Work Text:
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Twenty-three is –
It isn’t much of anything, honestly.
It’s a fundamentally uninspired point of time, an ellipsis, a trailing dot dot dot leading her towards what Sansa hopes is something brighter.
Twenty-four is – she doesn’t know much about what twenty-four is going to be, but it starts with Margie and Arya and Gilly and Maya and the rest surprising her with a night out and ends with them sleeping in a pile on her living room floor, like they would when she was thirteen, like they would when the world seemed shiny and new and the future was limitless.
They’re a lot more drunk now than they were at thirteen, but still.
She’s just been handed the keys to her bakery – yes, her bakery, and it’s her name on the lease and it’s a risk, she knows, but Sansa is tired of being frightened.
Twenty-three is an ellipsis.
Twenty-four is a beginning.
.
So that’s how it starts.
And, okay, maybe opening a bakery with absolutely no business experience whatsoever –
Maybe that’s not the best decision she’s ever made.
.
She’s covered in flour and chocolate when Theon Greyjoy storms through the front door of her bakery and back into her life.
(Not that he’d ever really been part of her life, honestly.
Theon was Robb’s. Theon was Jon’s. Theon was the older boy that all of Sansa’s high school friends had swooned over, with his crooked grin and his inky-black hair and that charming way he –
He was never hers.)
Maybe saying that he storms in is inaccurate. He bangs on the front door until she unlocks it and lets him in, and when she does he brushes right past her as if this is normal, as if him arriving at her new business barely past sunrise after being out of town for the last year and a half is something she should have seen coming.
“Your saviour has arrived,” he proclaims, holding his arms out wide as though expecting a round of applause.
“We’re closed, Theon,” she says, and then pauses for a moment. “Saviour of what, exactly?”
“Of this,” he says, as if it’s obvious.
This, judging by his hand gestures, is her shop. The shop that she’s poured her heart and soul into, the one that’s been consistently busy since the moment their doors opened (thanks in no small part to the constant promotion of her sweets to Margaery’s few hundred thousand Instagram followers).
Maybe a little bit too busy, honestly. A lot busier than she’d planned for it to be. But that’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Her shop does not – does not – need saving. Certainly not from a man who she once witnessed break his leg trying to jump into the pool from their roof on a dare.
A dare that he’d given himself.
“We’re doing just fine, thank you very much. No saving required.”
“You sure about that, sweetheart? Because Robb said you need a hand.”
“Robb doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
She has employees, after all. She has Gilly, and Jeyne helps out when she’s free, and sometimes her mum comes in to help her decorate – so yes, she hadn’t really expected how long the lines were going to be just a few weeks after opening and sure, maybe four people isn’t exactly a bustling staff roster, but it’s better than nothing.
Better than Theon fucking Greyjoy.
“He said you cried to him on the phone for three hours last night, love.”
“That was just…I mean, it was nothing. He doesn’t – I can’t believe he told you.”
He shrugs, and Sansa hates him more in that moment than she ever has. “He’s worried.”
“He’s always worried. I’m fine.”
She’s not.
(Theon doesn’t need to know that.)
“Look,” he sighs, long-suffering, as if this conversation has been going on for three hours rather than two minutes, “you’ll be doing me a favour, Sans.”
“Oh, I will be, will I?”
“I really need a job, and nothing would piss my dad off more than this one. I mean, a Greyjoy in a pastry shop? In a Stark-owned pastry shop? He’d have an embolism.”
“So this is all about maintaining your status as the family disappointment, then.”
“Exactly.”
She quirks an eyebrow.
He glares right back.
“Also,” he continues, and Sansa quietly celebrates her victory, “rent is fucking expensive, and I’m going to need every pound I can get if I ever want to be able to move out of your brother and Margaery’s guest room. Those walls are ridiculous thin and they’re like dogs in fucking heat, I swear.”
“Gross, Theon.”
He laughs at her evident discomfort, but at least he has the good graces to do so quietly.
“I’d be a good employee, Sans. Top fucking tier quality.”
“I struggle to believe that.”
“Remember that lemon cake I baked you for your sixteenth birthday?”
Of course she remembers that. She remembers it breaking her heart in the best sort of way, seeing how hard Theon had worked just to give her something special. He’d been cut off financially from his father for years, couldn’t buy her a shiny necklace or a cashmere sweater or whatever else he knew had been on her list.
