work and he works all the time. And Martin and Damian love him but like a kid brother. Sometimes, Amanda is all he really has.

He follows her into the main part of the house and into the kitchen where Alan stands chopping vegetables.

“I picked up a stray,” she says. Alan looks up, brows high on his forehead.

“Look at that,” he says.

“Can we keep him, please?” Amanda pouts.

“He can stay for the night but in the morning he goes right back to the pound,” Alan says. Robin smiles because he has no other choice. “What’s in the little bag?”

“Mr. Dunne brought it for our offspring,” Amanda says. She hands it back to Robin. “She’s upstairs playing in her room. Go give it to her.”

“Yes, boss,” he says. When he’s gone, Alan’s knife stills.

“He just showed up,” Amanda says which comes off defensive and suspect. She shouldn’t have said anything at all.

“I can see that,” Alan says.

“He’s lonely,” she says.

“He’s fixated,” Alan says in that soft, calm voice that always heralds trouble.

“He’s my best friend!” Amanda says. Alan sets his knife down.

“I’m your best friend,” he says. “It was in our wedding vows and everything.”

“Not... I just meant... at work,” she sighs. “He’s not a threat to you, honey.”

What she means is, she’s not going to leave Alan for Robin. But it’s a murky definition of threat and Alan looks like he knows it.

“I’m not gonna kick him out,” he says, picking the knife back up and centering the long, yellow squash before him. “I trust you.”

She smiles but it feels strained and if she can feel it, he can see it. They’ve been married a long time, after all.

She climbs the stairs softly, her eyes on Olivia’s open door at the top of the steps. She can hear laughter, Robin’s deep chuckle and Olivia’s suppressed giggles. When she gets the door she can see them on the white rug, both lying on their stomachs with the open coloring book between them. They are each working on a page. Olivia is coloring her fairy’s hair yellow and Robin’s is coloring his fairy’s hair brown.

“Am I going to find marker on the rug?” she asks, trying to sound stern.

“Mommy, mommy,” Olivia says. “Fairies!”

“I know, baby, did you say thank you?” Amanda asks.

“She did,” Robin says.

“I want Uncle Robin to spend the night,” Olivia announces.

“Uncle Robin can stay for dinner,” Amanda says. “You should go wash your hands, Liv, and help daddy set the table.” Olivia hesitates for a few moments and then finally relents, standing up and stepping through Robin’s legs to get to the door. Amanda touches the crown of her head lovingly as she passes.

“She is a gem,” Robin says.

“Don’t I know it,” Amanda says, leaning against the frame. He looks back at the coloring book and caps his marker. “Robin-”

“I’m fine,” he says. He says it so quickly that it scares her. She puts her hands on her hips. She’d never meant to hurt him but here he is sitting on her daughter’s floor, so clearly damaged.

“Maybe we can just start over?” she asks. His laugh is hollow and short, more akin to a sharp cough than much else. She thought she was the only one hurting so badly they were getting physically ill over it - achy bones and hair coming out in great handfuls but Robin’s laugh is chest-rattling and it looks like it pains him.

“I don’t know how to even start doing that,” he says. She shrugs.

“Get up and come have dinner, I guess,” she says. She turns and heads back downstairs before he can stand up so they aren’t standing in the narrow hall together. It seems mean, just to leave him there like that, but as she descends the stairs, she has to press a hand to her hot throat. Has to breathe deep and even.

Dinner is all right, considering. Liv is at that age where she just talks and talks and it fills up the room and makes them all distracted enough to giggle and tease her. Alan and Robin mostly avoid each other, speaking politely through Amanda, but they all have a beer and it seems to help ease the tension a bit. Robin wisely chooses not to stick around once Alan announces, not so subtly, that he has an early day.

“I’ll call a cab,” Robin says.

“Where is your car?” she asks.

“In the shop,” he says. “It’s fine, I took a cab here,” he says. “Makes me feel like I’m living in New York City.”

“Well,” she says. “Stay and help me clean up the kitchen and I’ll put Olivia to bed and then I can take you home.”

Robin looks over at Alan first, like he’s asking for permission and Amanda drags her eyes over, too, though she doesn’t want to.

“Least we could do,” Alan says softly. “For a friend of the family.”

Maybe Alan has simply resigned himself to his fate, whatever it may be, but when he goes upstairs to tell Olivia goodnight, he doesn’t come down again.

Robin leans against the island while she washes the last of the dinner dishes. She runs the soapy side of the sponge along the rim of a wine glass, rinses it, sets it in the rack to dry. Robin puts his empty beer bottle down, the glass making a soft noise against the counter.

“You okay to drive?” he asks.

“I am,” she says. Two glasses of wine over several hours. She is alarmingly sober. It’s strange to have Robin in her home - to have the things she’s worked so hard to keep separate all in one tender location. It’s delicate but not uncomfortable. She likes having Robin around; likes being at home. Having Robin in her kitchen does not magically make her love her family any less.

She dries her hands.

“Thanks again,” he says.

“Oh,” she says. “Stop. I’d do anything for you.”

He gets a funny expression so she busies herself finding shoes and car keys and a coat. Where is her purse? On the chair by the door to the garage, under Olivia’s purple rain coat. She hangs it up on the rack - so bright against the blacks and browns of her parent’s coats.

Robin seems calm enough, following her into the dark garage. They sit in the car while the door opens and then she starts the engine.

On the street, the windshield gets covered in drizzle and Robin fiddles with the dashboard, turning on the heat.

“Just when you think the rain is over,” she says.

