delirium - taste of want
by cimorene
After that it was more a matter of how to stop than how to continue--not that Elijah wanted to stop, but Dom didn't really seem to either, and they were just as casual about it as Elijah's worst nightmare could have conjured. It was more work to sleep companionably curled around Dom than companionably in the next room, more work to say "fuck me" when he wanted to say "you do know, don't you, that you're beautiful?" than to say nothing at all. And it wasn't cold, this casualness, because they had never been cold. There was no reason to completely eliminate tenderness--no reason except that it might have been safer. Sometimes he was terrified. Or, no, almost all the time, of one thing or another. He made fun of himself in the morning, in front of the mirror, brushing his teeth: oh look, Elijah, ohmiGOD, another love bite. I'll never wash my cheek again. And the worst part was that even though he did wash his cheek, of course--he couldn't tear his eyes from it, and his hand might have trembled when he cupped it over the marred skin.
Elijah was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table one afternoon, having just recently got out of bed, already dressed and idly wondering if he felt up to making food, and whether coffee would be enough breakfast before he went to meet with his agent. The click of the door made all his nerves stretch taut, even though he didn't turn to watch--huh, funny he hadn't quite known before that he was only waiting. Finally, of course, he did turn his head, right before Dom came close, slapped his ass and ruffled his hair. "Got recognized in the store," he said, pulling milk out of a bag: ah, yes. They had been out. Evidently driving on the right was getting easier. Well, he had been around more than a month.
"Oooooh," said Elijah, reaching for the milk and taking it out of Dom's hand with utter nonchalance. He poured a glass, and continued, "more fans of Hetty Wainthrop Investigates."
Dom snatched the milk back. "Yes, and right after the hordes of those had finished with me, I met with a few more proposals of marriage--" Lij snorted; Dom grinned, "--for you." Oh. Damn. Dom was just looking at him, trying not to smile. "Go ahead. Pout."
Lij took a drink of milk instead. It took him that long to figure out what to say. "The only problem," he said, "is choosing between all the attractive offers. Don't even tell me about these. I mean, I could have my pick of fourteen year olds, sixteen year olds..."
"Fifteen year olds," said Dom helpfully. "Thirteen year olds. Even some twenty-somethings, I bet, but you'd have to grow into them..."
Elijah wisely ignored the interruption and mourned, looking at his fingers on the milk-fogged glass, "And they all have so much to offer, too. If only I were the decision-making type, but as it is, I--I'm just stuck. I'm doomed to remain a bachelor."
"Doomed," Dom agreed solemnly. A short, morose silence pervaded the room until Dom broke in again, much more brightly: "Unless, of course, you want to marry me!" No pause could have been long enough to allow that to properly sink in. "--Of course, you'd have to be the one in the dress..."
"Of course," said Elijah smoothly, over the absurd little lurch of his heart at the thought. Not, of course, of the dress (...), but of the wedding itself: and a wedding. what was wrong with him? In love, yes. Fourteen year old girl, no.
Hopefully.
"You might look good in a dress." Dom's look had gone speculative, one eyebrow quirking and his eyelids lowering a bit. "In fact..." a pink tongue darted out to lave his lips, and. Oops. Elijah was blushing. Okay. Fourteen year old girl. Dom, can I have your babies? He was thinking, just now, that any amount of pain might be worth it, uh, in a not-real, um, metaphorical, er, figurative sense. Right. Not that he particularly liked pain, although he was very much into the shoulder-biting thing.
Which, come to think of it, he might be able to negotiate. He turned and leaned against the table, braced his feet apart. "In fact?" He prompted, with a look of invitation.
Dom grinned. "You're a pretty girl."
"I think I might have heard that somewhere before."
"You mean I don't get points for originality?" He sounded wounded.
Elijah grinned and spread his legs further. "Well... maybe you can make it up to me."
A pause in which Elijah must have flushed from the tips of his toes to the top of his head in the wake of Dom's eyes, burning hot and wandering all over him. He might or might not have started biting his lip at that point, but he didn't drop his eyes. The burning flush, the arousal masquerading as uncertainty in those moments when Dom stared him down like that--that was getting to be, more and more, what he lived for, which was its own can of worms that he did not care to open, thank you very much, immediately prior to pre-breakfast sex on the kitchen table. Dom smiled a bit wider and said mildly, "You're so confident. What if you weren't the prettiest little thing ever and I suddenly gained the ability to resist you?"
And of course he knew that was teasing, but God. Could Dom pick anything to say that would make him hotter (well, other than the shameless kind of sex talk they'd only managed once or twice on the phone without collapsing in embarrasment/laughter)? "That might suck," Elijah managed, lifting one leg to prop his foot on the edge of a kitchen chair. Aha, that was Dom's eyes following the line of his thigh.
"Might," said Dom absently, stepping closer into the wide V of his legs. "But it doesn't look like 's gonna be a problem t'day..." His words got slurrier, and Britisher, when he was turned on. Elijah's spine was going liquid, and he had enough presence of mind to lean forward to claim a kiss faster, close-mouthed and long and almost still, at first, to let the unexpected little thrill of it spread out and settle down before Dom pushed all the way close and his legs went around Dom's hips. Mmmmmm.
"So good," he muttered, with a little nibble, tonguing the point of one of Dom's canines.
