just for the asking

by cimorene
For Naina.

It doesn't seem fair to you that the things you could have just for the asking and the things you want so hard your teeth hurt never seem to be the same things. You want a successful acting career, eh? Be a model. You want to look in the mirror and see a straight nose and normal ears, for once (or, at least, you did when you were fifteen, and sometimes you still do); and instead, you lose so much weight whenever a piece of food so much as looks at you funny that you're in no danger of, say, heart disease.

Or, in your opinion, of looking good in a swimsuit.

Elijah, of course, disagrees. And that's the kicker, the crowning jewel, the absolute MOST unfair of all, because Elijah would certainly deserve you. You say "would" because you can't quite think "does," because, of course, Elijah is not what you want.

Elijah, who is like a little porcelain doll except for that little flat tilt at the end of his nose, his porcelain cheeks and his silk mouth, Elijah with his eager knowing eyes and his bedhead. Elijah knows he is tempting, and he knows he's not tempting enough.

You think it is petty of you to see it as one more piece of evidence for his not-quite-right-ness that this doesn't hurt so much as confuse him. Elijah faces failure and doesn't recognize it.

Billy faces you across the table at this little cafe and raises the swooping emphatic arch of one eyebrow and says, in the fadeless Scottish burr, "So you're not going back." And if he sees your confusion and distress, and that only amuses him through his mild sympathy, well, you're sure he can't recognize all the rest of it, the mental notes you're always taking on exactly how many lines feather from the corner of each green eye, and the real reason for your blush.

"No," you say, "that's not it. I am. I am going back, I just."

You can't buy the ticket, when it's so easy to wake every morning in Los Angeles and Sheffield's so far away. You can't get off the plane in London, you're afraid, without buying another ticket to Edinburgh.

He calls for the check, his eyes abandoning the problem of unravelling you for a moment, brief awkward wave of one fine pale hand.

You take a deep breath and wonder, after all, why you don't go back. It's sort of selfish of you, you think, because even if Elijah doesn't show it, it probably is hurting him, on some level too deep down to show. Elijah has depths and layers, like that, and hidden pockets fastened up tight of unexpected emotion and memory.

It's hard to think. Maybe you'll stay just long enough for Billy to leave, and then you'll decide when he's gone.

Right. Instead of moping and drinking and coming perilously close to taking Elijah up on one of these things he doesn't know he's offering, and jerking off in the shower, you'll sit right down with a pen and a pad of paper and work it all out. Four little boxes with four little lists, "Going: pro/con," and "Staying: pro/con." Right. No. If you don't decide soon, will you ever? You don't look at Billy, driving back to Lij's apartment, but you don't think either.

But sometimes when you think you're trying to do something, to work, you're running as far and as fast from it as you possibly can; and sometimes when you think you're sitting and waiting for inspiration to come to you, you're bottling it up tight and sealing the lid with wax and a ribbon bow. Billy's dangerous around you. His calm overlays humor, little secret smiles, tiny tender moments, hidden like traps, emerging like sparks, arcing between your synapses, and if you aren't careful they'll set you ablaze. You're dry, but you aren't dead. You're something, waiting to happen, and you're afraid of what it is.

And then you catch yourself watching Elijah critically, at dinner. You have a way of letting your mind wander in several directions at once. You rinse lettuce for the salad that Elijah wouldn't make unless you twisted his arm nearly all the way off, and most of your consciousness putters around its Billy-shrine, trying not to touch any one memory too much. You don't want to take the shine off of them.

Really, you think, it's not that hard to believe that you would fall in love at first sight, if, you know, you're spending your time looking for the perfect person. So, if, for the sake of argument, Billy *were* perfect, well, maybe your subconscious is really smart. Maybe it figured it out right away. Maybe it wasn't the sarcastic tilt of that high eyebrow or the crinkly lines when he grinned.

