X-Men Fic: Charles/Moira
Jul. 4th, 2011 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI have written Charles/Moira fic. Why? Nobody knows.
Title: "Reinvention"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairing: Charles/Moira
Word Count: ~5700
Rating: R for sex, talk of sex, disturbing themes.
Warnings: Reference to domestic violence and sexual violence and ableist triggers. (This is the most heavily warned story I've ever written.)
Summary: Charles and Moira's arduous journey to sexual friendship.
A/N: This story comes from a desire to find some continuity between movieverse Moira and comicsverse Moira. To that end, I've spliced pieces of comicsverse backstory onto movieverse Moira. I lightened up her past of abuse a lot, yet it still manages to remain rather shocking.
"Reinvention"
From the porch, Charles watched Moira out on the lawn, knocking her students on their arses. It had been a smart move to hire her, a triple--no, quadruple--win: it gave her a job now that the C.I.A. had sacked her; it gave him an excuse to restore her memory; it gave the school an excellent instructor; and since Moira had decided to pursue a second bachelor's with a focus in genetics, it gave her a convenient tutor.
Quintuple win: it gave him a friend, now Raven was gone, and Erik.
At this moment, though, watching her in action, he couldn't shake his awareness of himself in his chair, a year away--a world away--from the days when he'd trained with them. Thoughts like that were poison, but they happened all the same. Her flowing kicks made him feel defenseless even though he wasn't. Indeed, as time went on, his mind just grew stronger. He could picture himself, two hundred years from now, a giant brain oozing goo on the seat of a silvery, floating wheelchair (probably the remains of Erik). When he looked at Moira, he wanted his body back.
***
Once upon a time, Charles had waltzed his way through women. He'd known when they'd wanted him and known what he wanted: fun, release, company, and no complications, no wounded feelings driving knives into his brain. Knowing who to pick and when been almost embarrassingly easy.
Now, he was a different man, one most women excluded from the realm of sexual beings. He himself wasn't sure what he wanted now. At times his body seemed an alien device. Masturbation sometimes left a pleasant feeling in his belly, but mostly it struck him as ridiculous, like practicing for some marathon he was never going to run. Yet he ached to be touched again. It bewildered him to realize he hadn't held a woman in a year and a half. Some nights, he skimmed the children's minds when they had sex, not to spy on their personal lives: he did his best to minimize what he read of their thoughts; he just wanted to feel that way again.
And Moira was attracted to him. She had been before the injury--in a passing, distracted way. Now, over their evening talks of genetics, education, politics, her attachment to him had deepened. She fantasized about him sometimes (though she fantasized about him the way he'd been before). In the old days, he would have...
He would have drunkenly told her her hair was groovy within two seconds of their having met. These days, he bided his time and reeled her in with smiles and penetrating gazes, dinners and discussion of the wonders of meiosis. He waited months, until he was more than certain that if he asked her to sleep with him, she would say yes.
And still his heart pounded the night he took her hand and found her eyes said, "Moira, I would consider it a great honor if you would join me in my bed."
She smiled shyly. "I'd like that, Charles."
***
At first, it seemed as easy as water to the sea. Moira showed up at his door in a robe that covered a conservative but form-fitting nightgown, dark blue, a good match for her hair, which he told her. She asked if she could help him undress and get into bed, and he told her thanks but he had the drill down. So she slipped under the covers and waited, looking (feeling) small, like a fairy child. He arranged himself on his back and drew her into his arms, across his chest, basking a little in her admiration of his biceps.
She hadn't asked him what he wanted or what he was capable of. She wondered, but she wasn't wondering very hard, and he liked her for that: that they could simply be together. He'd forgotten the warm softness of someone's else's skin; he loved her slender arm around his ribs and her breasts beneath blue nylon. They kissed a while, first gently, then harder.
And after a few minutes of mounting nerves, she asked the question. They had quiet little conversation about how he could get an erection, but typically not for very long, and couldn't reach orgasm.
"It seems to me," he said, "that the easiest way for us to fully enjoy each other is for me to pleasure you and feel it through your mind--if you'll allow me."
She was silent, but her thoughts balked. Well naturally, by any normal standards the suggestion was bizarre. On the other hand, she was reflecting, she hadn't gone to bed with him in the expectation of textbook sex. "Okay," she said at last.
The talk had broken their momentum, but self-conscious at first, they began to stumble into a rhythm again. He waited till he felt her lose herself in his kisses, then slid his hand down her belly and between her legs-- And killed her arousal utterly. Oh, she went on pretending, but the pleasure blinked off like a lightbulb. Her arms, like the tentacles of an octopus, ensnared him; he failed and, holding her away from him, blurted, "Moira, hang on. We're not going about this the right way," a rubbish thing to say, but it was what came out.
Her anxiety ballooned. She pulled back and looked down at him, dim in the glow of the nightlight, her frown conveying great concentration. "I'm sorry, Charles. What did I do?"
"You didn't do anything." Comforting smile, hand on her arm. "You're wonderful. It's just, I can tell you're nervous. And so am I. And we just--I think we need to slow down."
She stared a moment, then flopped on her back, a hand on her forehead, weary and not too far from tears. Everything he said was digging him in deeper, and Charles should not be like that; he knew how to handle people. He considered closing his mind to block the hurt, but he didn't want to fly this blind without access to her feelings.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I'm not very good at it. I guess that's obvious to a telepath."
He reached out and stroked her hair. "Moira, listen to me: you are very good at it; it's just nerves."
She shook her head and looked away, not wanting to talk and wondering how much of her he could see. He could see damage, of course. He didn't need to probe for that; even a non-telepath could see it. Thinking back, he'd always felt a blemish in Moira. It lay on her like a treasured piece of shadow. He'd assumed she'd had a painful childhood; who hadn't? Beyond that, he'd given it no thought. She'd been far away from it, thinking of covert operations and nuclear war. The past was dealt with. But now it had shot back.
He found he shared her weariness. He'd spent his life skipping clear of others' neuroses, making sure those hollow graspings were pointed well away from him. He considered suggesting that they call it a night, but that was off the table. It wasn't what a friend would do. A friend would... When he thought about it, he hadn't always fled neurosis. With Erik, he hadn't even considered it. Erik had worn his damage beautifully. Then, why was hers grating, pedestrian? Just because she didn't happen to be the one his soul had climbed into?
Her voice, quiet, caught him by surprise. "I just have some bad associations with sex."
