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Annabeth is on her fourth attempt of reading the same paragraph when she hears the front door of the apartment bang open and then closed again.
“Percy?” she calls out.
“Hi,” he calls back, sounding tired.
She’s in their bedroom, having collapsed there an hour ago and decided to tackle her reading for class tomorrow. Safe to say she has made little progress. This is, in part, due to her mind wandering back to the calc test she’d had this morning. The rest of her is just staring at the page wishing that the lines would stop moving around so she could read them. She’s grateful when Percy slumps into the room, giving her a real excuse to put the book down and stare at something else for a while.
Percy looks like a zombie, shuffling around, removing his shoes, rubbing at his face and his hair as if he can remove the tiredness that stains him that way.
“How was the presentation?” she asks him.
He mumbles, “Mmf. I don’t know. Horrible. I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Alright.”
After he has slowly and angrily dumped his bag in the corner and thrown his jacket over the back of the desk chair, he finally looks at her. His gaze falls and stops on her bare legs, crossed together on top of the covers. Annabeth waits patiently, her eyebrows rising towards her hairline
Percy blinks. Jerks his gaze up towards her face.
"Is that my sweater?" he asks eventually.
She looks down at herself. "Oh yeah. The one we shrunk in the wash." There’s a long lasting debate about who was responsible for shrinking the sweater. In the end they went for shared custody of said responsibility. Annabeth will never admit that it was her, she's gone far too long denying her guilt to ever confess to it.
Percy's mouth quirks, he looks a little less tired. He's still standing at the bottom of the bed, arms hanging by his sides. "It looks cute on you," he comments.
Annabeth stretches one leg from its crumpled position and pokes his thigh with her toe. " You look cute on me. Get over here."
He does, circling her ankle with his long fingers to move her leg aside, and crawling tiredly over her. She shuffles down the bed and lets her legs fall apart for him to nestle between. He falls onto her, burying his face in the pillow next to hers.
"That's better," she says.
He turns his head to press his mouth to her neck, barely a kiss, and groans softly in agreement. Annabeth lets him relax against her, bearing all of his weight as she strokes his hair and the tight muscles in his shoulders. Slowly, he becomes more the more pliant, soft version of Percy Annabeth has learnt to develop a quiet adoration for in their evenings and mornings in this apartment. Their apartment. It feels like building something, a lasting thing, together.
"Hey," she says gently after a little while, "I love you more than life itself, but your belt buckle is digging into me, you jackass."
He grunts in acknowledgment and lifts his hips slightly off her but makes no other move to amend this inconvenience. His arms are respectively tucked under their pillow and wrapped around her upper half. Annabeth sighs and reaches between them to undo the belt herself. Practice allows her to undo the buckle, unthread the length of leather from the belt loops, and dump it on the floor without looking.
Once it's off, Percy drops his hips and shifts them as if to get comfy, unintentionally sending a wave of heat straight to Annabeth’s lower belly. She can't help the slight roll of her hips, searching for the feeling again. Percy turns his head to press kisses to her neck, more purposeful than the one earlier; perhaps that shift hadn't been as innocent as she'd thought.
Ass .
He's working his way from her neck to her jaw now, lifting his head to throw a smug smile her way before kissing her mouth. It's slow and lazy and accompanied by luxurious rolls of his hips against hers.
Annabeth gives up all pretence of apathy and lets her fingers resume their previous positions of winding into his hair and rubbing his shoulders, this time with a little more pressure. She feels his tongue touch the roof of her mouth and goes boneless, squeezing his hips between her thighs as he tucks his hand under hers or his sweater and rubs his thumb over her ribs.
Percy shifts his body up over hers and rolls his hips in a determined, knowledgeable way and Annabeth's head falls back, breaking the kiss and releasing a groan with the long breath that falls past her lips. Percy's mouth moves to her neck again, she can feel his smile against her skin. He smiles so much when they're fooling around, whether he's pulling laughter or groans from her.
"Why are you still wearing pants?" she asks him, face still turned to the ceiling, hands tugging his shirt up.
Percy lifts his face from her neck and tilts his head at her. "Excellent question. Why are you still wearing a sweater?"
She grins. "Because my boyfriend told me it looked cute on me."
"Well he's right. But he should have also told you that it would look better-"
She puts a hand over his mouth. "Don't do it, man. Don't say it."
He licks her palm and she tears it away, smacking his shoulder with a protesting cry.
"But you set it up so well," he says, still grinning - jackass - as he tugs the sweater off her body and over her head.
