Two Steps Back

"No, dude, seriously, hear me out."

"Nuh-uh!"

"What's so wrong with calling us the Flash Mob?"

"Everything!" Barry exclaimed, but he was laughing. "There is nothing right about that!"

Cisco was laughing too. He didn't seriously want to call them the Flash Mob. He had about seventeen ideas for what to call their weird little group - Science All-Stars was his current favorite.

But Barry's day had been rough. He hadn't had to bust out his super-speed, but apparently there had been a pretty bad crime scene. Cisco hadn't really needed the details after hearing "dismemberment," but he'd known his buddy needed cheering up.

So the evening had featured monster burritos, beer, the comfy couch in the Star Labs break room, Mario Kart (Barry didn't like fighting games anymore. He got too much of the real thing) and Cisco falling easily into his goofball sidekick role.

"Caitlin!" he said. "C'mon, what do you think? Isn't Flash Mob the best?"

He expected vehement denials and withering scorn. Caitlin never liked his nomenclature. Said it was too comic-booky.

But Caitlin, curled up in the beat-up armchair, just shrugged and said, "It's okay."

Okay? What? He glanced at Barry, who shrugged, equally baffled.

Caitlin was . . . off tonight. She'd gone home late, then come back less than an hour later. She'd shaken her head to the offer of a burrito and flopped down to watch them play in silence, drinking her beer.

He wondered if something was wrong with her.

He wondered if something was finally right with her.

"Geez," Barry said, looking at his phone. "Is it seriously 2 am?"

"Here's where he weasels out of best-of-seven Mario Kart," Cisco told Caitlin. She smiled a little. Okay, that was weird, he thought even as his heart bumped once against his ribs.

"Honest, man," Barry protested. "I've gotta be at work at seven tomorrow."

"Today," Caitlin said.

"Yeah, I guess." He clapped Cisco on the shoulder. "Thanks for the burritos."

"Your turn next," Cisco told him, scooping up some stray guacamole out of a wrapper and popping it in his mouth. He knew Barry was thanking him for more than the burritos.

"Yup. Night, Caitlin. See you tomorrow."

She flicked her fingers at him.

Barry gave Cisco another look, a find-out-what's-wrong-with-her-would-you look. Cisco nodded a little, and Barry smiled his thanks. He grabbed the second half of his third burrito and was gone in a blast of wind.

Cisco caught a couple of flying burrito wrappers, crumpled them into a ball with the rest, and pitched it toward the trash can. The ball fell apart in midair, one wrapper bouncing off over the floor while the others made it in.

"And the crowd goes wild!" he cheered himself.

"You missed one," she said, and drained her beer.

"I'll get it later." He held out the plastic bag of burritos. "There's some left. Sure you don't want one? They're from Taco Galaxy down the street."

"Aren't they cold by now?"

"Burritos are the perfect food at any temperature."

She unfolded herself from the armchair and took a couple of wobbly steps before dropping down to the couch, hip-to-hip with him. He concentrated on breathing while she peered into the bag. "Nah," she decided.

He tossed the bag on the coffee table. He'd have them for lunch tomorrow. Maybe breakfast. Or mid-morning snack. Burritos really were the perfect food.

He turned his head to ask something, but it slid out of his brain when she leaned into his side and said, "Hi."

"Hi," he said slowly. Her eyes were hazy and her breath smelled like beer, but not unpleasantly. Something caught his eye, and his brows rose. "Uh, Caitlin? How many beers did you have?"

She angled her head to peer at the empty cardboard six-pack holder, sitting next to the chair she'd occupied. "I'unno."

He calculated. Barry had stuck with one, because his metabolism burned through the alcohol too fast to make it any fun. Wells had one just to be polite before going off to do-whatever Wells did. He'd had one himself, and it was sitting half-full on the coffee table because you tried to hang onto your reflexes when playing Mario Kart with the Fastest Man Alive.

So that left - "Three? Three of those? In like an hour?" He couldn't keep the laugh down. "Were you a frat boy in another life?"

"They were good," she said.

Strike that. She most definitely had not been a frat boy. She was as floppy as a rag doll. "You're not driving home, are you?"

"I'll call a cab," she said. Her consonants were mushy. It was kinda cute. He felt like he should film this for posterity or get her a bottle of water or something.

He decided the bottle of water was less likely to get his tongue ripped out and fed to him later, and he started to get up.

"Nnnn," she said, grabbing his t-shirt, and he sank back into the couch. She said softly, "Hi."

"We did this part," he said, but grinned at her. "Hi."

Her brows crinkled. "You have a really nice smile." She said it like a scientific observation.

"Thanks."

"You smile at everyone," she continued in the same tone.

"Everyone worth smiling at." This conversation was weird, even factoring in the alcohol. He had to remind himself - be Cisco, be her funny buddy. She's drunk. That's why she's draped all over you. Don't listen to all the nerve endings clamoring in every square inch of your skin touching hers.

"How is that everyone?" she demanded.

"I like people."

"Even me?"

A strand of hair had fallen in her face. He tucked it behind her ear, fingers lingering in the soft strands because, what the hell. She probably wouldn't remember this in the morning. "Sure, I like you."

