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She’s plainly never done this before.
With some women, that would be an automatic turn-off. With some women—maybe most women—that would make Cosima’s instinct toward giggling at the world around her switch on full-force, would make her head bow back and her fingers probe her own forehead in bemusement. With other women, the sheer inconsistency of it, of this gorgeous, dangerous, terrible idea of a woman not knowing at allwhat she is doing, would put a stop to the whole thing at a snap.
Maybe that’s how it should be. It would make Sarah happier, for a certainty. Sarah, with her holier-than-thou advice, and where does a punk chick who’s spent the last several weeks dancing around in a dead woman’s shoes get off telling her what to do, anyway?
Forget Sarah. Sarah will get over it.
Delphine is different.
She was different from the first moments, from the obviousness of her charade and the quick twist of her smile and her absurd little phrasings of things like “a jogging.” She was different when she kissed Cosima’s cheek goodbye, and more different still when Cosima—stupid, so stupid—misread that moment and sent her stumbling for the door. Everything about her is different.
She shouldn’t like it.
She’s been telling herself she doesn’t. Like it, that is. She’s been telling herself, pacing back and forth in her room with hands flailing and a lit joint resting companionably in the spaces between her fingers, that she can do this a la Sydney Bristow, James Bond, Sarah Manning. She can be cool. She can play it safe.
Except she’s, like, five-hundred percent positive Sarah stopped playing it safe with Paul a long time ago, and Alison’s a total headcase where her monitor (monitors? Terrifying, how they still don’t know) is concerned, and they kind of do share DNA, so how could she be any different?
A scientist’s arrogance, thinking she’d be any more in control than the rest of her lab rats. Go figure.Kind of playing the idiot odds there, aren’t you, Sunshine?
Delphine is bumbling. For a woman who walks the way she does, with her head held high and her face alight with easy confidence, that feels funny in Cosima’s bones. Feels like a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit right, like a bit of cardboard with just a hair too little shaved off the left edge, until it sits aloft from the rest of the image. Feels like a trap. Except she’s pretty sure this is the one part Delphine didn’t plan, because who would plan to be uncomfortable at sex?
Anyone brilliant. Anyone who knows what you’d be looking for in a monitor. Anyone who knows you’re on to them.
She shakes it off. It’s too hard, holding on to her separate trains of thought at the same time. Too hard, to at once play into Sarah’s paranoid distress and her own scorching desires. Much easier, much better, much kinder to let go.
Delphine is clumsy, and awkward, and her hands don’t seem to have the first bastard clue where to go, but she does make it easy to let go.
It’s the smell of her that does it first, the heady scent of citrus and hope that comes from standing too close, from staring her down that way. It’s the scent of her shampoo, and the little dab of perfume Cosima senses beneath it. Like she planned for this. Like she wanted to feel pretty before crashing into Cosima’s room and bed and life. Would a monitor do that?
Shut up, she barely has the energy to think, because for all her fumbling, Delphine is enthusiastic. And tall. She is incredibly tall, and incredibly invested in the shape of Cosima’s mouth, in the arch of her back and the slope of her shoulders. At this point, kissing her blind feels like the only option left in the game, Sarah’s warnings be damned, because you just don’t leave a woman this enthusiastic and this tall hanging.
Obvs.
It just goes without saying, doesn’t it?
So she kisses her, and keeps kissing her, every fresh surge sending a snap of electricity down her arms and legs and sanity. Her glasses have bumped up on her nose, jamming into the skin around her eyes, and she knows she’ll have to take them off, but there isn’t room to move just now. Delphine’s got her back against the desk. Delphine is crushed against her with apparently no comprehension of how this whole thing works, all hands rooted solidly to her hips and body held just out of reach.
She’s never done this before. Sex? Or sex with a woman? She can’t imagine this spy of a woman being a virgin, somehow, but at the same time, isn’t it common sense? Sex, for her, has always been an animal thing, a primal instinct thing, an intoxication of fingers and toes and hair and laughter. Nature. Worldliness. Sex is excellent, because it’s the thing all beasts have in common, the thing that doesn’t matter if you’re good at it, as long as you’re enjoying yourself.
And she is enjoying herself. Arms around Delphine’s neck, she rolls her hips forward, appreciative of the gasp that echoes into her open mouth. Appreciative of the way Delphine’s stone-clamp hands clench at her hips when pelvis meets pelvis through thin cloth. Appreciative of Delphine’s tiny embarrassed smile working its way up through the curve and spin of her kisses.
She rolls her hips again, and this time, Delphine catches on. Follows suit. Grinds her clumsily back into the desk, and Cosima thinks she could get used to this unbearably quickly. To the uncertainty of Delphine’s tongue curling around her own. To the pleasant frame of Delphine’s hands, hot through clothing that screams to be discarded. To the planes and lines of Delphine’s shoulders and neck, and the way she rasps out a tiny sound of delight when Cosima turns her head away from the kiss and licks at the skin beneath her jawline. She could tuck it all away in a scrapbook forever, tugging it out to moon over on rainy nights. She could have it memorized in no time at all. She could want this for the rest of her life.
