Fic: Agony and Apathy
Title: Agony and Apathy
Fandom: Nathan Barley
Characters: Dan Ashcroft/Jones
Prompt: 05- You can be like me
Word Count: 2354
Rating: Probably hard R, but NC-17 to be on the safe side
Summary: Dan thinks about what he wants and what he wanted and how little his life is like he thought it would be.
Warnings: Swearing, het sex (though non-graphic)
Disclaimer: Nathan Barley is not mine nor do I have any creative rights over it or its characters.
Author's Notes: I'm very out of practice, so please be gentle. Link to my prompt table.
x-posted to nakedskillsclub,booshslashhaven and un_love_you
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Dan Ashcroft rubbed his forehead as he scowled over his shoulder at the dance floor from the bar, where he was steadily drinking himself into a better mood. Or that was the plan anyway. Clearly more alcohol was required.
The music was repetitive and soul flatteningly loud, but that didn't bother him. He lived with a DJ of questionable talent and undoubtable enthusiasm, tuning out the pounding bass line was a piece of piss compared to tuning out his immediate surroundings.
His head pounded with years of rage and impotence, the sound of blood obnoxiously loud in his ears as he tried to ignore the trills and childish giggles of twenty somethings that had turned into thirty somethings a few years ago and were hoping no one noticed. The obsession with youth confused and irritated him. Fucking twenty year olds was all very well when you were twenty, but Christ, who'd want to put up with them once your own vapid puerility had run out? Sleeping with them only reminded him of his own wasted youth.
So many years ago now, fresh out of university, full of fury and passion and promise, he'd been certain that he'd... he wasn't even sure anymore. He just knew that there was a time when he'd felt like everything was ahead of him and that he knew what he wanted and how to get it.
Instead he'd turned from an angry young man into a cranky old bastard and he had nothing to show for it, despite the intellectual superiority he felt towards.... well, everyone really. The world was full of phonies and feeble minded fakes and the people who were your comrades in arms when you were in your twenties were converting garages now that they were in their thirties. Fuck, forties now almost.
Everyone sold out. His friends had one by one stopped raging against the man and traded ideals for a three piece cage and a salary. For the first time in his life he knew the crushing disappointment of knowing that someone you once respected owned a plastic pot plant.
How had it started? When he had taken the permanent job at Sugar Ape? Before?
It made sense at the time. Spend a year or two there getting an audience while keeping out of the mainstream noose until he was popular enough to do his own thing. Surely it was better for people to read what he wrote instead of having so much to say and no one listening to him.
What he hadn't quite realised then was that the words “underground” and “mainstream” were practically interchangeable. The establishment took the revolution of yesterday and shamelessly turned it into their own McPayout™, choking money out of fuckwits who wouldn't see the hypocrisy in buying a band hoodie with an anarchy symbol on the back from Disenfranchised Inc. and who were impressed with anything prefixed with “alt-”. And here stood he, stoking the fires of the alt-capitalism machine, like the useless fucking pawn that he was. Everyone sold out eventually and he had a lot earlier than he'd thought.
Even now that he had “made something of himself” and people regularly and religiously read his articles, it felt nothing like he'd imagined it would. The subjects of a harshly worded exposé are not supposed to read your vitriolic hatred of them and nod along pompously, secure in the knowledge that this Ashcroft bloke, yeah? He was well the voice of the digi-neration.
If this was success then it bore the same shocking resemblance to failure that the rest of his life did.
He rubbed harder at his forehead and the furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he looked at the half empty bottle of whisky in front of him. Or maybe it was half full hey? Get out.
He felt a hand at his elbow at he turned to look blearily at a girl standing beside him and leaning into his personal space. She was moderately attractive in the pointy androgynous way that was popular at the moment. While it was nothing short of depressing seeing chubby Lilliputs trying to squeeze themselves into clothes that seemed to be designed with a sixteen year old boy in mind rather than a woman, this girl was blessed in that regard with a taller than average frame and long thin limbs. This meant that she suited the clothes she was wearing, but he still would have preferred more tits.
“You're that bloke,” she said, her breath minty and warm against his cheek.
The phrase “that bloke” covered a multitude of sins. It was possible that she was one of his more rare female readers, but far more likely-
“That bloke what was on the telly, yeah?”
Far more likely she recognized him from Nathan Barley's reality tv show. Fucking brilliant.
