Chapter Text
“I don’t know what that makes us,” Finn said to Rey’s ceiling. He had a key to Poe’s apartment on a ring with his own keys. Poe had found a little rubber ring shaped like a hamburger to stick over the end of his own key to make it obvious which key was which.
“You slept in his bed again,” Rey said, “stone cold sober?”
“I wouldn’t say stone cold sober,” Finn said. “I’d had half a bottle of wine, which is half a bottle of wine more than I’d ever had before.”
“If you do the math though,” she said, and consulted her little notebook. Her little notebook had an astonishing amount of information packed into it, all written in her highly individual cipher.
There was a key to the cipher, and she’d given the paper with the key to Finn, and he had it stored in a pocket of his wallet, with a grocery list scrawled on the back for camoflage. They’d said Finn was paranoid, but he knew Rey didn’t even let on to them the full extent of the stuff she still thought about. He should’ve taken a hint from her and lied, but he hadn’t had the reflexes for it at the time.
He should start lying about it, though, because he was still too honest with them. He’d defected, and not long afterward, Kylo Ren had set out on a mission to retrieve him forcibly, but had used the opportunity to smuggle Rey out, and Rey hadn’t been consulted on this but had been remarkably cheerful about it once she’d realized she couldn’t easily go back. She insisted that Kylo Ren really had no intention of harming Finn, but Finn still didn’t entirely believe that.
Poe would understand, but Finn couldn’t confide in him. Legally, he couldn’t. And he wanted badly to know what it was that Poe knew about Kylo Ren. But those doors were all closed off from one another.
“Mm,” Rey said, “a standard serving of wine is 250 ml, which is three units of alcohol—“
Finn had forgotten what they were talking about. “It probably doesn’t matter,” he said.
Rey had been kept isolated in the wilderness at the edge of the First Order’s territory, and had developed a lot of obsessive behaviors to compensate for her extremely lonely upbringing. It was as deliberately different from Finn’s upbringing as could easily be imagined. She’d been intended to be some sort of prophet or sacrifice or something. The majority of the First Order’s beliefs were pretty pragmatic, but there was a weird spike of mystical belief that kind of went right through the middle of it. Finn knew next to nothing about any of that; he’d been trained to stay away from it. Rey knew next to nothing about anything but that; it was about all she’d been given.
“You didn’t have sex, though,” Rey concluded, going back to his sort of scattered recounting of Friday night.
“No,” Finn said. “Lord, if we had, I’d’ve led with that.”
“I know,” she said, a little downcast. “But. I really wanted you to. That’s what I’ve been rooting for this whole time.”
“I feel like if a man confesses to you that he’s had to stop having sexual relationships in his life because they’ve taken up such an unhealthy role in his self-image,” Finn said carefully, “then you’re sort of duty-bound not to immediately set about trying to fuck him.”
Rey sighed. “You’re the expert,” she said.
They both had a good laugh about that, and Finn sat up and moved to rest his back against the chair she was sitting in, so she could pet his hair. “I wish I was an expert,” Finn said.
“So, what, you just kept him in a tender submission hold until he passed out?” Rey asked.
“No,” Finn said. “But I asked if I could help him pack for his trip this weekend, and then asked if I could stay because he looked like he was in a pretty fragile state, and I was feeling pretty fragile.”
“And you snuggled?” Rey asked. She was very, very unused to physical contact. She couldn’t even stand for Finn to pet her hair, the way she was petting his now. Petting Finn’s hair was, for her, extremely intimate, and she’d had to work up to it. But they were used to each other, and she liked it this way.
“We did,” Finn said.
“So he’s your boyfriend, then,” Rey said. “If you snuggle with somebody like that it’s got to mean something, right?”
“It might mean something,” Finn said, “but you’re not someone’s boyfriend if you don’t formally agree to it, I think.”
“Are you going to ask him to?” Rey asked.
“He said he doesn’t date anymore,” Finn said. “It was pretty platonic snuggling, I think. I don’t think he wants to date me, I think he’d’ve brought it up.”
“No,” Rey said, “I don’t think he’d ask. I think he’s convinced himself he doesn’t deserve you. It sounds like he’s kind of down on himself, you know?”
“Well,” Finn said.
