Chapter Text
Johnny inhaled his cig deeply, aching to feel the familiar burn of it in his lungs. His back was propped up against the wall, his legs stretched out in the middle of the bed. V slept soundly beside him, half-curled on her side, one knee bent, looking warm and impossibly inviting. Her dark hair fanned out around her. She wore her favourite old baggy Samurai tee referencing their 2007 tour. The good years. It did things to Johnny seeing V in his merch, especially when it was hiked up above her hips, her ass pointed at him and damn near falling out of her tiny pink pyjama shorts. He blew out the digital smoke and rested his head back against the wall, trying to pretend there wasn’t a slight tremble in his breath.
Fuck. He wished he didn’t lust after the smart-mouthed little merc that had been playing host to him. The truth was, she was hot. She was dangerous but hilarious. She loved his music, when most gonks her age were ignorant to it. She always carried herself with charisma and had fighting skills that impressed him. Johnny arrogantly thought he was quite badass himself, but V moved like no one else he’d ever seen. More than once he had found himself electrically charged as he watched her shooting the shit with fierce determination, blood spattering her. But she was also intelligent, calculated, and soft when the situation called for it. She helped those who needed it and only killed the assholes that deserved it. She was a better person than him, that’s for sure.
Earlier that day, V had been sliding and vaulting all over the place in a gunfight with a group of ugly Maelstrom. Her jaw was set with a lethal calm and control, but her bright green eyes sparkled with a sharp focus that bordered on crazed. When she’d obliterated them all and stood with her chest heaving, her gaze fell on Johnny who was leaning against a nearby wall, and it struck him. She might have been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She had lifted the corner of her BURN CORPO SHIT tee - another favourite of his - to wipe the worst of the blood spray from her face, careful to avoid her piercings, and he had tried not to notice the taut muscles of her tattooed stomach just poking out.
“Bravo” he had said, trying to act his usual annoying self, clapping at her as his cig hung out his mouth. She had stuck her middle finger up at him and flashed him a tiny smile before tucking her pistol into the back of her pants, moving on with her day. He had tried desperately not to watch her leather-clad ass swaying as she walked away and called her fixer (only God knew which one it was this time) to tell them the gig was done. Later that evening had been torture as she showered, and he had had to hold himself back from joining her in the steam.
Johnny sometimes felt V’s eyes roving over him when she thought he hadn’t noticed. And then there were the times when he was making lewd jokes, and occasionally she had laughed almost hysterically as he grinned at her. He liked to convince himself that was because she was feeling flustered. On a couple of occasions she had glanced at his mouth. Regularly he felt some confusing pull from within her, and he had said to her face that she had a clusterfuck of hormones anyway, but maybe she was feeling things. After all, it had been a while since she’d gotten laid. Hell, he had been stuck in Mikoshi for 50 years himself, and it had therefore been a damn long time since he was between a girl’s legs. He lost count of how many he had taken to bed a long time ago, but V made him feel different.
He wanted her with an intensity that made him careful. Every word became measured. Every glance had to be shortened before it revealed too much.
Johnny brought his thoughts back to himself, sat on V’s bed, the late Night City hum in the background. He adjusted himself in his pants as he tried to stop thinking about V flushed from exertion and splattered with blood after that shootout, tried to banish the idea of any reciprocated interest. He dared to flick his eyes down to her as he inhaled his cig again, watching her body ever so slightly shifting as she breathed, her fingers and toes twitching. He folded his arms and smirked at this telltale sign she was in a deep sleep, convinced she’d be embarrassed to know this was something she did every single night.
Just then V sighed in her sleep, and muttered something he couldn’t make out. She must have been dreaming.
Then Johnny held the breath he didn’t have as V shifted slowly, rolling on to her other side till she faced him. Her leg stretched out and her right knee settled on top of his thigh. She was still asleep. Johnny blinked down at her through his shades, not daring to move a millimetre. They got on well with a comfortable familiarity generally, but they didn’t do…this. He seemed to heat under her knee and he felt a stirring deep in his stomach knowing she was just right there.
V sighed again and her brows furrowed slightly, before her expression relaxed. She looked so gentle and peaceful, and Johnny felt lucky to see this side of her rather than the general reputation of simply being one of Night City’s best mercs like she was to everyone else. He felt the bite of his fingernails digging into his crossed arms. He itched to touch her, but he had never done that. Occasionally they brushed against each other when in his old Porsche by accident, but that was it. Of course he had smacked her clean across the face when they first met, just a couple of feet away from where they were now, much as he tried to forget about that. The times their fuzzy and strange connection blurred and they could feel each other properly made him ache.
Something primal started to unravel his tight control, and before he had time to wonder what the fuck he thought he was doing, his arms were uncrossed and he was reaching for her. His ganic hand settled slowly on V’s hip, the material of her shorts thin and her skin omitting warmth underneath. Clearly their connection was on his side tonight. He dared a feather-light creep of his fingers down to her thigh, the heat from her soft but toned flesh growing stronger. It was intimate, gentle, vulnerable. V’s lips twitched a couple of times in her sleep and Johnny exhaled slowly. He felt a sense of calm envelop him whilst something clenched and unclenched inside his very being.
Then, her emerald eyes flew open, finding his own black coffee ones immediately. He snatched his hand away like he’d been caught doing something unbelievably bad.
“Johnny..?” she whispered, blinking up at him a couple of times as he simply stared back at her, wary. Her irises, glinting in the low lighting from her apartment, roved all over him, like a feather drifting against his skin. Her forehead glistened with a faint sheen of sleep time sweat. Her plump pink lips parted. She started to slowly push herself up, coming to a seated position with her legs crossed.
“You were in my dream” she breathed, her head tilting to the side slightly as her hair fell in an inky curtain around her.
Johnny tried to quell the somersault in his stomach, time seeming to still.
“Oh yeah?” He tried to sound bored, pretending to take great interest in his cig. She nodded once. “What was I doing, nuking Arasaka?” He pulled his lips into a smirk, taking another inhale of smoke between fingers that now burnt having touched her. His heart thudded as he waited, eventually glancing back at her after some time.
“No…” V was biting her lip, glancing down to his mouth. After a pause, heat flushed his insides as he worked out what she meant. Johnny narrowed his eyes at her.
“Bet you hated that” he murmured, testing, prodding, embarrassingly hoping.
She shook her head, her lower lip puckering more as her teeth bit down harder. He felt his veins igniting. He wanted to bite her lip himself, paint pictures all over her flesh with his tongue, feel her warmth clamped around him.
This was crossing a line.
Johnny cleared his throat gruffly and made to get off the bed to ghost over to his usual spot way, way over there on the sofa, banishing his cig to the ether, but before he had shifted even an inch, a warm palm fell on his knee.
“Don’t go.” Those two desperate, whispered words of longing from V could have brought him to his knees if he wasn’t already sat down.
He froze, his eyebrows twisting together as he snapped his eyes back to hers and searched them.
A beat and a deep breath in was all it took before V was slowly making her way closer. She braced herself on his chest and swung her right leg over. Johnny felt his throat catch and his fingers curl into the bed sheets underneath as he felt the heat from between her legs settle over him. His cock twitched with interest against her core. Her eyes held his as she lifted her hands to the arms of his shades and slowly took them off, tossing them gently across the bed. The smell of her wrapped around him, all apples and soap from her shower products mingling with the faint sweetness of sweat. Johnny breathed her in deeply.
V danced her fingers across to his ebony hair, tangling in it as she lowered her lips to his.