It hadn't done that well when it had first aired and was cancelled after one and a half series, but the wretched shit-com had gained a cult status on, wonder of wonders, the internet. Enough people uploaded it onto youtube and other video sharing websites until the clip of him eating soup from his own shoe had reached “meme” levels of popularity, whatever that meant.
The show was often repeated on cable channels, the DVD had come out last Christmas. There was talks of it being recommissioned. Every time he got a cheque in the post, Dan wanted to scream for an hour or two or for the rest of his life. Instead he'd go out and lodge it and then buy a bottle of booze and sit by himself until Jones came home and switched the house's pulse back on.
Aside from the money, another upshot of selling his soul, or whatever bit of it Jonatton didn't already have dibs on, to Beelzebub in his lesser known guise of Lord of the Monkey Brained Cretins, was that occasionally girls like this one would find his drunken angry antics endlessly attractive because he'd been “on the telly”.
“Yeah,” he replied shortly and turned back to his bottle of precious alcohol.
Sadly the giant neon Fuck Off sign flashing above his head that he was imagining as hard as was humanly possibly didn't seem to be working. The girl eagerly sat down on the stool next to him leaning further forward with her long legs crossed towards him.
He sighed and endured the slightly more feminized version of the by now inevitable impromptu lecture on “post-modern media, yeah?” that he heard in one form or another from every stylie twat that recognized him. He pulled his whiskey closer to him and settled in for the long haul.
Several drinks later and the girl was in his lap sucking on his tongue as he rubbed her absent mindedly through the rough denim of her jeans. She moaned into his mouth and tried to rock her hips surreptitiously against his fingers. She pulled back a little and looked into his eyes.
“You wanna get out of here?”
Yes. Just not with you.
“Yeah, ok,” he said, because it was... easier.
*
Laying on top of her with his head next to hers to avoid the artificial intimacy of eye contact, he moved in and out of the girl he'd met two and a half hours ago and reflected that he could've just gone home and had a wank.
Her sighs and gasps filled the silence of the strange bedroom and he realised that he was about as far from an orgasm as he'd been before she'd spotted him at the bar. He slipped his arms underneath them and around her naked waist and started to turn over slowly, careful not to slip out of her.
“You go on top,” he said shortly. His hips were getting tired.
The girl nodded and started to grind against him, settling into a rhythm quickly and resuming her previous mmming and yeahing.
He gripped her hips hard, watching his thumbs press white ovals into skin. He wondered if she bruised easily and if she'd have ten little reminders of him poking out of the waistband her low slung jeans tomorrow. He let go with one hand and brought it down in a stinging slap against her arse, where a satisfying red handprint shone against her pale skin for a second before fading away slowly. She moaned from deep in her throat, more gutturally than before, so he did it again and watched another handprint rise and fade away, more slowly this time.
He looked back to her face and his eyes flicked down to where they fit together.
“Touch yourself for me,” he said slowly and looked back into her eyes. She gulped quickly and he felt only mild satisfaction when she immediately reached down to do as he told her.
Within minutes she was coming, more vocally than was strictly speaking necessarily he thought, and he managed to follow her with a small grunt. She hummed happily and held the condom at base of his dick firmly as she moved off him. He sighed and pulled it off, tying it at the end and throwing it in the vague direction of the wastepaper basket.
“You alright for taxi money, yeah?” the girl asked him as she lay down contentedly on her bed.
Dan tried to look like he hadn't been moving to lay back down next to her and nodded shortly.
“Numbers of local companies are on the hall table,” she said and closed her eyes.
And that was that.
Later that night, when he finally got back to Jones' house, it occurred to him that he'd never asked her what her name was. And she'd never asked his either.
*
He didn't go out the next weekend. Instead he waved absently to Claire as she went off (presumably somewhere important, or maybe just to get away from the noise) at half seven on Saturday evening and started to drink
The good thing about living with Jones was that he didn't bother you when you didn't want to talk to anyone if he was messing around with his decks, which by a charming coincidence happened to be most of the time. This happy arrangement lasted a good six hours as Dan sat looking blankly at the opposite wall thinking about which of the many ways to strangle Rufus Onslatt with an ethernet cable would be the most rewarding.
Finally though, the music wound down and Jones wandered over to him smiling like skull.
