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“You look stressed again, Noldor.”
“And how the hell would you know that?” she snapped at the sound of an all too familiar, softly mocking voice behind her, the door to her home office left wide open on the assumption that she’d have the apartment to herself tonight. Halbrand always went out with his litigation team on Thursdays after work. “I’ve hardly been home all week.”
“Maybe,” he said, refusing to agree with her yet again. “But I still see you. And you’re looking fucking awful.”
Galadriel turned her head to greet her roommate with a roll of her eyes, the correct and expected response to any of the stupid shit he said from time to time, grateful for the messy bun she’d tamed her hair into earlier so she could glare at him unimpeded. Despite having known each other since high school, when she’d been queen bee and he was the right kind of new and interesting to be invited to every house party, they had never been friends in the truest sense of the word.
Back then Halbrand didn’t want to do more than hover around the edges of her carefully maintained friendship group, preferring to remain unattached to any place or person, and she would have promptly forgotten the vaguely cute boy existed if she hadn’t been forced to work with him in sophmore Psych. His presence meant she was asked to be someone she wasn’t - cheerful, friendly, welcoming - and their first project had descended into such a vehement debate around nature versus nurture that Galadriel expected to be refusing to speak to anyone associated with him ever again after their trip to detention. Instead, it landed them top marks, but during one of those early arguments hidden away in the school library Halbrand somehow became the first guy she’d ever considered really making out with. She hadn’t even liked him, she’d just wanted to do something unexpected in the moment to shut him up.
Which, even after history kept repeating itself and they kept finding themself in the same place at the same time, he never did. In hindsight, Galadriel was relieved she hadn’t wasted her first real kiss on him, even if after half the homecoming court raved about his lips she found herself thinking she could have laid claim to him long before any of them had a chance to.
She expected graduation would draw an indelible line under things, but as if the fates she didn’t believe in had decided they were going to be stuck irritating each other now until the end of time, they ended up in the same dorm at the same college, the same study group at the same law school, even on the same goddamn partner track at the same law firm. So when he needed a place to stay for a few weeks while his landlord was redecorating, Galadriel had offered him her vacant second bedroom without really thinking beyond the fact that sharing her home with Halbrand had to be a better option than taking in a stranger. Much like the friend who’d been using it before, she didn’t have to hide any part of herself around him. And there would be no surprises - she already knew the exact breed of asshole Halbrand was.
That was eighteen months ago.
They both should have realised that his place was getting ready to be sold, but despite the numerous times it could have come up, neither of them had found a tangible reason to force him into moving out and on. She hadn't wanted to admit that she’d needed additional income to keep living comfortably on the top floor of a doorman building within walking distance of Lindon, Dell and Hollin after Elrond had gone West for the job of a lifetime, but after a year and a half Galadriel, reluctantly, could no longer deny that having Halbrand around gave her some budgetary breathing room. He didn’t make everything easier, of course, but it was enough to make a difference for the better.
Never mind that she could buy shoes again without having to dip into her savings, being able to tell her parents that she had no room - after they hinted her messy artist brother wanted to live in the city again - had almost made her stop considering how she could remove the same stupid smirk Halbrand was again sending her from the doorway and just hug him for saving her from a nightmare instead. She was positive he would still give the best hugs. But of all the things they didn’t do now, touch was at the top of an ever increasing list.
“I can help with that.”
Fighting the yawn that would be the only sign she’d been sitting at this desk for too many hours with little to show for it, Galadriel pushed her chair back to gesture at the papers she’d been allowed to bring home. “With mergers and acquisitions? Be my guest, although I’m not sure you’ll understand half of it.”
It was the biggest case the managing partners had entrusted her to lead on yet, meaning longer and longer hours as contracts were drawn up, argued over and re-written line by line even though time was not on their side with these clients. Galadriel could feel the clock counting down faster with every moment she allowed herself to pause, knowing her team still had to iron out every one of these newest concerns post-haste. Any perceived slight and this multi-million dollar merger would be taken to one of their competitors, meaning her promised junior partner promotion would disappear quicker than she could say corner office. She’d spent every evening over the last fortnight in one of the firm’s unused conference rooms to make sure her hard work would be worth something at the end of this deal, but the cleaning staff had finally thrown her out earlier tonight.
Halbrand never seemed to have to put in so much overtime.
“Galadriel,” he laughed and she was wheeling herself around before he could finish, ready for another fight, whatever joke she’d just made completely unintentional. He hadn’t called her by her first name in years and there was no reason she could see for him to start doing it now.
“I take it the fancy boyfriend hasn’t taught you about stress relief then.”
