Chapter Text
one.
They’re all casual around each other, which is good for camaraderie and team bonding and pretty much everything else that’s necessary to turn 23 women into a cohesive unit. But it’s currently torture for Ashlyn, because it means that Ali has pretty much full range of motion, and that means she’s decided to use this particular moment to make Ashlyn wish she was never born, or was born in a different body, or was born with the ability to teleport into a different room where there was a little more privacy and a lot less clothing involved.
It’s only lunchtime too, and that’s the worst part of it, because she would understand a little laziness, a little handsy teasing under the table, if it was late and Ali was tired, because the second the woman became even slightly sleepy she became soft and automatically reached out for Ashlyn, tugging her closer in a way that was both intimate and innocent.
Just to be clear: this is not intimate or innocent.
This is Ali’s hand under the table, one knuckle pressing its way up and down the inseam of Ashlyn’s jeans with enough pressure to make everything in her lower body throb. She's doing pretty well, taking sizable bites of her sandwich and swallowing smoothly, reaching for her water and only shooting Ali the tiniest glare, which gives her the tiniest inch of pride. Then Ali unfurls her clenched hand, fingertips grazing a different area of the inseam, and Ashlyn’s hips buck slightly, unconsciously forward, face flushing with the rush the minuscule motion sent down her legs.
“Krieger.” Ashlyn’s voice is too low and too strained to be even remotely appropriate for the moment, but thank God for Kelley O’Hara, who is currently trying to prove her dominance in flipping spoons in spinning arcs across the table and keeping the whole team enthralled. “Stop.”
Ali does stop, instead spreading her palm on the inside of her thigh, fingers brushing too high. She drums out a slight beat and Ashlyn is fucking squirming at this point, completely unsure of whether she wants the pressure to stop or just pick up the pace.
“Hey, ‘m not doing anything,” Ali murmurs, and her voice is so sugary sweet that Ashlyn has to close her eyes for a second, at which point Ali gives her leg one more squeeze before retracting her hand.
“I hate you.” Ashlyn tips her head up to the face the ceiling, and she swears she feels the ghost of a kiss on the sunburnt skin of her shoulder.
“No you don’t.” Then Ali is gone, leaving Ashlyn to slowly relax her legs and stop imagining dark hotel rooms and white sheets and hands everywhere, because that’s exactly what Ali wants and for once Ashlyn doesn’t want to give in. Not yet, at least.
two.
“You’re so fucking tense.” Ali is leaning against the lockers and Ashlyn is pointedly ignoring her and Becky, two seats away, is pointedly ignoring both of them. That’s something that will change quickly if Ali goes too far with all this, but Ali learned those lines long ago and now she just dances around them as if it’s all a game to her. Which it is, Ashlyn guesses, because this is all for fun now that they don’t actually have to sneak around, now that the intrigue is all fabricated. It would be silly, perhaps even laughable, if it weren’t for the way Ali’s eyes have darkened in the two seconds that she’s traced the whole of Ashlyn’s frame.
“Yeah.” Ashlyn rolls her shoulders, trying to keep her face from flushing again. “Lunch didn’t help.”
“Really?” Ali is adjusting her cleats and Ashlyn is averting her eyes because she sees Ali like this in the locker room all the time but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel new as hell every time she catches an extra glimpse of skin. “I always feel better after I eat. More loose.”
“Real funny, Alex.” She’s pretty sure she hears Becky swallow a laugh, and Ali takes a step closer, extending one hand for Ashlyn’s gloves. For no particular reason, she’s gained a rather sudden fondness in the last year for putting on Ashlyn’s gloves before training — not before games, as if this messes up their juju — and now Ashlyn wonders if it’s just because it gives her an extra handful of seconds to put their hands on each other before they take the pitch.
She tugs the left glove on, then the right, and her hands trace their way up her arm, fingers following the paths of each tattoo, which she must have memorized by now. That touch snakes up just under Ashlyn’s sleeve, and there’s something in the way that Ali loves to touch the skin that no one else sees, even if it’s just an inch of skin that’s normally covered by the shoulder of her jersey, that makes Ashlyn’s mouth go a little dry.
Ali takes a risk and takes a step forward, letting her knee knock into the inside of Ashlyn’s thigh and their fronts are almost pressed together, and she’s smirking upwards at Ashlyn with a hand light and delicate on her hip, and she doesn’t say anything because Becky is almost immediately barking at her over one shoulder to hurry it up, and she doesn’t need to say anything because Ashlyn’s heart rate has jumped to that of a hummingbird in a matter of seconds.
All that just from proximity. It’s amazing she’s still alive.
three.
It’s team dinner and there’s really nothing to add except that Ali’s hand has disappeared back under the table and this time she’s foregone the politeness of resting her grip on the curve of her thigh, instead she’s got the pads of her fingers all over that seam of her jeans and Ashlyn’s legs are aching from the way they’re pressed together to stop herself from shaking.
She tries to eat but all she can think of is the last time they made lasagna, which ended with Ashlyn bending Ali haphazardly over the kitchen island and finishing her with three fingers in that quick, dirty way that she craves at the most random and inopportune times.