"Mmmmm," said Dom, enunciating Elijah's exact thoughts. Amazing, how they were on the same wavelength, Elijah thought a little hysterically, because it wasn't really funny, or rather, it was but it shouldn't have been, when you were talking about sex, but there were other ways that it wasn't funny because they scared him half to death. Like the way he paced around the house like a caged tiger with a tremendous appetite for tiger fingernails, er, claws, whenever Dom was gone--like when he went back to England for a few days and it took Lij way too long to realize his fingers were bleeding. Good thing blood wasn't, like, poisonous or something. Or the way if Dom went to bed early, all of a sudden, Elijah was ready for bed, not even because he wanted to fuck or steal cuddles or watch Dom sleep (or d, all of the above), but because he couldn't think of anything else he'd rather do, as if there were no point when Dom wasn't there. And, really, even if they did get married. Well, you know. Figuratively, get married--if they were together, some time, and ancient geezers, you had to assume he would get over that, because that was pretty fucked-up-edly codependent behavior for any kind of couple.
This, he thought hazily, groping at Dom's delicious firm ass through stiff dark jeans, was not Romeo and Juliet, and Elijah was not a twelve-year-old girl or even a twenty-one-year old girl, and had not spent his whole entire life reading trashy romance novels about girls with blond hair and the Big Men who rescued them from pirates and shit. Whatever it might seem like.
It wasn't really possible for there to be a person he couldn't get enough of, was there? No. So he would just wait, and they would fuck, and he would cry to himself in the bathroom in the middle of the night because he couldn't do it in bed any more, and maybe eventually he'd reach his limit of Dom, probably.
Meanwhile, they were living together, going to awards shows and the grocery store together, cooking dinner together sometimes, in the kind of way that would have been perfect enough to sicken other people if only it weren't for the eensy little unrequited-love factor. Which Elijah wasn't thinking about as he thrust his hands under the waistband of Dom's jeans and scooted forward to the edge of the table, and then really wasn't thinking about when Dom's hand found its way inside his boxers and a cool, slim finger slid without preamble into his ass. The tensing was only an instant long, now, eyes closed mouth open knees clutching around Dom's waist, soft rippling relaxation as blood rushed downwards with shocking suddenness. They didn't have any lube in the room; maybe it was the urgency that was making "rough" sound so appealing all of a sudden, or maybe it went the other way, if that made any sense. Maybe not.
Ah, well. Elijah concentrated, instead, on getting Dom's jeans unbuttoned. Normally this might not have required much effort, but considering his shaking fumbling fingers and the things Dom was panting in his ear, it was amazing they managed at all.
"Lube?" Dom muttered, just like he didn't know the answer. Elijah squirmed and kicked his boxers off before wrapping his legs around Dom's waist again, breathing harshly.
"How about any fucking way at all as long as you do it now," he said, and Dom's hands were on his hips already, just waiting for permission. He was strong enough to brace his thighs on the edge of the table and pick Elijah up by his hips, and hold him there long enough to lower him carefully, with exquisite aim, onto Dom's cock.
Ahhhh. When Elijah's brain stopped whiting out, he realized Dom's hands were supporting most of his weight, kneading his ass absently, and they were standing a little apart from the table, no, moving, and fuck, if they fell--but no, they staggered drunkenly, kissing and laughing and Elijah clutching his muscles tight along the length of Dom buried still inside him--and ended up only banging Dom's hip on the counter before they slammed into the wall. Lijah might have ended up seeing stars from that, but he was already a little disconnected from reality. He'd bit his lip hard enough to start bleeding at some point, oh, look at that! Something else to angst about in the middle of the night.
The middle of the night is a good time for angst if you're into metaphysical metaphors, when your brain is more likely to accept the profound similarity between the physical pain of biting your lip and the psychological pain of buddy-fucking the cutest little charming steamy-hot ball of British sex to ever walk on two feet. (And when you taste blood the taste is the bitter yet sweet sensation coming from the self-inflicted wound of... huh. Maybe he should return to this metaphor in the middle of the night, when he'd be able to bullshit through it with no trouble and convince himself completely while he was at it. Because, of course, he needed more self-pity to wallow in. Yes. Smallest violin in the world, here, playing a lament for poor little me....)
"You know," Lij found voice to pant breathlessly in the general direction of the ceiling, his back flat on the wall, Dom's fingers biting into his naked hips, another sharp shallow thrust from Dom making his toes curl so hard they almost cramped, "--you're pretty good at this."
"A natural," Dom growled, and took the edge of Lij's ear between his teeth while his mouth was over there anyway.
Another thrust, and Dom lost some grip so Elijah slid down with a little jolt. They both stopped breathing for a second, Dom shuddering with the effort to keep control, Elijah slickly undulating a little, breathless wanton wiggles, tilting his hips and trying and failing to grind closer. Fuck it, Dom, come already, I want to--ah. The last inner clench did it, Dom burying his face helplessly in Lijah's neck, his body starting to go limp. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to collapse in a sweaty heap with Dom on the kitchen floor. It would make something else to angst about, and if he told Sean about it (which he occasionally did, and Sean tried very, very hard to be sympathetic and not act shocked no matter how shocked he was), then that should be yet another source of amusement. But, no: there was Dom's orgasm, and a few shallow thrusts, and Dom didn't even have to touch Elijah again before he was coming too, a hot shivery one that swept up over him and turned him thick and liquid, utterly destroyed, in its wake. Shit, Dom. Shit. Was he just an incredible lay (well, like, a REALLY incredible one), or was Elijah such a mushball that he went all melty deeply moved by sex with his One True Soulmate?
Wait.
"Okay," he hissed on his cell to Sean that night, when Dom was asleep inside, "when did he go from my pitiful adolescent crush to my pitiful burning unrequited love to my One True Soulmate?"
There was a little silence.
"Sean?"
