fic: i will be home then
Title: I Will Be Home Then
Author: Ellyrianna
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: "Christ, Brian, this isn’t a melodramatic crying-in-the-rain scene."
Notes: For sexypumpkin.
Brian pulled up along the curb and rolled down the passenger-side window. He leaned his elbow against the wheel and picked out Justin’s silhouette in the dark, misty night. Rain was falling in sheets, and the roads were beginning to resemble rivers. Brian jammed the heel of his hand against the horn impatiently. He didn’t have all night.
Justin jumped a little in the shadows, stumbled out onto the sidewalk. He cracked open the door of the Corvette and climbed in. Rain trickled from his hair down the slope of his nose the way it did against the eaves of a house. Brian resisted the instinctive urge to reach out and wipe it away, and instead shoved the grimy white towel from under the seat into Justin’s hands.
“Christ, Brian, this isn’t a melodramatic crying-in-the rain scene,” Justin muttered, tossing it aside.
Brian picked it up again and threw it blatantly in Justin’s face. “You’re dripping all over my leather interior.”
He shifted the car out of park and made a quick and dirty U-turn, spraying the street with a deluge of muddy rainwater. He stomped on the gas and nearly went through the red light that loomed over them, bright and glowing in the dark.
“Why didn’t Mommy pick you up?” Brian asked just to break the silence. The sarcasm and scorn in his voice made Justin wrinkle his nose distastefully.
“She’s on her honeymoon.”
“I bet Tucker wanted to go somewhere meaningful, like Nigeria or Cambodia or one of those other filthy third-world countries.”
Justin set his jaw and stared forward. “She dumped Tucker two years ago, Brian. You know that.”
Brian found himself wondering if he really had known that, or if it was one of the millions of pieces of information Justin rattled off that washed right over Brian, that didn’t even begin to sink in. Justin chattered and Brian tuned him out - that was the way they had operated for a long time. Come to think of it, two years ago was about the time Justin left him for what he claimed was the last time.
“What about Daphne?”
“Lamaze.”
Brian shot Justin a quick glance and then jerked when a car behind him beeped; the light had turned green and he hadn’t even noticed. As the Corvette lurched forward, Brian furtively tried to think if that was one of the things he was ‘supposed to know.’
“Since when is she pregnant?” he asked gruffly to cover himself.
“Since her boyfriend knocked her up six months back,” Justin deadpanned back at him.
“Well, that would make sense.” Brian hoped it sounded as cutting as he’d meant it to.
Justin blotted his face with Brian’s stiff, unwashed towel and then stowed it under the seat again. He shook his head, spraying water from his longish hair against the window. Brian grimaced and thought about how much he didn’t feel like cleaning the inside of his car, trying to remember the last time he’d done it himself and not at the car wash. It had probably been right before Justin left. Justin liked to wash the car on warm summer days, for whatever reason; he said it was his inner hetero screaming to get out. He would drag out his old clunky boom box and turn on the shit he called music and bop around in Deb’s front yard as he used her garden hose to rinse off the mound of suds he’d scrubbed up all over the hood and trunk. Brian and Michael would sit on the porch with beers, and Brian would watch him, half-smirking, wanting to push him into the water and fuck him right on top of the car…
“Brian -“ Justin bit out, and Brian remembered the turn just in time, the wheels skidding across puddles and the aged car protesting with squeaks and squeals. Justin was gripping his seat with both hands, one eye closed, like he was about to get punched.
“You should plan these little return trips better,” Brian mused out loud. “Choosing the train that arrives at eight at night when you know full well anyone who can possibly pick you up is occupied then is just stupid.”
“You weren’t occupied.”
Brian glared at him sharply. “The fuck I wasn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
The brief thought flashed across Brian’s brain that he would have come no matter what, for any reason, but he smothered and choked it quickly. Showing Justin that he’d come to his senses sentimentality-wise two years too late would only cause more ire and resentment than already existed between them, and also exacerbate the pain with which they missed one another.
So Brian said under his breath, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have.”
Brian didn’t remember where Justin was staying at the moment. He split his time between Pittsburgh and New York, but as he had finally landed a solo show and was preparing for it, he had been spending most of the last six months in the Big Apple. Brian knew it had been at least that long since he’d seen Justin last because his hair was longer, grown out with the carelessness of someone who is too busy to notice such things.
