Happy Birthday, yin_again!
Title: Touch Dominance (part 1 of 4, Table Porn Series)
By: tesserae_
Fandom: SGA, Sheppard/ McKay (slash)
Rating: NC-17
A/N: This was written for the lovely yin_again's birthday and is a remix of her story Devil You Know, offered up with much love and hopefully, enough commas. Many weeks later, she offered to beta it for me, so this is the edited version.

Part 2, While You Were Dreaming
Part 3, Untitled Table Porn
Part 4, In Words This Time





Touch Dominance

For all that he liked to fly and he liked to shoot, John wasn't a particularly visual guy. What he liked about flying the jumpers was the way they put speed and space directly into his hands without the noise and vibration of an F-15, and without the instruments that sometimes made him feel like he was watching an animated database calculate his tax refund.

When he got back to Earth he bought the biggest pickup truck he could find, and an old Jaguar E-type. The truck had cruise control and GPS and a stereo system he needed an engineer from work to program, and driving it felt almost like flying a jumper. The E-type had five speeds and a manual choke, and when he drove it up the coast the steering wheel transmitted so much vibration into his hands that his shoulders hurt when he finally pulled over in Big Sur and climbed out. He liked that better, maybe because driving the Jag was nothing like flying.

What he liked about shooting was mostly that he was very, very good at it. Being good at it had gotten them all through the gate one last time, five minutes ahead of a group of very large people with even larger guns, and about twenty minutes before Rodney would have bled out. (According to Carson, who told him this much, much later.) And that was when John had said, enough.

Surprisingly, it worked. It worked on JPL, which came through with a job offer, and on the Los Angeles real estate market, which coughed up a house on Mount Washington with a view of downtown. It was still working when he got through to Rodney at his sister's in Canada, and at the airport, where Rodney was the first person to walk off the plane ("First class, nitwit. What, are you still flying coach?"), and didn't flinch when John wrapped his arms around him and held on for a little too long. It worked all the way up to the moment he opened the door to show the place to Rodney for the first time, and realized two things: one was that he was glad he'd asked for chopsticks at the takeout place. The second was that he didn't have any furniture.

"Shit, Sheppard."

"Yeah."

They ended up in the truck that night, eating green curry and drinking Tsing Tao. After the first six-pack, downtown Los Angeles still didn't look like Atlantis, even with Rodney beside him waving his arms around and ranting about the stupidity of colleagues he hadn't even met. So John did what he'd wanted to do since about the first week in Atlantis: he captured Rodney's hands in his own, and waited until the stillness told him he had all of Rodney's attention.

Then he pulled Rodney toward him and kissed him.

Rodney opened his mouth and just fell into the kiss, twining his strong fingers into John's and grinning happily into his mouth. Which made John feel almost the way he did flying the jumpers, with Atlantis herself stretched out along his arms and that bone-deep connection thrumming through him. But this was Rodney, and the night air smelled of flowers, not the sea, and John could think of all kinds of otherthings he wanted those hands to be doing.

John was really more of a hands-on guy, after all.

The back of the truck was just about as uncomfortable as it looked, even with John's sleeping bag under them. They didn't get to much of John's list that night, just the parts that involved Rodney's mouth on his, and his mouth on Rodney's dick, and Rodney's big hands wrapped around his belly and his cock, stroking him hard and fast till he came, in a white flash of light that he realized later was a police helicopter doing a yard-by-yard.

*

Now, on the rare days when the offshore flow brought the smell of the sea all the way inland, he headed out to the shop he had set up in the garage and took heavy power tools to impossibly expensive pieces of oak. His first project was bookshelves, which Rodney rapidly filled with books that John was secretly reading. His second was a dining room table. Rodney took up a lot of space at dinner, and because John loved to watch him waving his hands around when he talked but hated cleaning up broken wine glasses, he was making a really big table.

A really big, sturdy table, because sometimes they stopped for takeout and stayed up talking past midnight, in the room at the back of the house with the big windows that John thought would make a great dining room. The card table they were using was too small, but John had this fantasy of leaning over a real table, Rodney - his big hands gripping his hips hard enough to leave bruises - fucking him into the lights of the city sprawled out below them.

*

The day he finished the table's base he walked back into the house to find Rodney at the kitchen sink, up to his elbows in soapsuds. There were easily a dozen shopping bags around him on the floor and he was humming. As John watched, he lifted a white plate with a fine gold rim out of the bubbles, gently rinsed it off, and set it in the drainer.

John had never seen this plate before. "What are you doing?"

Rodney turned around and gave him a crooked grin. "I – ah, see, well, we've been eating off that crappy melamine from the 99 Cent store, and I think it's giving me a canker, see, here –" he opened his mouth and pointed, and John obediently peered in, but there was nothing there that he could see – "so, I bought dishes."

"Dishes."

"And wine glasses, and better forks, and candles - I thought, well, that table you're building, it's gonna need…" and when Rodney's voice trailed off a bit John looked up, just as the happy pride on Rodney's face started shifting into embarrassment. He leaned over the bags and kissed him, still a little bit surprised at how soft Rodney's lips were, how perfectly that wide mouth fit against his own.

John sucked Rodney's lower lip into his mouth, and then stepped closer, pinning Rodney against the counter, and reached around him to turn off the water. Rodney grinned at him and grabbed his hips with wet, soapy hands, and when John yelped, dragged him up against his erection.

"Your hands are wet."

"So they are," Rodney said, and slid them underneath John's t-shirt and into the hollow at the base of his spine. John arched against him, bringing their cocks together and shuddering at the jolt of pleasure that shot through him. Rodney slid his tongue into John's mouth and moaned around it, kissing him until they both pulled away for air.

"So, dishes," John said, a little breathlessly.

Rodney nodded. "Nice ones."

"And candles."

Rodney turned pink again. "Well, see, I have this fantasy …" John felt himself grinning.

"Yeah, me too."


(edited and re-posted, 8/06)