"I'm thinking. I mean--"
"You're not supposed to think. You're just supposed to make me feel better."
Sean sounded exasperated. "What did you think I was thinking about?"
Elijah snorted. "For future reference, try something like 'Yes, you're exactly right. Poor baby.'"
Sean laughed instead of taking the whining at all seriously, which was probably just as well, even though Lij was at least half serious. "Poor baby. Maybe it was around the time you started having sex on a regular basis? Just an idea."
Lij groaned and buried his face in his hands. "You're supposed to be helping, asshole."
"Lij, I'm really sorry," said Sean with his patented switch from Teasing Big Brother to Concerned Big Brother, "and I wish I could help you better, but all I can do is try to give you advice and tell you what I think, and you know I'm pulling it out of my ass. And I really can't" an exasperated sigh, and he broke off and started over, "It's just that I don't really know about this. I don't think it's a good idea to take what you think you can get. You deserve--everything. And I don't think you should give up on Dom. Why don't you just talk to him?"
"Gee, thanks," said Elijah sarcastically, fumbling for a cigarette. "I never thought of that."
Of course Elijah had been lying--he thought about it constantly, all the fucking time. He'd imagined it so many ways he couldn't remember them all anymore. He thought about it before Dom arrived, thought about it so much when Dom was first there, running into and out of the house with crazy filming and errands he kept making for himself, that he didn't eat and drink, essentially, for weeks, and made himself so sick he collapsed. You can live without Dom a bit more easily than you can live without water and nutrients.
It was living with Dom that was the problem.
Right after the sickness, for a while he was drinking more than enough, and for a while after that, enough, almost entirely by himself. Well, for a week or so anyway. Well, alright, maybe he wouldn't have at all if not for Dom hovering and reminding him, coming to find him with glasses of orange juice and iced tea and water.
He only actually managed 8 glasses one day--people weren't meant to drink that much. He didn't have enough time to go to the bathroom that often.
And now Dom was still reminding him all the time, but he was getting so used to it he was in danger of forgetting and getting sick again. "Water," Dom said, lifting his face from the pillow on Lij's bed (larger than the guest bed and somehow not so forbidding, when you weren't alone in it) and poking with bare toes at Elijah's thigh. Easy to catch the foot, grinning and looking down so Dom wouldn't see whatever silly things his face was doing, and bend over to press a kiss to the back of the slim tanned thigh emerging from the edge of the sheet. His hand skated up under the light cotton, over the sweet curve of Dom's ass. Dom grinned, sleepy-eyed, like sex incarnate with his hair all over the place and the marks of his teeth fresh on Elijah's shoulder under the shirt he was wearing.
Elijah swallowed with difficulty. "Right," he said, "Water," not even listening to himself. "I'll be back--soon." But not soon enough for him. He wanted to bury his face and his hands in Dom's neck and his hair and the smell of him, and his cock, twitching impatiently against his thigh, thought wrapping himself up in Dom and a lot of blankets and being fucked back into oblivion was the best offer he was likely to get all day.
He left. Elijah drove too fast with the window down, sunglasses on and a cigarette between his fingers, no music in the car but the keening of the wind. In his dream he'd been walking an intricate pattern on the beach for Dom to follow, with the water washing his footprints away while he cried and the waves numbed his toes. He was carrying white rose petals, and his fingers were bleeding, and he never dropped a petal that wasn't stained with at least a smudge, a bright kiss, of red. They littered his path, but he didn't look back; it didn't seem to matter, or perhaps he was afraid to let himself think that it might, any more of the thought, that is, than it took to keep dropping the petals--even though it made his fingers bleed and he was getting dizzy.
That day driving home with a cup of McDonald's drive-thru coffee cradled awkwardly in one hand, Lijah was next to another car at a stop light with its windows down, blasting Missy Elliot so loudly it gave him a headache in (yes, he counted) five seconds, and he had to roll his window up. Strains of noise oozed across the windshield and made it through the passenger window, along with a breeze ruffling the pages of the book Dom had been trying to get him to read for the past month. Elijah looked back out his own window at the pale girls in the other car with their dark glasses, or at least, through them, past them in their general direction, not seeing. He thought he should talk to Sean again, with the part of his mind that wasn't planning the fastest way to get out of his clothes and deciding whether he was going to drag Dom into the bedroom for long and slow right away, or blow him in the living room on the floor fast and hard first and save, for later, the long and slow and sweet, God, sweet as fuck and the little space between Dom's lips when he was listening very hard.
In the end, his body made the decision for him. Lij was a bottoming-from-the-top kind of guy, but he really hadn't wanted to leave that morning and his hands and his mouth and, of course, his cock, were so happy to find out Dom was still there when they got back that they couldn't control themselves. And who wanted to, with Dom's hair against his lips? Not Elijah. Dom's hands started resting on his waist, but he was shocked, Elijah could see, at the speed of thrusts that wrung little helpless open-mouthed cries from both of them at once, right away. Dom's hands tightened because he couldn't help it, digging into Elijah's pale thin-skinned hipbones, and Lij hoped hoped hoped it would bruise so he could touch the marks in the shower and feel them in bed tonight, when it was too black to see them.
Dom slept, and for a while Lijah lay half-draped over his back with his lips on one powerful exquisite slope of shoulderblade. As casually as possible, of course. They'd long ago kicked the blankets and sheets out of reach, and now even the sun falling on them wasn't keeping him entirely warm as the sweat cooled, so he got up, dragged the sheet over Dom, went to the window. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack on the nightstand and stood naked with his forehead on the cold glass pane, looking out at his backyard with only the occasional glance sideways at the swell of Dom's bicep, the curve of his cheek.
