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eqt-95 · 14 days

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there were too many beds

prompt came from this reverse trope list. (thanks anon for suggesting it be pulled into a standalone post)

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There were too many beds.

Kara scanned the room: two, four, six, seven beds.

Sevens of them. All done up with pillows and over-starched fabric and tiny brochures translated into broken English with a map of local attractions splattered from inch to inch.

When she'd persuaded Lena to live out her dream of a four-week backpacking European holiday, she never expected there to be so many beds. Hostel after hostel with 'private' rooms filled with beds. It was perfectly roomy which was exactly the problem. Kara had daydreamed of a closet-sized room tightly packed with a single double bed, a tiny nightstand and, maybe if they were lucky, a private bathroom.

What she didn't expect was Lena plans-ahead Luthor booking out an entire 'group' of beds at each location.

"It'll give us guaranteed privacy," Lena explained when Kara flushed at the bundle of euros being slipped across the counter city after city.

Because that was the other thing: Kara had just come out. As Supergirl. And for as much as she liked to pretend everything was normal, everything was not normal. They could barely enjoy their plates of cicchetti in Venice without being barraged with onlookers. Their walk through Gaudi's masterpiece was ruined by slack-jawed observers gawking at Kara in civilian clothes. And now, in the city of love itself, Kara's romantic plans of a blanketed dinner in front of the Eiffel Tower was ruined by one nosy teenager with a social media following.

And now they were back, dinner ruined, a half-eaten baguette in one hand and the remaining drags of a perfectly delicious bottom-shelf bottle of red in the other. It was terrible. It was awful. It was not going at all like Kara wanted or planned or hoped.

Still Lena smiled. She knowingly leaned into Kara with each spontaneous combustion of crowds. She squeezed a hand reassuringly and chuckled when the wildest requests were made for autographs and signatures and "can we see the suit?". Tiny reminders of "it's ok, darling," were whispered through a crowd while an adoring smile settled Kara's stewing frustration.

"Everything ok?" Lena asked, one hand disappeared into her overflowing backpack.

"Hm? Oh, yea," Kara replied. A blush crept over her cheeks and a distracted hand scratched at her neck. "Just tired I guess."

"It'll pass. Soon you'll be able to walk down the street and be a nobody just like me," Lena offered with a sympathetic smile. And then there it was; there it came: a quick squeeze of Kara's forearm followed by the light trace of a kiss on Kara's cheek. "Thank you for an amazing day."

And then it was gone as quick as it came with the bathroom door squeaking shut.

And still, there were seven beds.

Seven.

Beds.

Now, what happened next is up for some debate. To the desk clerk, it might have sounded like a robbery. To Lena Luthor, one threshold away, it sounded like Kara was having one of her early-aughts inspired dance sessions. Kara herself would explain she'd seen a black widow. An army of black widows when an amused Lena pressed.

"Not bedbugs?" Lena asked, surveying the damage and stepping over a smoking mattress.

"Uh... coulda-coulda been?" Kara said, flushed and dry-mouthed.

"Mhm, well then we couldn't possibly sleep here tonight-"

"Black widows. It was definitely a fleet of black widows. Not a bedbug in sight actually-"

"A fleet?" Lena pressed, barely containing a grin and dropping her day clothes onto her completely unscathed, pristine backpack.

Kara nodded. She nodded with vigor and superspeed.

"I see," Lena continued, plopping onto the mattress.

How exactly it happened didn't really matter. All that mattered was that, in the span of time it took Lena to brush her teeth and change into soft sweats and Kara's old NCU t-shirt, six beds had been destroyed.

"I guess we'll just have to share, won't we, darling?"

#(this is a repost)#thanks anon for your suggestion - i didn't think about it getting lost in the reblog shuffle #i also like way too many of these reverse trope prompts #'sevens' was a typo but i'm absolutely keeping it #there were too many beds #supercorp fic #supercorp

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boxboxlewis · 10 months

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galex, only four beds, 2k

George said he would book the hotel room himself. Cara was busy, smoothing out the endless administrative details of George’s life, and it wasn’t work travel, anyway—just a little lads’ holiday with Alex, just a stolen slice of time out of time, away from it, in the hot summer weeks when Formula 1 held its collective breath and waited for the season to restart. A spur-of-the-moment thing, after Alex’s plans with Lily fell through. A lark.

Underneath all that was another secret reason for making the booking himself: a sly secret sideways reason. He called the hotel instead of booking online, to make sure they had the kind of room he wanted available. He barely let himself think about the call even as he was making it, most of his attention fiercely directed at the dense weave of the upholstery Carmen had chosen for the sofa he was sitting on. It had a subtle striped pattern, beige on beige.

They were going to Jersey, because neither of them had been, and because Alex suggested it as a joke and then it seemed funnier, somehow, than it should have: the idea of actually going there. “We’re going to lower the median age on the island by about twenty years,” Alex said, the day before they were due to leave, and George, who had looked up “tourist attractions on Jersey” to have in his back pocket in the event of just this sort of cold feet, said “They’ve got these tunnels from WWII, it looks quite neat actually. And you can windsurf.”