He’d given her something amazing. And she’d fallen in love with him just a little bit, then, with the handsome older boy and his crooked smile and –
And, honestly, the cake had been really fucking good.
“If you hit on any of the customers,” Sansa says, “I reserve the right to kick your arse.”
Theon –
Theon winks, the smug bastard.
“Promise?” he says, and she thinks she might hate him for it.
.
But here’s the thing:
Theon, as it turns out, is really good at his job.
He can make a genoise sponge like an old pro. The roses he pipes are absolutely sublime; his pâte à choux puffs like something out of the pages of a magazine.
Sansa wants to be angry about it. She wants to be frustrated that Theon fucking Greyjoy waltzes into her bakery – her bakery – without warning and somehow manages to be naturally perfect at everything he does. She wants to be angry because he was right, because she did need his help, but then he smiles at her from across the counter and, well –
It’s very difficult to be angry at someone who looks like that.
.
“It’s disturbing, isn’t it?”
Gilly hums absently, more focused on kneading the dough in front of her than she is on Sansa’s obvious discomfort.
“I mean, it’s weird. Almost unnatural.”
“Is this about Davos wearing socks and sandals again?”
Gods, she wishes that’s what her discomfort was about. At least the incredibly dad-esque fashion sense of one of their favourite regulars was disturbing in a charming way.
“It’s about that.” She points in the direction of the cash, where Theon is currently holding down the fort. “How much they love him, I mean. Don’t you think it’s weird?”
The they in question are her customers, who seemingly flock to the counter whenever Theon is around. Men and women, giggling when he presents them their pastry with a flourish and lingering with their hand in his for a little too long when they pass over their cash. They act like school children, all of them, and quite frankly she’s never seen anything like it in her life.
The thing is – the thing is, he’s not even doing anything in particular to encourage it. He’s just being Theon, charming and funny and impossibly handsome, and it’s utterly ridiculous to see how well it’s working.
“Isn’t it a good thing, them liking him?”
“It’s not a bad thing. I’m not unhappy about it.”
“So you’re happy, but disturbed?”
Sansa doesn’t like the way that Gilly is looking at her – like she can see every thought forming in her mind. Honestly, for someone who looks so innocent that woman is far too sharp for her own good.
“I can be two things at once,” she huffs, feeling at once like a petulant child.
Theon looks over at them then as if on cue, and Sansa can’t help but notice that there’s the slightest smattering of flour on the tip of his nose, up the side of his right cheek. He grins, blows them a quick kiss, and then turns back to the next customer in the queue as if nothing’s happened at all.
When the sun shines on him just right…
Well, maybe she can see why the customers are so enamoured.
“I think it’s sweet,” Gilly says, resuming her kneading with the faintest hint of a smile, “how hard he’s trying to impress.”
“I don’t think he needs to try. One wink and they’ll give him a fifty percent tip.”
Gilly scoffs.
Scoffs.
“I wasn’t talking about them, Sansa.”
Now –
Now, she doesn’t care for the implications of that at all.
.
That smile – that damn smile – stays stuck in her mind for longer than she’d care to admit.
So yeah, fuck, maybe it’s not that unnatural after all.
Maybe it’s just…him.
.
He arrives at exactly five-thirty in the morning with piping hot coffee (cinnamon almond macchiato, no whip, just how she likes it), hair artfully dishevelled (and she’s known Theon long enough to know that he doesn’t even have to style it, that’s just how it is), and some ridiculous story to pass the time as they prepare for opening.
YouTube conspiracy videos about how Melisandre is actually ninety-six. An overly-complicated breakdown of the plot of Westworld. A two hour monologue on why Thor is the best Avenger, no questions asked.
Those –
Those are the more normal ones.
“Did you know,” he tells her, gravely serious, “that my great-great-uncle once fought and killed a giant squid with his bare hands?”
That one catches her attention enough that she stops what she’s doing, elbow-deep in brownie batter, to turn towards him. His face is flat, but she can see the flash of pride in his eyes – there’s no doubt in Sansa’s mind that he knows that he’s roped her in.
“I’m almost positive that didn’t happen.”
Theon gasps, bringing his hand to his heart in mock-offence, and Sansa hates the fact that she has to struggle not to laugh. “Are you accusing me of lying? For shame, Lady Stark.”
“Not accusing you of anything.”
“Good, because –”
“I’m saying your lying, because you are.”
“I’ve never lied about a single thing in my life!”
“You lied about being hit on by Cersei Lannister.”