“But you do want to,” she said.
Finn sighed. “I do,” he said.
“But you think he doesn’t want to have sex ever again,” Rey said. “What kind of boyfriends would you be if you never had sex?”
“It would be… all right,” Finn decided, thinking that over. “I mean. I would be sad I never got to try it out, but that’s really only a little part of what I want to do with him.”
“You’ve had sex,” Rey said, surprised.
Finn squinted. It was hard to discuss these things with her. “I mean,” he said. “There are a lot of things under that umbrella. I’ve done some of those things. There are other things I want to do. That’s all I mean by that. But I think it’d be more important to me to be with him than to do any of it, either the stuff I’ve done before or the stuff I still wanted to try.”
“I want for you to have all of the sex with Poe,” Rey said. “Just— all of it. I feel like that would be the right thing.”
“I only want to have sex if he wants to,” Finn said, “and only the kind he wants to, and if that’s none, then it’s none. But I don’t even know if he wants that from me. Can we talk about something else?”
Rey sighed, and stopped petting his hair, rolling to her feet and puttering across the room. “Fine,” she said. “If you insist.”
They went out to their customary Sunday brunch at the place with the menu with the pictures on it. It was an ethnic food place that was used to locals not knowing how to eat the food, so the waiters had no issue explaining the menu and were used to giving instructions as to how things were meant to be eaten. Both Finn and Rey loved it for that reason. They ate a lot more “ethnic” food than “regular” food since they didn’t know the difference but they knew that the “ethnic” places were more likely to not think you were incredibly weird for not knowing how to eat the food.
They had their customary Sunday adventures, including Finn’s grocery shopping, which was always more entertaining with Rey along to be astonished at the things that were genuinely astonishing that nobody around here ever seemed to notice. And then they went back to Finn’s apartment.
Finn painstakingly assembled the casserole he’d bought the ingredients to make, and she chopped things for him. He was getting pretty good at making recipes that had exactly enough food for two suppers on Sunday, and then packed lunches the rest of the week. It got boring, but it was better than sandwiches.
He put the casserole in the oven and set a timer for an hour. He’d texted Poe asking when he’d be back, and Poe had replied that he didn’t know, probably late. So he figured now would be a good time to go give the cats some attention.
And so Rey met Poe’s cats and apartment before she met the man himself. “I like it in here,” she said, peering around in fascination.
“He has so many books,” Finn said. “He told me I could go through any of the shelves and read whatever I wanted to, but I don’t know where to start.”
“I do,” Rey said, and made a beeline for the shelf of photography art books. She pulled out a pile of them, not in the slightest bit shy about it, and sat on the floor to read them. It only took Artoo about a minute to come over and join her.
Finn picked out a paperback novel instead and went out to the balcony, clicking his tongue for BB. She was sitting on the balcony under a chair, and came running in, delighted to join him on the couch.
“Did you sleep in his bed last night?” Rey asked.
“He told me to,” Finn said, a little feebly. “For the cats.” He looked up from his book. “That wasn’t creepy, he told me to do it.”
“Of course,” Rey said.
He reconsidered his choice. If she was going to keep talking to him, he should get a picture book instead. He set the novel aside and snagged one of the art books from her pile. This one was the catalogue of a museum exhibition of art, and he was soon engrossed.
Rey devoured several big art books, then got up and started prowling around the apartment. “He has a lot of booze,” she said, investigating the glass-fronted cabinet full of bottles.
“I don’t know how you tell if someone’s an alcoholic or just joking about it,” Finn said.
“I’m sure you can look that up,” Rey said. She went and stood in the window sill to look at the tops of the moldings. BB, delighted, followed and jumped up onto the window, patting at her leg curiously.
“What are you doing?” Finn asked.
“I’m looking for bugs,” Rey said.
“Bugs,” Finn said.
“Electronic surveillance,” Rey said. She had checked his apartment for the same thing, and did so periodically.
“I think that’s the router for his Internet,” Finn said.
“I know that,” Rey said. “But I’ve researched it, and if you were going to monitor someone, it’s dead easy to hide hostile devices inside of innocuous devices they already own.”
“Why would someone be monitoring Poe?” Finn asked.