(they burnt the bread but honestly neither of them cared)
Now Ashlyn is clenching her fists and she’s not breathing and she’s wondering if they should eat lasagna for dinner more often.
four.
She should wait, because they have a movie night that isn’t quite mandatory but definitely isn’t optional in thirty minutes and that’s not really the right amount of time for all of this, both too much and too little. But Ashlyn is past the point of being choosy, and honestly she just needs contact, needs a release, needs something besides what they’ve been doing so far today.
Her opportunity comes fleetingly and she seizes it, walking into the elevator on the heels of Kling and Ali, who are talking animatedly about something involving defensive strategy. This doesn’t keep Ali from leaning back to wink at Ashlyn, which is about all she can handle for the next 24-hour period.
“Kling, out.” There’s a brief moment when Kling is standing wide eyed, her hands held up and splayed out in an almost-cliche image of confusion, but the drawling “What?” dies on her lips when she sees the way Ashlyn is looking at Ali. She gets out of the damn elevator.
Purely out of respect to her friend, Ashlyn waits until the doors have closed all the way before she pushes Ali up against the wall.
In their early days of dating, Ashlyn had always been gentle, her hands soft and her grip delicate, because Ali felt like a breath of fresh air and she wanted to hold her in the same lovely way that Ali held her heart. Then she had her first experience of Ali pinning her to a bed, learned that her diction slipped to a decidedly filthy level the second her clothes came off, realized that the woman was pure muscle and pure aggression and pure want. And that changed things.
The truth was that Ashlyn had never been quite capable of handling Ali. At least when it came to this. Because Ali was sweet and her smile was wide and contagious and her laugh made a whole room shake and she was pure and she was the simple, uncomplicated conglomeration of everything good that Ashlyn had ever seen in this world. Ashlyn understood this about Ali, fell in love with this, with who she was and how she lived and interacted with the world around her.
Then she fell into bed with the girl the first time and her whole world was changed, perhaps wasn’t flipped upside down but was solidly tossed onto its side and kicked around a bit. She’s been playing catch-up ever since.
Today is yet another day when she’s running behind, so she does her best to even the score, pressed them to the wall and not wasting time getting her leg between Ali’s thighs and getting her mouth on her throat and holding her arms to the wall with fingers curling into her biceps.
The elevator ride lasts 22 seconds, which Ashlyn counts out as Ali’s pulse quickens under her tongue, and then they’re breaking apart and the walk back to her bedroom is deliciously short. In the seconds between the door opening and the door closing, she makes a split second decision — rush into this or drag it out?
She goes with option two. She pins Ali down and doesn’t let her come up for air, keeps her in this perfect in between of kissing hard and keeping clothes on, creating enough friction without ever really giving up any ground. It’s minutes before she dips her hands under that flimsy little t-shirt to run her fingernails across the smooth edges of Ali’s ribcage, and even longer until she takes the shirt off, and at this point Ali is squirming and cursing and none of it is particularly quiet or subtle.
Her name is on Ali’s lips but Ashlyn is taking this slow because, if she’s being honest, she’s mostly in this for revenge right now. She has no intention of finishing anything, instead tugging at Ali’s earlobe with her teeth and leaving a mark precisely half an inch below her collarbone before starting her way slowly down her torso. It takes agonizingly long, and Ashlyn knows it, knows it by the way Ali’s hips bucks her hips and winds her hand through her hair and grips down hard on the sheets.
Ali also tells her, of course, loudly and without mincing words.
“I swear to fucking god, if you don’t hurry it the fuck up—“ Ali’s breath is strangled and Ashlyn rests her chin on the ridge of Ali’s hip.
“Baby, I’m sorry, we’ve got to go to the movie.” Ali is sitting up and there’s so much lust-filled rage in her eyes that Ashlyn has to laugh, even as fingernails dig into her shoulder.
“If you fucking think—“ Ashlyn stands, her face relatively composed besides the slightest hint of a smirk, and she swears she thinks Ali is going to knock her over.
“Have you ever tried to skip Megan Rapinoe Movie Night?” There’s a crinkle to Ali’s nose that suggests that she knows Ashlyn is right, in some sense of the word, but also knows that she’s equally full of shit. Ali rolls her eyes and walks out of the room, still tugging her shirt back on, and Ashlyn’s laugh echoes loudly. Her legs still ache, of course, but at least she knows the feeling is mutual.
five.
They make it through twenty minutes of the movie.
It takes two texts, both of which are long enough to make Ashlyn dig her nails into her palm but succinct enough to make the point blunt and obvious. Two minutes later, she has a phone call to take. Ali doesn’t even make an excuse, just stands and follows, and ten minutes later they’re all tangled up, with Ali back on top and in control.
“Do you think they were sketched out by us leaving?” Ashlyn asks, and she’s answered by a series of kisses from her jaw to her collarbone and a twist of fingers that leave her particularly breathless.
“Who gives a fuck?” Ashlyn gets the point and she shuts up, stays quiet until she can’t stay quiet anymore.
And dear God Ali teases her badly, but she never fails to make up for it, with her mouth and her hands and the way she sighs into the crook of her neck, and mostly in the way she holds on, for minutes and then hours afterwards, her hands returned to their gentleness, her eyes full of warmth, soft whispers of love pouring off her lips as she falls asleep.