She scowled up and up at Halbrand, pointedly blinking, his assumptions about her personal life always sitting badly with her. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
She’d met Celeborn at a company wide mixer just before Christmas, finding him strangely easy to talk to and, after discovering that he was possibly the least ambitious dickhead amongst the junior partner wannabes, had agreed to go on two dinner dates with him last month. A third had not been arranged. He’d played her or she’d read him wrong and beyond his nice surface there was nothing about him that fit with what she really wanted. Her type was more… Well, Galadriel wasn’t really sure what it was anymore but, whenever she found it, he certainly wouldn’t come with hazel-green eyes, designer stubble and an easy arrogance that seemed to grate on her nerves no matter what time of day or day of the week it was.
“Good,” Halbrand nodded, folding his arms across his broad chest, looking ridiculous trying to stare her down dressed in soft clothes meant only for bed, his feet bare. “I didn’t like him.”
“That’s not saying much. You don’t like anyone.”
“Neither do you.”
He wasn’t completely wrong, but she was getting better at keeping in touch with the handful of people outside her family who she had come to care about. Although, for all of Halbrand’s good qualities as a roommate - she especially appreciated that he was punctual with paying his rent and enjoyed cooking enough that there were always leftovers in the fridge - plus all the time they’d spent sort of getting to know each other, Galadriel didn’t think there would ever be a point where he’d make it into that group. His bad habits still outweighed the positives three to one as far as she was concerned. He tended to walk around the apartment partially dressed as if he owned the place and she was only here because he’d granted permission, he couldn’t stand there being dirty dishes in the sink for longer than ten minutes after anyone had finished eating, and he never missed an opportunity to celebrate a win even if he had nothing kind to say about any of the overprivileged trust fund kids on his team. And that was before she considered how much she hated that he went into court looking like he was heading to fashion week, or that he had very definite ideas about the hierarchy within the firm that didn’t come anywhere close to her own.
No wonder she saw their relationship as something balanced on a knife edge between almost friends and not quite mortal enemies, something no one who knew them both even tried to understand anymore. Her paralegal had even - traitorously - insinuated that their rollercoaster of animosity was only because of a torrid, decade long, on-again off-again affair.
Galadriel’s reply to that should not have been uttered in a shared office.
Perhaps if she hadn’t seen Halbrand grow up, and he’d not been there watching her do the same thing, things would feel different between them. She couldn’t even remember when he’d become heart-stoppingly gorgeous to everyone but her; tall and muscular with those fucking beautiful eyes and a wicked smile if he was in the right mood, though the string of weekend women early on in their arrangement certainly made her take more notice of it than she wanted to. She’d liked him even less than usual during that phase of his life, and after learning how she had inadvertently helped Halbrand ghost one or two of them she simply refused to be in the same room as him for weeks. Their neighbours nearly called the cops when they finally worked that issue through.
Fortunately - for her sleep patterns at least - he hadn’t brought anyone else home in the past few months, but that only meant Galadriel felt like whenever they were alone in the apartment together, his main goal in life seemed to be doing everything in his power to royally piss her off.
“But maybe if you put yourself out there more, you wouldn’t-“
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I was planning on going out for a run when I’m done here,” she told him, neither of them moving from their chosen corners, Galadriel mirroring his earlier position by crossing her arms and legs as he stood up straighter.
“It’s 1am, Noldor.”
“So?”
“Galadriel,” he said again, this time like he was actually worried her late night excursions might get her killed one day. She hadn’t thought he cared enough to notice her comings and goings. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then? I haven’t got time to sit up all night playing word games with you.”
He shook his head, muttering something she couldn’t make out at that distance, and then suddenly Halbrand was right beside her, rolling up his sleeves as he waited for her answer to the unspoken question written all over his face.
Feeling unsure but not entirely uninterested to see which direction this was heading, Galadriel nodded. There was a reason she went to law school after all - she’d always enjoyed winning but beating him seemed to taste sweeter than it did with anyone else - and, after sixteen years, more than a modicum of trust existed between them. They might not have been particularly pleasant to each other but he didn’t talk down to her the way others did, she knew to leave him be when he came back silent and moody after seeing his father, and they could even be civilised enough to share the sofa occasionally - if they were both tired enough to not care what they watched.
They didn’t speak about the night they’d been so exhausted that they had fallen asleep together on that same sofa, waking the next morning warm and entangled and a little too happy in Halbrand’s case. Galadriel had stored that incident away as the only exception to their current no touching rule, something never to be repeated - even if she’d kept her eyes closed for as long as possible after the fog of sleep had faded, telling herself she would not be the first to retreat from even this uncompromising situation. Tiredness must have won out over her stubborn streak, though, as the next thing she remembered was Halbrand slamming the front door hard enough to shake the entire building on his way out.
“Let’s leave your stupid games at work where they belong.”
“They’re not stupid if they get results.”
