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As she attempted to politely card a small but wiry co-ed with starkly familiar eyes, somewhere in the recesses of her overtired mind, Brienne vaguely recalled that, when Renly had first offered her a part time job at The Rose and Stag, he'd promised that this would all become comfortable with practice. Not that she was counting, but it had now been two years, eight months, five days and a little under three and a half hours since she had poured her first drink and Brienne felt like she was still finding her feet.
"It's not my fault I didn't grow when I was supposed to", the girl huffed, emptying out her each of her pockets in turn, but to no avail. Even from the other side of the bar, Brienne towered awkwardly over the college student. "Can't you just trust that I'm as old as I say I am?"
Feeling memorised words burst to life on her tongue, Brienne opened her mouth, intending to inform the grumbling patron, as she had so many before her, of the history of harsh penalties given out to any establishment caught serving a minor, as well as the reasons for the long standing law behind it, but a barked masculine laugh stopped her dead.
"Do we really have to go through this again?" he pondered from over the girl’s shoulder, nonchalantly insisting on their full attention. While the smile he sent was met with more suspicion than acknowledgement, the afterglow burned Brienne's freckled skin nevertheless. "If I had a dragon for every time I've watched you stand there and terrorise some poor kid... just give the girl a beer, Tarth."
"The last time I checked your name wasn't above the door, Lannister. I don't take my orders from you", she snapped back, taking a glance at the successfully retrieved ID card being thrust under her nose. The expiry date put Arya in the soon to be graduating class and, hoping that she wasn't some kind of child prodigy or con artist, Brienne quickly exchanged two ice cold bottles for a handful of silver coins. The girl nodded her thanks and blended back into the Friday night crowd like a raindrop falling into the ocean, a blink and miss it moment, leaving Brienne alone in the company of one of her few regulars.
"Apart from my drink orders, you mean", he smoothly pointed out well before Arya dropped out of earshot, the ghost of another heart stoppingly gorgeous smile lifting his lips in barely concealed amusement. She glared, knowing there was no comeback she could have thrown at him to counter the truth, although if they'd originally met during daylight hours, she would have more likely been putting him behind bars than serving from one. Sighing at the irony of the situation, Brienne waved her hand in the vague direction of the multicoloured wall of booze on display.
"So what ridiculous concoction can I make for you tonight, Jaime?"
"I'm feeling nostalgic, Brienne", he replied, batting his eyelashes innocently as if he hadn't gone out of his way to order more and more complicated cocktails every time they saw each other. She could almost swear he'd bought a book on the subject just to be infuriating. There was more than just teasing present in his tone this time, though, as he nearly growled, "Double scotch on the rocks."
Throwing a few cubes of ice into a glass, she instinctively waited for the punch line, trying not to remember that all those days and months and years ago it was Jaime Lannister, looking like he was taking up residence half way between a fantasy and the grave, who had been her very first paying customer with that exact same order. She hesitated between pouring the first and second measure, chewing on her lip as she covertly studied the planes of his much too handsome face, checking for any sign of the world weariness that kept drawing him back into the warm embrace of The Rose and The Stag. “Is… is everything… okay?” Brienne tried desperately to make the question appear vague and frightfully pointed at once.
"All the better for seeing you, sweetling", he drawled with vehemence, running a hand through his golden curls with a deliberate languor, holding her eye a little longer than Brienne would ever want to admit to. His perfectly tailored suit jacket had been abandoned somewhere between leaving his post at City Hall and settling into the leather covered bar stool, shirt sleeves pushed up past his elbows to expose toned muscles that flexed appealingly with his every movement. Once upon a time, Jaime had been a special forces commander, a fact he'd casually dropped into their first biting conversation between rapid fire innuendo laden insults, his drunken efforts at impressing or intimidating the pre-law army brat refilling his glass falling flat. She remembered calling him a cab later that night, the first of many such calls which had put her on friendly terms with the young Night's Watch receptionist, only half listening to Jaime insisting that if what he'd done in Bravos was any indication, he'd be more than strong enough for her.
"I know I'm hot, Tarth", Jaime quipped, stopping her from dwelling on how their friendship seemed to have formed slowly and all at once, each unintentionally shared story or secret adding another layer of trust to a painting that was no longer merely black and white. "But you'll need to stop staring if you don't want to spill that."