Of course he wouldn't light the cig in the bedroom.
He didn't light it at all, actually.
When he turned on the computer there was a long e-mail from Sean, which he'd learned to look for after the kind of conversation they'd had. And by long, woo, yeah. If I thought he knew what he was doing to you I'd be angrier with him, it said. And then, But then I ask myself if you know what you're doing to him. Think about it, Elijah. Yeah, asshole, that would be so useful if he knew what Dom thought about it all. Felt. Felt about it all was probably what he meant, for this weird warm cocktail of confused emotion. And then if he did know, of course he would not have thought twice about it. Fuck.
He wasn't being fair, though, even if it didn't make sense, because it probably would in the end, and maybe it didn't now because he didn't want it to. Right. The computer chair swiveled and creaked; it wouldn't stay still as long as he didn't, and he, of course, couldn't. Elijah ran a distracted hand through his hair and kept reading too fast, skimming, but he would reread it. It was hard to finish a whole email about Dom just after sex, dressed in his boxers, still post-coitally lazy, without spacing out. It wasn't even all Dom under him pressing his hips into the bed; there was Dom's face when he turned to look over his shoulder, hearing the door open. There was the sparkle of his eyes emerging from the neck of his shirt when he tugged it over his head. The curve of his ass and the fine-fluted tendons on the backs of his hands, his flat stomach and its dusting of hair, his huge ears and the noises he made when Elijah licked them.
I was thinking about this, and I think there are some things that are hard to do that we keep working at until they destroy us, and there are some things that are hard that we do because no matter how much we love them they love us back. Elijah brooded over that, nibbling delicately on the edge of his fingernail, pausing to look at his reddened fingertips--nope, not bleeding yet; better nibble more. Ummm.
Right, Sean. It could be worse, but does that make it easy?
I know you'll do the right thing--what a relief. I don't know what to tell you when there's no question to be answered. Except, how long can I handle this? And some others he didn't dare to ask. You don't have a question to be answered; you have a house, a career, a few very good friends, and a life. I know you're happy, and you know it, and you've never hurt like this because you've never had so much to want before.
Elijah read it twice without understanding it all, and he read those lines until they stopped making sense, and then he took the text of the email, put it in a text file, and saved it. He had a feeling he would eventually want to understand what it said--when he had half a brain, and maybe a cigarette or two and some more clothes. He closed the email program, saved the file. Wiggled his toes in the cold carpet and thought about getting dressed, but then instead, he ended up playing Tetris.
Dom found him almost two hours later, eyes glazed, leaning back in the chair and bathed in the blue light of the computer monitor, one hand at his mouth. He hadn't realized, actually, that he was chewing his fingernails until he had to take the hand from his mouth to accept the glass of water Dom handed him.
A pointed glance at Tetris frozen on the screen. "Productive afternoon, mate?"
Lij, having drained the glass, licked his lips and leaned over, head against Dom's stomach, lips suggestive even through the material of a t-shirt. "Started well enough," he breathed.
And now ended well enough too.
He was an actor, and so he was probably not used to being entirely honest about anything with anyone. Well, and it would be nice, but could you afford to be? Elijah was guarded, and always had been. At the same time, he wasn't used to watching very carefully what he said. In the grocery store, not "I want to kiss you," but "Maybe another flavor of icecream"; at a bar, not "Come here so I can feel you up" but "Look at that chick"; in the car, not "This couldn't be more perfect" but "Look at what a gorgeous day"; at a movie marathon, not "I'm going to lick you all over starting at your toes and suck your cock until you scream" but "I'm getting sleepy"; and never, even when he was coming, "I love you," or "Dom" the way he wanted to say it.
At the hobbit-house in New Zealand Dom had been the one from the beginning who ran to the store in the middle of the night. Elijah, however, didn't have to be very drunk to get silly, and when Dom had heaved himself out of the depths of the couch one night--pretty early, still; they hadn't known each other very well yet--he'd bounced along, and insisted on wearing his sunglasses and sticking his head out the sunroof of the jeep on the way to the convenience store.
"If I have an accident your head'll get chopped off, y'crazy yank," Dom had said gruffly, trying not to laugh, and Elijah had laughed and said,
"If it does you'll be too dead to feel guilty!" And that had been the funniest thing either one of them had heard all night.
Obviously--and Dom and Elijah had always been in total agreement on this point--only sissies and wusses and uptight annoying people drink skim milk. Which was not to call Sean those things--okay, well, maybe it was. But at any rate, in front of the milk Dom had hesitated and said with morose whimsy, "Now, I forget, what kind of milk did Sean want," but he was already reaching for it.
Elijah, drunk, giddy, and bouncing up and down with "tee hee, convenience store in the middle of the night" excitement, had seized Dom's hand and crowed, "Well, you couldn't remember so you did your best. And with a drunk Elijah to watch out for--y'know, to keep me from, uh, hitting on the shepherds--" Elijah had never yet been on a midnight store run, and the novelty on top of the tequila was a bit much. "--and, you know, I distracted you so your best wasn't--"
And then Dom's eyes had lit up. "Good enough?"
Elijah had nodded emphatically, just enough to make himself dizzy, not enough to fall over. They'd watched as if enspelled as Dom's hand drifted to the 2% (not quite daring the whole).
"Sean's going to kill you," Elijah had whispered gleefully, trying not to giggle too loudly into his hands.
Dom had thrown him a look melting from startled to mischievous in a second flat and said: "But at least I'll be too dead to feel guilty."