“Reduced to talking about the weather, are we?” he says.

“Don’t be mean,” she chides.

“I’m not,” he says. “I’m just... sad about it.”

He does seem sad, disappointed, resigned, alone. Her heart seems to swell up in her chest for a moment; a pressure that doesn’t quickly dissipate.

It’s faster to get on the freeway, so she does.

His apartment complex has decent parking so she pulls into a space not too far from his door and turns off the engine but leaves the key in - the interior lights stay on and she looks at him. His hand is on the door.

“Thanks,” he says. “I won’t drop in again, though. Alan is wonderful but if he punched me in the face, he’d be right to.”

“He wouldn’t,” she says.

“He should.” He pulls the handle on the door and it clicks open.

“Coffee,” she blurts. He hesitates. “I’d have coffee if you asked me in.”

“I don’t... think... I have...” he stumbles.

“Robin,” she says. “Ask me in for coffee.”

What is she doing? She locks the car, follows him down the sidewalk and up the damp steps. Robin gets out his keys, turns the lock.

“It’s a mess,” he says.

“I don’t care,” she replies.

“Amanda-”

She knew she was going to do this the moment she offered to drive him home. They have been on this inevitable path for some time now and she just wants something to finally change, to ease, to let her breathe free again. He says her name and she kisses him in his open doorway before he even has the chance to turn on a light.

Robin pushes her back, confused and with a... maybe outraged expression. He shuts the door, flips the switch on the wall. One dim light comes on in the far corner. She brings a hand to her mouth. Maybe it had been wrong to expect him to jump after so many months of holding him back.

There’s an open suitcase in the living room and a trail of clothes lead up the steps to where his bed is, in the little loft. She’s been here a handful of times, usually because she has picked him up or dropped him off. Once, early in the filming of the show because he’d accidentally taken a prop home with him and they needed it for filming, so they’d come to his place with Damian while Martin filmed an alternate scene. They’d torn through the little apartment. She remembers it well, opening a drawer and finding it full of condoms - slamming it shut and letting out a high-pitched giggle. The way Robin had grinned wickedly when he realized what she had found.

Now Robin crosses his arms and seems to ignore the mess. The empty beer bottles on the coffee table, the red light on his DVR that says something is recording, the stack of newspapers cluttering up the little table in the dining nook.

“I...” He shakes his head. “You’d better not be screwing with me.”

“I’m not,” she says quickly. “I swear to god, Robin, everything you’re feeling, I feel too.”

“I don’t even see how that’s possible,” he says. “You have no idea what this is like. This is... this is agony.”

“I know,” she says.

“Every day I don’t see you is like a fucking waste,” he says.

“I miss you, too,” she says.

“We were cruel in Regina,” he says. “It wasn’t enough.”

“No,” she says. “That didn’t work.”

After a moment, he turns around and climbs the stairs.

She gives him a few moments and then carefully follows him. He sits on the end of bed, his head in his hands.

She doesn’t worry about his career, he’ll do fine. He’s handsome and talented and willing. But she worries about the state she’s left him in. She holds onto the railing with one hand, feeling untethered and adrift. The room smells like him, like his laundry detergent and aftershave. She wants to press her face into the scent, like a warm towel just out of the dryer.

“Ever since I’ve met you,” she says. “I’ve wanted you to make love to me.”

“Shit,” he says.

“And it’s come to this point where the wanting is going to ruin my marriage faster than the deed itself,” she says. “I can’t promise you anything past tonight and we don’t even have that long, but Robin... Robin, I swear, if you don’t touch me now I think something inside of me is going to just fade into nothing.”

“What if it’s worse after?” he says.

“What if it isn’t?” she asks. “Be brave with me.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Like Helen and Will.”

“Running into the darkness,” she says. “With both eyes wide open.” She steps toward him, letting go of the railing as she does.

oooo

Robin’s back is sweaty as he pushes inside of her. She’s so wet that it’s hard to help him; she feels like he just sinks in uncontrollably. She puts a hand on his lower back to guide him, but her fingers slip along his skin and he groans. She hears him grit his teeth. She gasps because he pulls out a little and she can finally feel the friction and it’s hot and hard and so, so good.

Her breath catches in her throat as the pleasure pulses and she can’t believe this is real, this is happening. She digs her heels into his thighs and presses into the next thrust. Their hips come together and his exhalation is a broken sob.

She wants to drag it out but there isn’t time and so she throws one arm up over her head and drags the other up and down his back, his neck, his ass.

“More,” she says. He whimpers and speeds up but the angle isn’t quite right and so she pats him. “Turn over.”

Sinking down on him, her thighs spread wide, her jaw slack with pleasure, her eyes heavy, she sighs.

“Is that good, boss?” he asks. She slides her hands up his chest and nods, her hair in her eyes.

“I’m gonna go fast,” she warns him.

“Okay,” he says.

She rocks her hips and when she finds that one spot that makes her keen, she hits it hard again and again. She can see the muscles straining in his neck and shoulders, can see the wild light in his eyes. He touches her everywhere - her white thighs, her breasts, the pink peaks of her nipples, her face, her hair. He’s deep inside her now, as deep as her husband has ever been. It’s odd, the intensity of the pleasure she feels. First times ought to be at least a little fumbling and strange, foreign with a steeper learning curve. Alan knows just how to touch her, to get her off in the most efficient way possible. She’s had sex with her husband a thousand times and each time has been its own kind of good, but they had learned together over years and years.

Robin presses his thumb against her clit so she has something to move against and she lets out a low grunt, totally undignified, totally unstoppable. She’s going to come, she realizes. And not in a little while, not after some work, not eventually but right now.