He was thinking this out the wrong way. Dear God, how self-centered he'd been. And the moment she didn't perform as he wanted, he was half inclined to order her out of his bed. And that, he realized, was exactly what she feared: performance pressure, the very quality of her anxiety.
"Moira, I'm sorry." Hand still on her hair. "What I said to you was thoughtless. I made you responsible for not only your pleasure but mine as well, and that isn't fair, especially not between two people under such... strange circumstances, who are just starting to learn how to please each other."
She gave the ceiling an ambivalent smile. "It's not your fault, Charles. I just--I had a bad marriage; that's the short version, and I guess I never got used to it--sex--after that." She sat up. "I should go before I lower the tone of the evening any more." Again, the tears hovered close. He fought the urge to pluck them out of her head; he could make her feel peaceful, but it wouldn't be for her. It would just bury her problems and leave her confused. He couldn't do that to her just to ease his own discomfort.
He looked up at her face, lost in a strip of shadow. "Please stay." His palm pressed her hand. "Keep me company."
She squeezed his hand. "You sure?"
He let his expression answer, and the gentle tug with which he drew her back down under the covers. He put an arm around her and pulled her against his chest. He felt like he was in James Joyce's, "The Dead," having waited, as Gabriel waited hours and hours to flee the stuffy party and make love to his wife, only to find that for hours and hours, she'd been lost in the memory of her dead lover. The story had fascinated Charles because that unawareness of another's thoughts ran so counter to his experience. And yet tonight, he understood how it wrenched the guts to be pulled up against one's own fantasy by the reality of another human being. It was a gift, he told himself.
***
"I got married right out of high school." Moira sat on a low-hanging branch, her ham sandwich drooping.
Graced with a warm evening, they'd escaped outside for supper, well away from the mansion and the children. They'd ended up near the main gate, just a few feet off the road, not the most secluded place for a picnic but the easiest route for the wheelchair.
Charles found something touching about the way her knees poked girlishly out of a lavender dress. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" she asked.
He leaned in and held her eyes. "If you're ready to tell me."
She surprised him with a rueful laugh, her moods in such flux he couldn't follow. "I haven't talked about it in years. I told myself I was over it, but--" She hesitated, falling back over her life. "So anyway, Joe's parents were friends of the family, and he had a bright political future; everybody said it was like a fairytale. It was um..." She floundered.
Charles closed off his mind. He'd got seasick in the pitch and plunge of her emotions, and he didn't want to see her past. It was right he know about it, that he be a friend and listen. But he had no obligation to see it, not when each glimpse he failed to shut out was a corkscrew in his brain.
The quiet closed in like a cellar door, he alone in his thoughts and she in hers. "We were married for two years; everything but the first, I don't know, three or four months was pretty bad. Bad to worse. I don't really want to go into gory details--maybe you can see..."
"I'm not looking."
"It ended when, well, I ended up in a coma for a week. I remember when I woke up, I saw these pink dahlias--I can see them right in front of my face." She raised her palm up to her eyes. "And my mom was there, and I asked her where they came from, and my mom said, 'Maizie,' (that's her nickname for me), 'Maizie, you're not going back.' I mean, I know it didn't happen exactly that way because the first thing my mom did when I woke up was rush over to my bed and praise God I was awake and so on. But still, that's how I remember it."
Her eyes had fallen to her sandwich. "Sometimes I get so angry at her that she didn't say it sooner. It's not as if she didn't know. She used to tell me-- My dad was a nice enough guy, but he definitely ran the house, you know? She just did what he said. She used to tell me, 'You just need to learn to use a little finesse. Let a man believe that he's getting his way and you can wrap him around your little finger.'" She smiled. "I was never very good at finesse."
It was not unlike being inside her mind the way his throat tightened and his head hurt on her behalf. It unnerved him that he hadn't suspected anything like that degree of brutality. Ordinarily, he'd have seen, but she didn't show it, not the way most people did, even her anxiety in bed hadn't been as extreme as that.
"Moira." Her head shot up as if she'd forgotten he was there. "You are one of the strongest people I have ever met to have been through so much and let it mar you so little, to be so confident, so unafraid--"
"I'm not--"
"I know you're not. It's left you with fears, with scars, of course." He leaned toward her. "But I have spent my lifetime seeing inside people's thoughts. The type of experience you're describing: the psychological disruption is usually so much greater."
She smiled wanly. "Years and years of therapy."
"Even so."
"And it was more than ten years ago." She bit into her sandwich. "And it's not really as dramatic as it sounds. It was bad. I'm not saying it wasn't, but when you say, 'My husband put me in a coma,' it conjures up certain images. And the fact is, he didn't really hit me that hard. I just--it just knocked me off balance and I hit the coffee table wrong."
Charles stared. "Moira, do you hear yourself?"
"Well, what do you want me to say, Charles?" He could hear the anger in her voice, even through the silence. "That it was hell? That he was nothing but a monster? Is that somehow supposed to make me feel better about my taste in men? I'm not saying he wasn't wrong; of course, he was wrong. I'm just trying to have some objectivity."
They sat wordless. Moira ate the rest of her sandwich; Charles studied his.
"Anyway," said Moira, wadding up her napkin, "I owe--owed--my job in C.I.A. to Joe, that is, his uncle in the House got me an in. Would you like grape juice?"
She owed her job in the C.I.A. to the man who beat her into a coma; the loss of that job she owed to Charles. Funny old world, he thought, unamused.
"Charles? Grape juice?" She held up the thermos.
"No thanks."
She poured some into the lid and drank it off like whisky. For a while, she fingered the lid. "The rough part about being involved with someone that screwed up is that it makes you wonder what's wrong with you. That's really so much harder than anything they actually do to you. I spent most of my marriage second-guessing every word I said, every tone of voice. Afterward, I'd replay every little thing I did, over and over, trying to pick out what I did to set him off."
"Surely, you must know you didn't do anything."
"Of course, I do. I'm talking about back then. Now--oh boy--now I wonder what was wrong with me that made me stay. How could I have been that stupid? I always saw myself as a smart girl. Why did I pick him? What inside me was so off? I never loved him. I told myself I did, but I never did. And am I still that good at lying to myself? What if I waste years of my life on more lies?"
Was she talking about him? Charles cracked his mind open. No, not him, he realized with relief. Just life.