Don’t, she warns herself, even as Delphine’s long fingers nervously push at the clothing still holding them apart, even as she shimmies cheerfully free of everything but her bra and panties, even as the glasses weigh uncomfortably on her nose. Don’t, as her hands sift through Delphine’s hair, cradling her skull, holding her close enough to share breath. Don’t, as she pushes off from the desk and leads the way to the bed.
Delphine is hopeful. Delphine is warm. Delphine has plainly never seen another woman’s body in such an open, wanting light before, and Cosima doesn’t miss the way her brows knit and her mouth hardens momentarily when Cosima moves to undress her. Delphine is many things, real or playacted, but being scared isn’t something Cosima would have expected.
She goes slow. She waits for the green light, for Delphine’s trembling hands to wrap around her wrists and guide her. She waits for the tentative kiss Delphine lingers in, drawing it out as a bare thigh works its way between her legs and flexes. She waits for Delphine’s breath on her neck, arms around her shoulders, nails digging into her back. Slow is good. Slow is safe.
She wonders when the last time was, when Delphine felt safe.
Her bed becomes a nest of sorts, all gentle rocking and softly murmured urgings. When she moves to ease Delphine’s underwear off her hips, she senses a beat of unease, and hesitates. Slips a hand beneath the material instead. Brushes light fingers across plainly interested skin. Delphine isn’t faking this much; it’s too honest, too biologically truthful to be ignored. Something in her chest leaps with pleasure at the drip of it, at the heat of it, at the way Delphine’s breath hitches when fingers dip low and Cosima meets her lidded gaze. Waiting.
She gets the go-ahead in the form of lips and teeth and tongue, and this is more what she had been expecting: Delphine, wanton, Delphine, ecstatic, Delphine’s hips jerking up to envelope her. She goes slow until Delphine says her name, and all the clumsiness seems to evaporate from the room. She’s certain that this is all she needs in the world to be happy—not genetic coding, not answers to her past, not Sarah and Kira and Alison and all the rest, but this. Just this. Just making love to a warm woman who cries out for her, and clenches around her, and awkwardly jerks the plastic frames off of her nose before yanking her into a kiss that feels a little too bruising to simply be fabricated.
It’s only when Delphine—tall, and strong, and lithely Amazonian in the hottest possible sense—has come down from her high and rolled her onto her back that she remembers how new this all is to her. When Delphine kisses down her breasts, and the flat of her stomach, and the jut of her hipbones. When Delphine, knees hanging off the bed, pauses and just stares at the fabric of her underwear like she’s never seen such a thing in all her life.
It isn’t funny, and yet, Cosima finds herself biting down hard on her lip to keep from laughing. The absurdity of this woman, who is so brilliant and—in all likelihood—such a liar, being stumped by something so…
“You don’t have to,” she assures her softly, and it’s true. She’s happy just with this, with the heady scent of Delphine on her fingers, soaking into her skin and sheets and life. She’s happy just to coil against Delphine’s side, holding her close, resting her head upon her breast and dozing off. It doesn’t take much, to make her happy. She needs Delphine to know that.
Her knowing could destroy you, a voice like Sarah’s reminds her, and she kicks it away. Not now. There’s no time for that now, no space in her scrapbook for it. This moment belongs to her, and to her Delphine, and if there’s another out there, one who smiles too rigidly and wears a lab coat and helps bad men do bad things, that can wait until morning.
Delphine casts a smile up at her, nervous and excited, and doesn’t answer. Just presses a kiss to the juncture of her thighs. Just does her best.
Her best wouldn’t win her an A-plus, or a gold star, but from where Cosima is laying, her hand clutching the pillowcase behind her head, her breath short in her chest, it’s more than enough. She’s been buzzing with lunatic energy since the moment Delphine stepped through the door, and now, with Delphine’s cautious mouth writing cautious symbols through a scrap of fabric—it’s more than she could have hoped for. More than felt acceptable to dream of. Even if her tongue doesn’t trace skin, even if she isn’t doing it right, according to everything else Cosima has ever known, it feels somehow more intoxicating than she’s ready for. To be kissed by a woman who has plainly never kissed another this way. To feel her warm lips part, the wet of her mouth opening around lace, the flat of her tongue learning the curves at a slow, deliberate pace…it’s clumsy, and it’s simple, and it sends her spiraling.
She wants to clutch at blonde hair when she comes, wants to surge up to meet Delphine’s tentative, open strokes, her broadly-brushed kisses, but to scare her would ruin this whole thing. She shakes instead, sprawled on her back, spreading her legs as wide as she can and riding with it, with the groan lodged in her throat and the too-far pressure of a tongue through flimsy fabric. Delphine has never done this before, Delphine has never wanted this before, and maybe the rest of it is a lie, but the woman is making that noise against her, turning her face to hide against the curve of her inner thigh, and even the best liar can’t do that. She can’t believe it. Won’t believe it.
Delphine could be anyone. Anything. Her name, her smile, everything she has ever told Cosima, could be so many details written with this specific story in mind. Could be. Probably is.
But this moment—the fumbling, slightly inept way she traces Cosima’s hidden skin, the sheepish smile she gives in the lamplight, the throaty French curse she releases when Cosima rolls her over and proceeds to show her how the pros do it—is different. This moment, no matter what anyone says, is real.
She doesn’t know much right now, but that—that, she has to believe.