“Are you crashing with Daphne or what?” he asked, because he couldn’t very well go on driving around Pittsburgh for the rest of the night. If he was lucky, he could drop Justin off without incident and then head out to Babylon and find someone with short, buzzed hair that wouldn’t remind him of anyone at all.
“Since my mom’s out of town I figured I’d stay at her place.”
Apart from the occasional time when Brian and Jennifer bumped into each other and went out for dinner afterwards to commiserate over the rising gas prices and how all the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, sucked ass, Brian didn’t know anything about her or her life. That included her address. Justin looked at him out of the corner of his eye and seemed to guess as much. He rattled it off in the same way he would have if he was relating back to Brian the take-out they were planning on ordering and stuffing the freezer with until the end of time.
Brian made a series of quick turns and found his way to the condo Jennifer was sharing with her new husband. It looked like the old one to Brian, only in a trendier neighborhood. He thought it was funny that she had gotten younger as she got older. There was a stoop outside this one, too, and Brian could picture Justin standing across from him as he sat on it, all frustration and a jumble of nerves at the tail end of the summer.
Brian parked outside the condo, but Justin made no move to get out of the car. He hadn’t brought any luggage with him, and that made Brian think that he actually was keeping things at his mom’s house, and keeping things at Daphne’s apartment. It made Brian think that he had nothing of Justin’s in his own home except for the huge canvas he’d bought at the very first show. He’d had to move his television to hang it because no other wall could accommodate it.
Sometimes, he would sit down to watch the TV and wind up watching the painting instead, wondering if Justin had started that before or after he’d left, if Brian had seen its humble beginnings or if it was something completely organic, something devoid entirely of Brian. He wondered if Justin had been inspired by another person to paint it. He wondered if he inspired any of Justin’s works at all now, contrary to the way he had inspired everything before.
Brian put on the fake, condescending smile he wore when dressing down Hunter’s idiot girlfriends, each of them stupider than the one before. “Why didn’t you bring your new beau home to meet Mom?”
Justin blinked at him. “What new beau?”
“New York is teeming with thousands of beautiful, artistic men. Surely one has managed to capture the elusive Mr. Taylor’s heart.” He sneered as much as he could, dredging up old, buried memories of Ethan to fuel his otherwise apathetic attitude.
Justin shook his head slowly. “I’m not seeing anyone.” He paused. “Are you?”
Brian snorted derisively. “What do you think, Sunshine?”
“I think,” Justin started slowly, “that if you’d never met me, you never would have had a relationship with anyone. And now that we’re not together anymore, you won’t have a relationship with anyone else.”
“Fucking smarmy egotist.” Brian could see the absolute truth in Justin’s deduction but could never see to admitting that even a fraction of it was correct.
“Not really.” Justin’s voice was plain and simple, unadorned. “Just stating a fact.”
Brian pretended to consider Justin for some time. “And I see in my crystal ball that the young artiste has tried again and again to find love in other places, and yet, alas, he cannot find it, because he has been spoiled for it by me.”
“Spoiled!” Justin laughed. “Maybe you turned me off of it altogether. All the fights and the lies...all the abuse…maybe I just got over it completely.”
Although he had started out amused, Justin was watching Brian with completely serious eyes.
“Abuse? That’s cute,” Brian snarled. “Did I take you into a closet and beat you with a belt? Did I touch you when you didn’t want it? Did I punch you in the stomach so hard you couldn’t sit up straight for a day?” Justin glowered darkly at him. “Moreover, did I ever make you fucking stay? Did I tie you to a chair and tell you you couldn’t leave? Fucking tell me I did.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Justin retorted. “There are different -“ He physically stopped himself, reeling in his anger and hurt and defiance. He took a calming breath and opened the door of the Corvette. “No, Brian, you didn’t make me stay. Thanks for the ride.”
Justin started to clamber awkwardly out of the low car. Brian thought of the one time that Justin had convinced him to go to a drive-through - one in the morning, after smoking two joints, hungry as all hell. The Corvette had been so far away from the window that Justin had had to climb out, go around, and stand up on the tips of his toes to take the food and pay the money. Brian, equally stoned, had sat behind the wheel shaking his head and quaking with unshed laughter.
“I watched you.”
It blurted out of him before he could contain it.
Justin looked over at him tiredly. “What?”
“After you got bashed.” Brian cleared his dry throat and flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “Every time you walked away from me, I watched you. Just…in case.”