Her hands come down hard on his chest as her body curls in, wracked with pleasure. She can feel herself clench and release and her knees come up as she tries to push him in even farther. He holds her through it, his hands on her back and then, when she collapses onto him breathing hard, rubs her spine.

“Good,” he says. “So good. You’re so good to me.”

She rubs her face into his neck.

To Amanda, sex is not about completion, about arrival, but about touching. All that skin, every tiny hair, every bead of sweat pressed together. Her pores open up and he rushes inside. Her body comes apart for him, opening, widening, lubricating.

“Hey,” he says and she meets his eyes, still breathing loudly. He’s painfully hard inside of her. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” she says.

He flips them back over and gives her a few slow, easy, shallow thrusts and then gets to work. She hangs on to the edge of the bed, her breasts bouncing almost painfully on her chest as he strains over her. He isn’t holding back and that makes him beautiful in his effort.

“Oh,” he says. “God, yeah, that, that, that,” and then he loses his words and cries out. She clenches hard around him, holding him close, not letting go, cradling him as he’d done for her.

He’s heavy on her when it’s over.

Finally, he slips out and rolls off of her. She’s about to tell him that she doesn’t want to leave when he says, “You can use my shower if you need to.”

“Okay,” she says instead.

She uses a rubber band she finds to hold her hair up and out of the spray. She doesn’t want to explain coming home with wet hair, scrubbed clean of her sins. Not that it works that way.

When she comes out wrapped in his blue towel, he watches her put on her dirty underwear, her tangled bra, her wrinkled shirt and discarded jeans.

“I love you,” he says, when she’s easing the rubber band out of her hair with a grimace. She looks at him; he’s still naked except for the sheet.

“I know,” she says sadly.

She lets herself out. She drives home in the rain.

oooo

She has lunch with Damian, drives to his little house with the pretty red door and plops right down in his living room and bursts into tears.

“Oh, honey,” he says. His family is out, made scarce for her benefit. There is food on the counter but she isn’t hungry.

He watches her cry for a minute and then sits near her and sighs loudly.

“I tried to warn you two.”

“I know,” she says.

“Did you fuck him?” Damian asks. She flinches at the phrasing but doesn’t deny it, doesn’t attempt to. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her nose on her wrist and then digging through her bag for a tissue. She moves it like a mop across her face.

“So are you going to... leave Alan, or...?” he probes. As delicately as Damian can, which is not very.

“What?” she says, head snapping up. “No!”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “Or if he does, I guess he doesn’t care.”

Damian furrows his brow. “Then why in God’s name are you sitting here crying?”

“Because!” she says. “Because I... I feel bad!”

Damian sighs. “Let’s take a walk,” he says.

It’s bitterly cold out. The rain has stopped but it seems like only to gear up for another late snow. Amanda shoves her hands into her pockets and sniffs as the tears and temperature makes her nose run. She can see Damian’s breath puff out in front of him. They meander down the block.

“Have you ever been unfaithful?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “I mean, you never asked me to, so...”

She elbows him and he doesn’t retaliate.

“It’s a terrible thing to do to someone,” she says.

“I don’t like that word,” he says. “Unfaithful. I don’t think it’s accurate.”

“I cheated,” she says.

“Maybe. But you love your husband and you love Robby and you did what you thought you had to do. It’s going to be all right.”

“Should I tell Alan?” she asks.

“Nope,” he says. “You should just keep... I mean, are you going to do it again?”

“No!” she says. “I don’t... think so. Probably not... not on purpose,” she settles on.

“That good, huh?” Damian asks. Amanda cants her head, says nothing. It had been pretty good up until the end. When they had emerged on the other side, ashamed, weak, a little sore.

“Maybe it’s good the show is in limbo,” she says. “I won’t see him every day.”

“He’s so different,” Damian says. “How did this happen?” Different from Alan, he means.

“I don’t know,” she says helplessly. “Haven’t you ever just looked at something, at someone and, and, and wanted them? Just wanted them on some stupid, reckless, dirty level?” she asks.

Damian looks at her and away again rather quickly.

“Yeah,” he says.

“It happened to both of us and we tried really hard not to... tried for months, for years. I just got so tired and we broke so many rules and it just...”

She starts to cry again.

“Hey,” he says. “You’re not a bad person. You’re just a person. A regular human being. Congratulations on being one of us!”

She laughs, despite her tears.

oooo

She dreads the next time she sees him. She dreads not his behavior but her own. That it’ll show all over her, that she won’t be able to cover it up, to lie about this one thing even though she’s built an entire career on being an exceptional liar.

Before she knows it it’s the end of January, and then February, and then late February. She keeps herself busy – her agent keeps her busy. Her family keeps her busy.

She’s texted him exactly twice since they spent (most of) the night together; he has replied once. The first time was a week after, asking if he was okay. He said he was fine, hoped she was too. He didn’t say he missed her but she read it anyway, as clearly as if the words had been right in front of her. Somehow, all this time and all this want have tied them together in a way that feels innate, in a way that tugs at her blood, reminding her each and every day how the distance grows on between them but how they can never really separate.

A few days after Valentine’s she texts him again because she sees something that reminded her of the night they’d spent barhopping in Georgia, but he doesn’t reply. She doesn’t blame him.

Chevron in London is soon, and they’ll have to see each other then. They’re not contractually obligated to go or anything, but it’s good publicity and it’s good fun and they have fans counting on them and they’re still good people, after all. It might be their last true trip for Sanctuary; neither of them would miss it.