Maybe it was something about the way he moved, and it didn't cast a spell on you and it wasn't lust, but part of you knew what it meant. Maybe, say, bending your elbow just like that and leaning your chin on your arm SHOWS something about you, something important. And maybe you, who do the same kind of little thing, movements that show who you are--hooking your feet over the rung of the chair, sitting compulsively with your knees apart, touching the hollow of your throat when you don't know what to say, spreading your fingers apart over your knees when you're tense--maybe you knew then the things you took such delight in discovering, just who Billy was.

You could have known the same way you know now, somehow, that whenever you do it, if you ever do, the first kiss will make Billy shy. He'll hesitate, blush, turn his head away. It won't be because he doesn't want it--at least, you don't--no, it won't. It won't.

And while you're thinking this, and cutting the carrots, and of course, part of you is noticing the sun outside the window and making a note not to go out without sunglasses, another part of you is looking at Elijah. Looking *critically* at Elijah. Elijah's skin is absolutely perfect, there's no question. He'll never get anything resembling good facial hair. He'll age well. He'll fall asleep right after sex, which makes you grimace internally at first and then you think, well, maybe it would be better--

And then you catch yourself thinking it.

And you realize: you DON'T want Elijah, no, but you're *afraid.* Afraid that Billy would turn you down, naturally, but no, that isn't it, you're afraid to try. And you're keeping Elijah--in reserve.

Because if you go away now, you know, that's the same as a "no" to all the "please"s Lij has thrown your way in the last few months. If you leave with Billy, Lij will stop asking, stop offering.

You jerk your hand out of the way of the knife, which skips off the side of a radish, but does not, luckily, sever your thumb. Wipe your shaking hands on your shorts and look up, and you have to watch the crown of Elijah's head for a moment before he glances up to meet your eyes.

"I think," you say, "It's about time I was going."

One elegant eyebrow starts to rise; then you reach for the cordless, and you can see him get it. That little slump--is that relief? You think it is. You feel guilty, for a moment, and then you feel relieved too. You don't want to lose Lij's friendship. This way, you won't have to. You might be walking on glass for a few months around each other, but you can deal.

Billy comes into the kitchen while you are on the phone. He overhears, "at 10, I think," and he knows at once that you mean when he's leaving. "Delta." Of course you know the airline. And puts out his hand for the phone. You blink at him, but you hand it over, and he pulls a paper out of his wallet with the flight number, and tells your travel agent, before he gives you back the phone.

"One trip to the airport," says Elijah, and pours a glass of iced tea. The silence after he says it is more strained than the silence before.

"If you can drive," you say. You have to catch yourself before you say "we," end up, instead, with "I could get a cab."

There's the possibility that Elijah would be offended. And you knew that, but you think now you've decided the faster he leaves, the better. If Billy's there, you'll be braver.

Elijah is looking at you.

You can't tell what he's thinking, for a second; then you take a breath, and a drink of beer, and Elijah comes back into focus--your friend, Elijah. And you realizeElijah doesn't quite know what the look means, either. Elijah doesn't know what the LEAVING means.

Because you owe him that much, you catch him in the kitchen after lunch and hug him hard enough to hurt and say "Thank you. But I *have* to go." And Elijah still might not know exactly what it means, but he smiles.

You pack that night in a tearing hurry, and you have almost finished before Billy pops his head in the door to "check."

"Can I help? --Wow, looks like you're nearly done."

"Of course," you say, "yeah. Sure." Stop talking, you tell yourself, and by the time it penetrates Billy's sitting across the suitcase from you, but luckily you haven't said anything else yet.

You're still off-balance. You feel like you walked off the edge of a cliff with your eyes open when you decided to go, and you were waiting to start falling--and then Billy reached out and caught you.

And you've said "of course," but there is not a lot for him to do. Billy's hands fold around each other, around the edge of your bag. His fingernail makes a buzzing noise on the edge of the zipper until you look up suddenly, and your eyes meet and you both smile, like a light going on in the room.

And then he puts his hand over yours, hesitates. "Dominic," he says. "Are you--okay, with this? You're not leaving because of what I said--?"