“That,” he jabs a finger towards her, looking almost comically serious, “absolutely happened. She fucking caressed my biceps, for Christ’s sake”
“You lied about beating Drogo in a fight.”
“I didn’t lie. I just omitted the fact that it was a fight in a video game.”
Shit. Maybe – just maybe, he’s got her there.
“Seriously, Theon. A squid?”
She’s not giving in. She’s not. But Sansa can just tell that he’s buzzing with excitement to share this story with her – a story that’s obviously bullshit – and she might be a bit of a bitch at times but she’s not cruel enough to deny him this.
Theon never talks about his family. He doesn’t talk about home, or his father, or anyone besides Yara and, on occasion, his mum. Maybe Sansa’s a little bit disappointed that the only time he’s ever brought it up is in the context of one of his (probably fake) relatives fighting a (definitely fake) sea creature, but she figures that it’s better than nothing.
“The thing was massive. Like, if Jaws was about a big ass squid – which, let’s be honest it should have been – it would have been about this one. And he just, like, tore it to shreds.”
“He tore it apart?”
“Metaphorically,” Theon says, rolling his eyes as if that should have been obvious all along. “He used one of its own tentacles to choke it to death.”
“He choked it. The squid.”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
She knows what she could say.
She could tell him that she’s pretty sure you can’t choke a squid to death, because they don’t have lungs and they don’t have a respiratory system like a human and – well, there’s a lot that she could say about that, but Theon seems ridiculously excited about this completely absurd story and, for the first time in her life, Sansa can’t imagine doing or saying anything right now that would possibly bring his mood even slightly down.
So she knows what she could say, and she knows what she’ll say instead.
“That,” she says, “is one of the coolest fucking things I’ve ever heard.”
It’s not the answer Theon expects, she knows.
She knows because he grins, childlike and bright, and she knows her answer is the right one.
“More where that came from, baby,” he says, with another typical, exaggerated wink, before jumping into a story about another one of his ancestors who was very, definitely a pirate.
(She tries not to notice the way that, when he talks about something he’s excited about, his eyes glow brighter than anything she’s ever seen.
Sure, she fails, but at least there was an attempt.)
.
10:13 PM
Arya I need your help
Just a simple question, really
10:14 PM
You have to promise not to judge me
Or tell Robb
Jesus, please don’t tell Robb
10:15 PM
Has Theon always been…like, ridiculously hot?
.
Arya calls her no less than two minutes later.
When Sansa answers her phone, she answers it to hear nothing but her sister cackling on the other line.
The absolute bitch.
“If you were going to make fun of me, you could have just done it through a text.”
“Text doesn’t convey,” her sister says through her hysterics, sounding ridiculously out of breath, “how fucking hilarious this is.”
“It’s not funny!” she insists, because it’s not. “It’s traumatic! I think all of the oven fumes are going to my head – is that possible?”
“Right. They’ve been going to your head for the past, what, ten years?”
“I have no idea to what you’re referring.”
“Sansa.” She hates when Arya talks to her like this: slow, as if she’s a child, even though Sansa is the older sibling and, frankly, the one with a significant amount more wisdom to offer. “Sansa, you haven’t exactly been subtle. You used to follow Theon around like a puppy when we were kids.”
“Only because I was annoyed that him and Robb used to exclude me from things!”
“Remember how pissed off you got when Jeyne Poole had a crush on him? You wouldn’t talk to her for weeks, Sans, and you practically threw a fucking party when she came to you crying because Theon had turned her down at the Tyrell’s pool party.”
“I was pissed because it was weird. He’s Robb’s best friend, and she’s mine.”
“You’ve got like, five hundred shirtless photos of him saved to your phone.”
“Pictures I took at our cabin.”
“Pictures you took because you’re a horny little –”
“Because he asked!”
“And because you totally want Theon to plow you into next Tuesday.”
“Gross, Arya!”
Her sister starts cackling again, and at once Sansa is immensely thankful that they’re having this conversation over the phone rather than in person. The last thing she would need would be for her sister to see the flush that’s no doubt taking over her face at the completely disgusting thought of –
Okay, maybe not completely disgusting.
Maybe not even a little bit.
“I don’t want him to plow me.”
“You do. You’re a blizzard, and Theon Greyjoy’s the Mister Plow of your dreams.”
“Could you possibly put that in a less vile way?”
“I could,” Arya says, and Sansa knows there’s a but coming, “but that’s nowhere near as fun.”