“Alright Dan?” he asked, sitting down heavily next to him, disturbing his imaginary homicide.
He shrugged and crossed his arms, starting to re-imagine the Fuck Off signal above his head, hoping that Jones was better at body language that the girl he'd fucked last week. This only provoked a more determined attempt by Jones to insinuate himself into a conversation.
“I think I'm getting close with this one, I'm really starting to feel something with it,” he smiled even more widely and started to natter on about his music.
He was a fucking dire DJ, much as Dan liked him he couldn't deny that, but he loved what he did so much. Jones looked like an idiot, talked like an idiot, but he wasn't one by any stretch of the word. He honestly did not care what anyone thought of him instead of simply pretending not to while fostering a desperate desire for validation, like most people who claimed indifference. He hardly ever got booked, he played in a hairdressers during the day and in his own house all night and he was happy.
It was a skill that most people forgot sometime around the time adolescence hit you with a shit ton of hormones and social ineptitude. More than that he had actual opinions, albeit ones that Dan almost never agreed with, but he knew what he liked and what he thought and he didn't plagiarise and posture like almost everyone else in Hoxton. London. The entire fucking world.
Jones had never sold out.
“Here Dan, what's up? You look like a smacked arse mate.”
He looked into that pointily androgynous face and felt his entire body ache with sheer exhaustion.
“Nothing,” he muttered.
“Don't look like nothing,” Jones went on. Now that his attention was on Dan it was unlikely he'd give up for hours.
The annoying thing about living with Jones was that when he decided he wanted a chat, he'd not leave you alone until he'd decided that sufficient chatting had occurred.
“No,” he started again impatiently, “It's just- My whole life is that. Nothing.”
“It's not though,” Jones said, tilting his head to one side.
“It is!” He scrunched up his face and ran his hands through his hair angrily. “I have done nothing with my life.”
“You mean like having kids and stuff?” Jones asked and then smiled at his expression of utter disgust.
“I mean like my work,” he scowled, “I don't know when I last wrote anything that anyone actually understood and cared about.”
“Do you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Writing? Cos like, if you don't, you should do something different.”
“And what could I do? I can't just quit my job and carve a new path into the wilderness, whistling a merry tune, can I?”
“You can if you want to. I don't mind you stopping here still while you figure stuff out. It's not like you need to pay rent or that here,” Jones said, maddeningly reasonable.
“I don't want to do anything else,” Dan snapped. Jones smiled again and Dan wanted to hit him. “I'm a writer. I want to write, but I'm wasting my life doing what I'm doing now. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not accomplishing anything, I'm just existing and taking a paycheque for churning out substandard dribble, or worse, work that I'm actually proud of only to see it completely misunderstood by the drones that read it and completely dismissed by people who might get it but are never going to listen to me because they've already made their minds up that I have nothing of any value whatsoever to say.”
“You could write a book or summat,” Jones said after a brief silence. “Do it under a different name or something, you know? Or look for a job in a different mag-”
“Shut up,” he said, cutting him off. “I don't want advice. I just-”
“What do you want Dan?” Jones asked him.
What did he want? Dan looked over at the younger man sitting across from him. He looked completely earnest and sincere. Big blue eyes wide and free of judgement.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, Dan Ashcroft reached out and took what he wanted.
He wound his fingers through Jones' hair and pulled him closer until he could crush their mouths together messily. Jones smiled into the kiss and moved so his knees were straddling Dan's lap.
“What took you so long? Thought you didn't fancy me.” He kissed the end of Dans nose and ducked back in to recapture his lips, not waiting for an answer.
They made an executive decision that Claire could sleep on the couch if she came home and made their way to the bed.
They fell down onto the mattress, kissing more heatedly now and pulling at each others clothes. He felt Jones' hands at his fly and he reached down to lift them away awkwardly.
“Do you mind if we... don't,” he mumbled the question into his chest and avoided Jones' eyes. “Not forever or anything, I do want to, I just-” He found himself unable to finish the sentence and just trailed off, trying to ignore the fact that he was blushing like a fifteen year old girl.
Jones moved his right hand and put in on his cheek gently.
“If you like,” he said simply. He leaned in again to kiss him again. “Night Dan.”
They moved around until they were comfortably lying side by side, wrapped around each other.
