@wolfwritings / bodyguard au. continued from here.
she melted into the kiss — and he did too, his arms shifting and shuffling to wrap around her back, press her closer to him and to the wall in equal measure. it’s almost everything he dreamed of for this moment, a moment which he never thought would come to fruition. ( gendry, the working class and arya --- the people’s princess. they were from two different worlds, and even though gendry had been brought to hers through sheer dumb luck, it wasn’t his to live in. he wasn’t meant for it. maybe he never would be. but in this moment, he can pretend for the briefest of seconds that this, all of it, was fate. )
his fingers itched with the need to remove cloth and clothing, peel it from arya’s frame and feel her bare skin against his own. but like a bucket of ice cold water — similar words echo in his mind’s eye. the truth is, i love you. i love you gendry. words said with sadness and pain, like she knew he didn’t love her back. like she knew his heart truly belonged to another. and you don’t have to say it back. her lips hd pressed together, like she was trying to hold in a sob. but… i need to know. is there a chance… that one day… you might? ( he hadn’t said anything in response. anything gendry could have said would have made him look like an asshole — say yes, and he was lying, because there was only one person he loved. one person he’d ever loved, alongside mya and edric and his mom. say no, and he was a bastard who wasted her time. so he’d nothing, and sarah had smiled sadly and quietly closed the door to their bedroom. ) gendry had slept on the couch that night. though slept was a vague term — he mostly stared at the ceiling, thinking of arya, trying to find a way in which he could tell her he loved her and keep his job. trying to find a way to detangle himself from sarah’s life, without hurting her in all the ways he vowed never to hurt a significant other. a cake and eat it too situation.
unsurprisingly, gendry had no answers by the time the sun rose.
“arya.” he sighed softly against her mouth. even the images in his head and the words ringing in his ears couldn’t stop the utter love and adoration coating his tone — the giddyness of a smile on his lips as she kissed along his nose, his cheeks, his forehead. “arya, my love.” there’s some kind of hesitation --- unwilling to burst the bubble they’ve found themselves in, but needing this, them, their moment --- to not be tainted by the mistakes of gendry’s past. “we… i…” a part of him can’t even say it. he doesn’t want to say it — he should just ignore it, keep on kissing her, touching her. they’d been waiting for so long, kept apart by duty, propriety, his issues, her family, the press and public’s predisposition for sticking its nose into matters that wasn’t theirs. he doesn’t want to ruin this when they’ve finally come together. finally gotten their acts together. but he can’t lie to her, either. he can’t have this moment be ruined by his own cowardice, his own selfishness, nor by the truth of the matter. he can’t do that to arya — when she deserves more, deserves better than a shady fuck against the wall because he couldn’t control his jealousy. “i... i still have a girlfriend.”