“Gods, this is humiliating,” she groans, burying her face in her hands. “I can’t be horny for Theon Greyjoy, of all people. I’m his boss! That violates like, a million different codes of workplace conduct.”
“Seriously, you perv. Looks like Baelish rubbed off on you after all.” Arya’s just teasing her, she knows, and she’s sure that she deserves it after all the shit she put her sister through with Gendry, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating. “Metaphorically rubbed off, obviously.”
“You can’t tell anyone, Arya, seriously. He’s actually like, ridiculously good at his job –”
“Fucked levels of good. Can you tell him to save me and Gendry some of those salted caramel eclairs again?”
“If he quits because he finds out I want to jump him we’re going to lose like, half of our customers.”
Arya snorts, the sort of unladylike snort that Sansa knows their mother would scold her for, and she can practically hear the roll of her eyes from through the phone. “Believe me, if he finds out quitting will be the last thing on his mind.”
She sighs.
Takes a swig directly from the bottle of wine she’s been meaning to pour for the past ten minutes.
“I’m fucked.”
That, at least, is one thing they can agree on.
.
Except it’s not, as it turns out, the end of the world.
She’s apparently not half bad at hiding how badly she wants to lick Theon’s neck and things between them carry on as they are – the shop is bustling and the customers love him and he never fails to ask Gilly questions about little Sam, about how big he’s gotten and whether or not he’s walking and talking yet.
Theon is…he is, officially, shockingly, part of her life. Not only that: he’s an unresectable, fully-fused, completely necessary part of her life. He’s one of the first people she texts when she has a problem and he sends her the sort of ridiculous, idiotic memes that he’d typically only reserve for Robb and Jon, and somehow, between five am shifts and coffee breaks and sharing recipes on the weekends, Theon becomes one of her best friends.
A best friend with an inconvenient part time job as the object of her fantasies.
They close up the shop together every afternoon, and they dance to whatever shitty pop music Theon feels like blasting through the speakers, and sometimes he tosses flour in her hair and sometimes she smears chocolate icing down his cheeks, and it takes them about an hour longer than it probably should but, well, she not going to complain.
He reaches up (they’re basically the same height, after all) and ruffles her hair and she tries to act like it doesn’t bother her, that he still sees her as a kid sister and she sees him as –
Sometimes he lifts up the hem of his shirt to wipe the flour off of his face.
She almost definitely isn’t obvious about how long she stares when he does.
I can live like this, Sansa thinks, as she watches him help Old Nan carry her cupcakes to her car, chatting jovially all the way.
(She’s got a vibrator, an apartment with no roommates, and an active imagination.
She can live like this.
She’s going to have to.)
.
The next few months are a chaotic, beautiful, infuriating mess.
Their customer base is bigger than ever. Sansa hires three more people – Podrick, Miranda, and Brienne, of all people – and they get an espresso machine, and Pod starts running deliveries and things are, quite honestly, better than she’d ever imagined.
Tyrion Lannister does a write-up on his blog about her shop, about the sweet, hard-working flame-haired owner and her charming assistant with the swoon-worthy smile (his words, not hers), and she tries not to cry a little bit when she sees the review he gives her: four and a half stars, he says, with the half taken off only because he’s bitter that their shop is a six hour drive away from Kings Landing.
(But, he says, it’s worth the trip.)
When the article comes out she takes the staff out for drinks, closing the shop up even earlier than normal on a Saturday, and she does a toast to the lot of them, to the way they’ve all helped make her silly little pipe-dream come true.
Theon doesn’t lower his glass when she’s done.
“To Sansa,” he says, gaze never wavering from hers. “Our fearless leader, without whom I’d probably still be sleeping on a couch in her brother’s basement.”
Everyone laughs – everyone but Theon. He looks more serious than she’s ever seen him.
“I’ve never seen anyone chase their dreams like you do, Sans. I’ve never seen anyone as brave as you are, and that makes me want to be brave too. I know you don’t like being the center of attention so I’ll keep this quick, but I think I speak for all of us here when I say: thank you, but also, fuck you for making us look like a bunch of lazy slobs next to you.”
She’s not crying.
(She definitely is.)
When he’s done she hugs him, tighter than she’s ever hugged him before, and he only hesitates for a second before hugging her right back – he’s warm and familiar and she never wants to let go, not now, not quite so soon after she’s found him.
When Sansa pulls away, she sees Gilly staring at the two of them.
Staring, and smiling.
The bitch.
.
The next few months go on, and on, and on.
