bakerstreet | ( Highly Inappropriate Sexual Tension Meme )

( Highly Inappropriate Sexual Tension Meme )

The Highly Inappropriate Sexual Tension Meme

Touches. Glances. Sides brushing, so close to each other. The moment is, most likely, quite, subdued, and calm. Or it could be loud and full of life, right in the middle of a vivacious party. Yet, no matter the case, your blood is pumping - no, nearly boiling with the passion bubbling between you and your companion.

Unfortunately, this sexual tension is completely and absolutely out of line. Whether it be the place, the time, your relationship with the person (be that literal relation or power difference, age difference, experience difference, and so on), your own lack of knowledge, or personal convictions, you should not act on any building desires.

But here's the thing about tension: it builds. It builds, and it builds, until...

Well, even subtlety can come to an inappropriate head.

HOW TO PLAY

This meme isn't for smut, though smut is allowed. What it is for is the delicious, anticipatory build up and the dances people can do to deny attraction. Foreplay, especially creative foreplay, is encouraged.
Comment with your character, canon, and preferences in the subject. In the comment body, be sure to mention if there are any squicks you have, scenarios you don't/do want to play out, and if you're okay with AUs or handwaved CR.
Reply to others.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[long running UST is a guilty pleasure. No Nats, Sharons or Darcys please. cross-medium, cross-canon friendly.]

He was hot, she'd give him that. She'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to see that. But he was also way out of her league in ways that had nothing to do with what he looked like and everything to do with the way that he'd come back from the...okay. Maybe she'd done that, too. But he was Captain America. Maybe she could keep the fangirling she was doing private and flirt and tease him just like she did everyone else, but that didn't mean there wasn't a little flailing going on in private.

The only problem was that the longer she knew him, the more she wondered whether the butterflies in her stomach were because he was Captain America or because he was Steve, the guy with the goofiest sense of humor she'd seen since Tommy. And she was pretty sure he wasn't going to turn out to be her long lost secret brother. But she was just getting over a relationship with Alex and he was working with her brother. She'd seen through her brother and Felicity's relationship - the one she'd thought was going to last 'til death do them part - that mixing business and pleasure wasn't the best idea. She didn't care to think about her own experiences with relationships in the workplace.

Still, he was here and Ollie was busy talking to Curtis about obscure computer things that went well over her head and she was free and he was free and...

And she found herself sitting on the table next to his chair. "I don't know about you, but I'm a little bored. I'd suggest getting out of here, but you'd probably be mobbed." She grinned at him. "Spar instead?"

Steve wouldn't call himself the best when it came to relationships. You didn't get to do that when your last, and only one, romance attempt had ended because you'd turned yourself into a Popsicle for a little under a century and you'd lost track of your best friend after he'd done his best to kill you. He thought he was starting to get back to where things should be with friendships thanks to Natasha and Sam, Thor, Clint, Bruce and yeah, even Tony but the romantic side -

he'd flubbed that about as badly as was humanly possible and since then - since then he had gotten the feeling that that kind of thing, that kind of life, just wasn't for him anymore. His time had passed or maybe he'd just lost whatever it was that made you the right kind of guy for that kind of thing between the ice and all the personal wars since. Aliens and World War II organizations and sentient robots... maybe he just didn't fit in any other world but that anymore. Didn't fit in one where people dated and held hands and watched movies and whatever it was they did these days. That part of Steve, the one that his weak heart had held since before the serum and clung to afterward for a while - maybe that part of Steve wasn't necessary any more. Wasn't important. He could do that, put that aside, because what were the other options really? He didn't have any and wishing he did didn't serve any purpose but to whisper lonely in his ear late at night when the world went quiet.

Thea... Thea had a way of making him forget that sometimes though...

She made him feel - real.

The talk had gotten into computer tech and lost him pretty quickly. He wasn't clueless - but he didn't have the innate grasp of concepts that people that had grown up around computers this high tech took for granted. He could logic point to point but so much computer talk relied on assumed understandings and terms that he still got lost listening to other people talk tech. Luckily they hadn't needed him for that anyway and he'd been grateful to take a chair and stretch out his long legs a little.

He didn't watch her but he was very aware of Thea as she moved around the room. She gave off something like heat, something he could almost feel that faded or grew as she shifted the distance between them. He'd wondered if she felt it too - and reminded himself that the - alliance he had with this group didn't include dates. When she settled on the table near him, it was almost close enough for their legs to touch. Close, but never closer. He'd gotten comfortable with her by now, learned to look forward to her company and their interaction and he was smiling himself, knowing light in his eyes when he raised them to look at her. She really wasn't good about sitting still.