Alex raised his eyebrows and said, “All right, eager beaver.” George thought, without meaning to, of the first time he’d had sex with a girl, wanting to like it, for it to be good.

“I’ve got a deal with the Jersey Tourism Board, as it happens,” he said: the less insane part of him. “This trip is actually hashtag spon.”

Alex laughed, and didn’t suggest cancelling the trip.

They flew from Nice to Nantes, drove a rental car to St Malo, got a ferry to Jersey. “This is very Planes Trains and Automobiles, isn’t it,” grumbled Alex, even though Cara had arranged all the travel, in the end, and George did the driving.

“Oh, sorry, did you want me to teleport us?” George said. “Because I actually left my superpowers back in Brackley.”

“Oh, ‘superpowers’? Bit of a puffed-up nickname for the W14, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, sorry, remind me what you drive?”

They were still bickering as they walked into the hotel. It felt, to George, more like family than any of his own family’s carefully meted affection.

“Heya,” he said cheerfully to the concierge, “booking for Russell?”

The concierge typed something and smiled at them. “Ah, Mr Russell. Of course, sir. Let me get you checked in, sir.” Alex’s face was carefully blank, in a way that was very easy to read if you knew Alex at all, but George preferred this old-fashioned kind of service to what you got at more modern places where the staff all pretended to be friends with you. Although he turned down the porter who offered to help with their luggage; they only had backpacks.

Alex gestured at the wallpaper as they exited the lift and walked along the corridor to their room. “Bloody typical of you, Georgie. ‘I’ll pick the hotel,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. And then you bring us to a place where they probably iron the fucking newspapers in the morning.”

“No, come on,” George said. He found the door to their room and slid the keycard in. The lock clicked satisfyingly and flared green. “It’s all iPads now, innit. They iron the iPads.”

As they walked into the room Alex started laughing, gratifyingly hard, and George basked in how well his iPad joke had landed. Then he clocked what Alex was looking at. The room was nice, spacious, big windows with a view out over the harbour, and—crisp white linens on the beds: all four of them. Four single beds, arrayed in a neat line.

“This is like the fucking orphanage in Madeleine,” Alex said. “Which two do you want, mate?” He was laughing again by the end of the sentence.

“I don’t—this isn’t what I asked for,” George said. What he’d asked for, very specifically, was a nice big room with a sea view and one king bed and no sofa. He picked up the handset on the desk by the window and called the front desk.

“Good afternoon, this is Reception.”

“Yeah, hi, Room 310. Erm, we have a bit of an issue, to say the least. There are four beds in here?”

“Let me just check your booking, sir. Ah, yes. I see you booked by telephone? And there’s a note here that you specifically wanted four beds?”

“No,” George said. He glanced over at Alex, who was definitely listening. “I asked for two beds,” George lied emphatically.

“I am most sorry for the inconvenience, sir.”

“Well, we just… we’ll need another room, that’s all.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir. It’s the Battle of Flowers this week; everywhere on the island is booked up.”

George dug the hand that wasn’t holding the handset into his pocket and pressed his knuckles into his thigh. “Sorry, the what? The what of what?”

“The Battle of Flowers? It’s—”

“Yeah, I don’t care, actually. I only booked last week, how could I’ve done that if everywhere is so busy?”

“You must have got lucky, sir. Perhaps there was a cancellation.”

George attempted to channel Toto at his most disappointed and scary. “Right. Right. So what are we going to do about this, then?��

“Don’t worry, sir, we’ll get this sorted for you.”

George put the phone back into the cradle. Alex was kicked back on one of the beds, feet dangling off the end. “You know,” he said, “I’m sort of regretting letting you do all the planning for this trip. You did get us return tickets, right? You haven’t signed us up for some sort of murder mystery tour with actual murder?”

“Ha ha,” George said, sitting on the bed next to Alex’s. “Didn’t see you offering to do any planning, did I?”

There was a knock at the door, and they exchanged a look. “This better be a complimentary fruit basket and bottle of champagne,” George muttered, and went to answer it. Two hotel porters came in: not bearing gifts.

“Hello, gentlemen,” one of them said. “Sorry about this mix-up. Right.” He gestured at his colleague, who nodded. Each porter seized a bed and with great stamping and flipping and manoeuvring got it wheeled out of the room into the corridor.

One of the porters stepped back in and touched the brim of his cap. “There we go, sir. Won’t happen again. Thank you for your patience, sir.” He stood looking at George, who looked back at him.

Eventually George said “Thank you,” sternly, so as to show he wasn’t the sort of person to stand for four beds in his hotel room.

The porter touched the brim of his cap again, and left.

“He wanted you to tip him,” Alex said, voice lazy. He hadn’t left the bed he’d chosen.

“Tip him?!”

“Mm. People tend to like that. Being tipped.”

George sat back down on the bed next to Alex’s. If he reached his arm out he’d touch Alex’s mattress. “Well, that’s rubbish, isn’t it. I’m not going to tip them for messing up.”