Justin was taken aback, but he didn’t express it, in abject shock.
“So?” he asked. There was more to the word than there was to the word when Justin said it.
“That time when I came back from Baltimore, and I drove you to school, and you said you were getting the Rage movie made - you got out of the car, and I watched you walk away across campus. I watched you get smaller and smaller, and I kept thinking about how if I hadn’t had the surgery, I -“ It hurt him to say it, physically hurt him, because he couldn’t ever remember saying anything like it to Justin before. Not unless the proposal was taken into consideration, and in his mind it shouldn’t be, because they were all insane for that period of time after the bombing and before Justin left, and nothing counted then - no one’s actions or words. He didn’t believe so, anyway. “If I hadn’t had the surgery, I wouldn’t have been able to watch you walk away.”
Justin sat back down heavily in the car, shutting the door softly.
Brian glanced at him and then away. “On the other hand, I had the motherfucking surgery and I still got to watch you walk away from me.”
Justin was visibly stung by the double entendre.
“I didn’t want to,” he began, “but you made it so fucking hard. Why do you always do that? Every time we finally become fine, you can’t deal with it and you make everything difficult. You’re the one who told me to go to New York, but when I started coming back you just got pissed off every time I left again.”
“I told you not to come back again until you were ready to stay.”
“That would have taken years, Brian, and you know it,” Justin said bitterly, and looked out his rain-streaked window.
Before Brian could stop himself, he bit out, “Years would have been fine. This coming and going shit? That’s what I can’t deal with.”
“Your bullshit is what I can’t deal with,” Justin said shortly. “That’s why I left.”
Brian thought about the first time Justin had come back from New York. He had been late at work, and had come home to the loft to change before he went out to Babylon with Emmett for the night. It had been completely dark except for the light over the bed. He had kind of had a feeling about what was waiting for him, and had taken his time in doing menial tasks to keep Justin waiting. By the time he finally sauntered up the steps to the bedroom, Justin was curled up on his side of the bed, asleep, and also naked. Brian had laughed and sat down beside him to shake him awake.
“What?” Justin asked him warily.
Brian cleared away the fog of his memories and narrowed his eyes. “What, what?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Brian wanted to tell him to get his ass out of the car because he was sick of having the same conversation he had had over and over with Justin right before he’d left him for the last time - or what he’d said would be the last time.
It was two years later, and he was still sick of that argument.
Sighing dramatically, Brian shouldered open his door and stepped out into the rain. He slammed it shut behind him and rounded the car to Justin’s side. He opened up that door and waited for Justin to climb out.
When he did, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Walking you to your door,” Brian said around a grimace.
“How very senior prom of you,” Justin snarked.
“Well, never did get the chance to round out the night, did I?” Brian fired back.
They looked at each other and then away, both recognizing territory that wasn’t supposed to be crossed. Brian shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and sloshed up the driveway with Justin to his mom’s front door. Justin produced a key from somewhere and let himself in.
Brian stood on the stoop and looked placidly back at him.
Justin sighed and stepped back. “You’d better come in and dry off.”
Brian walked past him and ran a hand through his wet hair, spraying rain on the hardwood. The place was narrow and dark and smelled new, like bleach cleaner and freshly-assembled furniture. Justin flipped a switch and toed out of his shoes, methodically, probably because his mom had always made him take off his shoes the minute he got in the house. Brian smirked at that and purposefully left his shoes on, even though they squelched on the floor.
Despite the furniture being practically just unwrapped, there were framed photos tastefully decorating tabletops and wall unit shelves. Justin and Molly and Jennifer and the possible permutations thereof. One of Jennifer and her new husband. Molly with a tall black guy, obviously on her own prom night. Justin’s high school senior picture.
Brian picked it up and moved it back and forth under the track lighting so that the glass reflected in different places. Justin puttered around behind him, the lack of something to do obviously weighing on him. Brian thought that the Justin in the picture looked nothing like any Justin he had ever known, and that was probably because it had been taken before Justin had known Brian.
He set it back down on the table and turned around. Justin was sitting on the sofa, his hands clasped under his chin, pensive.
“You know, it sucks that you’re my last resort as a pick-up for the train,” he said flatly. “It was a lot better when you looked up the train schedule online and would be waiting for me out front, and you would take me to the diner before you brought me home.”
“It was even better when we fucked afterwards,” Brian added.
“That too.”
Brian tapped his foot impatiently on the floor, and then prompted, “Well?”