Well, you are. But... "No, I mean, it was really. It was time to go. It's not your fault."

Billy isn't sure.

"Really," you say, "really. It wasn't--good. To stay."

His lips firm and he says, "Elijah." It's a question, you see that.

"Well," you say, and you're hesitating perhaps more, now, at the feel of his fingers folding around yours. Billy's fretting. That's what the rhythm of his thumbnail on the zipper, now the ghost of his fingers rubbing your palm say. "Well," you say, "I think it's not really fair to him. I've overstayed my welcome, a bit, perhaps."

You're so tired of tip-toeing around what you really mean to say, but you can't speak to Billy of this here, in Elijah's house.

A bit of consideration, weighing, and then Billy smiles slightly. His eyes crinkle at the corners, in warm approval. "It'll be alright, then?" he says, and you have a feeling it's meant as reassurance despite the question intonation.

You bite your lip, because it feels ungrateful. But the same as you knew you had to leave, you know if you wait to say these things until you're away from here, until it's safer, it will be harder. The first leap is always the hardest, so you say it anyway, in a low voice, and you know Elijah would never hear, will be sleeping or lurking far away in the house. "When I'm gone from here, it will be," you say.

His hand tightens, and he's about to say something. Your tongue tingles, tasting the words in sympathy. Whatever Billy says, it will be important.

He's closer, but you think that's because you leaned forward. No, maybe you both. You look down into the suitcase, drop your eyes and count your breaths. He hesitates.

Then you're almost falling into the suitcase, because Billy--who is *never* practical when it would matter to be, like now, as if that's a sign that you're too preoccupied with things that shouldn't matter like logistics--has reached out and hugged you, tugging you into his arms across the suitcase and you're surprised you can balance at all, one knee on a stack of t-shirts, your hands closing in surprise around his arms.

Sitting on opposite sides of the suitcase has come to no good, then, you think a bit fuzzily, and Billy doesn't hug enthusiastically or gruffly but carefully and sincerely. He holds you sort of close, but not tight, and the embrace feels fragile and perfectly solid. Your breathing wants to speed up to match the frantic pace of your heartbeat, but it can't help but deepen when you can feel his breath by your ear.

He knows that it's harder for you to go than you let on. You have a precognizant moment, a vision of you and Billy on a plane, maybe tomorrow's, and his head is on your shoulder.

In the vision, when you bend your head to bury your lips secretively in his hair, it tickles your nose (you know just what it smells like, naturally), and it's like moving against a force-field, the weight of a lump in your throat and all the emotion of now bogging you down. Now, when Billy bends *his* head to kiss the top of *yours*--well, you don't know how hard it is, but you can feel the emotion in the air.

And the daydreaming with its faint unreality, the t-shirts under your knee with their persistent there-ness, the kind of detail one doesn't make up, conspire to put a spell on you. Everything seems to go completely still, and you hover between making some kind of noise, saying something, and falling the rest of the way into Billy's lap. His fingers move from your shoulder to the middle of your back with the kind of hesitant touch that you always anticipated, but it makes your teeth hurt anyway, and the pendulum swings. You start breathing abruptly when you scramble with painful slowness across the suitcase into his arms. Maybe you make a noise, too; later you won't be able to remember.

You should, you know, have waited. Instead you push your face into his neck, trying to reclaim with intensity the split-second you lost to hesitation.

He makes a rumblingly surprised sound, a little hum. It's something you've never imagined, in the few times you've let your mind wander in such a direction, and you're shocked into a little chuckle. A rope is untied around you and you sag with relief, and your shell cracks off. When you lift your head there's no effort at all and meeting his gaze is like the pain of the sun in your eyes emerging from a dark room, the consuming chill wash of plunging into cool water.

He's smiling. From the way the smile slowly widens, you think you are too.

"I think I'm going to kiss you, now," he says contemplatively, and then, by all that's holy, actually *waits*, as if in some universe he can imagine that might not be okay with you.