"It's like you said," she was saying, "things like that, they leave a lot of damage. I guess they start with damage too. And it's nice of you to say that I've gotten past it well--I like to think I have--but it's like... I'm china cup that got smashed and glued back together. I see little, yellow glue lines everywhere, and I wonder if the cup can hold water. Or is it just a cracked cup from now on--just--"
"You're not." He wanted to take her hand, but he couldn't reach that far and he'd lose the moment if he lumbered his chair in her direction, and if he held out his hand, she'd have to get up and come to him and stand over him, and they'd feel like idiots, so he didn't.
"Well, I was pretty cracked last night. I really told myself it was behind me."
Charles ran a hand through his hair, fingering what he needed to say. "Moira--this is a bizarre thing to say, but you don't feel like rape victim." She flinched at the words, and he shut his mind again.
"You feel a lot of them?"
Her question momentarily confused him.
She must have read his expression. "I mean, do you go through your life picking up thoughts like that? That must be awful."
"I pick up a lot of things in passing. I've learned to ignore most of it. It's not as awful as you might think." Like being put in a coma. "But it's common, yeah. It's so bloody common. And--" How to describe the sensation? "It wrecks trusts; it makes people expect to be hurt, not just in bed: in general. I didn't sense that from you. You just... were worried you wouldn't please me." How sick it was that some part of him felt unmanned that she hadn't been afraid. "Of course, I realize I don't make a particularly formidable specimen." An unhelpful, self-pitying thing to say, but apparently he had said it.
Frowning that Moira frown again, she got up and grasped his arm, sinking down next to the wheel of his chair. She sank too far, so that she peaked up over the armrest, chin almost resting on her hand, like a chipmunk. Nothing fit anymore. "Charles, you are the most powerful person I have ever met. You could kill me with your brain; don't think I don't know that." (Giant chair brain.) "But I do trust you. It would never occur to me not to."
"Thank you, Moira." He kissed her hand.
She gave up on clinging to his chair and sat in the grass, tucking her knees to the side. "I mean, I don't trust you not to read to my mind." He smiled faintly. "But I trust you where it counts." She fell into thought. He still kept his mind closed--to be safe. "The fact is Joe wasn't sexually violent, in particular." In particular, he thought. "When he was angry at me, mostly, that was when he didn't want me. Mostly... the hard part is that it tarnishes everything. I had good times with Joe. I did. I can remember some if I think hard, like we went to see An American in Paris and afterward--it must have been about midnight--we went to the park and pretended we could dance like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, and we giggled and giggled like kids. But when I think of it, it's like I'm looking at someone else's old photograph. I can see it, but I can't feel anything. It's like everything between us that was good didn't count. I know I had good sex with Joe, but it's all covered with cobwebs. In the end, I just couldn't think of anything but, 'Why am I in bed with this man?' I got really good at waiting for it to be over, and I guess I forgot how to do anything else."
***
They spent that night together, just to sleep. Moira was a knot of pain clenching and unclenching--inevitable, a perfectly normal response to the dredging she had gone through. But it frayed Charles till finally he closed his mind so he could sleep, and yet he never slept soundly so tightly shut. It was tense and lonely locked inside himself.
The next two nights, they slept apart.
***
In the midst of their review of her Civics course curriculum, she said, "You know what I like about Alex?"
"What's that?"
"He's really good at not showing his anger. I'm sure he's got enough, given his background, and he can overcorrect into sullen, and I don't doubt he's too repressed and so on, but selfishly I find him soothing." She tapped her pen on her clipboard. "I never really thought of it this way before, but one reason I've steered clear of making of close friends is that I didn't want to know people well enough to see them angry. I told myself it was easier in the C.I.A. not to have close friends, not to have to lie about your career all the time, but the truth is I overreact to anger. I'm not jumpy by nature; I could be out in the field on a job and be perfectly collected knowing that someone might shoot me dead in the next thirty seconds. But if someone snaps at me, I freeze up. I feel like I'm about to get hit by a train."
"Erik's exactly the same way," he said suddenly. "Absolutely fearless in the face of impending nuclear disaster, but if you caught him off his guard, when he was sitting with a book over a martini, say, the slightest things would frighten him. Like a delivery truck drove up once, and I swear he jumped a mile."
Moira frowned.
"Sorry, I don't mean to say it's exactly the same, of course."
She nodded, still lost in thought.
***
That night, in his arms again, she talked a little more. "It doesn't make sense that I'm still such a mess about all this. It's hardly bothered me in years. I know--I hope I know--I won't get myself into that kind of situation again, so why can't I let go of how stupid I was?"
"Because you hold yourself to a high standard?"
She didn't seem to hear him. "It's so complicated. There's no sight like hindsight, but when you're in the midst of making choices about your life, it's so hard to see what's really happening. Joe wasn't all bad. He was a good Councilman; he did good work lobbying for services for the poor. And he was funny; he did great Cary Grant impersonations. He went with me to the vet when we had to put down my old cat. And it's so easy to tell yourself it's okay because of all those things, that you're as lucky as anyone can expect, that every relationship has troubles. That it was understandable that he got mad because politics is a lot of pressure. That love means loving someone despite their flaws. You tell yourself you can help them."
Charles didn't like that line of thought because it rang too true. He, too, had fallen for someone who had hit him, someone because of whom he'd never walk again. The circumstances were completely different, but... she was right it made you wonder what wishful egotism made you think if you just had faith enough you could fix a broken person. Of course, Erik truly was a good person, immense and complex, a decent person, but... by Moira's own admission, Joe hadn't been all bad. Still, they didn't remotely compare, except... it was really all one continuum, from good to worse, loud to quiet, stupid, smart, all human beings graphed somewhere on the gridlines of one human nature, no categorical distinction, not between Joe and Erik, not between Joe and Charles, Erik and Moira. Charles re-experienced that every time he looked in someone's head. The only way to understand someone was to be capable of feeling what they felt. If he looked in Joe MacTaggert's head, he would understand him.
He rubbed his cheek against her auburn hair. "You're right; it's complicated."
***
The next day, Moira got her period. It brought home to Charles how transitory his liaisons with women had been how rarely he'd encountered that consideration.
It made him sad how relieved she was to have--as she saw it--a short vacation from sexual expectations. It was sad, too, how eagerly he leapt on her announcement to insert a presumption that "I expect it will be nice to spend a few days back in the comfort of your own room." She did think it would be nice, but the words struck her as a rejection too. Yet he needed a vacation from trying to figure out what to say. Nothing he said came out helpful; it was almost like talking to Raven.