“I miss it.”
Brian waited.
“That’s all you’re getting,” Justin said, and stood up. He left the room and went up the stairs, disappearing into the darkness of the second floor. He hadn’t asked Brian to leave, which Brian took as an invitation to follow him, however much he knew he shouldn’t. He deliberately took each step one at a time, not in any particular rush, the way he’d been that day when all that had been on was the light over the bed.
There weren’t any lights on upstairs when he reached it, but all of the doors were closed except for one, so he figured it was a safe bet. Justin was stripping out of his wet clothes and had yanked out the blanket and the sheets from where Jennifer had meticulously tucked them under the mattress. Brian remembered Justin’s brief stint as a go-go dancer, and how he would wake up in the morning to find Justin hogging all of the blankets into a giant nest around himself, the pillows stacked over his head and the sheets a rumpled mess.
Brian slouched in the doorway. “I miss it, too,” he said after a long time.
Justin made a noise with his teeth that sounded like Close, but no cigar.
“After the show is done, come back here. For good.”
It clearly wasn’t what Justin had been expecting. He paused halfway in the act of taking off his jeans to glance up, puzzled, at Brian in the semi-darkness.
“What?” he asked quietly. “But you’re the one who told me to go. You’re the one who fucking pushed me out the door -“
“I know what I did,” Brian cut in. “And now I’m taking it back. You got what you wanted out of there. Now you can live here.”
“Why does my arrangement bother you so much?” Justin asked after a second’s hesitation. “Why can’t we be normal if I switch off? How come it’s got to be me here and nowhere else, set in stone?”
“Because I know you,” Brian said simply. “The longer you’re away, the more attractive you find other…opportunities.” He loaded the word and let it hang heavily in the dark room. He could feel the heat of Justin’s embarrassed fury.
“If I haven’t found someone after two years, don’t you think I never will?”
“No. I don’t.”
Justin squirmed out of the wet jeans and left them on the floor. He sat down on top of the blankets and considered the pile of clothes.
“Do you promise you’ll stop being a fucking asshole about everything if I agree to stop living there?” Justin asked.
Brian shook his head, and the despair in Justin’s eyes reached astronomical levels.
“I can’t promise to stop making disparaging comments on your wardrobe,” he said. “Or the disgusting things you willingly ingest, or the shitty shampoo you use on your hair. And I will never let you cook with an electric skillet in my kitchen again, point unarguable.”
When Justin finally came to terms with the fact that Brian was being sarcastic, he weakly retorted, “The grease fire wasn’t that big.”
Brian crossed the room and pulled his shirt over his head. “Not until you threw all that damn water on it,” he said, and kissed Justin.
Justin’s mother came home two days later with her rich businessman husband. Justin was supposed to return to New York the same day, but he had been unwilling to compromise on his new deal with Brian just yet, so they had stayed in his mother’s fresh-smelling house. They had completely finished off the meager alcohol supply she had begun and ordered take-out twice, even though they never finished it either time. When she came home, Styrofoam boxes littered all the surfaces, and paper plates and chopsticks marked the trails they had made as they fucked in the various places the small condo offered.
The newlyweds trudged into the living room lugging baggage and feeling exhausted with jetlag, wanting just to fall into bed and be done with it, only to find Brian and Justin sprawled on the couch, Brian still in his two-day-old clothes and Justin fast asleep with his head on Brian’s chest. Brian was flipping through the channels on the husband’s 50-inch plasma TV, the last bottle of beer nestled in the couch cushions by the hand resting on Justin’s back.
“Brian!” Jennifer spluttered when she took in the scene. The husband flushed an interesting purple color and garbled whatever words he had wanted to say. “Don’t tell me you two are back together again,” she groaned.
“My sincerest apologies,” Brian said, and toasted her with the beer.
Author: Ellyrianna
Fandom: Queer as Folk
Pairing(s): Brian/Justin
Summary: "Christ, Brian, this isn’t a melodramatic crying-in-the-rain scene."
Notes: For sexypumpkin.
Brian pulled up along the curb and rolled down the passenger-side window. He leaned his elbow against the wheel and picked out Justin’s silhouette in the dark, misty night. Rain was falling in sheets, and the roads were beginning to resemble rivers. Brian jammed the heel of his hand against the horn impatiently. He didn’t have all night.