"I wasn't..." she spluttered unconvincingly, blushing harder at the thought of Jaime watching her work as carefully as she'd been following the day‘s events unfolding in his preternaturally green eyes. Her heart fluttered like the traitor it had always been and she swallowed hard, blinking twice before handing Jaime a distractingly poured double double with an apologetic grimace. "I was... I was only wondering if we're going to have to apply for an extended hours license if Renly really wants his wedding reception here in the fall."
Jaime raised an eyebrow along with his glass, seeing straight through her half thought out white lie with the ease of someone who had spent time learning each and every one of her tells. "To The Rose and The Stag", he toasted, near moaning as the perfectly aged alcohol hit his tongue, forcing Brienne to look anywhere but directly at him as a flood of recent memories coloured her cheeks an even uglier shade of scarlet. "Bringing people together for two years, eight months, five days and, what, four hours?"
His name slipped past her lips in an unconsciously breathless murmur, the wanted warning for his second obscene noise in the same number of minutes directly at odds with the knowledge that Jaime had been counting their time together too. Maybe…, she thought, but it took no more than a single breath for Brienne to realise that lingering on that kind of half drawn conclusion had nothing to offer her except future heartache.
Hearing the familiar voices of self doubt and sentimentality return to insinuate themselves at the back of her mind, she turned to clean the already spotless slab of speckled marble beneath her hands before Jaime could notice the misplaced lovers lament and pass comment. She felt him tense as if fighting some unknown internal battle, the already charged air starting to shift and thicken around them, silence falling to crackle and fizz at their feet.
"We only got that in a couple of days ago", Brienne informed him quietly as she handed over the last in a long line of dirty Martinis, watching how a group of giggling girls started to shamelessly undress a clearly uninterested Jaime with their eyes, pastel pinks and greens and blues swirling like forsaken candy wrappers as they eventually decided to flit back to their corner table. "Renly's been looking into new suppliers since it turned out the last one was robbing us blind on delivery." It was mindless small talk, which she usually hated, but it seemed easier to talk to him about alcohol than anything more pertinent. "What I mean is, don't pretend to like it if it's crap. I can always get you something else if you want."
"Why would I want that?" Jaime cocked his head, looking up from his half full glass and smiling at her slowly enough to be both pretty and dangerous in equal measure, though the mirth did not meet his stormy gaze. "Trust me, Brienne, I'm far too tired to play games right now."
"If it's really good enough to warrant all that moaning, I could put a staff recommendation on it."
"Why don't you have a drink with me and find out for yourself?"
In all the time she had known Renly, from pre-school play dates through awkward middle and high school years, where she had grown taller than all the boys and he'd come out, snuffing out her burgeoning teenage crush almost before it was given a chance to breathe, he had never been one to follow the rules. In fact there were only two things he'd been absolutely adamant about when it came to running The Rose and The Stag; no minors and no drinking on the job. Brienne had added a third at one point, a former classmate by the name of Hyle Hunt giving her reason to amend Renly's short list to include dating patrons, but that only lasted until he refused to leave one night and his advances had resulted in his face becoming intimately acquainted with her fist.
"Another time, maybe."
"Another time, definitely." Jaime took another sip, sighing contentedly as he swallowed and making Brienne wonder if it was possible to become intoxicated on a person. "You know if my brother was here, I'm sure he'd be trying to tell me that I'm already experiencing my mid life crisis."
Brienne crinkled her brow, searching for the point he was trying to make but coming up blank, knowing that the circles they were prowling around each other were finally coming to a head. "Why? What did you do now?"
"She's only twenty five but I think I'm in love."
"We've talked about the sports cars, Jaime, if you don't actually drive them they're not... oh."
"I thought we finally understood each other last night. If I'd just wanted a one night thing, I could have tried my luck with any one of those ridiculous sorority girls", Jaime continued, no trace of mockery left in his tone as piercing green beams held her widening eyes still, a wild animal stuck in headlights. Though to anyone on the outside looking in, he would appear not to have a care in the world, Brienne couldn't help but catch the flash of confused fury in his unwavering stare. "I would have made you breakfast had you stayed."
"Breakfast?" she repeated, the thundering heartbeat in her ears picking up speed, waves of guilt and nerves and unsaid goodbyes tying her stomach in knots.
"In bed. In my bed where we had amazing sex, twice, and you fell asleep in my arms."
"Jaime."
She sounded so young, much too young and inexperienced to be wading into the rushing current of romantic entanglement with one of her closest friends. Although the previous night hadn't marked the first time their lips had met, jokes about making alternative wishes over sapphire blue birthday cupcakes and two minutes at New Year where they simply forgot how to stop kissing all cementing how hopelessly Brienne was falling, the hunger that had taken them from double checking the locks to tearing each other's clothes off was frighteningly new.