***
A good part of him hoped that they would drift back to being just friends. He'd stepped in a hornet's nest (if he'd had a foot to step), and he wanted to get away. For a couple of weeks, he had his wish; they scarcely alluded to any of it. That proved extremely helpful. Day by day, Moira suffered her cycles of memory and self-comdemnation, and day by day, the edges softened, as any song played over enough fades from one's awareness. Charles, too, felt his tension fade. They began to enjoy each other's company again.
By the evening she looked up over her fillet of sole and asked, "Could we try it again?" he was ready to say yes.
***
It felt better. For a couple of nights, they made out in a friendly way without trying for more. Their moods were reasonably good. They lay hand in hand and chatted.
"The children are wondering what it is we get up to," he confided.
"If only they could see us now."
He smiled and voiced a random question: "Why did you keep your married name after the divorce?"
She hesitated. "I don't know. I guess it's what you do." She thought a moment. "You know, the C.I.A. likes its female agents divorced. It shows that you have things you care about more than domestic bliss, so you're a relatively low marriage flight risk, and it's also code for 'not a virgin and have been around the block,' which is obviously preferable."
After a moment, Charles broke into a laugh.
Moira got up on her elbow with half a smile. "That's funny?"
"Evidently."
***
Slowly, the passion regrew, like the foliage in the spring. Three weeks or so after the whole thing began, they were about as horny as they had been that first night before it went downhill. And now, once again, it was Charles getting nervous, back up against not knowing just what he was able to do with her.
Finally they settled on trying it out with Charles on his back and Moira straddling him. The pressure of her knees against his ribs was pleasant. But the rest of it kept going wrong. Between the two of them, they managed to get him hard, sort of, and get her wet, somewhat, but the damn thing just would not go in. He started to feel sorry for Moira, who was maneuvering with great concentration on top of him, and it was absurd that he couldn't move with her. He broke into a sweat in frustration.
"Sorry," she said at last, sitting back across his thighs and pushing her hair out of her eyes. "I've never been very good in this position. Honestly, I think I've only managed to get this off this way once."
He rubbed her knee absently. "I don't think you've ever been in this position." The words came out a little sharp. "I don't blame you; you're having to do all the fucking work." His face felt beet red. "It's ridiculous." His voice caught on the last words, and tears welled, and this wasn't helpful. He knew better than to feel sorry for himself. Nothing good ever came of that. And more than that, Charles Xavier had to set a good example. People were looking to him; he didn't have the luxury of breaking down like some scared adolescent. And now he had Moira feeling sorry for him too.
She lay down by his side and put an arm around him. With a desperate fishy flop, he rolled into her embrace and clung, sobbing and unable to quit. "Jesus God," he choked out.
After an eternity, the sobs wore out, and they huddled together and slept.
***
He awoke with a headache and a stuffed-up nose but calmer, embarrassed, but grateful that Moira was there. Pensive, she tied on her robe and went to look out the window at the dawn.
As he was sitting up, groggy, she turned and said quietly, "I am really sorry I shot you."
He should have seen that coming, would have if he hadn't been so caught up in himself. "It was Erik's fault."
"It was pretty stupid to take him on with bullets."
"It was the only means at your disposal."
She sat by the edge of the bed. "Some means."
He took her hand. "Moira, if the choices for stopping Erik were his dying or me getting shot, then I'm glad I got shot. It's so much better for me than the alternative."
She gave him the intent Moira frown and then kissed him hard, reading some sort of valiant self-sacrifice in a statement that, in fact, was wholly selfish. But he received the gift of her admiration and kissed her back, and if part of him was kissing Erik, he didn't have to show her.
***
The first time he made her come, it was much as he'd originally envisioned. It pleased him to get the affirmation that he was still good with his hands. The only difference from that first night was that now she trusted him better, trusted him not to have expectations she couldn't meet. He didn't ask if he could share her pleasure (that was already understood), but he let his gasps show her how much he did.
It was a strange, echoing orgasm, unlike the oneness he associated with masturbation and completely distinct from the duality that had defined the entirety of his experience with lovers. It rang louder, too, than listening in on others in another wing; it was complemented in his own flesh, and it was for him, and rang through his body like a deep bell tolling invisible across an ocean fog.
The both felt triumphant and sleepy. For a minute, Moira faded, sprawled on top of him. Then suddenly, she spiked with adrenaline-- distress? joy? the confusion of undifferentiated overwhelm. She got up on an elbow and looked down at him. He caressed her cheek in wordless comfort.
"Bad sex is so much easier," she said. "It's like going to the gynecologist. You take off your clothes and lie there, feeling awkward and uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then you put your clothes back on and go about your life. But good sex..." She shook her head. "I don't know what to do with this."
He held her head in his hands and kissed her: her lips, her cheek, her neck. His hands smelled like her.
"I love you," she said, an almost-whisper against his ear: not in love with you, though in that moment it came close: just love, thank goodness.
"I love you too," he said between kisses, reflecting he could squeak that into being truth. She had, after all, come to mean a great deal to him. She was the sort of person who might have meant more if that piece of his heart hadn't already been vowed away.
***
For fall term, she got accepted to Stanford, which was only proper given the prodigious affinity she showed for genetics. "I remember liking biology in high school," she'd once said. "But when I went to college to train for the C.I.A., poly sci just made more sense." Now she'd rediscovered the path the clearly made for her.
As he helped her compress clothes into a suitcase, she said, "Sometimes I can't help but think it's quixotic to make a career change this radical at my age."
He laughed. "Quixotic would be squandering your gift on anything else. You visualize the molecular world as if it were its own metropolis. It puts me in mind of the reflections of Barbara McClintock on 'seeing' transposons."
Moira stopped folding and stared at him. "Really?"
"There is no question in my mind that your researches will one day far outstrip mine." And even if he based much of that prediction on the fact that he'd chosen to teach instead, that didn't make the statement any less sincere.
"Thank you," she said thoughtfully.
***
It didn't make it easier to let her go. The loneliness loomed even before her departure. She was the only one here he truly considered a peer, the only one it seemed possible to invite into his bed. He wanted to keep her but couldn't; it was a theme in his life.
"I'll visit," she said for the umpteenth time as Alex loaded her bags into the green Mercedes.
"There will always be a home for you here, my friend," said Charles.
With everyone standing around to say goodbye, there wasn't much more they could say--or much more to say, really. She hugged Hank and Alex and Sean and what seemed a long line of students. Last, she kissed Charles lightly. And then she drove away but not, he told himself, forever. A true friendship was too precious to allow it to be lost.