Justin jumped a little in the shadows, stumbled out onto the sidewalk. He cracked open the door of the Corvette and climbed in. Rain trickled from his hair down the slope of his nose the way it did against the eaves of a house. Brian resisted the instinctive urge to reach out and wipe it away, and instead shoved the grimy white towel from under the seat into Justin’s hands.
“Christ, Brian, this isn’t a melodramatic crying-in-the rain scene,” Justin muttered, tossing it aside.
Brian picked it up again and threw it blatantly in Justin’s face. “You’re dripping all over my leather interior.”
He shifted the car out of park and made a quick and dirty U-turn, spraying the street with a deluge of muddy rainwater. He stomped on the gas and nearly went through the red light that loomed over them, bright and glowing in the dark.
“Why didn’t Mommy pick you up?” Brian asked just to break the silence. The sarcasm and scorn in his voice made Justin wrinkle his nose distastefully.
“She’s on her honeymoon.”
“I bet Tucker wanted to go somewhere meaningful, like Nigeria or Cambodia or one of those other filthy third-world countries.”
Justin set his jaw and stared forward. “She dumped Tucker two years ago, Brian. You know that.”
Brian found himself wondering if he really had known that, or if it was one of the millions of pieces of information Justin rattled off that washed right over Brian, that didn’t even begin to sink in. Justin chattered and Brian tuned him out - that was the way they had operated for a long time. Come to think of it, two years ago was about the time Justin left him for what he claimed was the last time.
“What about Daphne?”
“Lamaze.”
Brian shot Justin a quick glance and then jerked when a car behind him beeped; the light had turned green and he hadn’t even noticed. As the Corvette lurched forward, Brian furtively tried to think if that was one of the things he was ‘supposed to know.’
“Since when is she pregnant?” he asked gruffly to cover himself.
“Since her boyfriend knocked her up six months back,” Justin deadpanned back at him.
“Well, that would make sense.” Brian hoped it sounded as cutting as he’d meant it to.
Justin blotted his face with Brian’s stiff, unwashed towel and then stowed it under the seat again. He shook his head, spraying water from his longish hair against the window. Brian grimaced and thought about how much he didn’t feel like cleaning the inside of his car, trying to remember the last time he’d done it himself and not at the car wash. It had probably been right before Justin left. Justin liked to wash the car on warm summer days, for whatever reason; he said it was his inner hetero screaming to get out. He would drag out his old clunky boom box and turn on the shit he called music and bop around in Deb’s front yard as he used her garden hose to rinse off the mound of suds he’d scrubbed up all over the hood and trunk. Brian and Michael would sit on the porch with beers, and Brian would watch him, half-smirking, wanting to push him into the water and fuck him right on top of the car…
“Brian -“ Justin bit out, and Brian remembered the turn just in time, the wheels skidding across puddles and the aged car protesting with squeaks and squeals. Justin was gripping his seat with both hands, one eye closed, like he was about to get punched.
“You should plan these little return trips better,” Brian mused out loud. “Choosing the train that arrives at eight at night when you know full well anyone who can possibly pick you up is occupied then is just stupid.”
“You weren’t occupied.”
Brian glared at him sharply. “The fuck I wasn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
The brief thought flashed across Brian’s brain that he would have come no matter what, for any reason, but he smothered and choked it quickly. Showing Justin that he’d come to his senses sentimentality-wise two years too late would only cause more ire and resentment than already existed between them, and also exacerbate the pain with which they missed one another.
So Brian said under his breath, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have.”
Brian didn’t remember where Justin was staying at the moment. He split his time between Pittsburgh and New York, but as he had finally landed a solo show and was preparing for it, he had been spending most of the last six months in the Big Apple. Brian knew it had been at least that long since he’d seen Justin last because his hair was longer, grown out with the carelessness of someone who is too busy to notice such things.
“Are you crashing with Daphne or what?” he asked, because he couldn’t very well go on driving around Pittsburgh for the rest of the night. If he was lucky, he could drop Justin off without incident and then head out to Babylon and find someone with short, buzzed hair that wouldn’t remind him of anyone at all.
“Since my mom’s out of town I figured I’d stay at her place.”
Apart from the occasional time when Brian and Jennifer bumped into each other and went out for dinner afterwards to commiserate over the rising gas prices and how all the presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, sucked ass, Brian didn’t know anything about her or her life. That included her address. Justin looked at him out of the corner of his eye and seemed to guess as much. He rattled it off in the same way he would have if he was relating back to Brian the take-out they were planning on ordering and stuffing the freezer with until the end of time.