Annabeth falls back against the pillows, now wearing a tank and panties as Percy leans over her fully clothed. The imbalance of their clothing situation is making her feel simultaneously annoyed and turned on.
"Just take your damn pants off already," she grumbles, undoing the button fly before he can make a move to do it himself.
Instead of helping her, he leans down to kiss her jaw, and when she huffily tilts her head so that she can see what she's doing, he moves without comment to her shoulder. Percy’s kisses turn to the sort which will leave marks and Annabeth has had no more success than shoving his pants down past his hips, so she starts tugging at his shirt instead.
"Percy." she complains.
He bites her shoulder before unpeeling the length of his body from hers and hopping off the bed. Annabeth pushes herself up onto her elbows to watch him undress, showing an open appreciation for the pull and shift of lean muscles under bronze skin, the dips next to his hip bones, the trail of hair disappearing into his pants. Then he shucks off his pants - god, finally - taking his boxers with him and Hello Percy Jackson, naked at last. Annabeth grins at him and pulls off her tank top, throwing it at his face. He lets it hit him with a rolled eyes and reaches for her ankles, tugging her down the bed until she's half hanging off it.
Annabeth is about to complain about the fact that he's just now finally gotten naked and she doesn't even get to feel him pressed up against her, but then his hands fit to her waist and his mouth to her hip bone and she doesn't quite have the conviction to follow through.
“Fu-uck,” she breathes.
Percy looks up at her without moving his mouth from her skin. Annabeth reaches down to push his hair back. The brush of her fingers become a desperate grip as Percy starts to suck a hickey into the dip of her belly next to her left hipbone. Her neck aches from straining to look at him but she can't tear her eyes away. It's like he's coming back to life, slowly filling with light as he bites and sucks at her skin. A million miles away from the zombie who had walked into the bedroom.
Gods, she loves him.
It overwhelms her sometimes, her feelings for him, in unsuspecting moments. Watching him pull faces to make his baby sister laugh, seeing him teach kids at camp how to hold a sword, finding him hunched over books for college at two in the morning, coming home to greet him in their shambolic apartment. And now, here, in this moment. Annabeth feels him hum words against her skin and fumbles her fingers against his scalp in response.
His fingers hook into the sides of her underwear and she thinks he's going to pull it down her legs but he doesn't. He just moves the fabric down a fraction and kisses the exposed skin.
“ Gods .”
“Um. Let's not invite them.”
“Ugh. Percy.”
“What? You're the one who said it.”
Annabeth leans up on her elbows to find him grinning at her, elbows planted on either side of her hips. His eyebrows pull up and gods help her, he looks cute. She wonders if there's a universe in which Percy Jackson will not be irresistibly cute to her.
He leans down to kiss the skin below her naval once.
“Way to ruin the moment, Jackson,” she says, but her breath comes short as his stubbled chin brushes the line of her underwear.
“Yep.” He kisses her hipbone. “You're right.” Kisses the mark he’d left moments before. “Moment definitely ruined.”
His jackal grin is enough to make her bite her lip with anticipation.
Afterwards, when they're sharing one pillow and one space, legs pushed between legs, arms resting over ribs, breaths stealing the same air, she nudges her nose against his.
“You'd think, considering how good you are with that mouth, that you'd do better in presentations.”
Percy laughs. She feels it down to her toes. He kisses her cheek. “I don't think my class would appreciate that sort of presentation.”
“You're meant to say, but Annabeth, you're the only one who gets to experience that .”
“I mean that's basically what I said.”
“My line was better.”
“I don't know, they were both pretty terrible.”
She laughs as she rolls on top of him, propping herself up on arms either side of his head. “That's fair.”
Percy smiles as he looks up at her, looking an entirely different sort of tired than he had done before. His features are softened by sated happiness.
“Feeling better?” she asks him.
He nods slowly, reaching up to push her hair back. “I'm so… so lucky to have this.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Just.” He shrugs, as much as he can in his position. “You, this. I'm really happy that I can come home to this everyday.”
“What, sex?” She grins at him, teasing.
Percy rolls his eyes, tugging on the piece of her hair he's wrapped around his finger. “Not just that. It's… coming home to you. I feel like we're building something…”
“Permanent,” she finishes.
He grins and kisses her on the mouth. Annabeth lets herself lean into him, twisting her hands into his hair as his arms wrap around her. Then she pulls away.
“Now that was a terrible line.”
Percy's laugh rushes through her, from her mouth down to her toes. And she's so damn full. So damn happy to be right here, right now.