"Brienne."
"I didn't want to wake you.” I didn't want to see if you'd changed your mind. I didn't want to know if I'd lost you. “I had a tutorial first thing and I needed to..."
"Don't", he growled, his voice dropping so low that she was forced to take a hesitant step towards him. "If you think we made a mistake, just fucking tell me. Don't run away in the middle of the night without saying a word when you know that's what she liked to do to me.”
Seeing the fire blazing in his eyes, regretting every single moment she had not been with him since then and knowing she wanted to let him in again, Brienne felt the words tumbling out of her just as quickly as the tears that were forming behind her eyes, "I'minlovewithyou." Surging forwards without a much needed deep breath, not knowing if there was any kind of apology she could put together that would heal Jaime's re-opening emotional wounds, she rested her trembling fingers alongside his battle scarred right hand. "And I'm sorry, I didn't mean... I never wanted... we weren't a mistake, Jaime... I’m-I'm in love with you."
It only took seconds for Jaime to rush to his feet, abandoning his stool so that he could close down her slight height advantage in an attempt to put them back onto the same page, one that had been written while they had lain happily sated and wrapped around each other. Though his features remained strained, a returning glimmer of playfulness allowed the hurt in his eyes to begin retreating, trapping her hand beneath his and squeezing past the point of pleasure. "What was that?"
As she found herself suddenly speechless, Brienne became acutely aware of how little air there was in the packed room, her head spinning in lazy circles like a fairground ride that hadn't yet reached full speed, gasping through her disbelief that words which had haunted her sleep for weeks had left her lips so easily. In fact, her dreams had been so full of Jaime recently that even waking up with him tight against her didn't feel real until he'd snuffled and snored into her skin.
"What. Did. You. Say?" he demanded, close enough now for Brienne to be inhaling the very essence of him with every half breath, shivering despite the beads of sweat curling wispy strands escaping from her practical ponytail as Jaime pressed his forehead against hers. "Brienne?"
"If you'll still have me", she faltered, their previously drawn lines of friendship now so far crossed, Brienne could have been talking to him from the other side of the raging Narrow Sea. A thunderous rumble of embarrassment tickled at the back of her throat as Jaime nodded her into finishing what she'd started, beginning to burn from the inside out as if she had swallowed dragon fire while he'd been making her writhe and scream with his talented tongue lapping between her legs. "I want to be with you." Can we start over if we never really started in the first place?
She barely had time to release the sentiment into the wild before Jaime reached out and kissed her, the brush of his lips soft and determinedly unhurried like, on hearing her apologetically stumbling declaration, he had love and forgiveness to spare.
"Don't ever do that again. When I wake up tomorrow, I want you to be there", his thumb stroked along the arch of her neck as Jaime pulled her inappropriately close. He placated her wincing protest at feeling the cold counter top pressing into her stomach by worrying delicately at her lower lip until Brienne felt her knees start to give out. She moaned under her breath, understanding what he'd said and still wanting everything that wasn't sensible as her pulse was sent racing, Jaime murmuring her name into her opening mouth to messily meet her eager kisses over and over again.
"I get off in a couple of hours", Brienne sighed as he moved to awkwardly nuzzle into her covered collarbone, a grasping hand in her hair and another set against the small of her back keeping her from paying attention to the same flight or fight response that had pulled her from his side earlier.
"Don't you mean I'll be getting you off in a couple of hours?" he suckled at her pulse point and a rush of white hot desire ran from her core to her toes and back up to her clouding mind.
"Jaime."
"I'm guessing fucking your customers in the bathroom is one of those things on your strictly prohibited list", he mused, pressing one last tender kiss to her wanting lips before pulling away. She blinked as their surroundings came back into focus, huffing out a noise of pure happiness as Jaime boldly slid his hand up her ribcage and over her breasts before dropping a solid weight into the palm that wasn't still cupping his jaw. "So, why don't you hold onto this for me?"
Brienne forced her eyes away from his rapidly dilating pupils to see his front door key shining up at her, the intention clear. "I can't... how on earth are you going to get home?"
"Tyrion has a spare", Jaime waved her concern away, steering them back to the matter at hand. "When you get in, wake me up if I've fallen asleep."
She nodded, closing her eyes for a beat as a regretful blush took her by surprise. "From here on out. Always."