They catch different flights and they don’t actually see each other until a few hours before the first panel. It’s like there are two different Robin and Amandas; the public Robin and Amanda and the private, and it’s a distinction they’ve honed like a craft. They started this fucking up in Atlanta and then perfected it in Melbourne, but nobody besides them had a clue. They’ve been striking this balance for years now and not even sleeping together (finally, inevitably) has changed that.

The public Robin and Amanda function on a different plane of existence. They put their acting skills to good use, and nothing seems out of the ordinary. The jostle elbows and laugh together and only once or twice do their gazes linger too long. Only once or twice to they almost talk about it. Amanda notices she has a shorter temper and Robin is less excitable than usual, but nothing explodes. Amanda figures that’s because it already did a month ago.

The fans like it when they tweet pictures together, so they do. They have a few pints at lunch on the last day and it seems like everything will be fine. They’ve maintained their professionality all weekend and it wasn’t so hard. The tension from Regina has been diffused and now, it’s replaced by something tamer.

Something tamer, but something that weighs a hell of a lot more. She wonders if this is going to haunt her forever.

They’re in the back of a taxi on the way back to the airport when Robin breathes in and Amanda knows that on the exhale, he’s going to ask something that’ll break the illusion they’ve carefully maintained all weekend.

“Am I going to see you again?”

“Of course.” But a moment after she says it, she’s not so sure anymore.

“Did you tell anyone?”

Amanda bites her lip. “Damian.”

He doesn’t look upset or surprised. “Yeah, I figured.” A pause. “Alan?”

She feels a pang of guilt as he says her husband’s name, followed by an irrational surge of anger. She breathes in, breathes out the irritation. Reminds herself that she’s not actually mad at anyone. Maybe a little at herself. “No.”

Robin grows quiet again. They sit side by side, hurting, watching the traffic pass by, wanting to reach out for the other’s hand but unable to, until they reach Heathrow.

Robin’s going to Dublin for a week on vacation, or something. They go through security together and Amanda walks with him to his gate.

“Did you tell anyone?” She asks.

“Chip,” he says. Chip is his best guy friend in Vancouver. Maybe in the world. Robin wouldn’t have confided in anyone he couldn’t trust, and so Amanda tries to calm down. “He immediately wanted details.”

She glances at him sideways, pointedly.

Robin grins suddenly. Amanda’s heart feels like it’s going to burst.

“And what did you tell him?” She asks, keeping her eyes ahead as they walk side by side.

In her peripheral, she sees Robin scrub a hand down his face. “I told him it was the most incredible night of my life,” he says. “I told him you felt like a fucking revelation.”

There are entire roses blushing on her cheeks, she’s sure of it. She punches his shoulder because she’s pretty sure he’s being sincere but Robin is also prone to extremely sincere hyperbole.

He laughs and then she laughs and for a second she wants to cry again because this moment between them is so unexpectedly sweet.

When they get to his waiting area, they turn to face one another and she stares at him, smiles at him for a long time. She’s indulging. He’s so beautiful.

“Come with me,” he whispers. “I’ll show you where my dad grew up.”

She feels her cheeks start to burn again. “You know I can’t.”

He watches her for a second. “Okay,” he says simply.

Her chest has never felt this heavy before. She wonders if this is just the beginning of something when she thought it would finally be the end. A moment later, her arms are around him.

“If I could,” she tells him, “I’d go with you in a heartbeat. You wouldn’t even have to fucking ask.”

He kisses her cheek. Lingers. “Had a good weekend with you,” he murmurs, and pulls away. Her body instinctively resists.

“See you around, Mandy.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Bye, Robin.”

oooo

Robin’s St. Patrick’s day party is the stuff of legends. Amanda has never gone herself, despite his numerous invitations. It had always seemed like an unnecessary risk. This year, the invitation does not come, but she goes. Instead of holding at his apartment (too many complaints from elderly neighbors), Robin rents a couple hotel suites and basically takes over a floor of the Metropolitan.

She isn’t sure why she goes except for she wants to see him and she thinks it’s the safest way - surrounded by people who know them. He’s been gone to Ireland, so she can only imagine this year’s party is going to be the one to top them all.

Alan picks Olivia up from school, takes her to soccer practice and then, after, drops her off for a playdate with her friend Lizzie.

At home, Amanda stands in the large closet and looks at her options. She wants to look nice. She wants to look appropriate. She wants to look... hot. There’s not a lot of green, but there’s one, and Amanda doesn’t know why she’s been thinking about how she doesn’t know what she’ll wear all day, because this is really the only option she has.

It’s satin, hard to wear, but in this case, worth the effort. It’s a dark, emerald green and tailored to fit her. They’d bought it for Magnus but the fabric hadn’t filmed well. Martin had mentioned casually that it was too hot for Magnus, anyway.

“What?” she’d complained, looking down at herself. “Magnus is supposed to be hot!”

“Magnus is supposed to be elegant and attractive and desirable,” Martin had said. “That dress is about fucking.”

She’d bought it off the show. It had been made for her body, after all. It’s what any good executive producer would have done.

Now she puts on a black thong and a black, lacy bra that is so delicate that it won’t bulge through the skin-tight fabric. She likes pantyhose and it’s cold enough to need them, but she goes bare legged anyway. Black heels. Tall ones. She wants Robin to have to look up at her.

Amanda, were she going to some sort of red carpet function in this get-up, would pair it with the emeralds that Alan had gotten her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary, but that seems wildly inappropriate right now, so she puts on silver drops and nothing else. the expanse of bare skin above her cleavage feels wrong, but she knows Robin likes the skin there, how it turns red so easily, how her collar bones jut out.