"You'd be amazed what a pair of glasses and a hat can do." But the crooked smile that hung around his lips said he wasn't protesting her alternative.

Not when she grinned at him that way. His eyebrows did hitch at her suggestion though. A little surprised, though maybe not as surprised as he should have been.

"You think you can take me?"

"I might not be. My brother's been parading around in a mask and a hood for five years and usually people only find out who he is by him telling them. Still, he usually hides around in the darkness. He doesn't walk through a street in broad daylight. And Queen might be a popular name in Star City, but he's not universally famous like some people." She bumped her leg against his side. Maybe it was because of who she was, because she'd grown up being kind of like the Kim Kardashian of Central City with her exploits in the news, but she didn't think she was as awed of him as she should be.

"I think I have a better chance than you think. Arm me with a sword and I might even have the advantage." Maybe she didn't always like the training she'd received or the things she'd done with it, but months of training with Malcolm and then months more on the field before her brother came back and she could train with him had left her pretty confident of her abilities. The regular beatdowns by her brother had only given her a sense of self-preservation, not one of humility.

"Come on, Steve. What do you say? Come get sweaty with me." It was like her mouth was on autopilot, but she'd long since learned not to be embarrassed by the things she said. She owned up to them, instead, and made them work for her. So she was flirting with Steve. It wasn't like either of them was going to do something about it. Especially not when her brother was fifteen feet away. He didn't say much about her relationships anymore, but she was pretty sure he'd have something to say about this.

Besides, she'd heard stories about him. He could be naive about things. Maybe he didn't even know she was flirting with him. And maybe she was just trying to rationalize it so she could flirt without feeling like she was crossing a line that couldn't be uncrossed.

The bump of her leg has his lips relaxing into another smile and he doesn't lean into it, but he doesn't do anything to put distance between them either. It's rare to have people treat him like - Steve. Like just a guy from Brooklyn instead of something that's half myth, half legend and not entirely human. The smile goes a bit crooked at the mention of giving her something sharp and pointy to take swipes at him with though. He doesn't doubt for a moment - she wouldn't hold back if she did have a sword. And he kind of likes having all his fingers - and internal organs. He's about to comment on that - when she says the rest

and his eyebrows shoot up. Because - wow. That is not something he's used to hearing a woman say to him.

And maybe the temperature in the room gets just a little bit higher.

But she just meant it harmlessly, in regards to their sparring and so he presses his lips together, something like a smile on them, and nods in response to what she meant and not what she said that he misheard anyway because, apparently, off the dating market or not, no one's told his mind that.

"Sure." He stands up, absently slapping his thighs as he does. "I could use a good work out." He holds up a finger in warning, grin back on his face. "But nothing sharp and pointy for you. I like all my body parts still attached."

"I'm sure you do," she said, the way her eyes darted across his body implying that she liked them attached, too. "Still, you must not think a lot of me if you think I'm going to accidentally cut something off." Her eyes settled on that raised finger. She couldn't. It would be too much, even for this mild flirting they had that she fervently denied was happening. So it was with a bit of surprise that she found herself leaning forward and biting his finger up to the first knuckle. She darted back almost as soon as she'd done it, but she hadn't stopped herself.

Maybe sparring was a bad, bad idea. But she wasn't going to stop herself there, either.

"I only take off what I mean to take off."

She turned her back to him and tried not to think about the taste of flesh in her mouth. It didn't really sound sexy, but the reality of it was that it was. A little. Maybe more than a little. And it definitely wasn't something that she should have done. Not right before a sparring session, not ever.

She headed over to where she kept her workout clothes and started to change. She'd just blame temporary insanity, that was it. Or she was just teasing him. She was always teasing him; it wasn't her fault when she went a little too far, was it?

Bad, bad idea, but as soon as she was dressed, she went over to meet him on the workout mat.

[ If you're interested I'd love to see what these two do? Fair warning, she's nothing close to her comic background. ]

[I see you've got the au written up in your profile so I'm good. Don't know how Steve would react to someone so tangled up around things involving Buck and Hyrda but I'm game to find out!]

Sinthia had been sitting on the couch beside Steve for nearly an hour, quick-reading wikipedia; she had just as much to catch up on about the modern world as he did, if not a little more since she was almost completely unfamiliar with a world outside of either being an object of war or an object of assassination. It made finding a rhythm with the fast-paced and assumption-filled modern New York very difficult, to put it lightly.

That was why she liked Steve. He was more normal to her than most of the rest (she couldn't quite wrap her head around the idea of a Norse god, someone she'd read the epics about, sitting across the room from everyone) and he was handsome in the way that made the pit of her stomach clench. She'd spent long enough simply observing the group dynamic that she felt comfortable insinuating herself in one or two places--the amount of truly embarrassing thoughts revolving around that wordplay was incredible, and Sinthia was incredibly glad that though she could read other people's thoughts, her own weren't projected.