And then:
Twenty-five.
.
Robb and Margie throw her a surprise party, except her brother had spoiled it to her weeks ago so, really, the only surprise is how he’d barely even been able to make it through a few days without running his mouth.
Everyone is there. Her mum, her dad, Bran and Rickon and Arya and all of their dates – even Loras and Renly are there, having made the trip all the way from Highgarden, and they come bearing a ridiculously expensive necklace as a gift from Olenna Tyrell that Sansa’s almost positive is worth more than everything in her closet combined.
Twenty-four had been a beginning.
As she stands in a room, surrounded by people who love her – she doesn’t know what twenty-five will be quite yet, but it feels like something good.
Theon is there too, of course, and it’s Theon who brings her favourite gift of all: a three-tiered, immaculately decorated, picture-perfect lemon raspberry chiffon cake, one that she knows must have taken him hours to make. Hours of his own time, because he’d been working every day that week leading up to the party with hardly a moment to spare for himself, let alone to make something like this.
To make it for her.
“Happy birthday, Sans,” he whispers in her ear when she hugs him, and she feels delightfully, embarrassingly like she’s sixteen all over again.
Then he pulls back, and shouts, “Who wants shots!”
God help her –
God help her, she loves him.
.
It’s quarter past ten when Robb pulls her aside in the kitchen, swaying gently from side-to-side while clutching his beer.
“How long has that been going on for, then?”
Drunk Robb is ridiculously intrusive, and ridiculously vague. “How long has what been going on?”
“You and Theon,” he says, and then he makes a gesture with his hands that Sansa…she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to unsee.
“God. Does no one in this family have boundaries?”
“Boundaries go out the door when you start hooking up with my best friend!”
“We’re not –” she begins, and then pauses for a moment to collect herself, to lower her voice; the last thing she nears is the entire party hearing this absurd conversation. “We’re not hooking up, Robb. Theon and I have a strictly professional working relationship.”
“Yeah, sure. A strictly professional working relationship in his pants.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, and he holds up his hands as though she’s the one being unreasonable. “I’m not against it. Honestly, I think the two of you are kind of perfect for each other. He can help you loosen up, and you can help him stop being such an insufferable little prick.”
“The only prick I’m seeing right now is you, Robb.”
“And I know that I can be a bit of an overprotective arse sometimes,” Robb continues, as though she’d not even spoken at all, “but it’s not out of anything other than love for both of you. I’m just worried because, like, I know he might just seem like he’d be a proper choice for a fling or whatever but I don’t want to see you hurt him, Sans.”
That –
That seems…backwards.
Flipped upside down, turned around, backwards.
“Hang on,” she says, because Sansa’s pretty sure that in two sentences Robb’s just broken her brain. “You’re worried about me hurting him?”
Her brother has the audacity to look at her as if she’s lost her mind. “Obviously.”
“You’re my brother. Shouldn’t you be worried about him hurting me?”
Not that he will, because he won’t. She knows Theon better than that – and besides, she’s pretty sure that if Joffrey Baratheon can’t irreparably damage her, then there’s no way in hell that Theon Greyjoy can.
At least, she hopes not.
Robb snorts, sounding far too much like Arya for her liking. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why is that ridiculous?”
“Because everyone knows that Theon’s been in love with you for like, ever.”
Again –
Backwards.
“No,” she says, slowly, despite the panic creeping into her voice. “No, Robb, everyone doesn’t know that, because I don’t know that, and if I don’t know that then that means that there’s absolutely no way that that’s possibly true.”
He’s looking at her like she’s lost her mind and, frankly, she probably has.
“You sound like an insane person.”
“You do!” She snaps, because apparently repetition is the only thing her brain has the capacity for at the moment. “You’re the insane person, saying things like that!”
“He baked you a cake, Sans.”
“We work in a bakery! That’s literally his job.”
“For your sixteenth birthday he baked you a fucking cake. Do you know how long he spent working on that thing? Jon and I made fun of him for like, weeks.”
“Just because you guys are arseholes doesn’t mean –”
“He was watching YouTube tutorials, Sans. I’ve never seen Theon so flustered over anything as he was over that fucking cake, and then when you told him how much you loved it I’m pretty sure he like, didn’t stop smiling for a month. It was kind of pathetic, honestly.”
Robb is still rambling, rambling like he hasn’t just blown her world apart in five seconds, rambling as though she isn’t standing in front of him having a complete and total breakdown in near-silence.