She curls her hair, she piles on the make up. Dark, dark eyes. Her irises look as blue as ice. She glances at the clock, shoves her wallet and her phone into a black clutch.

She takes Alan’s sports car. She doesn’t usually drive his car. She’d gotten it for him for father’s day and it’s his alone, but her Audi has been making this odd noise and he has the Volvo and she feels sassy. The hotel will have valet. It’s fine.

Damian is drunk in the hotel lobby, standing by the elevator with a drink in both hands. His face is comical when he sees her, strutting toward him on those impossibly high heels.

“Well fuck,” he says. “No mixed signal there.”

“Just stopping in to say hello,” she says. He rolls his eyes.

“With your vagina?” he asks.

“Shut up,” she says. “Don’t judge me tonight.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry.”

The doors open, they walk in. It’s kind of lucky he was there - she has no idea where she’s going.

“You look... a little scary,” he says. “Too hot.”

“I feel like I’m in costume,” she says. “We bought this dress for Helen.”

“We bought that dress for you,” he says. “Magnus only borrowed what you had.”

They arrive on the sixth floor. The doors open and there are people everywhere and the music is loud and Amanda isn’t sure how Robin gets away with his life, really.

A few people wave at her. She should have brought someone. Not Alan, but a friend. Except besides her husband, there’s Robin and then her other friends are all men and she needs more friends who are women, really. Teryl would know what to do in this situation.

Well, first things first. Find the booze.

“You okay?” Damian asks, sweaty and grinning.

“Just go,” she says and waves him away. She wishes he’d given her the other drink in his hand, but she suspects they’re both for him. She scans the hall for Robin but doesn’t see him, so she moves deeper in. The first room is mostly empty, the second full of too many beautiful young women for her to deal with, and the third is jam packed. No telling if Robin is in here, but certainly she’s found the alcohol.

And wouldn’t she just know it. When she gets to the front of the line, guess who is tending bar?

“And what’ll you have - oh my fucking fuck, Jesus,” Robin says looking up at her. The pint glass spinning in his hand goes flying to the floor. It thuds on the carpet, but does not break. “Amanda!”

“Hey,” she says. “I... wanted a drink.”

“You wanted to give me a damn heart attack,” he says, looking her over. “I remember that dress. That dres... do you know how many hours I’ve lost to thinking of that dress?”

He’s pretty drunk. There’s half a bottle of Irish whiskey by his side and someone has put duct tape over the label and written ‘ROBIN’ on it in permanent marker.

“Whiskey,” she requests, ignoring the comment. “If you’re willing to share.”

“You know I am,” he says. It feels like a dig about Alan, but she’s probably just being paranoid.

He gives her a cup, clear but plastic, and fills it way too high.

“House special,” he says. “On me.”

“Thank you,” she says.

She has some friends at this party. She doesn’t hang around him like a lovesick teen. She makes her rounds, sipping her drink. It burns going down at first and then gets much easier. Everyone tells her she looks amazing, everyone loves her dress, her shoes, her make-up. She tries not to let it go to her head.

Her drink is almost empty and she’s sitting on a chair by the window overlooking the night skyline when another drink appears in her line of vision. A drink in a hand, the hand on an arm, the arm is attached to Robin.

“I’m drunk,” she says, looking over at him. Suddenly, the people who were around her seem to have disappeared. They’re not alone in the room, but it’s not crowded. She glances at her wrist, but she’d left her watch at home. Her purse is in the glovebox of the car. Her phone too. How irresponsible of her.

“Good,” he says. “Me too.”

“And Damian,” she says.

“He went home,” he says. “It’s after eleven. All good mommies and daddies have left.”

That feels like a dig, too. It is late, and maybe she should go but she can’t drive home like this and she doesn’t feel up to explaining a cab ride home to her husband. She doesn’t even want to leave. She’d come to see Robin and she’s hardly seen him all night.

“Do you have some place we can go?” It comes out awkward and not as she meant, but he just grins and nods.

“I do,” he says.

They have to get on the elevator and they go up a floor.

“Sneaky,” she says.

He has a room, doesn’t fumble with the keycard. Maybe he’s less drunk than her, maybe he’s just better at it.

“I’m glad you came,” he says, letting her in.

“You didn’t invite me,” she says. “I crashed your little party.”

“You’re always invited to my parties,” he says. “But you never come.”

“Not never,” she corrects. She has to hold her hand against the wall. This room is not a suite, it’s just a bathroom and a king sized bed. He has a duffle bag in here already, and a bottle of champagne chilling on the nightstand. “Uh-oh,” she says. “Am I... how do you say it? Cock-stopping you?”

“Cock blocking,” he chuckles. “And no.”

“But you weren’t planning to be in here alone,” she says, pulling the bottle out of the ice. It drips on the floor, one freezing drop on her bare leg.

“I just like to be prepared,” he says. “Like a boy scout.”

“What’s her name?” she presses.

“Amanda,” he says.

She rolls her eyes. “I didn’t come here to sleep with you,” she says.

“Oh?”

“Not at first,” she amends. They’re in the room - she’d ask to come here. Playing hard to get at this point seems like a waste of time. “Just wanted to see you.”

“Here I am.”

“Because we were okay and then we weren’t and maybe we were and I don’t-”

She doesn’t get to finish her thought.

He tastes like whiskey, but then, so does she.

oooo

Robin starts to unzip her dress.

