Chapter Text
“Dude, is that a bug?”
Coraline jolted away from the bathtub’s edge, springing to her feet in an instant. With practised precision, she took out the sickly little centipede monstrosity with a vengeful palm and a satisfying squelch.
“You’re nasty.” Wybie wrinkled his nose and gagged theatrically.
Coraline arched an eyebrow at him and then she leaned over the edge of the tub to shove her palm, dripping with bug innards in Wybie’s face.
Wybie preemptively shrieked and brought his legs up to repel Coraline if the need be.
“Stay back! Coraline... Coraline, no.”
The need was.
She clambered into the bathtub and tried to climb over his knees, hand outstretched, gooey and honestly just plain gross, all with a tiny vindictive smile pulled across her rosy lips.
“You’ve got a little something on your face, let me get that for-”
Wybie propelled his legs forward, unsocked feet planting square into her abdomen and the no doubt evil punctuation to that sentence was cut off when Coraline fell back into the other side of the tub.
Thunk!
“Okay, ow.” Coraline glared at Wybie, rubbing the back of her head.
“You jerk, what’d you do that for?”
“Don’t be a sore loser Jonesy.”
Sitting opposite in the bathtub, their legs were tangled together, giving Coraline the perfect positioning to jab at Wybie’s thigh with her foot. It slipped on rough denim and socked him right in the crotch.
While the placement was believably unintended, the low groan it elicited out of Wybie absolutely was intended. He curled into himself halfway and shot her a rueful look, paired with a pained grimace.
“I gotta clean my hand somehow.” Coraline sprawled back with a triumphant glint in her eye, leisurely with her death-stained hand hanging over the edge of the bathtub.
“I’m not a cleaning rag.” Wybie’s voice was slightly strained, ruminating in the sting of her attack.
Coraline grinned, freckled cheeks rounding with glee. He knew exactly what she was thinking. Wybie mocked her expression with a cheesy grin of his own then dropped it, deadpanned.
“You may not use me as a cleaning rag.” He pulled Coraline’s foot away from its point of impact by the ankle so that it rested on his hip.
“You look like a cleaning rag,” Coraline clarified, as if Wybie didn’t already know the cheap jab she was trying to make, still with that perpetual grin.
Wybie tongued the inside of his cheek, fixing Coraline with a dry stare through his shag of curls, going for stern and unimpressed. He would never admit this to her, lest she become even more insufferable, but he loved Coraline’s mean streak. It ran deeper than most people knew. But Wybie knew. He loved that too. That he was the only one who knew that Coraline was just a little bit disturbed of mind.
“D’ya wanna find someone else to stick a safety pin in?”
Checkmate. Wybie slid his finger under Coraline’s stripy sock and traced his finger around the bone that jutted out of her ankle, enjoying the feel of the smooth, ghostly skin that stretched over it. She flexed her foot, putting pressure on his cock through his jeans and a quiet heat settled in his abdomen. His lips ticked minutely upwards at the corners.
“Bet your grandma would let me. She’s way cooler than you.”
Wybie’s smile dropped. “Man, not my grandma.”
Coraline brought her soiled hand up to her face, examining it keenly like the wondrously strange person she was. “She’d rock an industrial.”
“She’s like eighty?” Wybie narrowed his eyes at her.
“So? And ‘like eighty’? Don’t you know how old your grandma is?”
“She started counting backwards when she got to fifty. This year was her twenty-first.”
“So she’s eighty nine,” Coraline replied without missing a beat.
Another thing Wybie loved about Coraline was how freakishly intelligent she was. Again, an anecdote best kept to himself. People repeatedly underestimated her, but not him.
“Witch.”
“Tell her she doesn’t look a day over twenty.”
“Tell her yourself, you creep. I’m not helping you flirt with my grandma.”
“In another life…” Coraline sighed wistfully.
“Coraline.” Wybie was well used to her dark sense of humour by now.
“Oh, come on, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see me with another girl.” Coraline rested her temple on the low rim of the bathtub.
