Disclaimer: Of course they’re not mine, and I think that’s okay, because Joss is doing a damn shiny job of taking care of them himself. However, I borrowed them for a bit, hoping to give ‘em a little lovin’ they never got onscreen (through no fault of Joss’s, of course).

PG-13 for a little bit of language and a little bit of Jaylee fun.

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Kiss ‘Em On the Mouth

By ShinyBug

“So, Jayne,” Kaylee asked as they both worked together to restore Serenity’s momentarily stalled engine of all its valves and ventricles, “...why don’t you ever kiss ‘em on the mouth?”

The brand-spanking new compression coil slid sideways as Jayne’s attention suddenly diverted, and thirty pounds of metal found itself coming to rest on the trapped fingers of a mercenary. Jayne yelped and removed the offended appendage, leaving Kaylee to stagger beneath the sudden weight.

“What the hell, now?” Jayne shook his hand and scowled fiercely, letting Kaylee struggle with the coil for a minute on her own, before finally taking it back and sliding it one-handed into its proper position in the engine.

Kaylee laughed, clapping her hands together and gazing at her engine, which now had all its necessary parts. She leaned over and pulled the lever that engaged the engine, and Serenity’s heart began to beat once more. The soft purr and whine of the revolving mechanism filled the air, and Kaylee rocked back on her heels in satisfaction. At Jayne’s exasperated growl she glanced back at him in surprise, having briefly forgotten he was standing there.

“Huh?”

Jayne glared and held out his hand, which was bleeding across the knuckles.

“Oh, oops,” Kaylee replied sheepishly, grabbing a rag from her toolbox and pressing it to the cut. “So, how come you don’t?”

“Don’t what?” Jayne asked, the sudden flush in his tanned cheeks betraying the bluff of his ignorance.

“Kiss girls on the mouth? ‘Cause, you know, most girls don’t got drugs on their lips. So what’s the real reason?” She played a tug-of-war with his hand as he tried to yank it away, and in the end she won, pulling him over to the engine room sink to clean him up.

Jayne cleared his throat, twice. Shuffled his feet. “That’s none of your ruttin’ business.”

Kaylee ran water over his hand, sluicing away the blood with her fingers. The cut was shallow, and she doubted that Jayne could even feel it, really, considering how often he damaged himself lots worse than this. Still, it gave her something else to focus on other than his frowning face, and she felt her own cheeks heating up under his stare. Truly, she hadn’t even intended to ask the question, it had just come out, and once it was said she found she really did wonder at the answer.

“That’s probably so, it ain’t my business. So, how come?” She stole a glance at his face as she dried his hand with a clean towel, and saw that he was watching her with an expression somewhere between embarrassment and curiosity, with a dash of intense focus (on what, she couldn’t have said) thrown in for good measure.

“Well, uh. The manner of girls I tend to take up with, you know. They don’t always go for kissin’, and uh, I kinda find it don’t much matter to me anyway.” He tried once again to pull his hand away, but Kaylee was intently spreading salve on his knuckles.

“But...don’t you like kissing at all?” Kaylee searched the overhead cabinet for the bandages Simon had insisted she keep in here just in case, not relinquishing Jayne’s hand.

Jayne cleared his throat again, and his voice when he spoke was suspiciously gruff. “I suppose I like it as much as the next fellow, just save it for special occasions, is all.”

She carefully wrapped gauze around his knuckles, feeling the hard calluses on his palm, absently noticing that her own palms were only slightly less callused from engine work. “Special occasions? Like what, marriage?”

He scowled again at the teasing in her voice. “No, just, special girls. Payin’ for sex don’t make it special, though I’ll be the first to admit it don’t keep it from bein’ fun as hell.”

“Jayne, I ain’t never seen you kiss a girl. And I seen you go off with lots of ‘em. And they ain’t all been whores. So what gives?” His hand rested in hers, though she was done with her bandaging, but if he noticed he didn’t object, and she kind of liked it there.

Jayne’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and his face grew redder with anger or embarrassment. “Aw, gorrammit, girl! Why the hell are you so curious all of a sudden about my sex life?”

Kaylee bristled, straightening her shoulders. “Now, I never said I was interested in your sex life. The way you tell it, your sex life don’t include kissing anyway--”

“’Cause kissin’ means something. When you kiss a-body it’s personal, like. Sharin’. Sex don’t necessarily mean nothing more than gettin’ your rocks off together. Don’t mean you have to share anything more than fluids. A girl’s mouth has all kinds of...secrets, and stuff. She lets you kiss her, it means she’s sharin’ herself, and that’s...” Jayne trailed off, seemingly out of words, having just given probably the longest consecutive speech of his life. Also, he was staring at Kaylee’s mouth, which seemed to take more of his concentration than allowed for talking.