After a moment, she pulls away. She’s breathing heavily.

“I don’t want to be good anymore,” she whispers, letting the corner of her mouth brush his cheek. There had been an airy sort of disconnect in her voice a moment ago but it’s gone now.

Her fingers are cold and wet against his cheeks from the ice water on the champagne bottle and he shivers, just a little. She trails them lower to his jaw, arches her back into his hands.

“Okay,” he says. She can tell that his eyes are closed from the sound of his voice. She can tell how fast his heart is beating. “Okay. So let’s just...be bad. For a little while.”

Amanda contemplates this and then snakes a hand behind his neck, up through his hair, and tugs him back to her.

They kiss and stumble their way across the room, a mess of lips and tongue and teeth and it feels familiar like an easy dance, like that first glimpse of the Vancouver skyline coming home from a long trip. It’s familiar like the butterflies in the pit of her stomach. They still want this so badly and that’s a pretty incredible, scary thing, she thinks. She can’t imagine a time she didn’t feel this way. She feels insatiable.

Robin is guiding her so she follows mindlessly, his hands on her hips, pressing back, back, back until her heels click-clack against the tile in the bathroom. She was expecting the bed but she’s flexible and Robin is nothing if not spontaneous.

“Didn’t think you’d ever let me do this again,” he murmurs, and she realizes this isn’t about spontaneity. It’s about finishing something.

“Yeah, well,” she breathes, resting against the counter ledge, chest heaving. She tips her head back, closes her eyes. “Me neither. Surprise.”

He’s slipping all that green fabric slowly from her shoulders. She opens her eyes to work her fingers through the buttons of his shirt, moves to his belt next, and strips it away. She lets her hands wander a little, across the front of his pants, his bare hips, his stomach. She pulls him closer and slides her hands slowly up his back.

He makes this raw noise, like a moan or a whimper, and the sound hits her square in the chest. She has to pull away, has to close her eyes again to keep from spinning all apart. This still feels as surreal and heavy as it ever has; it’s just getting easier to move through it.

His hands, however, keep following that trail of bare, freckled skin until the dress pools at her feet. She kicks it away, along with her heels.

The light from the hallway is soft and the bathroom door casts a faint shadow. Amanda looks down and watches him as he kneels, slips that bit of lace down her legs. She kicks that away, too.

“Luck of the fucking Irish,” he says.

She manages to give him a smirk. “You unimaginable dork.”

When she spreads her legs he runs both thumbs along the seams of her thighs. She really doesn’t need the foreplay and neither does he but they didn’t get much of it last time and they’re still pretty drunk.

He touches her all over for long, long minutes, until she starts to squirm uncomfortably. “Robin, stop, or start, for Christ’s sake--I can’t--”

“Sorry,” he says quickly. “Fuck I just want to remember how you look, how you feel under my fingers.”

She huffs. “How about under your tongue,” she says. “I bet that would be pretty memorable, too.”

It’s almost comical, how immediately his mouth is on her. She’d laugh, but no, because she’s on fire. She weaves a hand through his hair and the other scrambles along the ledge as he works with abandon. He sets a quick pace, mouth rocking against hips against mouth. Their collective movements feel wide and sweeping and almost languid, intense and messy in the most wonderful, delirious way.

“Oh, my god,” she gasps, because he finds a perfect spot by accident but the way she tenses tells him to stay, and how to proceed (soft, hard, harder, deeper, harder).

The pleasure is ridiculous. She loses her breath for the entirety of that long, long moment. She feels woozy and the world around her starts to pulse.

The next thing she feels is Robin’s hand tugging on her arm and so she follows, helplessly. The bed is right beneath her and she spills onto it.

Robin starts to kiss her neck. He slides a hand down between her thighs again. “Not done yet,” he says.

“Never,” she tells him, and slides her hands down between his. He helps her push his pants down his skinny waist and legs, and she lets her hands trail and linger on this newly uncovered skin.

She thinks briefly back to a few hours ago at the party, to a few months ago, to a few years ago when they first met. His lips are earnest against her pulse point but she pulls him up to look into his face. Last time, it was so dark that they couldn’t even really see one another, couldn’t see all the mistakes they were making, even though their bodies were screaming them all right out loud.

Now, there is enough light that she can see the slight wrinkles on his forehead, the stubble growing unevenly along his jaw, and she traces his lips with her thumbs. Stares into his eyes without blinking.

Robin has always been completely irresistible to people who don’t know him like she does. Everyone fawns over him and they get taken in by that natural charm (even though he’s always acting, Robin, even if he doesn’t realize it). They talk about how goofy and gorgeous and sweet he is and how he could charm the pants off anyone in the room. She heard it all tonight.

The thing is, Amanda has seen him tired and fussy and attention-starved and she’s heard him say all manner of stupid things. She’s seen him angry and frustrated and unattractive. She’s talked with him about the breakup of his marriage and about how he can’t change the things he needs to change to be happy because he’s too goddamn stubborn and maybe more than a little selfish.

But she still thinks he’s the most hilarious, wonderful person she knows and she still always, always wants to press her lips to the corner of his mouth when he gets that little smile curving his lips, the one that makes tiny crescents dent the corners of his mouth.

She knows that just beneath his skin is something worshipful longing to spread out and devote itself to someone who can tame it. She...doesn’t usually allow herself to follow that thought to its next logical step, but tonight, she does. She lets herself be that someone in this moment as she cradles his head in her hands. It won’t last because she can’t be that person forever, even though she’s been half-indulging for years. This can’t is why her heart is breaking but it’s enough, it’s going to have to be enough.