Title: "Reinvention"
Fandom: X-Men (movieverse)
Characters/Pairing: Charles/Moira
Word Count: ~5700
Rating: R for sex, talk of sex, disturbing themes.
Warnings: Reference to domestic violence and sexual violence and ableist triggers. (This is the most heavily warned story I've ever written.)
Summary: Charles and Moira's arduous journey to sexual friendship.
A/N: This story comes from a desire to find some continuity between movieverse Moira and comicsverse Moira. To that end, I've spliced pieces of comicsverse backstory onto movieverse Moira. I lightened up her past of abuse a lot, yet it still manages to remain rather shocking.
"Reinvention"
From the porch, Charles watched Moira out on the lawn, knocking her students on their arses. It had been a smart move to hire her, a triple--no, quadruple--win: it gave her a job now that the C.I.A. had sacked her; it gave him an excuse to restore her memory; it gave the school an excellent instructor; and since Moira had decided to pursue a second bachelor's with a focus in genetics, it gave her a convenient tutor.
Quintuple win: it gave him a friend, now Raven was gone, and Erik.
At this moment, though, watching her in action, he couldn't shake his awareness of himself in his chair, a year away--a world away--from the days when he'd trained with them. Thoughts like that were poison, but they happened all the same. Her flowing kicks made him feel defenseless even though he wasn't. Indeed, as time went on, his mind just grew stronger. He could picture himself, two hundred years from now, a giant brain oozing goo on the seat of a silvery, floating wheelchair (probably the remains of Erik). When he looked at Moira, he wanted his body back.
***
Once upon a time, Charles had waltzed his way through women. He'd known when they'd wanted him and known what he wanted: fun, release, company, and no complications, no wounded feelings driving knives into his brain. Knowing who to pick and when been almost embarrassingly easy.
Now, he was a different man, one most women excluded from the realm of sexual beings. He himself wasn't sure what he wanted now. At times his body seemed an alien device. Masturbation sometimes left a pleasant feeling in his belly, but mostly it struck him as ridiculous, like practicing for some marathon he was never going to run. Yet he ached to be touched again. It bewildered him to realize he hadn't held a woman in a year and a half. Some nights, he skimmed the children's minds when they had sex, not to spy on their personal lives: he did his best to minimize what he read of their thoughts; he just wanted to feel that way again.
And Moira was attracted to him. She had been before the injury--in a passing, distracted way. Now, over their evening talks of genetics, education, politics, her attachment to him had deepened. She fantasized about him sometimes (though she fantasized about him the way he'd been before). In the old days, he would have...
He would have drunkenly told her her hair was groovy within two seconds of their having met. These days, he bided his time and reeled her in with smiles and penetrating gazes, dinners and discussion of the wonders of meiosis. He waited months, until he was more than certain that if he asked her to sleep with him, she would say yes.
And still his heart pounded the night he took her hand and found her eyes said, "Moira, I would consider it a great honor if you would join me in my bed."
She smiled shyly. "I'd like that, Charles."
***
At first, it seemed as easy as water to the sea. Moira showed up at his door in a robe that covered a conservative but form-fitting nightgown, dark blue, a good match for her hair, which he told her. She asked if she could help him undress and get into bed, and he told her thanks but he had the drill down. So she slipped under the covers and waited, looking (feeling) small, like a fairy child. He arranged himself on his back and drew her into his arms, across his chest, basking a little in her admiration of his biceps.
She hadn't asked him what he wanted or what he was capable of. She wondered, but she wasn't wondering very hard, and he liked her for that: that they could simply be together. He'd forgotten the warm softness of someone's else's skin; he loved her slender arm around his ribs and her breasts beneath blue nylon. They kissed a while, first gently, then harder.
And after a few minutes of mounting nerves, she asked the question. They had quiet little conversation about how he could get an erection, but typically not for very long, and couldn't reach orgasm.
"It seems to me," he said, "that the easiest way for us to fully enjoy each other is for me to pleasure you and feel it through your mind--if you'll allow me."
She was silent, but her thoughts balked. Well naturally, by any normal standards the suggestion was bizarre. On the other hand, she was reflecting, she hadn't gone to bed with him in the expectation of textbook sex. "Okay," she said at last.
The talk had broken their momentum, but self-conscious at first, they began to stumble into a rhythm again. He waited till he felt her lose herself in his kisses, then slid his hand down her belly and between her legs-- And killed her arousal utterly. Oh, she went on pretending, but the pleasure blinked off like a lightbulb. Her arms, like the tentacles of an octopus, ensnared him; he failed and, holding her away from him, blurted, "Moira, hang on. We're not going about this the right way," a rubbish thing to say, but it was what came out.
Her anxiety ballooned. She pulled back and looked down at him, dim in the glow of the nightlight, her frown conveying great concentration. "I'm sorry, Charles. What did I do?"
"You didn't do anything." Comforting smile, hand on her arm. "You're wonderful. It's just, I can tell you're nervous. And so am I. And we just--I think we need to slow down."
She stared a moment, then flopped on her back, a hand on her forehead, weary and not too far from tears. Everything he said was digging him in deeper, and Charles should not be like that; he knew how to handle people. He considered closing his mind to block the hurt, but he didn't want to fly this blind without access to her feelings.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I'm not very good at it. I guess that's obvious to a telepath."
He reached out and stroked her hair. "Moira, listen to me: you are very good at it; it's just nerves."
She shook her head and looked away, not wanting to talk and wondering how much of her he could see. He could see damage, of course. He didn't need to probe for that; even a non-telepath could see it. Thinking back, he'd always felt a blemish in Moira. It lay on her like a treasured piece of shadow. He'd assumed she'd had a painful childhood; who hadn't? Beyond that, he'd given it no thought. She'd been far away from it, thinking of covert operations and nuclear war. The past was dealt with. But now it had shot back.
He found he shared her weariness. He'd spent his life skipping clear of others' neuroses, making sure those hollow graspings were pointed well away from him. He considered suggesting that they call it a night, but that was off the table. It wasn't what a friend would do. A friend would... When he thought about it, he hadn't always fled neurosis. With Erik, he hadn't even considered it. Erik had worn his damage beautifully. Then, why was hers grating, pedestrian? Just because she didn't happen to be the one his soul had climbed into?
Her voice, quiet, caught him by surprise. "I just have some bad associations with sex."