And that had been the funniest thing in months. Drunkenness somehow seemed to wear off of Lijah onto Dom, so that he was also too dead to feel guilty about buying Bar-B-Q potato chips and grape-flavored condoms, and too dead to allow Elijah to hit on an actual shepherd when they ran into one in the aisle with the shampoo and toothpaste and deodorant, and too dead to resist the chocolate at the checkout or the "artificially-flavored" peach alcoholic beer crap that they couldn't stop giggling about.
Ever since then there had been a Thing with Elijah sticking his head out of sunroofs while Dom drove. The best part was that his car didn't even have a sunroof (or maybe that was the worst part), so lately, it had been more of a standing-up-in-his-chair thing, just enough to make his head touch the roof, and Dom would start laughing or shake his head. Or slap his ass, you know, whatever.
That was the first thing Elijah thought of when Dom wanted to go for a drive. He blinked in a post-coital haze, with fragments of thought about having sex in wheeled office swivel chairs still drifting around and getting tangled with going-for-a-drive thoughts, so he ended up thinking "blowjob in the backseat" and "handjob while Dom drives."
"Oh," he said dumbly, "...sure."
Dom, who was either psychic or just also really fixated on thoughts of sex (and he ought to be, naked and wrapped around Elijah from behind in his office chair), grinned and said, "It's a beautiful day," and nuzzled behind Lij's ear. Lij squirmed a little on his lap, and felt the rapidly-drying stickiness of come.
"Maybe we'd better shower first," he said, and Dom then blew his mind by saying in his ear,
"Just to get all dirty again?"
Sex outside was something Elijah had never done before, but when he looked out the window--when he looked out the window an avalanche of memory came down on him with the painful power of a wicked papercut. The blue-green of the sky over the trees in his back yard, the wisp of cloud--it was dangerous, too dangerous, to remember now that day before Dom had come, when he'd stood alone by the side of the road overlooking a rolling sweep of landscape and thought of nothing but the probable taste and feel of Dom, with a palpable, gnawing weight of hunger twisting him up inside. Dom's hand was warm on his stomach, warm and too intimate with Dom's breath on his ear, or maybe it was just the breath that was the problem. Either way, he could see he was in trouble. The wavy glass was as wavy as ever, but a bit less substantial, and the "maybe fall in love" and "too late" universes were on a collision course.
If they buddy-fucked under this sky, in front of that vista, elbow-to-elbow with the ghosts Lij knew he would be able to see of the fantasy kiss--
Ah, hell. When had it not been too late?
He stood up all at once and didn't turn back and look at Dom until he stood in the door of the room, on his way to the shower--"Let's get cleaned up first." Dom's ass, with sunlight striking the curve of his spine and his ribs and his long fingers on the mouse and the keyboard.
"Let me just close this--ah, shit," a few clicks of the mouse, a ctrl+alt+del, while Elijah watched Dom nibbling on his lip, the fluid sex of him straightening again, the slope of his shoulder as he reached for the power button and turned the whole thing off. Before he followed, he smiled over his shoulder at Lij, a ragged promise in the stubbly line of his jaw.
Buddy-fucking was not without its advantages, certainly. It hadn't been long enough, yet, for more than playfulness in the warm spray of the shower, and they were both eager to get out of the house anyway. Elijah tilted his head back to expose his throat to the water, arched his back and was hardly surprised to be pressed face-first into the wall, Dom's hands tightening around his waist, mouth on his neck making more of those little red marks Elijah counted every morning. The amount of time he spent luring possessive reactions out of Dom was probably more than the amount of time Dom spent thinking about them, before or after. And of course he could tell himself that it meant something, that you don't bite the throat of anyone but your mate, and the only thing that could make a rough fuck the automatic response to a certain look of Lij's would be a powerful instinct. Right, like "the sensitive Dom, in its natural habitat, prefers to court with alcoholic beverages, or, occasionally, to forego the usual practices of courtship altogether and focus directly on the claiming of its sexual partner."
Ahem. Dom's natural habitat being LA. Anyway, there was part of him that wanted to believe that buddy-fucks are inherently casual, and the kind of sex that left bites on his shoulders was inherently not-casual, and that therefore they weren't buddy-fucking. No, no, they had both fallen in love a long time ago!
It's easy to tell yourself that, hard to get it out of your mind once you do--but it isn't so easy to convince yourself entirely, and that was just as well. Elijah wouldn't fuck himself over so completely by lying. He would have sex next to the ghosts of a sweet and soft and tender kiss, the kind he'd used to imagine before the memorable fuck on the couch (not that he was complaining, oho no) and it would be real and gritty enough, maybe, to vanquish those ghosts forever.
"We going somewhere in particular?" Said Dom in his little dark sunglasses, turning his head curiously to look at Elijah.
"No," he lied, but he smiled so Dom would know he was lying.
That was Dom's cue to change the subject. "Good job we went t'day. We gotta get up early tomorrow to get Billy?"
"Oh, shit," Elijah sighed. "7 am."
Dom snorted with laughter. "Don't worry. I'll wake you."
Elijah slanted him a look. "You'll be up at dawn to start your usual method of waking me early enough."
A crooked little leering smirk. "I'll manage."
Elijah shook his head. "Forgive me if I set the alarm anyway."
"Nope," Dom said promptly. Another look. He was going to have a wreck at this rate--what if Dom happened to be licking his lips when he glanced over? "But I might forgive you if we have a Monty Python marathon."
Blink. Blink. "You know," Elijah said finally with what he thought ought to have been Oscar-winning presence of mind, "That's just what I was going to suggest."