Amanda thinks about the first time they met, the way his eyes slid over her, the way their lives came together like waves crashing, and about how everything between them since just flows. This thing has been out of their control since the beginning and right now, she decides she’s going to let herself feel that, and feel it honestly without hating what it does to them both. It’ll be enough.

His boxers are off and she rolls on top of him. She wraps her fingers and her palm around him, skin sliding against hot, hard skin.

He groans, shifting his hands to her bare thighs. He kneads them into her hipbones, holding onto her, and she settles down against his body. He must feel that excruciating damp heat against his stomach, because he groans again and arches into her.

“Fuck, shit, shit,” he moans, and she rolls her hips a little harder. Robin is always sleeping with these tiny, busty blonde chicks and for a while he pretended like he wasn’t imagining Amanda, until later on when things between them got messy and he stopped lying to himself, but it was always difficult to fantasize because nobody else feels like she feels. There are more curves on her than he knows what to do with, so much pale, bare skin scattered with freckles that he thinks he could map out entire constellations on her body. She’s whole and warm and real and when he touches her he feels something inside of him wind and wind and wind until he thinks he’s going to snap in half, but he never does.

“Amanda,” he begs. “Jesus, baby, please.” He’s starting to sober up, and fast.

Amanda lets go of him and runs a hand back through her long, dark hair. In the dim golden light, he thinks she suddenly looks unburdened for the first time in months.

“I love hearing you say that,” she says. “My name.”

“Amanda.” He manages a crooked smile.

She smiles back, trying to say I love you with just her eyes, and then he flips her over onto her back.

She nuzzles his neck and he kisses her, but then she runs her fingernails down his shoulder blades and he loses it a little. The next few moments pass hard and fast. When her knees fall open he ducks his head to flick his tongue here and there between her thighs, hands roaming ceaselessly, before moving right back to her mouth and pushing himself inside of her.

She moans deep in the back of her throat, a sharp exhale that he wants to hear again and again; she’s so wet and open and willing that he just pitches himself completely until their hips are flush, until she tilts her pelvis and he sinks just a little lower. He stays here, not able to move just yet.

While they acclimate Amanda breathes in and out, in and out, like the oxygen is being tugged quickly from her lungs. Robin’s not breathing at all, not until she reminds him to. His arms are shaking, propped on either side of her shoulders.

“Shh,” she murmurs, and she isn’t sure that either of them are in control here anymore. “We have time, now.”

He pulls out just a little, slowly, and thrusts back in, faster. She makes that sound again.

He glances down at her; she looks lost in this. She looks like she wants everything he can give her.

“Do you love me?” he asks, and maybe it feels too serious, too sudden. Maybe his voice sounds too loud.

Amanda has her eyes closed but she doesn’t answer. Robin urges his hips forward again, hissing, and her whole body responds, clenching around him.

“Amanda look at me,” he tells her breathlessly, and locks their fingers together. “Look at me.”

He thinks he sees her shake her head a little, but then she opens her eyes. They are clear and blue and her pupils are blown open wide, brows knit like she’s hurting.

She’s always avoided his questions like she avoided her own self interrogation, dismissing, ignoring, finally consenting to ‘you know I do’ or ‘yes I feel the same’ but she doesn’t know how she’ll ever be okay again if she doesn’t hold onto this desire for honesty with all the strength she has.

Last time she was in his doorway and he was still naked on the bed and he had told her that he loved her. She couldn’t bring herself to say it back, maybe because she thought it didn’t matter either way, that it wouldn’t change things.

She wasn’t going to get a third chance.

“This has been about love from the beginning, you know that,” she tells him, finally, and it feels a little like setting herself on fire. Her voice is trembling and the heels of his palms are pressing into hers, pinning her beneath him. “Sometimes--sometimes I think I must be crazy, but I’m so in love with you that I can’t breathe right when you aren’t around.”

Robin laughs but it sounds more like a sob. “Might not be around a whole lot more, soon,” he says. “I guess we’ll both have to learn to breathe on our own.”

She smiles sadly and tilts her hips and everything feels, feels, feels.

“Yeah,” she says, but it, too, sounds like a sob.

“Tell me one more time,” he whispers, lips close to her neck.

He starts to rock gently and she says it again, I love you, into his ear, and then again and again louder and louder as he rocks faster and faster. She means it every single time.

Long fingers tangle in his hair and she feels emotions and pleasure and something else hot and aching swelling in her stomach, spreading out through her body like blood rushing.

“Oh fuck,” his voice is a rasp and she clings to him harder because she can tell he’s close, too. She meets his thrusts and grinds and meets again and he shoves a hand out to the headboard, gripping it for better leverage. He hisses again, moans her name.

“Robin,” she answers mindlessly, and when he slides two fingers between them she jerks, gasps, and he just wants this moment to last--

--there’s a loud crack up above her head and Robin loses his balance a little, and it takes her a moment to realize that it’s because the bed just broke. When she does realize it, she laughs, frenzied, and he shouts “oh shit” like he also just realized this could be incriminating evidence when looked upon later. But there’s laughter in his voice, too, and he sounds so much like the ridiculous, dorky guy she’s always known that she just tugs him back to her and kisses him thoroughly, unhesitatingly, and he can barely keep up with the way her lips pull and her tongue moves. When he does catch up, she rewards him with a hum.

“Concentrate,” she instructs, the word slipping from her mouth to his, and there is something wicked and bright in her voice that he hasn’t ever heard before (or if he has, it’s been too damn long). He doesn’t even have the sense to keep reminding himself that the faster they come, the faster this will all be over.