“The porters didn’t mess up,” Alex said. It was something he did sometimes, arguing a point just because he could, just to be a shit. George shouldn’t have found it attractive. He didn’t reply, and after a while Alex started laughing and said, “You do realise that, thanks to your phone call, we’ve now got one measly single bed each.”

“We could push them together,” George said, voice casual, as if it didn’t matter. “We could make one big bed. And then we’d both have more room.”

He watched Alex’s foot flex where it was dangling over the end of the bed. Up, down. Up, down. “Yeah, go on then. All right.”

It was harder to move the beds than the porters had made it look, but eventually they managed it, slotting the frames next to each other landscape-style, because they agreed that was likely to be more stable than having them next to each other lengthways. Then they went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. The food was heavy, French but French through a time machine.

“God, I bet this was the height of fashion in the seventies,” Alex said, poking at his terrine. “The next time I suggest a holiday destination ironically, just whack me on the head, thanks.”

“I think it’s nice,” George said, and Alex snorted.

“You would.”

George gave him a look that said, he hoped, I’m not flicking a pea at you right now, but only because this is a quite a nice restaurant even though you’re being a dick about it.

Alex flickered his tongue out, and grinned at whatever George’s face did in response.

They went for a walk along the seafront after their meal. “Come on, this is nice, isn’t it?” George said.

“Eh.” Alex scuffed his foot in the sand. “It’s all right, I guess.” He knocked his shoulder into George’s. “Glad this one worked out, you know. After…”

It took George a second to realise Alex was talking about the holiday they’d planned together that Alex had bailed on because he met Lily. He laughed, too loudly. “No worries, mate, all good,” he said. He thought about asking how things were going with Lily, and then didn’t. “Shall we…?” he asked. “It’s getting dark.”

“Yeah, all right, wild child.”

Alex showered first. He came out of the bathroom in his boxers, towelling his hair. Long legs, long arms, his knobbly ankles and wrists, his big feet, his hands. “All yours, mate.”

George’s mouth was dry. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll just—”

He jerked off in the shower, one forearm braced against the cool ceramic tile, the other hand furious and too-tight on his dick, the way he liked it. His orgasm was much more intense than he was expecting and he groaned aloud with it, too loudly, and then bit his lip as if that might suck the sound back inside.

“You alright in there, Georgie?” Alex called.

“Yeah, yep.” He dressed in briefs and a t-shirt, then took the t-shirt back off. It was warm, in the hotel room. Warm-ish.

Alex was lying on the beds, head cushioned on one arm. “You’ll go blind, you know,” he said, half-smiling. “You’ll get hairy palms.”

George thought for a split-second about denying everything but then tried a grin, awkward with it. “Come on, like you don’t do it.”

“Not usually in a hotel room with my mate,” Alex said lightly. “Question for you, Georgie: how many beds did you ask for? Real answers only, please.”

George settled himself next to Alex and shut his eyes. “One.”

“Uh huh. Because…?”

“Because I thought maybe if we had to share a bed we would.” George swallowed. “You would, maybe, you’d realise.”

“Realise what?” Alex said, very soft.

“Realise that you wanted me.”

“George.” George felt Alex’s hand brushing lightly over his shoulder, his chest. He tried not to breathe, in case breathing might make the moment stop. “What about Carmen?”

“She’s not—” How to explain everything that Carmen was not? He settled on “She’s not here.”

Alex hummed in response, and pinched George’s nipple. George yelped.

“Not going to ask me about Lily?” Alex’s finger was circling around George’s nipple, so delicate.

“I—I know she’s, I know I’m not,” George said, Alex’s fingertip trailing down his stomach, outlining his abs. “Look, she’s not here either, is she?”

Alex settled himself on top of George, the heavy mass of him pinning George down like a weighted blanket: but even better because George’s weighted blanket had never implicitly promised to fuck him. George hadn’t been pining for his weighted blanket for years. “What do you want, George?” Alex asked. “Is this a one-time thing? Get me out of your system? Or do you want something longer-term?” He kissed George’s neck, lighting it up, sparks straight to George’s dick. “Want to be my mistress?”

George groaned. “Let’s see how good your dick game is, mate,” he said, and grinned when Alex laughed.

“All right, you minx.” Alex ground his hips down against George’s. “Let’s see how well you take it.” He bit George’s lower lip and then kissed it, sweet and lazy. George bucked his hips up.

And then the second bed rolled away from the first, and George and Alex both fell through the crack between up and thumped unceremoniously onto the hotel carpet.

They sat in shocked silence for a moment, and then started laughing. “Right, ok, back to Plan A,” Alex said. “We’ll just share the one bed, I think.”

It was good with Alex, as it turned out: it was everything George hadn't quite let himself hope for, and the price of it was simply that now he was going to be wanting it, all the damn time.

it takes a village to raise a crackfic. thank you to beautiful geniuses @accio-ricciardo for chatficcing this concept with me, @ininininininstayoutstayout for crucial george dialogue thoughts, and @onadarklingplain for her incredibly kind and helpful comments!

#my fic #galex #there were only four beds #cw infidelity #(not between galex)#gr63 #aa23 #TOO MANY BEDS

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