“Because monitoring you is too hard,” Rey said. “Or because he’s still connected to top secret things. He knows about Kylo Ren, you said.”
“I don’t know what he knows,” Finn said.
Rey shrugged. “The fact that he knew the name is enough,” she said darkly. Suddenly she turned and squinted at Finn. “Where did he say he was going this weekend?”
“The city,” Finn said. “Some gig with a band he’s in. One of his side jobs is as a musician.” He checked the timer on his phone. Ten minutes left.
“Hm,” Rey said. “I haven’t checked that out.” She’d already vetted Poe extensively, Finn knew, had verified his identity and dates of employment at his primary job, insofar as she could without attracting comment. Whatever was public record, she knew.
“I really, really don’t think he’s a spy,” Finn said patiently.
“Mm,” Rey said. “Well.” She balanced on the back of the couch, and tested a foothold on the edge of a bookshelf.
“Do not,” Finn said, alarmed.
“It’s fine,” she said, “I can see the shelf’s anchored to the wall, there.”
“What are you even doing,” Finn asked, exasperated. “Come down from there!”
“There’d be access from the fire escape,” she said, pointing at the corner of the rather high ceiling. “I need to get on the roof to really clear this place.”
“Please come down from there,” Finn said. He wasn’t about to attempt to drag her down. They were both trained fighters but she had a lot less restraint than he did, even in play-fighting; he’d learned never to even pretend to arm-wrestle her.
BB was in raptures, wide-eyed and excited; it wasn’t hard to tell that Poe never climbed his own furniture.
“It’s fine,” she said, and managed to scramble up onto the bookshelf without knocking any of the knick-knacks on it down. She sat there, daintily perched, and peered at the ceiling.
“I have to go take dinner out of the oven,” Finn said. “Come down when you’re finished.”
“Okay,” she said, climbing carefully to her feet on top of the tall bookshelf.
Finn rolled his eyes, and went down the stairs. While he was investigating the casserole, he heard the outside door of the building open and close. He paused, straightening up. Surely it was the writer lady in the front apartment. He listened for a moment. If it was Poe, he’d probably react with alarm to going into his apartment and finding a woman on top of his bookshelf.
There were no audible sounds of alarm, so Finn relaxed, set the table, poured the drinks, and finally decided that Rey wasn’t going to come down on her own, so he went up to get her. “I told you,” he said, opening the door, “to come dow— oh.”
Poe was standing in the middle of his living room, overnight bag still over his shoulder, hands on hips, and Rey was still on top of the bookshelf. “Hi,” Poe said.
“Hi,” Rey said.
“We were petting the cats,” Finn said, mortified.
“And reading books,” Rey clarified.
“You said you’d be back late!” Finn went on.
“I figured the people I was riding with would want to spend the whole day in the city,” Poe said, “but they didn’t want to, so we came home.” He gestured. “I met Rey.”
“I hope she had a good explanation why she’s climbing your furniture,” Finn said. “I asked her to come down and she wouldn’t.”
“She’s checking for electronic surveillance,” Poe said. “I can’t blame her, I’ve done the same. I’m more impressed that she put the router back together when I told her it was clear.”
“I still want to look at this filter,” Rey said, holding up something small between her thumb and forefinger. She stowed it in a pocket somewhere, and nimbly climbed down the bookshelf. Poe cringed, but she landed lightly and dusted her hands off.
“I already checked,” Poe said.
Rey squinted suspiciously at him, circling closer. Poe held his hand out. “Nice to meet you, by the way.”
She shook his hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “How would you know what electronic surveillance devices look like?”
“I’ve used them,” Poe said. “I used to be involved in covert operations.”
“Oh right,” she said, lighting up. “That’s right. I forgot.” She leaned in. “You need to tell me everything you know about Kylo Ren.”
“I can’t do that,” Poe said.
“Nonsense,” she said.
Finn cleared his throat. “I made dinner,” he said. “There’s enough, if you want to join us, Poe, but I don’t actually have a third plate.”
Poe laughed. “I can bring my own plate,” he said. “I’d love to join you. Should I bring anything to go along with it?”
“No,” Finn said, frowning in confusion, “I made a whole meal.”
“I just mean— it’s polite, if someone invites you to dinner, to offer to bring something, like dessert or drinks.”
