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Hardison’s warm. He runs warm, runs hot, burns like a fever when he’s nervous and simmers down just a bit when he’s calm. His hands used to sweat, and now they don’t—maybe a perk of orange soda clogging up his pores, or maybe he’s just not fourteen anymore.
Either way, he’s still warm.
Parker’s a cold, light weight against his side. She’s so many things at once, that woman. Either constantly moving or deadly still, the gentlest of touches or the all in, and he’s learning enough about whatever operating system she’s got in there to know what each one means. Excitement. Scheming. Skittishness.
Love.
He knows that she loves him, knows it inside and out, starting from the first day she presses her entire body to his body, her cold skin against his fever, eating popcorn out of Eliot’s hand where that strong arm had been so carelessly slung across Hardison’s shoulders.
(Eliot doesn’t really have a temperature at all. He always feels like the room around them, just callouses and barely hidden strength beneath the skin when Hardison fits their hands together. Sometimes it feels like a Goldilocks kind of thing. The just right to his warm and Parker’s cold.
Other times, it feels like Eliot’s halfway to leaving. His body heat already out the door.)
—
“Hey. Hello. Hardison, hi. Are you listening to me?”
His eyes are burning, his head hurts from the four different streams of conversation running through his ear, and his fingers ache from the last hour and a half of saving everybody’s ass. He ignores Eliot a second longer, marveling at how he can do all this from the van and still not get paid his proposed Hardison-left-behind fee.
“Hardison! Are you dead out there?”
“What? No, I’m not dead, what are you talking about?”
“Well you’re about to be when I get t’you. Have you been hearing Parker? She’s losin’ it, man, she needs an exit.”
He separates the voices coursing through his head, too late to pick up the end of Parker’s sentence but fast enough to hear the panic in her tone. “Dammit, what happened?”
“I don’t know the specifics, Hardison, I was a little busy doing my job.” There’s a shuffle somewhere down the line, and Eliot swears low under his breath. “Speaking of which. Look, man, just get her out, okay? I’d do it myself but I’ve got to beat this guy’s ass. Hi. Yeah, you.” Eliot barks out a laugh, the kind that’s clear enough to cut through all the garbled chaos of the comms. “Your day’s about to suck.”
Hardison clings on to that sound even as he hacks his way into the fire suppression system.
Even when the alarms begin to sound.
—
“I just don’t think I’m cut out for this,” Parker says, and by this she means last night’s attempts at socializing with the beautiful woman at the bar. “I thought women liked compliments, but she got all weird as soon as I said she had nice hair.”
“Parker, listen to me, it wasn’t that.”
Eliot’s opposite the island from them, surrounded by tendrils of smoke and the bright, rich smell of meat cooking on the cast iron. Hardison’s salivating, and Parker’s hand is cold and clenching at his thigh. He knows that tell of hers now, too, hidden in the twitching of her fingers. Learning.
“She was fine when you complimented her hair, but then you started talkin’ about her lips, babe. That’s not—Parker, that’s flirting.”
“Oh.” Her hand on Hardison’s leg tightens again. “But she did have nice lips.”
Eliot shoots him a desperate look, his eyes wide behind the curls that have fallen into his face. Do somethin’.
“Right, right,” Hardison says, stepping in, trying to ignore all the nice lips in the room with him now. “Maybe just don’t tell ‘em something you’d say to…us.”
“Man, come on, how is that gonna help her?”
“Yeah, how is that going to help me? I mean, Eliot has nice hair, and you have nice lips, so how am I supposed to know which one to say to women?”
Eliot’s knife hits the cutting board. “You don’t think I have nice lips?”
She looks at him with that calculated blandness of hers, taking in the bright, show-off smile he’s got plastered to his face. “Sure you do, Sparky. Not as nice as Hardison, but…”
Hardison’s warm, normally, and now he’s hot inside like he’s melting down, too many programs all running at once.