“But...if you don’t do much kissing...” Kaylee murmured, staring in turn at Jayne’s mouth, which was actually fuller and softer than she had previously noticed, “...then, um, how can you be sure you remember how?”

Jayne’s eyes were very warm and bright, kinda like Serenity’s engine at soft burn, flickering between her eyes and her mouth. “I remember, all right.”

“But...how can you be sure?” Her fingers curled with the delicious tension buzzing through her skin, and encountered his hand still resting in hers. His thumb rubbed against the center of her palm and her mouth dropped open as she took a breath.

“Well, I think about it a lot. Kissin’. Think about kissin’ a special girl. One in particular.”

“Really?” Kaylee’s voice came out a breathless squeak. Her whole nervous system seemed centered in her palm, under his moving thumb, and in her lips, which were not as yet being kissed. She tipped her head back a bit, lifting her mouth a little closer to Jayne’s, wondering if he would kiss hard, or soft, or...

“Really,” Jayne replied. “I mean, Inara’s a beautiful woman, and a man can’t help but fantasize--”

He grunted and laughed when Kaylee slugged him in the ribs with a tiny ineffectual fist, and leaned down to press his lips against hers. Her arms flung themselves around his neck of their own accord, and she leaned her whole body against his, certain that he could take the weight.

Sure enough, he braced her up against him with both hands on her ribcage as he navigated the softness of her mouth with his lips and tongue, with a style both softer and more thorough than Kaylee would have expected from a mercenary who preferred smacking cows to leading them. She moaned happily as Jayne’s tongue stroked slowly over hers. His beard scraped her chin and tickled her nose, and he tasted strangely like cigar smoke and apples, though Kaylee could have sworn they’d finished off all the apples weeks ago.

Jayne kissed with all the skill and enthusiasm with which he performed all his mercenary duties, with the reverence and attention to detail he exhibited when cleaning and oiling all of Vera’s special parts. He kissed her as though he really had been thinking a lot about kissing, planning how best to go about it, determining what would make her melt and open up to him, to truly share herself.

Kaylee had to admit, head swimming and blood thrumming, with an overwhelming urge to climb up his body like a monkey and test out the true strength of his muscles, that Jayne was just as proficient at kissing as he was at mercenarying.

His hands slid down her waist to span her hips, and Kaylee did a little jig in his arms, jittering her breasts against his chest. Jayne bit gently at her lower lip and then lifted his head to grin down at her, and she was treated to a sight of the strong white teeth and sharp incisors she’d just run her tongue all over.

“Well, that was...special,” Kaylee gasped, her lungs working like bellows. She pressed her palms against his broad pectoral muscles, feeling the springy chest hair beneath the thin cotton t-shirt. She leaned her forehead against the coyly beckoning woman printed on the faded fabric, inhaling the spicy scent of sweaty Jayne and gathering her composure, which had, apparently, gone the way of the white buffalo.

“Yeah, that was special,” Jayne replied softly, his hands resting on her shoulders. She could feel the gauze of his bandage snagging on her hair. She wondered why it had never occurred to her before that Jayne’s single-minded intensity could be applied to all aspects of his life.

“I’m thinking, Jayne. I’m thinking that you should apply yourself to kissin’ more often. You’re awfully good at it.” Kaylee tilted her head back and saw that the desire in his eyes had been replaced by a kind of wary happiness, a shadow of insecurity.

“You think so?”

Her heart gave a funny leap at the catch in his voice. “Yeah, I think so. But I think you should only kiss special girls, of course. And often, just so’s you don’t forget how.”

Jayne puffed up his chest. “Well, I’ll be taking that under consideration, then, little Kaylee.”

Kaylee smiled so big her cheeks hurt. “So, I’m also wondering...can special kissin’, with special girls...can that lead to sharing fluids and getting your rocks off too?”

“Jayne, I need your help in the cargo bay, mashong,” said the captain over the intercom, all authoritative.

Jayne leaned down to give Kaylee another brief but surprisingly thorough kiss that left her staggering when he stepped away, smiling lopsidedly and blushing again. “Don’t know. I suppose so. Never happened before, but...there’s a first time for everything, I reckon.”

He showed another quick flash of teeth before he ducked out of the engine room into the corridor. His footsteps echoed back to Kaylee as she looked around the room, blinking, trying to get her bearings.

Well, this was new.

Serenity’s engine spun steadily, a soft thrumming glow of metal parts meshing together. Kaylee watched the revolutions for a minute, her cheeks hot and her knees weak. The audible hum of the engine seemed somehow pleased, or at least amused, to Kaylee’s ears.

“What are you laughin’ at?” she asked Serenity, and grinned.

~End~ ------------------------------------ Feedback is shiny, and much appreciated. :)