"If we don't go to bed at all, we've solved that problem, then," said Dom happily. Elijah could tell by his voice that he was stretching, probably backwards. His stomach was probably showing. He carefully didn't look.
Oh, but: an opportunity to win the conversation! "You mean if we don't go to sleep," he grinned.
Before he had a chance to properly savor the foretaste of victory, Dom blithely crushed all his hopes by saying lasciviously, "No. I mean, if we don't go to bed," which conjured unfortunate visions of the many places around the house yet to be... christened. And all the places where they had done it, of course. He was surprised there wasn't a dent in the kitchen wall. And he was still quite eager to try the bathroom.
Dom had been enthusiastic about the idea of them having Billy, especially for only a week or so. It's not that Lij wasn't, either; he was just prone to thinking too much, and he inevitably got around to thinking too much about what they were going to do and what they were going to tell their friend when he got there. Telling becomes harder when you've never really talked about it yourselves, and scratch the obvious solution there. No WAY were they talking about it, no, uh-uh. Or at least, not until DOM said it. Elijah had exhausted his rights at initiation with that first drunken lick, and he cursed himself for being drunk when he had enough self-control to not just be entirely grateful for the amazing sex.
He wondered, speaking of self-control, about the secluded spot, the site of his fantasy, where he was taking Dom. What would happen? ...Maybe nothing.
It turned out to be all a matter, when they got there, of the sunlight. The kissing-place--that's how Lij thought of it now--was dimmer and darker than it had been the first time, and the light was pinker as the sun sank below the horizon. Somehow that bathed everything not red or fuschia so much as indigo, a melancholy, limpid color like a blush on the cold cheek of the coming night. It was the color a bedroom ought to be, the universe filled sky-high with dusky light like water in a crystal bowl. The crisp press of the breeze better than a thousand satin sheets.
He blanked his mind as he got out of the car so he could tell himself later he hadn't consciously looked for the same spot to stand in--and he didn't look at Dom, or touch him, yet. Maybe that was because it was too dangerous. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was because he wanted to cling to the old Dom, the Dom of dreams, for a few moments longer. The door closed behind him, gravel crunched underfoot, he could feel his own eyelashes against his cheeks when he looked down, and it was the kind of day when the rolling hills and the grass on them, burnt golden, smell like the sea merely by the power of association.
When he stood in the same spot, it all came rushing back. The look of this day and the dying deep light merged with the other in memory, and his eyes almost closed when he recalled. He had wanted so badly to put his arms around Dom, in the second after he thought that thing, that he had been able to feel it.
Now Dom walked up behind, and wrapped Lij in his arms, but loosely and carelessly, not the bone-crushing grip Lij had thought of then. Not the press of his lips so desperate they tasted, not like Dom or Lij or a kiss, or blood, or beer, or dinner--all in his imagination, of course--but like emotion, and of course a kiss couldn't taste that way. Of course. But the thought of it made the back of his tongue come to life with little savory, near-painful bursts of tingles. He was turning in Dom's arms before he knew it, pushing his face against Dom's neck under his jaw and hugging Dom as tightly as he dared.
"Ummmmm," Dom rumbled, fingers digging into Elijah's hips, and he dove mouth-open into a slow, sleepy ravishing of a kiss, deep and lush and so thorough that if he'd owned only Elijah's mouth at the beginning, by the end he'd've owned his soul. It didn't taste very different from Dom, but as usual, the intellectualization vanished in a few seconds and he melted into it with a plaintive little whimper, pressing his body close.
"Here?" Elijah said, a question only in that he was asking for permission, when they were breathing too hard to keep up with the kissing, and his jeans had been unfastened, Dom's hand slipping inside.
"You got any place else we can go within the next second before I get you out of these?" He was shoving Elijah's jeans down. Oh, thank God for the secluded spot. And the grass.
Elijah just shook his head. There were places in New Zealand that had looked rather like this--the association was inescapable. New Zealand had been so long ago that he hadn't even known, yet, what he wanted. He'd wanted, alright, cast photo shoots, dinners, nights in the pubs and walks in the woods and drinking around the hearth of their hobbit house--but the wanting had burst on him later, in LA again, too old and powerful to be denied, too well-rooted already to be pulled out.
Now they couldn't undress fast enough, and his mind kept blurring, while he waited to get Dom's pants out of the way, around the feel of Dom's hips between his spread thighs, the look of violet sunset tinting Dom's face like underwater. There was going to be grass in Dom's hair. The longing was fierce, to be crushed too tight, to wrap his legs around Dom's waist and open his mouth on the slender elegant line of Dom's collarbone and suck on it. As much as he was Dom's in this primitive magic, Dom was his, whichever way the claiming went.
His legs wouldn't have wrapped around Dom's waist too well, but then they were naked, finally, and he found that it didn't matter too much. There was even an instant, in between trying not to scream at the bite of a longing with poisoned fangs and gasping his pleasure as he slid down to take Dom inside in one swift stroke, when he had time to smile. Then he lost that again, sinking a few final increments with his hands fisting in the grass beside Dom's ribs, arching his back, rotating his hips. Oh, it was deep, and what pain there was faded away like the initial sharpness to the taste of blood. It was deep, but not deep enough.
"Well, c'mon," said Dom breathlessly. Elijah had made him like that. Not that he was going to be particularly handy with language just now himself.
"Right." He laboriously opened his hands and used them to find Dom's hands--such pretty hands--and place them carefully on his own naked hips. Then he rocked in place, a little, forward and back. The movement set off little shockwaves without loosening the knot of teeth-clenching pleasure. Elijah's eyes were closed, after a while, because it was easier not to look at the sun-kissed pleasure-drenched lines of Dom's sweaty face.