She’s kissing him into insanity but he manages to find the pace again and god, it’s so good, the way she’s sucking on his lip and letting him push so hard, so fast, so deeply. The pleasure feels too immense, he doesn’t know how he’ll ever climb it but it quickly starts to spiral down, and she finally releases him so that he can look at her. Amanda’s mouth is devastating even when it’s not swollen from kissing him, even when it’s not parted and panting, teeth bared slightly with the effort of wanting release so desperately.

He reaches to touch her face. His thumb lands on her bottom lip, she flicks her tongue to it gently, teeth scraping the skin, and he comes with the feel of her all over him.

She follows not long after and even as the pleasure spills out so forcefully it feels like he’s tearing it from her body, she finds she doesn’t want to move because she still wants him just as badly as she did the first time.

They lose minutes, and then hours, and when they wake up tangled, naked and damp in the sheets with Amanda’s makeup smeared darkly around her eyes and across her pillowcase, it’s quiet for minutes more as they watch one another blink slowly in the pre-dawn light.

“Hi,” Amanda whispers, finally.

Robin grins, and it hurts again to breathe. “Hi.”

She leans in a little to nuzzle into him.

“It’s going to be hard. Harder. When we go back to work, it’s going to be different,” he says softly.

She breathes out.

“Robin,” she says, feeling her lip start to quiver a little. “Honey. There’s no more show.”

It’s the first time she’s said it to someone other than Martin or Damian. She hasn’t even confirmed it with Alan yet. And while everyone seems to know already - booking new jobs and moving on one by one, it’s harder when it’s real.

Robin’s face shifts from absolute pleasure to agony.

“What do we do?” he asks.

Amanda opens her mouth, but she doesn’t have an answer. She kisses him instead, softly, gently.

She wants to buy all the time she can before they have to say goodbye.

oooo

She feels ridiculous stepping out of the hotel lobby in the early morning light. She’s clean. They’d showered and she’d let all the dark, heavy make-up run down the drain while he’d moved gently behind her. But all she has is the dress and the shoes and the magic that she’d whipped up last night is gone like so many things.

She hands her ticket to the valet and he runs off to get the car without comment. She stands under the overhang, out of the direct sunlight. When her car comes around the corner, she has to dig in the glovebox to find her clutch so she can tip the guy.

“Oh,” he says. “Don’t worry about it, Ms. Tapping. It’s my pleasure.”

Oh great, the nineteen-year-old valet recognizes her walk of shame. Perfect.

“Thanks,” she manages and gives him five dollars anyway.

She drives halfway home, far enough to get out of the busy city streets and then pulls over on the first residential street on the outskirts of her neighborhood to look at her phone.

She has two texts from Alan - Where are you? and Please call me - and six missed calls from him. Three voicemails.

She has a text from Damian, too.

I told him where you were, he was flipping out. Sorry, love.

What exactly is she going home to? She doesn’t listen to the voicemails, she just calls him.

“Jesus,” he answers. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, tears already in her voice. “Honey I’m fine, I’m really sorry.”

“I was worried fucking sick, what the fuck is the matter with you?” he says. His voice is low, almost a whisper. Olivia must be awake.

“I left my phone in the car,” she says, wiping her cheek. “I didn’t think it was reasonable for me to drive home last night.”

“Damian said... well, I’m sorry, did your party hotel not have any telephones?” Alan demands.

“I’m almost home,” she says. “We can talk about it then.”

“No,” Alan says. She grips the wheel so hard with her free hand that her knuckles have gone white. She stares at her wedding rings.

“No?” she manages.

“Look,” Alan says. She can hear his feet on the stairs, putting distance between him and their daughter. “You’ve been so different lately it’s like you’re a stranger. It’s like the last two decades together suddenly mean nothing to you.”

“That’s completely unfair,” she says.

“Is it?” he asks. “I’ve tried to be patient. I thought maybe you were just having some sort of existential crisis because your show got canceled but you’ve never not come home before.”

“I was drunk,” she says. “I’m sorry that I made one stupid choice after working tirelessly for fifteen years, Alan.”

“One stupid choice,” he says softly. “I hope that’s all it is.”

“Jesus Christ,” she mutters. She twists the keys with her wrist and the engine shuts off. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to come home,” he says. “I want you to one hundred percent come home or not come home at all.”

She feels a hot stab of anger, but she knows the request is fair. She can’t keep doing this, can she? She can’t lead this double life. She can’t keep hurting everyone around her because she accidentally fell in love with her co-star, a man eleven years her junior, like the worst fucking actor cliche there is.

“I’m coming home,” she says. “Alan. Honey. I’m coming home right now.”

“I love you,” he says. “You’re my whole life. Please come home.”

“I love you, too,” she says.

And it’s true. She does. She loves him and their daughter and the life they’ve cobbled together and the memories they have and the things they still have yet to do.

They hang up and she starts the car. She’s going to start over. New jobs, new years, new Amanda. It’s scary, but she likes to do things that scare her.

She’s just pulling into the driveway, the garage door churning open when her phone buzzes with a text from Robin.

She shouldn’t look at it, shouldn’t pick the phone up, shouldn’t give in after she’d just promised her husband and herself that she was committed to their life.

She shouldn’t look at it, but she does.

It’s Robin. She’ll always take the call.

Home safe? he writes.

She writes back. Yeah, for now.

She gets out of the car, smooths her wrinkled dress, takes off her shoes to carry them in, and goes inside, home at last.