“Oh,” Finn said. “But you made me dinner the other night and I didn’t offer anything.”
“That’s all right,” Poe said, “it’s not required. It’s just a polite thing to offer, if it strikes you.” He pulled his shoulder bag off and walked farther into the apartment, tossing the bag into the bedroom. “Hi, Artoo,” he said. “Nice to know you missed me.” He went over to the kitchen, and looked in the freezer. “Like, I happen to have a box of ice cream sandwiches, which I could contribute as dessert, and I don’t have a whole six-pack of beer but I have three beers, so that would make dinner more festive, unless you had other plans?”
“I don’t,” Finn said.
“I love ice cream sandwiches,” Rey said.
“Then I’ll bring them,” Poe said, smiling, and Finn smiled back like an idiot.
Rey was watching them both narrowly. She accepted a beer when Poe handed it to her, and the three of them trooped down to Finn’s apartment.
“No,” Rey said, after a perfectly lovely dinner during which Poe had absolutely no difficulty adjusting to her unusually abrupt conversational style and seemed utterly unfazed to have met her while she was climbing his furniture, “I have to go home immediately, and on my own.” Finn often walked her home, but not always; this would not have seemed at all strange except that she fixed Poe with a very pointed look.
“What’s that mean?” Finn asked.
“Nothing,” Rey said, fixing him with a pointed look in turn.
Finn sighed, and slumped down in his seat. “I hope the conversation you had in my absence was productive,” he said.
“It was,” Rey said, and headed for the door.
“Wait!” Poe said, scrambling to his feet. There were only two chairs at the table, so they’d all gone to sit on the floor instead. He got up nimbly enough for a man who’d gotten as little sleep as he claimed to have.
“What?” Rey paused warily.
“Ice cream sandwich,” Poe said, and went to the freezer.
“Oh,” she said, and held her hands out excitedly, flexing her fingers. He brought one over to her, and she took it happily, unwrapping it immediately.
“Eat slow,” Poe said, “don’t get a brain freeze.”
“I love ice cream sandwiches,” Rey said fiercely.
“Safe home,” Poe said.
She beamed, and went out the door. Poe smiled after her, looking fond, then came back in and got ice cream sandwiches for himself and Finn.
“Did she tell you that you should have all the sex with me?” Finn asked, taking the wrapped treat and picking delicately at the seam. “Because she said it to me in exactly those words.”
“I feel like she toned it down for my benefit,” Poe said, but he looked amused, mouth curling appealingly. “All the sex? I like that phrase.”
“All of it,” Finn said.
Poe sat back down on the floor and tore his ice cream wrapper open daintily. “She was both hilarious and honest about it,” he said. “I wasn’t offended, if you’re worried.”
“It,” Finn said, fumbling a little for words, “she seems to either set people off or not.” He contemplated the ice cream sandwich. “I, um. I talk to her about a lot of things because she. You know. Understands. But I sort of underestimated how bad she is at— well, she was kind of raised by wolves, I think is the idiom.”
“Were there real wolves?” Poe asked, looking astonished.
“No,” Finn said, “which is kind of the problem, I think. She was kind of— isolated. If there had been wolves she might at least have some chance at, you know.”
Poe laughed. “Well, she didn’t offend me,” he said. “I think she was a good perspective.”
“Listen,” Finn said, sitting forward on his knees, “I maybe told her what you told me and I know that was told to me in confidence but—“
“She’s a confidante,” Poe said. “She’s your confidante. I’m not going to be angry about that. That’s all right. Everyone needs a confidante.”
Finn sat back a little. “Who have you told about me?” he asked, distracted.
Poe laughed. “I haven’t told anyone everything,” he said. “Eat your ice cream, by the way, it’s going to make a mess if you don’t.” Finn remembered the thing in his hand, and bit it before it melted. “The four people who were in the car with me all day yesterday and today all know that I have an extremely hot young neighbor I’m super-conflicted about and have collectively decided that I should just bang him, even though these are the same people who had been telling me for months that I needed to stop dating entirely.”
“Really,” Finn said.