The touch was small when she actually managed it, simply brushing her bare ankle against Steve's as she watched his face from the corner of her eye. It didn't require much talking, just a tiny lift of the side of her mouth; hopefully it was a good cover for how loud Sinthia was convinced her pulse was. It had to be audible.

"You're quiet. Again."

He's really not sure, at all, how he feels about her. On the one hand, she's far too close to a lot of very painful wounds inside himself and she tends to jostle them without realizing or meaning to, in a dozen little ways there's no way she even realizes or could control if she did.

And yet - and yet she's so strangely familiar, like a piece of time has stepped out of its place in the previous century and wandered forward to hang out with him. Things he misses, things he took for granted, things that he thought he'd never hear again. She gets his references because, to her, they're not history or obscure and she's been through the same war he has, not the world war but the one with Hydra. So there's something he finds very comforting about her presence as well. Something he honestly finds very welcome about it.

All of that pushed aside though, she's looking to right wrongs in her past and do good in the present and for that alone she's got a place on the team and at his side. Everyone deserves a chance to set things straight and Steve's got no compunction about letting the past stay in the past. People change. And when they do for the better - well, than they deserve all the hand upward that you can give them.

Still, her presence does jar loose thoughts he usually keeps firmly locked in the past and so he's been staring at the same page on the book he's holding for about ten minutes, vague memories of before the ice slowly tumbling past in his head. Ice cream with Bucky that rolls over into memories of chasing the ice delivery truck as a kid, barefoot and hot on a summer Brooklyn day for pieces of shaved or broken ice. His mom complaining about dirty footprints on the threadbare rug. The time the factory near his old apartment caught fire one night and coated everything with soot for days after. That string of neighborhood arson in back alleys he wonders if they ever caught the culprit of that happened just before he went in for the camp that would test to see if he was worth the serum or not. Dr. Erskine.

"Hm?" The nudge of her ankle pulls him back to the present but not entirely and his reaction is automatic, a noise to show he's heard her and is aware of her but also one that buys him an extra moment or two to reorient. Then her statement clicks and his smile goes a bit wry. A small shrug. She paid closer attention to him than most people did. He was still getting used to being seen as someone instead of something.

"Yeah. I guess so." He's well aware she's a psychic, something he still has a hard time wrapping his head entirely around because that's Houdini level stuff to him. Still, it makes lying for the sake of politeness mote since he's never sure if she's been peeking into his mind or not, despite the fact she's supposed to be staying firmly in her own. He'd be more concerned about that - except if she's here now it means she's already past people with a whole lot more top secret information in their head than he has. Nat is the espionage section of the job. Steve doesn't often have much to hide about his more battle tank position.

"Just wandering down memory lane. Sometimes its a little too easy to do."

"Was it nice?" she asks gently, with the openness of expression hat makes it clear she hadn't been listening in; Sinthia has a tell on that score though it's subtle. She tends to look at the sensory bits on other people through which things had been interpreted--ears if it had been an audial memory, mouth if it was taste. Since most people were visual when it came to reliving things it made drawing the distinction between her paying attention and her actively reading someone's mind mildly difficult, but not impossible.

Sometimes, vaguely, Sinthia wishes being candid about how she reads people wouldn't be taken as an admission of having immediately done it, but there's no way to ensure that and she's long since used to that idea. "Not many things were from back then. That's what we were always told. And the history seems to agree," she says with a little shrug of one shoulder, putting down the tablet she'd been reading on, since everybody else kept frowning at her for doing it on a stationary computer, or god forbid a paper book.

"Chocolate was okay." She had a singular fond memory herself of that, getting a tiny square of dark chocolate--bitter, sweet, Swiss--filled with marzipan. It was a bright spot, albeit faded by time and multiple erasures, but the brain's memory pathways were resilient. "I got some yesterday. If you want it."

( full disclosure: i don't care if this is sexy or even particularly want it to be, i just want to recreate the horrifying foreplay from cheddar but take it to the next level )

[I could see this being awesome with someone who is much older than him, like a teacher or coach, or someone from a rival team!]

Edited 2016-04-03 17:54 (UTC)

[canon and cross canon welcome! It would be really cool if someone from a rival school flustered this big cat, but I'm not too picky!]

[canon and cross canon welcome! It would be fun to see someone fluster him.]

[canon and cross canon welcome! It would be pretty interesting to see if someone can fluster him.]

(open to any scenario you think might work, she is a tough nut to crack but not impossible. canon mates and cross canon welcome. m/f and f/f friendly.)