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"The First Five Times"Written By: Clara Barton Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. The following
is an intellectual exercise with no intention of profit. That said,
these characterizations, words, and situations are mine. Please ask
before reprinting. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: angst, language, sexy times Pairings: 3x2/2x3, 1x5, past 2x5 Summary: After five months in a 'friends with benefits' relationship with Duo, Trowa is asked to pretend to be his boyfriend for Duo's ex's wedding. A/N: For Crafty Companion, who requested a few
text posts using 3x2. I decided to combine all of them into one fic,
which you maybe intended anyway? ( (text): .a bottle of vodka. My
place. now,(text) pants optional,(text) wanna be my plus one for my
ex's wedding? And pretend to be in love with me?).
"The First Five Times"
Chapter Six Three weeks. Before this, the longest time that had passed between me seeing or hearing from Duo had been two days. Nine months ago, I hadn't met him - he didn't mean anything to me, and there was no hole in my life when I looked at my phone and saw that he hadn't called, hadn't texted, hadn't sent me a message on Grindr suggesting we hook up in some thoroughly inappropriate place. I was a fucking idiot, for ever thinking that I was just friends with him - that this was some kind of casual relationship that I could enjoy and step away from. Maybe that was all Duo had wanted out of it - maybe that was all Duo had felt - but I sure as hell was in love with him. Even now, even after three weeks of hearing nothing from him. After three weeks of imagining what Duo thought of me, of remembering the look of shock and betrayal on his face when I confessed my job to him. It hurt, the lack of Duo, and the twisted thoughts of him judging me. It hurt, and it distracted me. I locked myself out of my apartment twice, checking my phone when I heard the text chime and hoping it was Duo, and then, disappointed that it wasn't, I had closed the locked front door behind me before realizing my keys were still on the side table by the door. I showed up to a gig in the wrong costume - Alex, Trant and I had been hired to do a group event as construction workers, but I showed up in the UPS costume instead after I realized that Duo had borrowed the plaid shirt I usually wore over my tank. We had made it work, but Alex and Trant now had yet another thing to razz me about, and I couldn't blame them. Cathy, of course, had commiserated with me about the fight with Duo and pointed out that I had been an idiot and was still an idiot. Call him, she had urged me, exasperated after five late nights of drinking after work. Call him. I had tried, seven times now. Had pulled out my phone and looked at the recent calls and hovered my finger over his name before hesitating, before putting my phone down and telling myself that there was no point. If Duo wanted me, he would call. He hadn't called - so he didn't want me. Unlike me, Duo didn't sit around and work through all of the horrible ways a scenario could fail before he committed - Duo just dove in headfirst. I was confident that he hadn't been sitting around for the last three weeks debating whether or not to call me. He had clearly decided - probably as he drove away from me - that he was done. Move on, Cathy urged me after three more nights of drinking. But, of course, it wasn't that easy. Even if I could set aside the fact that I thought of Duo ten, fifteen times a day just because I saw or heard something that made me think of him - that made me want to talk to him and get him to laugh - moving on meant meeting someone new. I met people every day - people who paid me to fuck them or strip for them. I didn't want a relationship of any kind with them outside of work. Ask out the bartender - he's been eyeing you all night, Cathy suggested when I pointed out that, outside of hotel rooms, cars, bars and strip clubs, I really didn't get out that much. The bartender was good in bed, making needy, whining moans as I fucked him from behind and admired the star tattoo on the small of his back as I watched my cock slide into his welcoming ass. After, he insisted on ordering pizza and we sat on his couch, half-naked, eating the pizza and watching Netflix. He wanted to watch Sons of Anarchy - he was in the middle of the third season - but he didn't get the joke when I asked if it was the episode where Jax tried to get the club out of guns. He just looked at me blankly, one eyebrow raised, and shrugged. It had been Duo's joke - pointing out that every episode was about Jax trying to get the club out of guns. In fact, I had never even seen the show before Duo insisted I watch it. I spent the night with the bartender, but in the morning, after we fucked again, I didn't bother to get his number and he didn't bother to ask for mine. I was so conspicuously miserable that even Alex and Trant, after the first two weeks, started to ease up on their routine efforts to embarrass