Wybie felt his face heating. Coraline had a habit of just saying these kinds of things out of the blue, no regard for his mental wellbeing. Or physical. He would have to start keeping a defibrillator close to hand with the mini heart attacks that Coraline loved to give him.
He punitively pinched the skin of her ankle lightly, not too hard. He was wary of the dangerous proximity of her foot to his crotch where he was still recovering from her previous result, as well as the mangled essence of bug still coating her palm, threatening and yellow. He wasn’t particularly the squeamish kind but no figment of nature should bleed yellow. Coraline was unbothered, however, clenching her hand and pulverising the creature further, though it was long past death.
“Not when the other girl is my grandma.”
Coraline kissed her teeth. “Semantics.”
“Grandma.”
Coraline just smiled.
“If you’re gonna keep being gross I’m leaving.”
Minutes later, after Coraline went downstairs to thoroughly (“With soap.”) wash her hands, Wybie was facing the tiled bathroom wall in all its rotted glory with blackened grout. Coraline kneeled behind him, back on the bathroom floor.
“Your bathroom is musty.”
Wybie could hear her fiddling with the piercing supplies they had spread out on a cut-out sheet of a dustbin bag. Supplies meaning a safety pin and a lighter; the best they could scrounge up as two seventeen year olds living in the backwater scraps of civilisation in Ashland, Oregon.
“I keep telling Mom and Dad to have the pipes looked at but they’re worried about the foundations.” Coraline slid a few bobby pins into his hair to keep it out of the way of his ear. “Also we’re broke.”
“Again?”
“No one buys gardening manuals in Winter.”
“You would.”
“I don’t need a manual.”
“No, you just chant a few witchy words and flowers grow at your feet.”
Coraline thumped him on the back of the head.
“You want an ear piercing or a lobotomy?”
Wybie looked up behind him and was met with hard, narrowed eyes and pink lips pressed into a thin crescent. He swallowed.
“Piercing please.”
Coraline righted the position of his head with a finger on his jaw. She then pushed her fingers into the overgrown curls at the back of his head, massaging his scalp lightly. Wybie tipped his head back into her hand and she tutted, but he knew that she didn’t really mind.
He felt spindly fingers trace the column of his bared neck and swallowed, the movement seeming to entice Coraline. She pressed her thumb into Wybie’s adam’s apple, keenly observing. Wybie closed his eyes, letting her look. She did that a lot. So much you’d think she’d never seen another person before. She was fascinated with the oddities of the human body. That was how Wybie had wound up here. When he told her he’d been thinking of piercing his ear, she jumped to volunteer to do it for him.
“Would you ever get any tattoos?” A faceless voice spoke into his ear, hushed. He hummed and shifted, trying to get marginally more comfortable with his back against the side of the hard porcelain bathtub.
“You remember my skeleton gloves?”
“Those were so dorky.”
“They were cool, shut up. Anyway, I’d get my hands tattooed like a skeleton.”
“Yeah?”
“You gonna call that dorky too?”
Coraline ignored him.
“How about here?”
She trailed her fingers back down Wybie’s neck, so delicate he’d almost think she was shy. He knew better, though.
“Skeleton neck?” He mused.
Coraline’s eyes carved a path from the hollow of his neck up to meet his eyes and there was a trace of a smile playing on her lips. She was trying to keep a straight face.
“You’d like that?”
Wybie knew that look. He was playing with her– and well too, if the roiling violence in her eyes was anything to go by. Like quicksand you could mistake for mud by the shine of it.
“I’d like for you to put your head back up so I can stick this safety pin in your ear already,” Coraline grumbled.
“To do the piercing, right?” He furrowed his brows in mocking fear.
Coraline said nothing, just continued to look down at him with that gleam in her eye.
“Right?” His voice cracked.
She pulled the hair that drooped over Wybie’s eyes back and glared at him.
“What’d I do?”
“Idiot,” she muttered.
Coraline yanked him up by his hair and positioned him once again, leaving Wybie feeling windswept, and his now frizzy hair looking it.
