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Baxter didn’t like touch — that was pretty common knowledge. Niffty understood everything had to be through his gloves and trenchcoat. If he wanted to be especially daring, his ambitious pairs of long-johns or turtlenecks and slacks made an appearance or two, depending on the situation. But it didn’t mean she still didn’t want to hold his hand. Or dig her fingers into his gills (a serendipitous lab accident resulted in him briefly, wonderfully going shirtless for a whole minute and a half). Or smash her face against his while they smashed something else together…
…so no, technically, the most she’d gotten out of him these past few months was a fleeting kiss on the cheek or hand, if only to be gentlemanly on a rare occasion or two.
And she had needs. As any taken woman does, especially if her better half is as cute as Baxter.
She’d shrunk her favorite nightie in the wash on purpose, and it had pained her soul to do so. If the payoff wouldn’t come through, Niffty was already ranking her favorite chemical combinations so she could burn this entire hotel down in rage and embarrassment.
“Oh, but pine sol smells so good and that would make the fire seem cozy,” she mumbles.
“If the fire wouldn’t kill everyone, surely the stench would do the trick,” Baxter pipes up from sifting through the DVD’s. He liked the physical media, and in a way, Niffty did too. He had a lot of her favorites. “Would you be amenable to the one with the human-animal hybrid? We’ve put it off to watch your choices, twice, now.”
Niffty blinks. “You just want to see where you went wrong when you did it to somebody,” she deadpans.
“I resent that.”
“Do you, really?”
Baxter grumbles something about unrecognized talent, and tilts his head. “If we watch this, I’ll indulge one of your more harebrained requests. No modifications of my own allowed.”
Niffty beams.
Her fucking chance. Baxter often loved participating in or encouraging her ideas, if only to see what would happen. The guise of an experiment was too good for him to pass up.
“Okay!” she chirps. “Can I cash in my favor before or after the movie?”
A bit puzzled at her immediate request, Baxter flounders for a moment before he slides the DVD in the player.
“Whenever, I suppose?”
He yelps when Niffty practically pounces on him, but not quite landing in his lap. Still giving a few millimeters of distance. Minuscule but existent, nevertheless.
“Can we hold hands? Like. Without your dumb gloves and stuff?” For fuck’s sake, even his pajama long sleeves had thumb holes and covered a majority of his hand. And he even wore soft, cloth gloves underneath to cover the gap. What was his deal? “Through the whole movie? And see how you feel about that and then we see how you feel about other stuff and try those—“
“No.”
“And then, and then! We can go on little shopping trips for it together and you can buy me one of those fancy necklaces that aren’t actually necklaces but we’re cute about it — wait, what was that you said?” Still, she isn’t touching him, but she’s sure her hot breath is making his cold skin create further condensation. “Was that a no, Baxter?”
His lip remains firm, and yet, he awkwardly looks away.
“No, Niffty. I’d rather we don’t.”
“I… wha? But we — uh,” She nervously laughs, a higher pitch nearly cracking at the tail end of it. “Baxter, you don’t tell me no. We don’t say no to each other, silly billy! We go see the dead rat o-or possum or take the mystery shot with your super sexy, very clean needles!”
Baxter nods, in both agreement and awkward hesitance.
“Do you have another request in mind or should I change the movie?”
“Baxter, I’m sorry.”
“No — no, Niffty, dear, you’ve nothing to be sorry for. You asked me a question, I answered. I made you a promise I could not keep and, so, we can watch one of your selections instead.”
“But,”
“But am I nothing if not a man of my word?” Baxter waves a hand. “Be it in my companionship with you or everytime I swore gory, wonderfully scientific revenge on my enemies.”
Niffty stammers, and shakes her head. “I don’t care about the dumb promise! I just want to touch you!”
“Yes. I realize that.”
“Is it the nightie? Is it making you too turned on? You think you’ll ravish me so hard you break me and then when I can’t move, you do what you really want to do to me?”
“Wha — no! It looks rather fetching on you, but that has nothing to do with it.” He folds his arms and scoots over when he notices her accidentally leaning in too close, the couch cushions giving way. “I don’t enjoy it.”
“It doesn’t have to be weird! We can be cute!”
“Any of it. Platonic, intimate, sexual, even my own medical endeavors, it’s enough to give me hives. And depending on how little someone listens, perhaps take them down to my laboratory to see how they like it.”
Niffty finally settles enough to properly sit on the couch, lightly kicking her feet.
“…am I ever gonna get to touch you?”
“You know, as a scientist, I despise definitives.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” she whines. She doesn’t want to, but she can’t help it, and next thing she knows, she’s covering her face to hide the welling tears. “I… I’m doing everything right. Right? Right?!”
She’s getting too loud—and where there’s loud, there’s whispers if she’s lucky and a slap on the usual. It isn’t her fault. Niffty has always thought of herself as passionate, and everyone at the hotel thinks so too.
Baxter loved using that word for her.
He loved her crackpot ideas and idle ‘what if’ rumination and abomination to science thoughts. She was also pretty sure that would be the only way he’d say those three little words too.
What the fuck was it about him that nestled so comfortably and happily inside her, like a horde of roaches finding an open bag of chips?
“You are,” Baxter reassures. “I think you exceed my expectations in a partner.”