me and stopped giving me shit about anything I did - or failed to do - that amused them. Even though we all did outside gigs together, on occasion, through Hollywood Strippers, I had first met Alex and Trant at Exiles. They had been working at the club for years, and the night of my audition, they made my life a living hell - catcalling and deriding me all through my routine, and afterwards, when I was hired, Alex had been asked to show me around and had proceeded to try to get me fired for the first two weeks I worked there. It wasn't until a month into my employment when they stopped being assholes to me - when another new dancer started working there, and they decided to torture him instead. It was another six months and two new strippers later that they invited me back to their apartment for a beer one night, and while the sex had been interesting and had led to a few nights over the years of threesomes between us, more than that, it had solidified my status as 'not the enemy' in their books. We started hanging out after our shifts, they started invited me to group events, and we slowly became friends. Two years ago, Alex had come up with the oh so clever, oh so ridiculous double act that he and I performed every few months at the club, usually after I lost a bet to him or owed him a favor. It wasn't the worst act in the world - and the patrons at the strip club always enjoyed it enough to tip very well - but it made me feel like an idiot, and I hated the song that Alex had chosen to go with it. It had been almost three months since he had grinned at me and told me to suit up. A streak that I had known, eventually, would come to an end. What I hadn't anticipated was showing up to work at the club on a Friday night, miserable because it was damn good to have the shift back and the money it brought in but unable to ignore the fact that working on a Friday night meant I wasn't curled up with Duo watching Sons of Anarchy, and having Alex standing by my station in the dressing room, arms crossed over his broad chest and grinning like a lunatic. "No." Alex nodded vigorously. "Yes. Oh yes." "I'm not doing it." I wasn't in the mood - hell, I was never in the mood, but I really wasn't in the mood now. "C'mon, babe, it'll be fun," he wheedled. Babe. I couldn't help but think of Duo. "Fun for you," I growled, and Alex chuckled and shrugged, unrepentant. "Well, yeah. But we'll both make out like pirates on the tips. C'mon. It's ten minutes of your life, Tro." Alex gave me a look that was supposed to be adorable and pleading. It wasn't. Still. Money was good. And hell, I was already miserable. Ten minutes of abject idiocy wasn't going to make it that much worse, was it? Alex saw the capitulation in my eyes, and he pumped the air with his fist. "Awesome. I'll tell Ninja to add our song to the list - you wanna do it during your first or second slot?" "First," I sighed. Might as well get it over with. I had three time slots on the stage that night, the first - now to be shared with Alex - in just twenty minutes. The second would be ninety minutes after that, giving me time to relax or troll for patrons who wanted a private show, and the last slot was the big midnight act that featured six of us onstage together. After that, I would likely hang around for another hour or so to give private dances before I called it a night. Alex grinned again, gave my shoulder a squeeze, and left the dressing room. I sighed and dropped my backpack onto the floor by my station. Inside were the costumes I had planned to wear for my first two sets that night - the finale costume was stored here, as was the costume for the act I did with Alex. Most strippers kept their costumes at home, because things tended to walk off when left at the club, and because a lot of us preferred to do our own laundry. I found my costume neatly in the storage cupboards at the back of the room. It smelled fresh, suspiciously fresh, and I rolled my eyes as I realized Alex must have taken it home to wash. He had probably - correctly - anticipated me trying to get out of it by claiming the costume was dirty. With a grimace, I picked up the ridiculous white and red hat, the sheer white stockings, red thong, red garter belt, white and red briefs and the white and red collar. It was stupid. So very, very stupid, and I had raised my eyebrows when Alex made me put it on the first time. It wasn't quite drag, but it wasn't not drag either. Exiles was a fairly eclectic club - there were usually one or two strippers who crossdressed for their acts, and the acts themselves ranged from merely smutty to fairly kinky. Even so, it was pretty tame, almost vanilla compared to some of the outside gigs I did. "You make a fucking gorgeous naughty nurse," Alex and Trant had assured me, Trant nodding enthusiastically while his eyes mentally undressed me out of the meager costume. I stripped out of my street clothes and grabbed the bottle of coconut oil out of my bag. Duo had lifted an eyebrow when he saw a half-empty bottle I had left out in my