He was thinking this out the wrong way. Dear God, how self-centered he'd been. And the moment she didn't perform as he wanted, he was half inclined to order her out of his bed. And that, he realized, was exactly what she feared: performance pressure, the very quality of her anxiety.
"Moira, I'm sorry." Hand still on her hair. "What I said to you was thoughtless. I made you responsible for not only your pleasure but mine as well, and that isn't fair, especially not between two people under such... strange circumstances, who are just starting to learn how to please each other."
She gave the ceiling an ambivalent smile. "It's not your fault, Charles. I just--I had a bad marriage; that's the short version, and I guess I never got used to it--sex--after that." She sat up. "I should go before I lower the tone of the evening any more." Again, the tears hovered close. He fought the urge to pluck them out of her head; he could make her feel peaceful, but it wouldn't be for her. It would just bury her problems and leave her confused. He couldn't do that to her just to ease his own discomfort.
He looked up at her face, lost in a strip of shadow. "Please stay." His palm pressed her hand. "Keep me company."
She squeezed his hand. "You sure?"
He let his expression answer, and the gentle tug with which he drew her back down under the covers. He put an arm around her and pulled her against his chest. He felt like he was in James Joyce's, "The Dead," having waited, as Gabriel waited hours and hours to flee the stuffy party and make love to his wife, only to find that for hours and hours, she'd been lost in the memory of her dead lover. The story had fascinated Charles because that unawareness of another's thoughts ran so counter to his experience. And yet tonight, he understood how it wrenched the guts to be pulled up against one's own fantasy by the reality of another human being. It was a gift, he told himself.
***
"I got married right out of high school." Moira sat on a low-hanging branch, her ham sandwich drooping.
Graced with a warm evening, they'd escaped outside for supper, well away from the mansion and the children. They'd ended up near the main gate, just a few feet off the road, not the most secluded place for a picnic but the easiest route for the wheelchair.
Charles found something touching about the way her knees poked girlishly out of a lavender dress. "Are you sure you want to hear this?" she asked.
He leaned in and held her eyes. "If you're ready to tell me."
She surprised him with a rueful laugh, her moods in such flux he couldn't follow. "I haven't talked about it in years. I told myself I was over it, but--" She hesitated, falling back over her life. "So anyway, Joe's parents were friends of the family, and he had a bright political future; everybody said it was like a fairytale. It was um..." She floundered.
Charles closed off his mind. He'd got seasick in the pitch and plunge of her emotions, and he didn't want to see her past. It was right he know about it, that he be a friend and listen. But he had no obligation to see it, not when each glimpse he failed to shut out was a corkscrew in his brain.
The quiet closed in like a cellar door, he alone in his thoughts and she in hers. "We were married for two years; everything but the first, I don't know, three or four months was pretty bad. Bad to worse. I don't really want to go into gory details--maybe you can see..."
"I'm not looking."
"It ended when, well, I ended up in a coma for a week. I remember when I woke up, I saw these pink dahlias--I can see them right in front of my face." She raised her palm up to her eyes. "And my mom was there, and I asked her where they came from, and my mom said, 'Maizie,' (that's her nickname for me), 'Maizie, you're not going back.' I mean, I know it didn't happen exactly that way because the first thing my mom did when I woke up was rush over to my bed and praise God I was awake and so on. But still, that's how I remember it."
Her eyes had fallen to her sandwich. "Sometimes I get so angry at her that she didn't say it sooner. It's not as if she didn't know. She used to tell me-- My dad was a nice enough guy, but he definitely ran the house, you know? She just did what he said. She used to tell me, 'You just need to learn to use a little finesse. Let a man believe that he's getting his way and you can wrap him around your little finger.'" She smiled. "I was never very good at finesse."
It was not unlike being inside her mind the way his throat tightened and his head hurt on her behalf. It unnerved him that he hadn't suspected anything like that degree of brutality. Ordinarily, he'd have seen, but she didn't show it, not the way most people did, even her anxiety in bed hadn't been as extreme as that.
"Moira." Her head shot up as if she'd forgotten he was there. "You are one of the strongest people I have ever met to have been through so much and let it mar you so little, to be so confident, so unafraid--"
"I'm not--"
"I know you're not. It's left you with fears, with scars, of course." He leaned toward her. "But I have spent my lifetime seeing inside people's thoughts. The type of experience you're describing: the psychological disruption is usually so much greater."
She smiled wanly. "Years and years of therapy."
"Even so."
"And it was more than ten years ago." She bit into her sandwich. "And it's not really as dramatic as it sounds. It was bad. I'm not saying it wasn't, but when you say, 'My husband put me in a coma,' it conjures up certain images. And the fact is, he didn't really hit me that hard. I just--it just knocked me off balance and I hit the coffee table wrong."
Charles stared. "Moira, do you hear yourself?"
"Well, what do you want me to say, Charles?" He could hear the anger in her voice, even through the silence. "That it was hell? That he was nothing but a monster? Is that somehow supposed to make me feel better about my taste in men? I'm not saying he wasn't wrong; of course, he was wrong. I'm just trying to have some objectivity."
They sat wordless. Moira ate the rest of her sandwich; Charles studied his.
"Anyway," said Moira, wadding up her napkin, "I owe--owed--my job in C.I.A. to Joe, that is, his uncle in the House got me an in. Would you like grape juice?"
She owed her job in the C.I.A. to the man who beat her into a coma; the loss of that job she owed to Charles. Funny old world, he thought, unamused.
"Charles? Grape juice?" She held up the thermos.
"No thanks."
She poured some into the lid and drank it off like whisky. For a while, she fingered the lid. "The rough part about being involved with someone that screwed up is that it makes you wonder what's wrong with you. That's really so much harder than anything they actually do to you. I spent most of my marriage second-guessing every word I said, every tone of voice. Afterward, I'd replay every little thing I did, over and over, trying to pick out what I did to set him off."
"Surely, you must know you didn't do anything."
"Of course, I do. I'm talking about back then. Now--oh boy--now I wonder what was wrong with me that made me stay. How could I have been that stupid? I always saw myself as a smart girl. Why did I pick him? What inside me was so off? I never loved him. I told myself I did, but I never did. And am I still that good at lying to myself? What if I waste years of my life on more lies?"
Was she talking about him? Charles cracked his mind open. No, not him, he realized with relief. Just life.