"Yes," you choke, and wrap your hand around the back of his neck.

Then he kisses you, and later, you will never be able to describe *that* exactly perfectly. There's a perfection to a first kiss that blends it archetypically with all the other kisses you remember, and the longer you wait for it, the deeper its roots go in your subconscious. if billy's lips weren't made for yours, yours will never know it.

It's soft, and warm, and wet, and at this point in describing it to someone else, like elijah, you will smile secretively or blush or go off into a daydream, because it's also full of the kind of thing you don't waste your time hunting for adjectives for when it's so much nicer to just remember. If you'd spent hours and hours building this kiss, every glance and every dream and every time you thought what Billy would think or say or do and every secret smile, and then sealed it to perfection when your lips met, you couldn't have been happier. There's another one of those breathless little moments, draining and filling, tingling, part of your brain standing back and blinking. After you've thought something enough you can't quite believe that it's happening to you, with a little piece of you, and Billy is turning his face away and blushing before you know it, just as you knew, and it's so perfect that he does it just as you'd imagined that you can't even pause to catch your breath before you catch his chin in your hand and kiss him to submission. His mouth opens after a sweet plush little moment, without hesitating, but a slow smooth natural glide that presses tooth to tooth and breath to breath before you have time to memorize the taste.

"Tease," he mutters, grinning, into your ear, and you put your head on his shoulder. You can't see his grin with your head there, of course, but you know he is.

"No," you say sleepily, and he pets your hair. "Billy," you whisper then, after a few confused minutes in which you think about the way he smells and whether or not you have to move, and somehow he's moved from petting your hair to petting your back, in long searching strokes, fingers spread wide, curving around your ribcage and back to the center of your back, sweet and deliberate.

"Mh," he breathes against your forehead. You feel the brief press of a damp kiss where his lips linger.

You insist, though. "Billy."

"What," he says huskily. You're pretty sure you'd call what his hands are doing on your back *caressing,* now, from something in the way they glide smooth and slow. You don't know if you want to fuck him or just go to sleep like this, but either way, you won't get to. You have to move. Finish packing.

You lift your head to speak and end up biting your lip, because this close together, you can see where some of his eyelashes are stuck together at the corners, and you aren't sure how he'd react if you tried to brush them apart. Your thumb is tingling, though.

And then there's also the fact that you don't know what to say. Obviously you have to say something. That, of course, frees up the stupid part of your brain to speak, and before you know it you have told him, "This is too easy." The moronic utterance is preserved slightly, perhaps, by the clear wonder in the tone. Everything you say is going to be shaky for a little while, probably.

He smiles, "I don't know. It didn't seem that easy to me."

"But no," you persist, "With Elijah, it would have been easy, because--" You can't exactly say anything, you realize, to fill in the blank there that's not on the lines of "he'd never say 'no' to me." Unfortunately, you don't realize this until you have started the sentence. Fortunately, Billy nods minutely, with a fond smile.

"Dominic," he says, "I *won't* play hard to get just because you think I should, and *you* won't play hard to get because you think I deserve it. That's silly."

You don't point out that he couldn't stop you, because the idea doesn't sound so good in practice as in theory. "Alright," you try, "but there has to be something. I mean, I can't just--*ask,* and--"

A warm mouth descends on yours, shy and sweetly soft a

Endnd already open. His kisses are paralyzing poison, almost, wicked, careful, masquerading as disarmingly innocent. He sips at your mouth delicately with damp plush lips and whatever you were going to say goes flying away.

When Billy says, dryly, "Then *I'll* ask," it takes you a minute to realize what he's talking about. "Do you want to sneak off into a corner in the airport tomorrow and snog? Or hold hands on the airplane? Do you want to come to Edinburgh," his voice drops to a husky whisper, "and watch stupid movies in the middle of the night, and have frozen orange juice for breakfast, and spend the whole, entire day in bed?"

You want it so hard your teeth ache. You swallow and smile. "That sounds alright."

End