Brian made a series of quick turns and found his way to the condo Jennifer was sharing with her new husband. It looked like the old one to Brian, only in a trendier neighborhood. He thought it was funny that she had gotten younger as she got older. There was a stoop outside this one, too, and Brian could picture Justin standing across from him as he sat on it, all frustration and a jumble of nerves at the tail end of the summer.
Brian parked outside the condo, but Justin made no move to get out of the car. He hadn’t brought any luggage with him, and that made Brian think that he actually was keeping things at his mom’s house, and keeping things at Daphne’s apartment. It made Brian think that he had nothing of Justin’s in his own home except for the huge canvas he’d bought at the very first show. He’d had to move his television to hang it because no other wall could accommodate it.
Sometimes, he would sit down to watch the TV and wind up watching the painting instead, wondering if Justin had started that before or after he’d left, if Brian had seen its humble beginnings or if it was something completely organic, something devoid entirely of Brian. He wondered if Justin had been inspired by another person to paint it. He wondered if he inspired any of Justin’s works at all now, contrary to the way he had inspired everything before.
Brian put on the fake, condescending smile he wore when dressing down Hunter’s idiot girlfriends, each of them stupider than the one before. “Why didn’t you bring your new beau home to meet Mom?”
Justin blinked at him. “What new beau?”
“New York is teeming with thousands of beautiful, artistic men. Surely one has managed to capture the elusive Mr. Taylor’s heart.” He sneered as much as he could, dredging up old, buried memories of Ethan to fuel his otherwise apathetic attitude.
Justin shook his head slowly. “I’m not seeing anyone.” He paused. “Are you?”
Brian snorted derisively. “What do you think, Sunshine?”
“I think,” Justin started slowly, “that if you’d never met me, you never would have had a relationship with anyone. And now that we’re not together anymore, you won’t have a relationship with anyone else.”
“Fucking smarmy egotist.” Brian could see the absolute truth in Justin’s deduction but could never see to admitting that even a fraction of it was correct.
“Not really.” Justin’s voice was plain and simple, unadorned. “Just stating a fact.”
Brian pretended to consider Justin for some time. “And I see in my crystal ball that the young artiste has tried again and again to find love in other places, and yet, alas, he cannot find it, because he has been spoiled for it by me.”
“Spoiled!” Justin laughed. “Maybe you turned me off of it altogether. All the fights and the lies...all the abuse…maybe I just got over it completely.”
Although he had started out amused, Justin was watching Brian with completely serious eyes.
“Abuse? That’s cute,” Brian snarled. “Did I take you into a closet and beat you with a belt? Did I touch you when you didn’t want it? Did I punch you in the stomach so hard you couldn’t sit up straight for a day?” Justin glowered darkly at him. “Moreover, did I ever make you fucking stay? Did I tie you to a chair and tell you you couldn’t leave? Fucking tell me I did.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Justin retorted. “There are different -“ He physically stopped himself, reeling in his anger and hurt and defiance. He took a calming breath and opened the door of the Corvette. “No, Brian, you didn’t make me stay. Thanks for the ride.”
Justin started to clamber awkwardly out of the low car. Brian thought of the one time that Justin had convinced him to go to a drive-through - one in the morning, after smoking two joints, hungry as all hell. The Corvette had been so far away from the window that Justin had had to climb out, go around, and stand up on the tips of his toes to take the food and pay the money. Brian, equally stoned, had sat behind the wheel shaking his head and quaking with unshed laughter.
“I watched you.”
It blurted out of him before he could contain it.
Justin looked over at him tiredly. “What?”
“After you got bashed.” Brian cleared his dry throat and flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “Every time you walked away from me, I watched you. Just…in case.”
Justin was taken aback, but he didn’t express it, in abject shock.
“So?” he asked. There was more to the word than there was to the word when Justin said it.
“That time when I came back from Baltimore, and I drove you to school, and you said you were getting the Rage movie made - you got out of the car, and I watched you walk away across campus. I watched you get smaller and smaller, and I kept thinking about how if I hadn’t had the surgery, I -“ It hurt him to say it, physically hurt him, because he couldn’t ever remember saying anything like it to Justin before. Not unless the proposal was taken into consideration, and in his mind it shouldn’t be, because they were all insane for that period of time after the bombing and before Justin left, and nothing counted then - no one’s actions or words. He didn’t believe so, anyway. “If I hadn’t had the surgery, I wouldn’t have been able to watch you walk away.”