That made it easier, too, for the ghosts. The ghost of him saying to Dom, "The first time I saw this place I knew I had to kiss you here," the ghost of Dom stroking his hair with tears on his face and dropping careless profusions of kisses, in sloppy lines, all along his jaw and his neck. The kiss of eyelashes on his cheek and the ghost of Dom whispering in his ear. It was all written inside his eyelids, faint and unreal but persistent, the last notes of a song, the memory of a hand-written anonymous love note, found inside your desk in elementary school--or one written, and left in someone else's desk at recess.
He would never write a love letter to Dom until he could find paper the color of this sky and some pretty fucking special ink, too.
He figured he was pretty safe, that way. The ghosts mocked him, holding hands, touching with hesitant wonder that almost made him cry as Dom's hands tightened on his hips, jerking up in a thrust to meet Elijah as he slid down (making him bite his lip). He didn't want hesitance--he wanted all the wonder of that, and all the dirt and dust and pollen smell and the cold wind on his back of this. He wanted Dom, real Dom, he did, whatever the cost.
But he couldn't stop that vision, either, the image of tears on Dom's face. He wondered if he would ever see it.
Dom's face was deeply flushed, the arms in his muscles straining as he rolled his hips to meet each thrust. Elijah's thighs were getting tired too, raising himself carefully-slowly almost off, sliding back down again, and trying, all the while, for the angle he wanted. Until, ah--Dom rocked up to meet him in a kiss, upsetting their balance, and he ended curling his hips forward--and that did it. The kiss of flame, a fast trail of it fading before he could catch it again, and he almost screamed--
Again. He wished desperately, though, for something to bite, because every thrust stroked that spot with blinding flashes of pleasure, warm suffusing bursts of it like sunwarmed water, but it created a deeper hunger every time, too.
"Baby," Dom whispered, and Lij clenched his teeth and eased his inner muscles around Dom's length tight like silk. That gained a wordless incoherence from Dom, and a burning brand in the pit of his own stomach, soaring heat. Good God.
Dom, just. A little harder. That angle again, a twist of Dom's hips, another little push of Elijah's, and his head was thrown back, making a sound like a shriek shot through with breath that might have been a scream if he hadn't pushed himself to the breaking point of exhaustion. Dom groaned, bucked, held tight to Elijah's hips, and came. His head hung; sweat was in his hair, dampening it as fast as the rising breeze could cool it. Collapsing on Dom's chest was not such a good idea, when he was this messy, but there was nothing else to do.
Sex brought, again and again, warmth and--whatever it was, a sharp flavor, a memory full of feverish brightness and delirium.
It never, ever, brought satisfaction--and the ghosts of his wants, his daydreams, didn't help. Oh, Dom. Elijah let his head fall to Dom's neck and hid kisses there, the tiniest brushes of his lips on Dom's collarbone and the hollow of his throat. There was a language to them that almost terrified him in its obviousness, a way his lips clung and curved that said "I love you, be mine," as surely as pen and ink. Dom couldn't read them, and Elijah--Elijah couldn't stop writing them.
Possible that he had enough crying stored up for both of them. Fucking sunsets. He couldn't stand many more like this one.
"We need to make a spare bed for him," Dom suggested that afternoon, coming out with two glasses of iced tea onto the back porch where Elijah was smoking.
The thought was actually startling. "Oh. Right!" He shoved at Dom half-heartedly. "It's my job to think of that, fucker."
"Y'bet yer ass," said Dom, leaning unconcernedly against the wooden rail, and since Lij really did, and was quite (well, depending on your definition of it) happy to do so, there was no response. Well, the spare room wasn't a problem, but the sheets were.
"What happened to the ones from when I came here?" Dom asked.
Elijah said, without looking up, "We fucked on them."
"So can't you wash them?" Their eyes met, and Dom answered himself, "Right. So. Wal-Mart?"
Someone stole the space he was waiting for and he had to park almost all the way at the far end of one of the rows, down by the steakhouse/source of blaring country music at the extremity of the parking lot closest to the highway.
They got distracted, on their way searching for what Dom insisted on calling the "bedlinen" just like some kind of snotty department store, by the food, the electronics, and then the little girls' clothes, where there was a display of what were apparently leftover Easter hats and small glittery purses with decorations such as fake gold chains and screen-printed Powerpuff girls.
Dom dove at them with an expression of glee, and before Elijah knew it he was being steered by the shoulders to look at the hat on his head in the narrow distorted strip of reflection on the edge of a set of shelves. "You're a freak," said Elijah, pretending weariness.
"You're the one wearing a hat with flowers on!" That problem was easily solved, but Dom (never satisfied!) said critically, "I want one of those turquoise ones. I don't think purple is really my color."
"I don't think it's mine either." But Elijah put a second hat on top of the white and purple one.
Dom pursed his lips and tilted his head so far to the side that both of the hats slid off and he had to catch them in mid-air. Lij hastily put them away: he could see a middle-aged lady in the women's fitting rooms across the aisle eyeing them suspiciously.
"There they are," said Elijah, pointing to a tremendous white wire cage in the center of the aisle filled with down pillows.
"Noooooo, those are pillows. Hate to break it to you, Lijah."
Lij shook his head impatiently, "But they'll be near there," and sure enough, three aisles down, there they were. Elijah would have gone for the first navy blue, but Dom, with his tiresome British sensibleness, insisted on 100% cotton because it was more comfortable.