He cocked his head, raising an eyebrow in consideration, his voice dropping to a murmur she had to strain to hear. “You don’t want to know the penalties for perjury in this house, sweetheart.”
“I never have and never will swear an oath to you, especially not in my house.” Spinning her back around, Galadriel was just about to inform him where to get off if he intended on helping by hovering over her like a stunning but completely useless marble statue when his hands landed on her shoulders. “What the fuck, Halbrand?”
“Unless you want to be in a worse state than when you started, I suggest you sit still,” he hissed, gripping tighter as she tried to push up to her feet, the obscene moan leaving her mouth at the pleasure-pain pressure of his thumbs against a knot in her muscles the absolute worst thing she could have done.
His amused breath was too loud in her ear then, her head falling forward the second he started to slowly squeeze and roll, his fingers settling alongside her collarbone while he began to knead the overly tight line of her shoulders in earnest.
“I swear to god if you don’t know what you’re doing I’m going to-“
“Kinesiology minor, Noldor, remember?”
She sighed involuntarily as he pressed harder, having decided long ago that each and every early morning wake up call during that time was equivalent to an unforgivable sin. He used to run literal circles around her when she fell behind on the trails outside their dorm, her perfectly normal length legs unable to keep up with his freakishly long stride, although Halbrand had insisted she was a better partner than any of his taller, sportier classmates. It was his fault she’d developed a love of running by the end of their degrees, every marathon they’d berated each other through since feeling like important milestones in her life.
“Ten years ago,” she said, trying to swallow or muffle her next heavy exhale. Granted she didn’t have a wealth of experience in bed - or maybe she’d just had shitty boyfriends - but after a few minutes of feeling Halbrand work out the tension from her arms to her neck and back again she was beginning to think that this was just as good as partnered sex. He was certainly pulling noises out of her that no man between her thighs ever had before, her paper thin shirt allowing Galadriel to feel the overwhelming warmth and power in his massaging fingers, rhythmically soothing and riling her up in equal measure.
“Eight and a half,” Halbrand corrected, pulling her back from thinking through a tangled web that began with his ulterior motives for studying such a thing and ended on the irritation of realising all the women he’d brought home had enjoyed some part of this, too. “I didn’t think you had it in you to be so generous, rounding me up like that.”
He pressed into another knot so quickly, so perfectly Galadriel couldn’t bite back the satisfied sound that wanted to leave her mouth then. “God, I hate you sometimes.”
“I hate you more,” he promised even as she rested her head onto her forearms on the desk in front of her, groaning when the new position meant he could better manipulate the muscles beside her shoulder blades. Galadriel was already feeling better, though the smell of his skin filling her head like he’d moved closer to make sure she stayed cocooned in contentment, keeping her spread out on the glass surface, was nowhere close to relaxing. She couldn’t stand that he was amazing at this. He needed to do this every single night to help her sleep, just climb into bed with her, roll her over and put his hands to work everywhere.
There was an unwanted ache between her thighs at the thought of him pinning her to her mattress, and Galadriel shifted a little in her chair, locking her knees together so she couldn’t get any further ideas. It was Halbrand for fucks sake. He was her roommate, her colleague, her sometimes friend, she certainly did not need to discover how his long, dexterous fingers would feel moving inside her. It wasn’t as if he’d ever been attracted to any part of her either, even as far back as high school he seemed to purposefully avoid dating blondes and he didn’t seem particularly picky from what she’d seen.
“That’s debatable.”
“No, it’s not,” he hummed, far too pleased with himself over how she was reacting to his still moving hands. She should have just let him have that moment, he probably even deserved it, but Galadriel knew she could only tolerate his smugness for so long before they were at each other’s throats again and this was already infinitely worse than any of his good days in court. Though it was Halbrand’s wordless encouragement along with the squeeze at her waist, asking her to arch her back so he had room to do more, that finally made her push off the desk, nearly running over his feet in the process of forcing him to move away.
“Galadriel,” he growled as he had to take several steps back, the note of wholly unexpected want wrapped around her name undoing so much of what he’d just painstakingly coaxed from her. “We’re not done here yet.”
“We’re done because I say we’re done.” She gathered her papers together, steeling herself for the fallout of whatever truce they’d just torn up, her voice coming out uncharacteristically unsteady. “I need to get some sleep… Halbrand, you should… just forget any of this ever happened.”
“And why the fuck would I want to do that?”
She shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye to find mossy green had been replaced by something unfamiliar and inescapably dark, his breathing as rapid as when they sprinted the last half mile of their runs, and when she turned further to run her eyes down the length of him, her own breath hitched noticing how painfully hard he clearly was. He didn’t even like her, he never had, but when he offered his hand to help her stand, Galadriel took it without question, surprising herself by allowing Halbrand to pull her into the circle of his arms.