From the clattering behind him, she was fiddling with the supplies. He’d turn to watch if he weren’t afraid of another yanking. Coraline meant business now. A whooshing flick of the lighter. Wybie felt her presence looming behind him.
“Wait wait, can we do a count down?”
“Hold still, scaredy-cat.”
The safety pin was a terrible idea. It was dull and pushed through Wybie’s flesh awfully slowly. He tried not to think about it and gripped the edge of the bathtub with both hands, hissing in pain through clenched teeth. When Coraline pushed the plain silver stud jewellery through, Wybie made a noise like a wounded dog, teeth gnashing together. His eyes were tightly shut and there were white spots popping in his vision.
Then Coraline’s hands were buried in his hair and her mouth was on his. She bit his lip and he exhaled sharply. He felt dizzy, like a ragdoll in her hands, and he fell into her kiss. It was all tongue, rushing in without finesse, tasting.
Somehow, Coraline wound up in the bathtub with Wybie, legs folded either side of him. He smoothed his hands over the sides of her thighs, up to her waist, wrapping his arms firmly around her and pulling her up against him. Her hair fell forward, brushing his jaw. Coraline pulled back and her slender fingers swiped his neck and she ran them over his lips, staring intensely. Wybie flicked his tongue out and tasted metal.
“That’s really unsanitary.”
“I didn’t touch your ear.” She scowled, indignant.
Wybie laughed lightly at her, eyes crinkling at the corners.
“You’re a strange lady, Jones.” He gripped her hips, marvelling at the captivating woman planted in his lap. His cock was filling out in the confines of his jeans which were becoming ever more uncomfortable.
Coraline smelt blood in the water. She angled her hips down and his mouth fell open in a silent gasp. She took the opportunity to press her thumb into Wybie’s mouth, rocking backwards and then forwards experimentally. Then, Coraline’s hands were back in his hair (she loved playing with it) and she met him in a kiss, once again, open mouthed, like she intended to take a bite out of him.
His hands wandered down to her thighs, kneading and coaxing her to grind down. Up, then down. Coraline’s warm body moulded against him, and Wybie’s thoughts ground to a sluggish halt. He licked into her mouth, tongue clashing with hers in a push and pull that felt raw and deeply intimate and rocked him slowly into a trance-like state. Coraline pulled his head back and he yielded.
“Sah aah...”
She spat into Wybie’s mouth, then sealed it with a kiss, muffling the low moan resounding deep in his throat. Coraline giggled, and he knew that she was loving this game, delighting in teasing him. Wybie was helpless to her wiles and unravelling fast with each rocking of her hips. His mouth had gone slack against Coraline’s. His breath rattled, hot on her skin.
“Cor-”
A thud from downstairs and a shout, “Coraline Jones, I told you to take the chicken out of the freezer for dinner!”
The pair of them stilled, listening intently to the footsteps of an irate Mrs Jones in the kitchen.
“The door-”
“Locked,” Coraline huffed.
“Coraline! Downstairs!”
Coraline groaned with every fibre of her being, making no move to get up and face her mother. Wybie smiled at her dramatics, but he too would need a minute to gather himself. He folded forward into her, resting his forehead on her shoulder and sighing deeply.
Loud footsteps came up the stairs and Mrs Jones rapped briskly on the bathroom door.
“Coraline, what are you doing in there? Is there someone here?”
Wybie very nearly tumbled headfirst into the opposite end of the bathtub when Coraline zipped up to her feet and turned on the shower.
“Eugh!” He shrieked, dazed, achingly hard and now wet.
“Wybie’s here, he got mud in his hair, we’re washing it out!” Coraline called back.
Mrs Jones was placated with the story and Wybie was-
“Gah!” He spluttered, slipping about in the tub as she took the showerhead and sprayed his hair with it. “You’re- waterboarding me!”
“You wouldn’t be able to talk if I was waterboarding you.” She did benevolently turn off the water, and Wybie hauled himself out of the tub, dripping all over the tile.
“Anyway, that should help with…” She gestured vaguely towards his now sodden crotch.
Wybie sighed. She was going to make fun of him for this forever.
“Nope.”