bathroom one night, and then grinned wickedly and proceeded to give me one hell of a massage. The next time he came over, he dropped off a full bottle of the stuff but didn't otherwise comment. I smoothed the oil over my body, making sure to cover as much of my skin as I could, until I looked in the mirror and was satisfied with the way I gleamed in the lights. I pulled on the red thong next, and was just starting to fasten the stockings to the garter belt when Alex came back into the dressing room. He had two drinks in hand, one cloudy amber and the other clear. He held both of them up, as though offering me a choice. I rolled my eyes and grabbed the Sidecar - what I assumed was a Sidecar - and drained it in one go. The bartender had not held back on the triple-sec, and I coughed a little. "Cheers," Alex chuckled. I glared at him, but went back to getting dressed. I pulled the garter belt with the attached stockings on - Cathy had taught me that trick. Putting the stockings on first is fucking stupid, and you'll pull a muscle trying to fasten the garter belt. Alex finished off his own drink and started to strip and oil himself up. His own costume - a green thong, green scrubs, labcoat and glasses - was the same one he used on outside gigs for any kind of medical sets. He had been hired to strip for a bunch of nurses once, celebrating the retirement of a colleague, and he had come back shell-shocked from the event and refused to say a word about what had happened. After the garter belt and stockings, I pulled on the white briefs with red trim and a red cross over the crotch. Then the white collar with little red crosses on the lapels, and finally the idiotic hat. I used gel to scrape my hair back from my face, and had to use bobby pins to secure the white nurse's cap. "Looking good, Barton," Alex assured me with a wink. I gave him a look. "When don't I?" He chuckled. "That's the spirit!" We could hear the sound of the audience cheering the finale of the act before ours, and Alex threw an arm around my shoulders. "Ready to break some hearts?" A poor choice of words, and Alex realized it as soon as he said it. "I mean-" "I'm ready to earn some money," I sighed. I wasn't in the mood to hear his clumsy apology. And, honestly, I needed to stop wallowing. Of course, I had been telling myself that for the past weeks with very, very little success. Miguel, a petite, wiry stripper who was Alex's current target for passive-aggressive attacks, came back into the dressing room. He was smiling and sweating from his set. I nodded to him, and he nodded back at me before his smile dissolved and he glared at Alex. Alex looked him over, lips curling in faint disgust as his gaze focused on Miguel's bulging groin, barely covered by a sequined blue thong. "Don't tell me you stuff that thing?" Alex sneered. He moved away from me and reached out as if to give Miguel a squeeze. The shorter man skidded away from him. "Alex," I warned him. I'd lived through the hazing myself and survived, but that didn't mean I liked seeing anyone else suffer. He rolled his eyes and looked back at me. "The little shit has to stuff his thong!" He sounded completely delighted by the discovery. Miguel, on the other hand, had a face so red I wondered if he was going to injure himself. I sighed. "He doesn't have to stuff it," I muttered. Both men looked at me, Miguel with confusion and Alex with a scowl of irritation for interfering. "What do you-" "Trust me, with his dick, he doesn't need to stuff anything. Well. He doesn't need to stuff his thong, at least." I smirked and looked over at Miguel. He was staring at me in shock, but he recovered before Alex looked over at him in disbelief. "You and the twig over there?" Alex asked in shock. "It's not a twig. A branch? No. A trunk. Definitely a trunk." Alex looked as if I was trying to convince him the world was flat. After a moment, he shook his head. "Tro, my dude, we have got to get you a man - a real man. You keep sleeping with all these..." He made a vague gesture towards Miguel. I arched an eyebrow at that, wondering just what kind of insult he was implying. Alex sighed. "Come on, we gotta get ready." He snarled at Miguel again as he walked past him and out of the dressing room. "Go sit in the audience and get some pointers on how real men do it." I lagged behind, waiting for Alex to leave. "I... Why did you lie for me?" Miguel asked. I shrugged. I had exchanged only a handful of words with Miguel - most of them on the first night he started work, when he tried to sit at my station and I told him to move his ass. "Alex is a dick," I said. Miguel nodded, and then gave me a considering look. "I... I mean, I'm not that small, you know. And I, uh, I prefer to bottom anyway, so if you-" I held a hand up to stop him from going any further. "You're cute," I assured him. "But you're not my type." I nodded towards his groin. "You really don't need to stuff your thong. But if you do, make it more subtle than that." Miguel was still staring at me as I left the dressing room. ~ * ~ |