“He baked me a cake,” she says, after a minute, after she’s learned how to speak again.
The only thing she hates more than herself in that moment is the smug look on Robb’s face.
“And Arya always says I’m the stupid one.”
.
Theon kisses her on the cheek when he leaves.
He lingers – just a second too long, but he lingers.
(She can’t believe Robb knew before she did.
Maybe she is the stupid one.)
.
On the one year anniversary of Theon’s first day at work, one month and two weeks after her birthday, Sansa’s waiting for him in the break room.
He comes to a halt in the doorway.
“I couldn’t get the tentacles right,” she says, when the silence goes on for just a beat too long. “I mean, I wasn’t sure how many, so I just guessed.”
She waits.
He’s still silent.
“Also,” she says, “also, I know I’m not very good at making people, so I should let you know that that’s supposed to be you. The one fighting, I mean.”
Theon blinks.
He swallows.
Fuck, she knew this was a ridiculous –
“Is that…is that a giant squid cake?”
“I mean, if you have to ask then I clearly didn’t do a very good job.”
“And that little dude there, that’s –”
“You choking the giant squid to death with one of its tentacles, yes.”
“Huh,” he says, face surprisingly blank. “Huh.”
Hardly the reaction she had been hoping for.
“I just thought,” Sansa starts, because now she’s feeling like an idiot and when she’s feeling like an idiot she begins to ramble, “that it would be a good way to mark your one year anniversary, you know? And you’re always making cakes for me, so now it’s my turn. I’ve also noticed that you seem to sneak bites of the devil’s food cake the most when you think I’m not looking, so that’s what it is on the inside, by the way. Is it too much? I feel like this might be too much. You don’t actually have to eat it.”
He’s still silent.
He’s still just…staring at her.
“Theon,” she says, because it’s six thirty in the morning and she doesn’t know how much longer she can deal with him looking at her like that. “Theon, if you don’t like it you can just say. It’s alright.”
He shakes his head, quickly, quietly, as if there’s something obvious that she’s missed.
“This is insane,” Theon says, voice as serious as she’s ever heard it before. “It’s completely, utterly insane, and I’m so fucking in love with you.”
Oh.
“Oh,” she says.
“Oh,” he agrees. “So I guess…I mean, I feel like I should probably go.”
“You’re scheduled to work until three.”
“And I’ve just told my boss that I’m in love with her, so I feel like I’m entitled to a sick day.”
“Aren’t you even going to have a bite of the cake that I made you? I was up until midnight, Theon. You know how much I hate fondant.”
“Of course I do. You call it –”
“Satan’s greatest masterpiece. Because it is.”
Sansa doesn’t like how suspiciously he’s looking at her. She doesn’t like the way that he takes a step forward, almost hesitantly, as if she’s going to lash out at him for getting too close. She doesn’t like the way that he almost seems afraid of her, because she knows that the only reason he feels like that is because he’s not aware of how ardently she feels the same way.
Of how much she loves him back.
When he gets close enough, Sansa stands so that they’re toe-to-toe, so that she could lean forward and brush her lips against his without warning. She could, but she won’t.
Not yet, anyways.
“Robb told me, you know. Weeks ago.”
“Bastard never could keep a secret.”
“Obviously he can, though, because he still hasn’t told you.”
The suspicion is still there, but it’s clouded by something else – confusion, maybe? Fear? Whatever it is, Sansa’s eager to see it gone.
“Never told me what?”
Now – now, she kisses him.
She’d expected Theon Greyjoy to taste like cigarettes. She’d expected him to taste like cheap beer, like black coffee, and she’d expected him to kiss her with the kind of obscenity that you usually only saw in unsavoury films that’d give your laptop a virus five minutes later.
She didn’t expect him to gasp against her lips, to cup her cheek with the kind of tenderness that you would hold a porcelain doll, to feel his other hand quiver where it rested against her waist.
She didn’t expect Theon Greyjoy to taste like lemons, and chamomile tea, and home.
When she breaks away, he’s grinning.
“Miss Stark,” he says, teasing and light and perfectly him, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to report you to HR.”
“Try it,” Sansa replies, and she can feel her smile matching his own, “and I’ll tell them about the time I caught you and the boss going at it on the break room table.”
It’s very fun, she thinks, watching the look on his face when her meaning finally clicks.
“Oh,” he says.
“Oh,” she agrees.
(And, honestly, as far as ideas go?
This has been one of her best.)
.