"I'm hard to like."

"Nah, you're not."

"Really?"

"I liked you right from the beginning. See? Not so hard."

She gave him a blearily suspicious look, but he was telling the truth. He'd liked her take-no-prisoners approach to research, her diamond-hard self-assurance when it came to her own intelligence. As he got to know her, he liked her coltish awkwardness around people when she wasn't in the lab, and the way she made jokes that nobody ever laughed at because they didn't realize she'd actually made them.

(He did.)

After nearly two years, he got to know more of her, and he liked that too. The way her eyes narrowed as ideas popcorned inside her brain. Her epic sweet tooth, which she did her best to suppress and he did his best to feed. When she was prickly and tough and when she was worried and soft. The way she cared about people, in a brisk, no-nonsense way. Barry, the metahumans like Bette, even him and Wells sometimes.

(Though it's not really hard to keep people from worrying about you, Cisco knows. A grin, a joke, and everybody can relax and go back to thinking about more important things, like bills or his sister's punk-ass boyfriend or a particle accelerator or metahuman mayhem. For example.)

Most of all, he liked her when she smiled because those were rare and when he got one out of her it was like he'd won the lottery.

"How much?"

"Huh?"

"How much do you like me?"

"Um." He looked away, reaching out one hand for the remote so he could turn off the tv. He badly needed to look away because if he told her how much he liked her, she would probably never speak to him again.

"Cisco?"

"Um?" He made the mistake of looking back at her.

She hooked a hand over his shoulder, pulled herself up, and kissed him.

The kiss landed off-center, more on his cheek than his mouth, but he turned into it so her lips slid over his.

Caitlin. Caitlin with her soft mouth and her hair sliding over his fingers, her breasts pressed against his chest.

She was licking his lips now and he was helpless, he had to open them so he could taste her. Beer and a little bit of guacamole, like she'd eaten an entire side order right out of the little container, which she did all the time and pretended she didn't. Which was why he'd asked for an extra even though Taco Galaxy put plenty on their burritos already.

"Mmm," she breathed when he slid a hand around to cup her neck.

"Caitlin," he said against her mouth.

Caitlin, who'd buried her heart with Ronnie.

Caitlin, who was pretty drunk right now, probably feeling sad and lonely and just wanted someone to kiss, no matter who it was.

She started to climb into his lap.

If she got there, this would definitely become more than a drunken make-out session. There were so many parts of Caitlin Snow he'd been wanting to touch.

He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her where she was. "Caitlin. Stop."

"Don't want to," she mumbled, grabbing his t-shirt for leverage to get her butt into his lap. "Cisco, why aren't you kissing me?"

He dropped his head back against the top of the couch. "God, I'm not drunk enough for this," he muttered.

Her soft, giving body went stiff as a board. "What."

His head popped up. She'd heard him. How had she heard him?

Because she was about six inches away, he answered himself. Dumbass.

She threw herself backward, off his lap, which was a relief and a worry. A relief because now she wouldn't ever know how much he'd enjoyed kissing her, and a worry because her eyes were blazing and he knew that look and wise men took cover.

He wasn't actually that wise.

"You're not drunk enough?"

Not drunk enough to forget that she was in love with a guy she'd lost forever, and he was in pretty much the same boat - in love with a girl he'd never have. And not willing to settle for crumbs, either.

If he'd finished his stinking beer, maybe he could have forgotten that last part. At least long enough to learn how her skin felt under his fingers.

But that was too much to explain, and she was up anyway, staggering backwards. "Sorry," she spat, clearly the opposite of sorry. "Sorry to inconvenience you."

"Caitlin - that's not what I - let me - "

"You know what, forget it. Forget all of this." She grabbed for her purse, fumbling inside.

He got up. "You're not driving."

She wrestled her phone out. "No," she snarled. "No, Dad, I'm not driving." She clawed inside her purse with her free hand and threw her keys at him. He ducked, and they bounced off the back of the sofa. "Happy?"

Not really, he thought, but he watched her stomp unsteadily from the room, ordering Siri to call her a cab and thought he should probably leave it there.

He picked up her keys and looked at them. The keychain was a picture of Caitlin and Ronnie, in a heart-shaped frame swinging from the ring. It was their engagement picture. He'd read that stupid announcement on the Central City News website about five times the first day it went up, just to make it clear to himself that he'd never had a chance with her.

He ran his thumb over her house key and sighed.

She'd gone out to the bus stop and sat hunched up on the bench, hugging her elbows against the bitter night air. Her toes curled into the cement. The fluorescent light glared pitilessly down at her.

He set her shoes on the ground where she could slide into them easily, laid her coat on the bench next to her, and put her keys on top.

She stared straight ahead for several moments. Then, still not looking at him, she snatched up her keys and wrestled into her coat. After another thirty seconds of silence, she said, "You don't need to stay with me."

He leaned against the frame of the bus stop. "It's two thirty in the morning."

She scowled, but didn't offer any more objections. Headlights turned the corner, far down the street. The cab.

He said, "About what happ - "

"We don't talk about it," she said. "Ever. Again."

He let out a huff of breath that became a cloud in the air. "Okay."

FINIS