The first time Maggie does it, it’s an accident.
Alex hisses and Maggie immediately lifts her hands off of Alex’s back, mentally chastising herself for not being more careful, more mindful, more gentle with Alex and more considerate of her lack of experience with all this.
But at the loss of her hands, Alex whines and looks down at her, confused, wide-eyed, hungry-eyed.
“Why’d you stop?” she half gasps, half squeaks, and Maggie’s breath hitches.
“I thought I hurt you,” Maggie apologizes, running her fingers gently over the spots on Alex’s shoulders, Alex’s rippled back, that she’d just scraped her nails down.
Alex can lie during a lie detector test, but she has absolutely no desire to lie to the very naked, very beautiful woman laying underneath her.
So she doesn’t tell her it didn’t hurt.
“I liked it,” she says in a small voice, and Maggie takes a deep breath. “A lot,” Alex clarifies, eyes not quite meeting Maggie’s.
Maggie’s lips twitch up into a smirk, and her eyes narrow slightly. “Good then,” she says raggedly, and leans up to bring Alex back down into an open-mouthed kiss, moaning into her lips, grinding into her hips.
When Alex shifts her lips, her teeth, her tongue, down Maggie’s jawline, to her throat, Maggie sends tentative nails down her back again. Alex gasps and growls and shifts her lips to clamp onto Maggie’s nipple, shifts her thigh to grind down onto Maggie’s clit.
It’s Maggie’s turn to scream, her head slamming back into the pillow, her nails full-out scraping down Alex’s back now, and Alex fucks her all the harder, gasps all the louder, growls all the deeper, because the harder she fucks her, the louder she gasps, the deeper she growls, the harder Maggie’s fingernails dig into her back, the louder Maggie screams, the deeper Maggie cums.
By the end of the night – by the end of most nights after that – Alex’s back is covered in scratch marks, covered in thin red lines that sting so good when she showers, that she smiles at over her shoulder in the mirror because they remind her of Maggie’s screams, of Maggie’s writhing body, of Maggie’s tender kisses all down each scrape afterwards, of the fact that not all pain comes from menacing threats and cruel intentions.
Maggie never leaves marks that are deep enough to pain her during the day; nothing that chafes against her tight-fitting DEO shirt, her sports bra for her morning runs.
So, in the field, Alex – focused entirely on her mission – will forget that her back is a map of her love life.
After a particularly harsh mission, Alex rips off her shirt when she slips into the DEO lab, J’onn, Winn, and Kara hovering worriedly over the second-degree burn that had scorched her side.
“Whoa,” Winn exclaims, standing behind her, and she furrows her brow because she didn’t think the burn was that bad.
“Alex, what happened to your back?”
Alex’s frown gets deeper, still confused.
“Agent Danvers, you need to call in all your injuries, you never know what infections you might acquire in the field – “
Realization dawns on Alex slowly, harshly, and her stomach swoops and her eyes fly wide open and she jumps off the med table she’d hopped onto and turns to face her little sister, her space dad, and the annoyingly lovable little brother she’d never had but always wanted.
“It… you know what, guys, I’ll uh… I’ll finish up here myself, it’s just a burn, no need to – “
“But Alex, those scratches – ”
“Are no problem, no problem, not an issue at all, nope, I uh, I mean hey, you know, I’m not a bio-engineer for nothing, I can take care of some little scratches that aren’t even a big deal – “
“But they’re all over your back, Alex, how could you properly treat – “
Winn squints intently at Alex’s burning face, at her wide-eyes and fidgeting hands, and gasps suddenly, backhanding Kara’s concerned arm softly.
“Um, Kara, I think Alex can take care of – “
“No, Winn, did you see those marks, she needs – “
“You know what, Kara, I’m sure Alex has it under control – “
J’onn is looking back and forth between Winn’s pale face and Alex’s red one, and suddenly he gets it, too.
“Good god, I have lived too long on this planet,” he mutters to himself and sweeps out of the room with his face buried in his palm.
“Come on, Kara, you know what, let’s call Maggie, get her to help Alex with that burn – “
“But – “
“Come on, Kara,” Winn insists, and pushes her out of the room.
“You owe me, you kinky woman you,” he mouths over his shoulder at Alex with a shit-eating grin on his face, and he barely dodges the rolled up shirt Alex chucks at him on the way out.