“Do you know I can hear you in your room?” he asked, sharing a deep and dirty secret, Galadriel parting her lips to catch his breath as it ghosted along them. She’d promised so many people so many times that they only tolerated each other because he kept her sharp and she kept him smart. How could there be anything else between them?
“Every damn night, Galadriel, I can hear you. How long have you needed to be touched by someone who knows what they’re doing?”
“I’m not like you. I’m not a slut,” she spat, wanting to scratch and bite at him as a rush of heat spread across her cheeks almost as fast as another wave of arousal threatened to take her legs from her. She had lived here far longer than him, she knew exactly how thick the walls were and always made sure she was so so quiet when he was sleeping down the hall. She hadn’t meant for him to know what she was doing when she couldn’t sleep. “I don’t get so starved for it that I’d let just anyone touch me.”
“Fuck,” he groaned again, watching her blush start to trickle down her neck. “You’ve been torturing me, Noldor. For months. And you can’t take a fucking hint.”
Galadriel couldn’t catch her breath, talking over him like it was only the way to get oxygen. “You need to shut up before you say something-“
“I was so turned on last night listening to you struggle I almost-“
She didn’t know which of them moved first, but Galadriel was suddenly kissing his mouth shut like she’d always wanted to do, the reality feeling a hundred times better than the fantasy when Halbrand kissed her back like he was about to devour and devastate her, the weight of his lips ferociously moving against hers sure to leave gently burning bruises for her to find later. Tangling her fingers in his hair, she kept him close, her eyelids fluttering as she met and countered every hard kiss, still not wanting to fully accept that all of this - his hands on her, his tongue tangling with hers, his straining erection - had been at the back of her mind since waking up on the sofa after closing the only case they’d ever worked on together. In the month following what they wouldn’t acknowledge he all but banned her from making a mess in her kitchen, the homemade leftovers in the fridge becoming neatly labelled and microwavable portions that she ate only when he wasn’t there to see it, and the month following that there was suddenly far more hot water left in the mornings than usual except on the day she’d crept in after a regrettable one-night-stand when she had wanted a shower more than anything. The month following that Halbrand stopped sleeping around so much but they were in each other’s faces every day like-
“Oh,” Galadriel breathed into his mouth, throwing her arms around his neck to better taste the new sparks that were growing between them, her back arching as Halbrand sucked at her lower lip, raking it with his teeth. Cursing at how quickly she wanted to feel more; her skin itching to be uncovered, her nipples tightening in anticipation, her heart racing the same way it always did when they were locked in one disagreement or another, she suddenly saw too many little things lining up as if they were unknowingly waiting for one final push before all their angry dominoes could fall.
His hand drifted from her waist to her hip then, massaging all the way down as if committing the curve of her body to memory, and Galadriel had to stretch all the way onto her toes to wrap a leg around him so he could help soothe where she was aching most, too. Halbrand savagely rocked against her and she shivered, breaking away from stealing the breath from his lungs to moan, full throated and hungry, trusting him to hold her up, his open mouth grazing her jaw.
“Galadriel.”
If he was going to say her name, she wanted it to always sound like that; in command and so out of control that she didn’t know if she wanted to pull him closer or push him away. Galadriel didn’t get time to make that choice though, not with Halbrand palming her ass in order to lift her fully off the ground, immediately pushing her into what felt like an instinctive rhythm as she cradled his hips between her thighs. The hard ridge of his cock ground against her barely covered centre with each rotation, two pairs of hands furiously trying to do something about her skirt.
She was a woman lost in a sea of sensation, vaguely wondering if they should have been doing this each and every time they’d been mad at each other; the very beginnings of an orgasm throbbing deep inside, tickling down her legs as Halbrand bit kisses down her throat, his facial hair grating against the softer skin. Galadriel squirmed in his arms, echoing his rough exploration by pulling on his hair and scratching at his shoulders, trying to control the pace of his mouth right up until he reverently pressed his lips into the hollow of her throat.
“You don’t know what-“
“I don’t want to,” she admitted breathlessly, rolling her hips again and feeling all her thoughts unspool as Halbrand snapped his up to meet her movements, his muffled moan vibrating across her heated skin. She’d walked in on him in the shower once when he’d forgotten to lock the bathroom door, the burning afterimage of his fist moving around his cock staying with her for too long afterwards, but seeing him chasing his own pleasure and feeling him do the same as she surrendered to the build being provided by delicious pressure and friction were two completely different stories.
“Remember that,” he purred, her toes curling as he manoeuvred them to brace her back against the nearest wall, the hand still cupping her ass sliding under the waistband of her soaked lace underwear and ripping them clean away, her hands going to undo the drawstring holding his pyjama pants up. “Remember that you needed me tonight.”