Ooookay. This necessitated walking up and down two whole aisles, looking at the little labels on practically every package of the right size for a label that said something other than 50% cotton/ 50% poly. Finally they found what was apparently the cotton section--"Less than a meter wide!" said Dom indignantly, with his brows wrinkling cutely.
"Do they have twin?" said Elijah. They did. "Good." The first package was an oddly hideous dull floral pattern, but who the hell cared?
"Those're bloody hideous," Dom observed, earning a glower over Lij's shoulder.
"You complaining?"
He grinned and stuck out his tongue. "Who, me?"
Right, then. They paused at the beer for all of half a second before Elijah made a doubtful face and moved on. He didn't need Dom's condescending elaborate resignedness. They could buy expensive imports later at the yuppie grocery store, and it wasn't like he couldn't afford it. The side-effect of detouring through what in Wal-Mart passed for a supermarket was that they walked down the candy aisle, and Dom, without stopping him or saying anything, caught up a bag of Hershey's nuggets with toffee, his new American vice.
Elijah remembered shopping with his mom when he was too little to shop or live alone, and the angst of the candy aisle and just knowing, some days, that if you ask the answer will be "no." You don't ask, and you don't think too hard about candy, because you don't want to jinx it. Being good through an afternoon of errands was the price of a bag of M&Ms or Hershey's kisses, but those weren't the guaranteed result of it, and he always ended up walking down the candy aisle with his eyes on the floor. He only looked up at her voice, warm with maternal amusement, "I think I want some black licorice candy--does that sound good to you, Lijah? I'm tired of M&Ms. How about frog legs?" He didn't fall for that anymore after he was about five, but then again, it'd taken him all these years to realize the amusement was because she could read his mind.
Maybe someday goodness would be its own reward, and in the meanwhile, you'd keep thinking it was, like a too-complicated mental voodoo, because you thought that's what you were required to believe.
He was just congratulating himself for only wanting to kiss Dom four times on the trip when Dom crossed his arms over his chest, displaying their sculpted mouth-wateringness perfectly, and brought the total up to five. No kissing in public, though. Lij wasn't totally overcautious, but he wasn't going to do something irretrievable, either, when he didn't even know what was going on. No need to freeze it out of the realm of half-maybes and into reality at this stage.
They didn't turn out to have time to fuck in the bathroom before Billy got there after all--or, rather, they would have had if Dom hadn't been so fixated on Monty Python, and insisted they eat an entire dinner, and that Elijah drink glass after glass of water till he thought he would burst. Even except for that, but neither of them was very neat or very good at remembering things, so at three a.m. they'd finished Monty Python's Flying Circus but hadn't started The Holy Grail, and Dom insisted on watching it. Then they had to clean the living room--of beer and pizza and trash, that is; there wasn't much more to be done for the poor leather couch, which still smelled, rather, if you knew what you were sniffing for and where to sniff.
There were a few books on the table, and a newspaper folded again not-quite-perfectly, and a little stack of unopened mail, when they were "finished."
"My mum'd never be satisfied with a room lookin' like this," said Dom with immense self-satisfaction.
"Isn't it great?" Elijah sighed. The urge to collapse on the couch and try to find the smell was so strong as to chase him outside with his cigarettes.
"Not much longer to keep awake," said Dom reassuringly as he left, and went to take a shower alone. See, if they'd only shared their showers, they could've done it then, but the problem was that they'd probably get exhausted enough, especially if they tried it standing up, that they'd either knock themselves out and drown or collapse on the floor of the bathroom immediately afterwards, asleep. Sad to admit that they were so utterly wimpy, but there it was.
Of course, the excitement of the drive and the question of being recognized helped to wake him up when it was time, and he stubbed out his cigarette on the cement step without thinking. Well, he'd do Dom a favor and not smoke out the window and "litter the lovely American countryside with ash." Presumably the front yard, unlike the highway, did not count as the countryside.
"So we managed to stay awake," said Elijah. Without going to bed. Or anything else.
"Well," said Dom, "there's always later." For sleep or for fucking in the hallway, the basement stairs, the back porch, under the dining room table?
Elijah let it go with a mental shrug. Hopefully there would be time for both.
They put up the radio and down the windows (as Dom liked to say) and let the wind ruffle their hair and rush in their ears to mute any possibility of conversation. By the time they got to the airport Elijah was almost blue in the face from not trying very hard to achieve a perfect indifference to the movements of Dom's mouth and neck.
Billy's plane had arrived ten minutes early, but thank God they found him in the baggage claim area. They didn't get recognized for the first time until Dom had one of Billy's bags and they were all craning at weird angles, trying to see the mouth of the baggage carousel. Then it was the telltale whispering and little flurries of noise and the cleared throat. "Ex--excuse me. Are you Elijah Wood?"
He turned around smiling, and abandoned Dom and Billy to the baggage. "Yes, I am."
"Oh, and--oh! That's--!" He could see things ticking over in the woman's head. "The other hobbit!" Which one she meant to refer to Elijah couldn't tell. The little boy with her nodded solemnly with tremendous eyes not quite as green as Dom's, and Elijah signed a napkin with a red felt-tip pen and made his apologies, grabbing Billy's second bag out of his hand. They didn't ask for Dom's signature or Billy's, at least, not loud enough for them to hear after the mass of people closed around them again.
Dom climbed meekly into the back seat for the ride, and Billy rode shotgun. He was good at small talk, and the wind was just loud enough to make it intermittent. Dom was behind him, just visible when he turned his head to answer Billy. Most of the time, then, he was driving and couldn't see, but the awareness of the Dom's presence sparked like hot, dry sex on his tongue and sunburn on the back of his neck. God, he was thirsty.