Poe rolled his eyes. “I promise I presented the issue as approximately as complicated as it really is, and I made a big thing about how unusually innocent and pure and also good-hearted you are, and so on, but by about the fifteenth minute of today’s drive they were all unanimous that I should really just solve all my problems by judicious application of your youthful and pure dick.”
Finn laughed, able at least to pick up on the humor. “I’m not that innocent,” he pointed out.
“Well,” Poe said. “And that was Rey’s point. I’m trying to remember her exact quote because it was brilliant.”
“I bet it was,” Finn said, grimacing.
“No, no,” Poe said, “I mean it. She said something along the lines of, whatever your specific bullshit is, Finn is an unusually competent human so he won’t have much of a problem handling it. That’s not it exactly but it was something like that.”
“You had like,” Finn paused to think back. “Two minutes alone with her, tops.”
“Oh yeah,” Poe said. “She refused to introduce herself. She said I could certainly figure out who she was and there was no time for that, we had to talk about you and I having all the sex.”
Finn couldn’t help but laugh. Poe was grinning, too. “I mean,” Finn said, hopeful. “That means you’re willing to consider it, though. With me.”
Poe licked his fingers, and balled up the wrapper of his ice cream sandwich. “I figured you knew that,” he said. “I’ve been staring at you like a moony lovesick teenager since I first saw you. Mentally rehearsing all the ways it would go wrong, starting with you not being into dudes and ending with you realizing what a fucking trash fire of a person I am.”
“I think we’ve established that none of that is actually true,” Finn said, ungracefully stuffing the last, melting remnant of the ice cream into his face.
Poe smiled at him, like he’d just done something particularly clever instead of what he’d actually done, which was faintly disgusting. (Finn had grown up eating extremely monotonous food with extremely precise and tidy table manners. Nothing he’d ever eaten had tried to melt before.)
“No,” Poe said, “I guess it’s not.” He fidgeted with the wrapper, then got to his feet, taking Finn’s ice cream wrapper from him and going to throw them out in the kitchen wastebasket. He stood in the kitchen doorway, then, looking at Finn. “She made a good point, though, that I shouldn’t patronize you. I’m older and I’ve had more relationships but that doesn’t mean I know anything more of substance than you do, so I shouldn’t act like I can make decisions on your behalf.”
“I cautiously agree with this,” Finn said.
Poe came back over and knelt on the floor, maybe arm’s length away, and Finn stared at him. “For serious, though,” Poe said, “I’ve been fucking pining over you like a ridiculous— stupid person. Was it really not obvious?”
“Not to a man who spent a lot of his life wearing a helmet with a face mask,” Finn pointed out.
Poe squeezed his eyes shut. “Baby,” he said softly, opening his eyes again, and he had that expression that Finn recognized— oh. That’s what that expression was. “Baby, I only want you to have nice things now.”
This whole time, that’s what that expression had been. “Christ,” Finn said. “No, I see it now.”
Poe laughed, and knee-walked closer, taking Finn’s jaw between his hands. “I’m not a nice thing,” he said, “but I’ll do my best.”
“Please,” Finn said, and closed the distance between their faces. He’d kissed people before, but it hadn’t been like this. Poe’s mouth was sweet and slippery on his. His eyes slid shut on their own, and he couldn’t help but make a needy little sound.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Poe murmured, pausing to kiss him deeper— Finn wrapped his arms around Poe’s body, pulling him closer— “mm, yeah okay.”
“I don’t even care,” Finn said breathlessly, “what the details are, I just— want— you.”
“You’ve got me,” Poe said.
Much later, Finn groped around until he found his phone, and laughed.
“What?” Poe asked, lifting his gloriously tousled head to look.
Finn showed him his phone, which had a message from Rey that was just all emojis. It wasn’t even a message in emoji, it was just a random keysmash of emojis.
“You gotta answer,” Poe said.
Finn rolled his eyes, then opened his phone camera, and turned it to the front-facing camera. “Christ,” Poe said, and ducked his head out of the frame.
“C’mon,” Finn said.
Poe moaned, but then tilted his head so that just his hair, forehead, and eye were visible, pressed against the curve of Finn’s shoulder.
Just as Finn was about to take the picture, BB jumped up into the frame with a delighted trill. She started grooming Poe’s hair.
Finn laughed and took the picture, and sent it without a caption.