Dan felt his heart beat slow down as it pressed against the back of the man in his arms. He felt it.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Fandom: Nathan Barley
Characters: Dan Ashcroft/Jones
Prompt: 05- You can be like me
Word Count: 2354
Rating: Probably hard R, but NC-17 to be on the safe side
Summary: Dan thinks about what he wants and what he wanted and how little his life is like he thought it would be.
Warnings: Swearing, het sex (though non-graphic)
Disclaimer: Nathan Barley is not mine nor do I have any creative rights over it or its characters.
Author's Notes: I'm very out of practice, so please be gentle. Link to my prompt table.
x-posted to nakedskillsclub,booshslashhaven and un_love_you
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Dan Ashcroft rubbed his forehead as he scowled over his shoulder at the dance floor from the bar, where he was steadily drinking himself into a better mood. Or that was the plan anyway. Clearly more alcohol was required.
The music was repetitive and soul flatteningly loud, but that didn't bother him. He lived with a DJ of questionable talent and undoubtable enthusiasm, tuning out the pounding bass line was a piece of piss compared to tuning out his immediate surroundings.
His head pounded with years of rage and impotence, the sound of blood obnoxiously loud in his ears as he tried to ignore the trills and childish giggles of twenty somethings that had turned into thirty somethings a few years ago and were hoping no one noticed. The obsession with youth confused and irritated him. Fucking twenty year olds was all very well when you were twenty, but Christ, who'd want to put up with them once your own vapid puerility had run out? Sleeping with them only reminded him of his own wasted youth.
So many years ago now, fresh out of university, full of fury and passion and promise, he'd been certain that he'd... he wasn't even sure anymore. He just knew that there was a time when he'd felt like everything was ahead of him and that he knew what he wanted and how to get it.
Instead he'd turned from an angry young man into a cranky old bastard and he had nothing to show for it, despite the intellectual superiority he felt towards.... well, everyone really. The world was full of phonies and feeble minded fakes and the people who were your comrades in arms when you were in your twenties were converting garages now that they were in their thirties. Fuck, forties now almost.
Everyone sold out. His friends had one by one stopped raging against the man and traded ideals for a three piece cage and a salary. For the first time in his life he knew the crushing disappointment of knowing that someone you once respected owned a plastic pot plant.
How had it started? When he had taken the permanent job at Sugar Ape? Before?
It made sense at the time. Spend a year or two there getting an audience while keeping out of the mainstream noose until he was popular enough to do his own thing. Surely it was better for people to read what he wrote instead of having so much to say and no one listening to him.
What he hadn't quite realised then was that the words “underground” and “mainstream” were practically interchangeable. The establishment took the revolution of yesterday and shamelessly turned it into their own McPayout™, choking money out of fuckwits who wouldn't see the hypocrisy in buying a band hoodie with an anarchy symbol on the back from Disenfranchised Inc. and who were impressed with anything prefixed with “alt-”. And here stood he, stoking the fires of the alt-capitalism machine, like the useless fucking pawn that he was. Everyone sold out eventually and he had a lot earlier than he'd thought.
Even now that he had “made something of himself” and people regularly and religiously read his articles, it felt nothing like he'd imagined it would. The subjects of a harshly worded exposé are not supposed to read your vitriolic hatred of them and nod along pompously, secure in the knowledge that this Ashcroft bloke, yeah? He was well the voice of the digi-neration.
If this was success then it bore the same shocking resemblance to failure that the rest of his life did.
He rubbed harder at his forehead and the furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he looked at the half empty bottle of whisky in front of him. Or maybe it was half full hey? Get out.
He felt a hand at his elbow at he turned to look blearily at a girl standing beside him and leaning into his personal space. She was moderately attractive in the pointy androgynous way that was popular at the moment. While it was nothing short of depressing seeing chubby Lilliputs trying to squeeze themselves into clothes that seemed to be designed with a sixteen year old boy in mind rather than a woman, this girl was blessed in that regard with a taller than average frame and long thin limbs. This meant that she suited the clothes she was wearing, but he still would have preferred more tits.
“You're that bloke,” she said, her breath minty and warm against his cheek.
The phrase “that bloke” covered a multitude of sins. It was possible that she was one of his more rare female readers, but far more likely-
“That bloke what was on the telly, yeah?”
Far more likely she recognized him from Nathan Barley's reality tv show. Fucking brilliant.