"It's like you said," she was saying, "things like that, they leave a lot of damage. I guess they start with damage too. And it's nice of you to say that I've gotten past it well--I like to think I have--but it's like... I'm china cup that got smashed and glued back together. I see little, yellow glue lines everywhere, and I wonder if the cup can hold water. Or is it just a cracked cup from now on--just--"
"You're not." He wanted to take her hand, but he couldn't reach that far and he'd lose the moment if he lumbered his chair in her direction, and if he held out his hand, she'd have to get up and come to him and stand over him, and they'd feel like idiots, so he didn't.
"Well, I was pretty cracked last night. I really told myself it was behind me."
Charles ran a hand through his hair, fingering what he needed to say. "Moira--this is a bizarre thing to say, but you don't feel like rape victim." She flinched at the words, and he shut his mind again.
"You feel a lot of them?"
Her question momentarily confused him.
She must have read his expression. "I mean, do you go through your life picking up thoughts like that? That must be awful."
"I pick up a lot of things in passing. I've learned to ignore most of it. It's not as awful as you might think." Like being put in a coma. "But it's common, yeah. It's so bloody common. And--" How to describe the sensation? "It wrecks trusts; it makes people expect to be hurt, not just in bed: in general. I didn't sense that from you. You just... were worried you wouldn't please me." How sick it was that some part of him felt unmanned that she hadn't been afraid. "Of course, I realize I don't make a particularly formidable specimen." An unhelpful, self-pitying thing to say, but apparently he had said it.
Frowning that Moira frown again, she got up and grasped his arm, sinking down next to the wheel of his chair. She sank too far, so that she peaked up over the armrest, chin almost resting on her hand, like a chipmunk. Nothing fit anymore. "Charles, you are the most powerful person I have ever met. You could kill me with your brain; don't think I don't know that." (Giant chair brain.) "But I do trust you. It would never occur to me not to."
"Thank you, Moira." He kissed her hand.
She gave up on clinging to his chair and sat in the grass, tucking her knees to the side. "I mean, I don't trust you not to read to my mind." He smiled faintly. "But I trust you where it counts." She fell into thought. He still kept his mind closed--to be safe. "The fact is Joe wasn't sexually violent, in particular." In particular, he thought. "When he was angry at me, mostly, that was when he didn't want me. Mostly... the hard part is that it tarnishes everything. I had good times with Joe. I did. I can remember some if I think hard, like we went to see An American in Paris and afterward--it must have been about midnight--we went to the park and pretended we could dance like Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, and we giggled and giggled like kids. But when I think of it, it's like I'm looking at someone else's old photograph. I can see it, but I can't feel anything. It's like everything between us that was good didn't count. I know I had good sex with Joe, but it's all covered with cobwebs. In the end, I just couldn't think of anything but, 'Why am I in bed with this man?' I got really good at waiting for it to be over, and I guess I forgot how to do anything else."
***
They spent that night together, just to sleep. Moira was a knot of pain clenching and unclenching--inevitable, a perfectly normal response to the dredging she had gone through. But it frayed Charles till finally he closed his mind so he could sleep, and yet he never slept soundly so tightly shut. It was tense and lonely locked inside himself.
The next two nights, they slept apart.
***
In the midst of their review of her Civics course curriculum, she said, "You know what I like about Alex?"
"What's that?"
"He's really good at not showing his anger. I'm sure he's got enough, given his background, and he can overcorrect into sullen, and I don't doubt he's too repressed and so on, but selfishly I find him soothing." She tapped her pen on her clipboard. "I never really thought of it this way before, but one reason I've steered clear of making of close friends is that I didn't want to know people well enough to see them angry. I told myself it was easier in the C.I.A. not to have close friends, not to have to lie about your career all the time, but the truth is I overreact to anger. I'm not jumpy by nature; I could be out in the field on a job and be perfectly collected knowing that someone might shoot me dead in the next thirty seconds. But if someone snaps at me, I freeze up. I feel like I'm about to get hit by a train."
"Erik's exactly the same way," he said suddenly. "Absolutely fearless in the face of impending nuclear disaster, but if you caught him off his guard, when he was sitting with a book over a martini, say, the slightest things would frighten him. Like a delivery truck drove up once, and I swear he jumped a mile."
Moira frowned.
"Sorry, I don't mean to say it's exactly the same, of course."
She nodded, still lost in thought.
***
That night, in his arms again, she talked a little more. "It doesn't make sense that I'm still such a mess about all this. It's hardly bothered me in years. I know--I hope I know--I won't get myself into that kind of situation again, so why can't I let go of how stupid I was?"
"Because you hold yourself to a high standard?"
She didn't seem to hear him. "It's so complicated. There's no sight like hindsight, but when you're in the midst of making choices about your life, it's so hard to see what's really happening. Joe wasn't all bad. He was a good Councilman; he did good work lobbying for services for the poor. And he was funny; he did great Cary Grant impersonations. He went with me to the vet when we had to put down my old cat. And it's so easy to tell yourself it's okay because of all those things, that you're as lucky as anyone can expect, that every relationship has troubles. That it was understandable that he got mad because politics is a lot of pressure. That love means loving someone despite their flaws. You tell yourself you can help them."
Charles didn't like that line of thought because it rang too true. He, too, had fallen for someone who had hit him, someone because of whom he'd never walk again. The circumstances were completely different, but... she was right it made you wonder what wishful egotism made you think if you just had faith enough you could fix a broken person. Of course, Erik truly was a good person, immense and complex, a decent person, but... by Moira's own admission, Joe hadn't been all bad. Still, they didn't remotely compare, except... it was really all one continuum, from good to worse, loud to quiet, stupid, smart, all human beings graphed somewhere on the gridlines of one human nature, no categorical distinction, not between Joe and Erik, not between Joe and Charles, Erik and Moira. Charles re-experienced that every time he looked in someone's head. The only way to understand someone was to be capable of feeling what they felt. If he looked in Joe MacTaggert's head, he would understand him.
He rubbed his cheek against her auburn hair. "You're right; it's complicated."
***
The next day, Moira got her period. It brought home to Charles how transitory his liaisons with women had been how rarely he'd encountered that consideration.
It made him sad how relieved she was to have--as she saw it--a short vacation from sexual expectations. It was sad, too, how eagerly he leapt on her announcement to insert a presumption that "I expect it will be nice to spend a few days back in the comfort of your own room." She did think it would be nice, but the words struck her as a rejection too. Yet he needed a vacation from trying to figure out what to say. Nothing he said came out helpful; it was almost like talking to Raven.