All he can do is laugh, loudly proclaiming his victory until, finally, Eliot’s perfectly pretty mouth screws up into a nasty little smile as he says, “Hey, you heard her. You may have the lips, baby, but I’ve got the hair.”
He’s about to give a really clever comeback when Parker spins on her barstool, drapes herself over the island, and says, “Nobody’s said anything about me yet.”
(They might take turns kissing her until she believes them when they say her lips are nice, better than nice, the most perfect lips ever except for when she’s maybe-accidentally flirting with the mark, and Eliot might offer to do her hair real nice for her, and Hardison might say look, babe, all I can do with hair is tug, and all of that might happen, but, if it did, then their dinner would get cold.)
—
Sometimes, Hardison has nightmares about pools.
It’s not the pool, but it’s close enough. Always watery walls too far from him to swim to and a distorted surface rippling out of reach. The water is thick and suffocating. There’s no one there to pull him out.
Before he starts to drown, he wakes up. Sucking in big deep breaths and reaching around in his empty bedsheets like the people that he’s looking for have ever stayed the night.
Parker doesn’t sleep well anywhere except her bed. Eliot, according to Eliot, doesn’t really sleep.
Still, sometimes his bedsheets feel like handcuffs. His mattress a hard wooden chair. There’s a key around here, maybe, but he just can’t pick it up.
On nights like these he relocates to his desk, still breathing hard, pressing his mind so far into whatever game grabs his attention that he comes out the other side somewhere, a little dazed, watching the sun rise over the city on the wrong of the glass.
—
Parker’s cold, her fingertips so freezing that it’s a miracle she doesn’t shake. He tries to hold her hand, to warm those bony, thin fingers between his own, but she never lasts long enough in the stillness to let it happen. Always too excited, too antsy, too Parker to be warmed.
The very first night he manages to convince her to let him stay over, he has the damn pool nightmare. He wakes up sweating, her warehouse bearing down around him; unsettling and strange all on its own.
In sleep, though, her hand is extended. Reaching through the water.
When he takes her hand, she starts to snore.
He curls around her. Clutches her cold fingers to his chest.
(When he wakes, her hand is warm and tell-twitching against his heartbeat. The smile in her eyes tells him exactly what it is that she’s learned.)
—
Sometimes, Hardison feels like he’s been waiting for something.
And then, one day, he’s not.
That day is today, and the moment is when Eliot mouths up the side of Hardison’s neck and says, in between the shifting sound of Parker trying to get them all undressed, “Jus' wanna be with both of you.”
“Don’t be silly,” Parker says, gritting her teeth at the difficult task of jeans. “You already are.”
“No, I mean…just you. If you guys want that, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, I—How’s this for an answer?”
Parker worms her way between them, then, lifting Eliot’s shirt, pressing her lips to his stomach with the kind of tender, red-hot longing that Hardison’s only ever seen inside his own head. Working her way up to his chest.
It’s too much to watch but way, way too much to look away, so Hardison only swallows hard and stays put, committing to memory the way Eliot tosses his head back. Covers his eyes. Moans into the quiet of the room, the sweetest strings to accompany the percussion pop pop pops of Parker’s kiss.
When it gets to be too much for future memory, he struggles to reach Eliot himself, digging his fingers in when he gets there just in case, and with a lapful of both of the people he loves most he says, “Hey, we’ve been waitin’ on you, baby.”
Parker nods, leaning back against Hardison's chest while Eliot impatiently strips out of his shirt and then pitches forward, pinning a laughing, squirming Parker between them before she has enough and squirms her way right out.
For a second, while Parker undresses, it’s just Eliot laying on him, skin to overheating skin, and Hardison feels a little of his warmth seeping over. Permeating that strange, room temperature thing Eliot’s got going on, until, by the time they pull apart enough to kiss each other, Eliot’s face has flushed a dusky sort of pink.
Parker threads her fingers through Eliot’s hair and scratches. She doesn’t stop until she makes him moan into Hardison's mouth.
(For the first time since that very first time they ever did this, Eliot’s kiss is almost warm.)