It hadn't done that well when it had first aired and was cancelled after one and a half series, but the wretched shit-com had gained a cult status on, wonder of wonders, the internet. Enough people uploaded it onto youtube and other video sharing websites until the clip of him eating soup from his own shoe had reached “meme” levels of popularity, whatever that meant.
The show was often repeated on cable channels, the DVD had come out last Christmas. There was talks of it being recommissioned. Every time he got a cheque in the post, Dan wanted to scream for an hour or two or for the rest of his life. Instead he'd go out and lodge it and then buy a bottle of booze and sit by himself until Jones came home and switched the house's pulse back on.
Aside from the money, another upshot of selling his soul, or whatever bit of it Jonatton didn't already have dibs on, to Beelzebub in his lesser known guise of Lord of the Monkey Brained Cretins, was that occasionally girls like this one would find his drunken angry antics endlessly attractive because he'd been “on the telly”.
“Yeah,” he replied shortly and turned back to his bottle of precious alcohol.
Sadly the giant neon Fuck Off sign flashing above his head that he was imagining as hard as was humanly possibly didn't seem to be working. The girl eagerly sat down on the stool next to him leaning further forward with her long legs crossed towards him.
He sighed and endured the slightly more feminized version of the by now inevitable impromptu lecture on “post-modern media, yeah?” that he heard in one form or another from every stylie twat that recognized him. He pulled his whiskey closer to him and settled in for the long haul.
Several drinks later and the girl was in his lap sucking on his tongue as he rubbed her absent mindedly through the rough denim of her jeans. She moaned into his mouth and tried to rock her hips surreptitiously against his fingers. She pulled back a little and looked into his eyes.
“You wanna get out of here?”
Yes. Just not with you.
“Yeah, ok,” he said, because it was... easier.
*
Laying on top of her with his head next to hers to avoid the artificial intimacy of eye contact, he moved in and out of the girl he'd met two and a half hours ago and reflected that he could've just gone home and had a wank.
Her sighs and gasps filled the silence of the strange bedroom and he realised that he was about as far from an orgasm as he'd been before she'd spotted him at the bar. He slipped his arms underneath them and around her naked waist and started to turn over slowly, careful not to slip out of her.
“You go on top,” he said shortly. His hips were getting tired.
The girl nodded and started to grind against him, settling into a rhythm quickly and resuming her previous mmming and yeahing.
He gripped her hips hard, watching his thumbs press white ovals into skin. He wondered if she bruised easily and if she'd have ten little reminders of him poking out of the waistband her low slung jeans tomorrow. He let go with one hand and brought it down in a stinging slap against her arse, where a satisfying red handprint shone against her pale skin for a second before fading away slowly. She moaned from deep in her throat, more gutturally than before, so he did it again and watched another handprint rise and fade away, more slowly this time.
He looked back to her face and his eyes flicked down to where they fit together.
“Touch yourself for me,” he said slowly and looked back into her eyes. She gulped quickly and he felt only mild satisfaction when she immediately reached down to do as he told her.
Within minutes she was coming, more vocally than was strictly speaking necessarily he thought, and he managed to follow her with a small grunt. She hummed happily and held the condom at base of his dick firmly as she moved off him. He sighed and pulled it off, tying it at the end and throwing it in the vague direction of the wastepaper basket.
“You alright for taxi money, yeah?” the girl asked him as she lay down contentedly on her bed.
Dan tried to look like he hadn't been moving to lay back down next to her and nodded shortly.
“Numbers of local companies are on the hall table,” she said and closed her eyes.
And that was that.
Later that night, when he finally got back to Jones' house, it occurred to him that he'd never asked her what her name was. And she'd never asked his either.
*
He didn't go out the next weekend. Instead he waved absently to Claire as she went off (presumably somewhere important, or maybe just to get away from the noise) at half seven on Saturday evening and started to drink
The good thing about living with Jones was that he didn't bother you when you didn't want to talk to anyone if he was messing around with his decks, which by a charming coincidence happened to be most of the time. This happy arrangement lasted a good six hours as Dan sat looking blankly at the opposite wall thinking about which of the many ways to strangle Rufus Onslatt with an ethernet cable would be the most rewarding.
Finally though, the music wound down and Jones wandered over to him smiling like skull.
“Alright Dan?” he asked, sitting down heavily next to him, disturbing his imaginary homicide.