***
A good part of him hoped that they would drift back to being just friends. He'd stepped in a hornet's nest (if he'd had a foot to step), and he wanted to get away. For a couple of weeks, he had his wish; they scarcely alluded to any of it. That proved extremely helpful. Day by day, Moira suffered her cycles of memory and self-comdemnation, and day by day, the edges softened, as any song played over enough fades from one's awareness. Charles, too, felt his tension fade. They began to enjoy each other's company again.
By the evening she looked up over her fillet of sole and asked, "Could we try it again?" he was ready to say yes.
***
It felt better. For a couple of nights, they made out in a friendly way without trying for more. Their moods were reasonably good. They lay hand in hand and chatted.
"The children are wondering what it is we get up to," he confided.
"If only they could see us now."
He smiled and voiced a random question: "Why did you keep your married name after the divorce?"
She hesitated. "I don't know. I guess it's what you do." She thought a moment. "You know, the C.I.A. likes its female agents divorced. It shows that you have things you care about more than domestic bliss, so you're a relatively low marriage flight risk, and it's also code for 'not a virgin and have been around the block,' which is obviously preferable."
After a moment, Charles broke into a laugh.
Moira got up on her elbow with half a smile. "That's funny?"
"Evidently."
***
Slowly, the passion regrew, like the foliage in the spring. Three weeks or so after the whole thing began, they were about as horny as they had been that first night before it went downhill. And now, once again, it was Charles getting nervous, back up against not knowing just what he was able to do with her.
Finally they settled on trying it out with Charles on his back and Moira straddling him. The pressure of her knees against his ribs was pleasant. But the rest of it kept going wrong. Between the two of them, they managed to get him hard, sort of, and get her wet, somewhat, but the damn thing just would not go in. He started to feel sorry for Moira, who was maneuvering with great concentration on top of him, and it was absurd that he couldn't move with her. He broke into a sweat in frustration.
"Sorry," she said at last, sitting back across his thighs and pushing her hair out of her eyes. "I've never been very good in this position. Honestly, I think I've only managed to get this off this way once."
He rubbed her knee absently. "I don't think you've ever been in this position." The words came out a little sharp. "I don't blame you; you're having to do all the fucking work." His face felt beet red. "It's ridiculous." His voice caught on the last words, and tears welled, and this wasn't helpful. He knew better than to feel sorry for himself. Nothing good ever came of that. And more than that, Charles Xavier had to set a good example. People were looking to him; he didn't have the luxury of breaking down like some scared adolescent. And now he had Moira feeling sorry for him too.
She lay down by his side and put an arm around him. With a desperate fishy flop, he rolled into her embrace and clung, sobbing and unable to quit. "Jesus God," he choked out.
After an eternity, the sobs wore out, and they huddled together and slept.
***
He awoke with a headache and a stuffed-up nose but calmer, embarrassed, but grateful that Moira was there. Pensive, she tied on her robe and went to look out the window at the dawn.
As he was sitting up, groggy, she turned and said quietly, "I am really sorry I shot you."
He should have seen that coming, would have if he hadn't been so caught up in himself. "It was Erik's fault."
"It was pretty stupid to take him on with bullets."
"It was the only means at your disposal."
She sat by the edge of the bed. "Some means."
He took her hand. "Moira, if the choices for stopping Erik were his dying or me getting shot, then I'm glad I got shot. It's so much better for me than the alternative."
She gave him the intent Moira frown and then kissed him hard, reading some sort of valiant self-sacrifice in a statement that, in fact, was wholly selfish. But he received the gift of her admiration and kissed her back, and if part of him was kissing Erik, he didn't have to show her.
***
The first time he made her come, it was much as he'd originally envisioned. It pleased him to get the affirmation that he was still good with his hands. The only difference from that first night was that now she trusted him better, trusted him not to have expectations she couldn't meet. He didn't ask if he could share her pleasure (that was already understood), but he let his gasps show her how much he did.
It was a strange, echoing orgasm, unlike the oneness he associated with masturbation and completely distinct from the duality that had defined the entirety of his experience with lovers. It rang louder, too, than listening in on others in another wing; it was complemented in his own flesh, and it was for him, and rang through his body like a deep bell tolling invisible across an ocean fog.
The both felt triumphant and sleepy. For a minute, Moira faded, sprawled on top of him. Then suddenly, she spiked with adrenaline-- distress? joy? the confusion of undifferentiated overwhelm. She got up on an elbow and looked down at him. He caressed her cheek in wordless comfort.
"Bad sex is so much easier," she said. "It's like going to the gynecologist. You take off your clothes and lie there, feeling awkward and uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then you put your clothes back on and go about your life. But good sex..." She shook her head. "I don't know what to do with this."
He held her head in his hands and kissed her: her lips, her cheek, her neck. His hands smelled like her.
"I love you," she said, an almost-whisper against his ear: not in love with you, though in that moment it came close: just love, thank goodness.
"I love you too," he said between kisses, reflecting he could squeak that into being truth. She had, after all, come to mean a great deal to him. She was the sort of person who might have meant more if that piece of his heart hadn't already been vowed away.
***
For fall term, she got accepted to Stanford, which was only proper given the prodigious affinity she showed for genetics. "I remember liking biology in high school," she'd once said. "But when I went to college to train for the C.I.A., poly sci just made more sense." Now she'd rediscovered the path the clearly made for her.
As he helped her compress clothes into a suitcase, she said, "Sometimes I can't help but think it's quixotic to make a career change this radical at my age."
He laughed. "Quixotic would be squandering your gift on anything else. You visualize the molecular world as if it were its own metropolis. It puts me in mind of the reflections of Barbara McClintock on 'seeing' transposons."
Moira stopped folding and stared at him. "Really?"
"There is no question in my mind that your researches will one day far outstrip mine." And even if he based much of that prediction on the fact that he'd chosen to teach instead, that didn't make the statement any less sincere.
"Thank you," she said thoughtfully.
***
It didn't make it easier to let her go. The loneliness loomed even before her departure. She was the only one here he truly considered a peer, the only one it seemed possible to invite into his bed. He wanted to keep her but couldn't; it was a theme in his life.
"I'll visit," she said for the umpteenth time as Alex loaded her bags into the green Mercedes.
"There will always be a home for you here, my friend," said Charles.
With everyone standing around to say goodbye, there wasn't much more they could say--or much more to say, really. She hugged Hank and Alex and Sean and what seemed a long line of students. Last, she kissed Charles lightly. And then she drove away but not, he told himself, forever. A true friendship was too precious to allow it to be lost.
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