Niffty whimpers, and can’t bear to look at him. “Then — then why? Why don’t you—?”
“If you haven’t noticed, I am one of the more peculiar characters in this menagerie,” He lets out a brief sardonic chuckle. And then, his hand hesitantly rests on her knee. “Niffty. Come on out of there.”
“From where?”
“That fuzzy place your brilliant head goes.”
She leans her leg into what little of his touch she can get, and sniffles. “Okay.” She nods, like she has to convince herself of it, “Okay.”
“It isn’t you. It is entirely a me issue. I’m strange like that.”
Baxter lifts his hand from her leg, and holds it out, for her to take. It’s going to be that same odd, clammy, cloth grip she’s used to. And yet, she still grabs it.
Niffty squeezes a bit, a few quick, and some slow, lingering ones before she drops her hand from his. Maybe he keeps the gloves and everything on so he can be her personal stress ball without injuring himself. Maybe his slick fish skin was sensitive.
“Niffty.”
“Mmhm?”
“Were you married?”
“I was!” And she says so, so cheerily. “I had to have been!”
And then, he looks at her, almost mournfully. “I’m sorry.” It isn’t quite pity. It’s that solemn, dark look he gets before a particularly heinous cut in flesh or insect or when someone gets a scientific fact horrendously wrong. Concentrated and concerned.
“Oh, you know,” She waves a hand dismissively, and wipes at her eye one last time. “It’s just another Nifftyism. That’s what Alastor calls them.”
“It suits you,” Baxter murmurs. “I’ll add it to my personal glossary.”
Niffty rolls her eye, half amusement and the other half frustration. “You can’t say things like that and not expect me to want you.”
He smiles while brushing a few locks of hair from her face. He always looked at her the same way he checked on his experiments through the magnifying glasses and microscopes — that’s how she knew it was something real. Baxter only looked at things like that if he really, really liked paying attention to it and it was something he could be proud of.
Niffty wasn’t sure how but she must’ve fit the bill somewhere along the line.
“I wish my fantasies were easy, like yours,” she sighs, forlorn.
“Letting me access your brain through a tear duct with a needle is far from easy,” he retorts, flabbergasted. “I understand it was how you died but I can’t imagine that ever gets easier.”
“No,” She can’t resist batting her eye at him. “Not for me. But it got easier for you! Doesn’t that count for something?”
Confusion still permeates his expression, before she watches him almost visibly shake it off. The previews and beginning credits finally stop rolling, and the film rolls — and Niffty gets endless, swift brushes and little flicks or adjusts for things only Baxter would notice, from the horrific dismemberment opening scene to the film’s climax of the married scientists stitching each other together.
It’s the closest she can get when it comes to nestled up against him; head halfway on his shoulder, knees touching, his thumb occasionally brushing hers.
And it’s the fact the other hotel residents always make a point to leave them alone for their movie nights. No one else can stomach, let alone be entertained by, the same things as them.
“Hey, Baxter?”
“Yes, those stitches would get infected if this was realistic.”
“No, I know that by now. I just wanted to say,” She looks at him, her eye vulnerable and wide. “Thank you for letting me be weird. And being weird with me. No one else does that. We never have to touch if we keep doing that, at least.”
“No definitives,” he corrects. She likes when he corrects her — the little tap to her forehead and the way he scrunches his nose a tad.
Niffty blows a raspberry at him before continuing, “I… I mean it. I think you’re pretty great.”
His smart aleck, crooked grin melts, just enough. Soft, as in malleable, rather than soft with tenderness, but it was something. And that something was for her.
“For what it’s worth, I find you rather fantastic as well.”
“Men never let me be weird. Or silly. No whimsy, none of them. I don’t mean the sort of men like Alastor and Husk. They’re not men like you.”
Baxter pulls that grin back into place, effortlessly. “You mean men you’re attracted to?” She can tell he can’t resist the teasing either. She hates how he bounces off of her too easily.
“Painfully,” she groans.
“You enjoy pain.”
“But it’d be nice to know I have the option of medicine! A nice warm shot to make me feel all better!”
“I really do regret to inform you it’s a viral infection that will only go away on its own.”
Niffty kicks her legs again, frantically, like she’s shaking the dust out of a rug. She even hugs herself a little but her side-eye seems to be the furthest thing from sensual.
“Hey, Baxter?”
“Yes?”
“Can you go down to the lab and get your heated blanket?”
Baxter was uninterested, not blind. He had noticed her nipples stiff from the cold the second he had walked into the lobby that evening.
“Ridiculous woman,” he grumbles. “Of course. Of course! Because you risked freezing to death in the name of seduction.”
“Hand-holding is step one of sixty nine, okay. Yeesh.”
“Did you actually read that vile brochure Angel Dust made during arts and crafts?”
Niffty sits up a bit to yell after him, “No! Well, yes, but it was too vanilla!”
Baxter’s grumbling dissipates as he heads into the basement, but she takes note of his affectionate head shakes and the slight laugh in his tone. She glances back at the television, with the film playing, and the creature’s vile rejection of the surgery makes her brain scramble.
“Oh-ho-ho,” she chortles. “He’s gonna have to give me pills to sleep tonight. Yippee.”