He shrugged and crossed his arms, starting to re-imagine the Fuck Off signal above his head, hoping that Jones was better at body language that the girl he'd fucked last week. This only provoked a more determined attempt by Jones to insinuate himself into a conversation.
“I think I'm getting close with this one, I'm really starting to feel something with it,” he smiled even more widely and started to natter on about his music.
He was a fucking dire DJ, much as Dan liked him he couldn't deny that, but he loved what he did so much. Jones looked like an idiot, talked like an idiot, but he wasn't one by any stretch of the word. He honestly did not care what anyone thought of him instead of simply pretending not to while fostering a desperate desire for validation, like most people who claimed indifference. He hardly ever got booked, he played in a hairdressers during the day and in his own house all night and he was happy.
It was a skill that most people forgot sometime around the time adolescence hit you with a shit ton of hormones and social ineptitude. More than that he had actual opinions, albeit ones that Dan almost never agreed with, but he knew what he liked and what he thought and he didn't plagiarise and posture like almost everyone else in Hoxton. London. The entire fucking world.
Jones had never sold out.
“Here Dan, what's up? You look like a smacked arse mate.”
He looked into that pointily androgynous face and felt his entire body ache with sheer exhaustion.
“Nothing,” he muttered.
“Don't look like nothing,” Jones went on. Now that his attention was on Dan it was unlikely he'd give up for hours.
The annoying thing about living with Jones was that when he decided he wanted a chat, he'd not leave you alone until he'd decided that sufficient chatting had occurred.
“No,” he started again impatiently, “It's just- My whole life is that. Nothing.”
“It's not though,” Jones said, tilting his head to one side.
“It is!” He scrunched up his face and ran his hands through his hair angrily. “I have done nothing with my life.”
“You mean like having kids and stuff?” Jones asked and then smiled at his expression of utter disgust.
“I mean like my work,” he scowled, “I don't know when I last wrote anything that anyone actually understood and cared about.”
“Do you like it?”
“Like what?”
“Writing? Cos like, if you don't, you should do something different.”
“And what could I do? I can't just quit my job and carve a new path into the wilderness, whistling a merry tune, can I?”
“You can if you want to. I don't mind you stopping here still while you figure stuff out. It's not like you need to pay rent or that here,” Jones said, maddeningly reasonable.
“I don't want to do anything else,” Dan snapped. Jones smiled again and Dan wanted to hit him. “I'm a writer. I want to write, but I'm wasting my life doing what I'm doing now. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not accomplishing anything, I'm just existing and taking a paycheque for churning out substandard dribble, or worse, work that I'm actually proud of only to see it completely misunderstood by the drones that read it and completely dismissed by people who might get it but are never going to listen to me because they've already made their minds up that I have nothing of any value whatsoever to say.”
“You could write a book or summat,” Jones said after a brief silence. “Do it under a different name or something, you know? Or look for a job in a different mag-”
“Shut up,” he said, cutting him off. “I don't want advice. I just-”
“What do you want Dan?” Jones asked him.
What did he want? Dan looked over at the younger man sitting across from him. He looked completely earnest and sincere. Big blue eyes wide and free of judgement.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, Dan Ashcroft reached out and took what he wanted.
He wound his fingers through Jones' hair and pulled him closer until he could crush their mouths together messily. Jones smiled into the kiss and moved so his knees were straddling Dan's lap.
“What took you so long? Thought you didn't fancy me.” He kissed the end of Dans nose and ducked back in to recapture his lips, not waiting for an answer.
They made an executive decision that Claire could sleep on the couch if she came home and made their way to the bed.
They fell down onto the mattress, kissing more heatedly now and pulling at each others clothes. He felt Jones' hands at his fly and he reached down to lift them away awkwardly.
“Do you mind if we... don't,” he mumbled the question into his chest and avoided Jones' eyes. “Not forever or anything, I do want to, I just-” He found himself unable to finish the sentence and just trailed off, trying to ignore the fact that he was blushing like a fifteen year old girl.
Jones moved his right hand and put in on his cheek gently.
“If you like,” he said simply. He leaned in again to kiss him again. “Night Dan.”
They moved around until they were comfortably lying side by side, wrapped around each other.
Dan felt his heart beat slow down as it pressed against the back of the man in his arms. He felt it.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.