Justin sat back down heavily in the car, shutting the door softly.
Brian glanced at him and then away. “On the other hand, I had the motherfucking surgery and I still got to watch you walk away from me.”
Justin was visibly stung by the double entendre.
“I didn’t want to,” he began, “but you made it so fucking hard. Why do you always do that? Every time we finally become fine, you can’t deal with it and you make everything difficult. You’re the one who told me to go to New York, but when I started coming back you just got pissed off every time I left again.”
“I told you not to come back again until you were ready to stay.”
“That would have taken years, Brian, and you know it,” Justin said bitterly, and looked out his rain-streaked window.
Before Brian could stop himself, he bit out, “Years would have been fine. This coming and going shit? That’s what I can’t deal with.”
“Your bullshit is what I can’t deal with,” Justin said shortly. “That’s why I left.”
Brian thought about the first time Justin had come back from New York. He had been late at work, and had come home to the loft to change before he went out to Babylon with Emmett for the night. It had been completely dark except for the light over the bed. He had kind of had a feeling about what was waiting for him, and had taken his time in doing menial tasks to keep Justin waiting. By the time he finally sauntered up the steps to the bedroom, Justin was curled up on his side of the bed, asleep, and also naked. Brian had laughed and sat down beside him to shake him awake.
“What?” Justin asked him warily.
Brian cleared away the fog of his memories and narrowed his eyes. “What, what?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Brian wanted to tell him to get his ass out of the car because he was sick of having the same conversation he had had over and over with Justin right before he’d left him for the last time - or what he’d said would be the last time.
It was two years later, and he was still sick of that argument.
Sighing dramatically, Brian shouldered open his door and stepped out into the rain. He slammed it shut behind him and rounded the car to Justin’s side. He opened up that door and waited for Justin to climb out.
When he did, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Walking you to your door,” Brian said around a grimace.
“How very senior prom of you,” Justin snarked.
“Well, never did get the chance to round out the night, did I?” Brian fired back.
They looked at each other and then away, both recognizing territory that wasn’t supposed to be crossed. Brian shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and sloshed up the driveway with Justin to his mom’s front door. Justin produced a key from somewhere and let himself in.
Brian stood on the stoop and looked placidly back at him.
Justin sighed and stepped back. “You’d better come in and dry off.”
Brian walked past him and ran a hand through his wet hair, spraying rain on the hardwood. The place was narrow and dark and smelled new, like bleach cleaner and freshly-assembled furniture. Justin flipped a switch and toed out of his shoes, methodically, probably because his mom had always made him take off his shoes the minute he got in the house. Brian smirked at that and purposefully left his shoes on, even though they squelched on the floor.
Despite the furniture being practically just unwrapped, there were framed photos tastefully decorating tabletops and wall unit shelves. Justin and Molly and Jennifer and the possible permutations thereof. One of Jennifer and her new husband. Molly with a tall black guy, obviously on her own prom night. Justin’s high school senior picture.
Brian picked it up and moved it back and forth under the track lighting so that the glass reflected in different places. Justin puttered around behind him, the lack of something to do obviously weighing on him. Brian thought that the Justin in the picture looked nothing like any Justin he had ever known, and that was probably because it had been taken before Justin had known Brian.
He set it back down on the table and turned around. Justin was sitting on the sofa, his hands clasped under his chin, pensive.
“You know, it sucks that you’re my last resort as a pick-up for the train,” he said flatly. “It was a lot better when you looked up the train schedule online and would be waiting for me out front, and you would take me to the diner before you brought me home.”
“It was even better when we fucked afterwards,” Brian added.
“That too.”
Brian tapped his foot impatiently on the floor, and then prompted, “Well?”
“I miss it.”
Brian waited.
“That’s all you’re getting,” Justin said, and stood up. He left the room and went up the stairs, disappearing into the darkness of the second floor. He hadn’t asked Brian to leave, which Brian took as an invitation to follow him, however much he knew he shouldn’t. He deliberately took each step one at a time, not in any particular rush, the way he’d been that day when all that had been on was the light over the bed.
There weren’t any lights on upstairs when he reached it, but all of the doors were closed except for one, so he figured it was a safe bet. Justin was stripping out of his wet clothes and had yanked out the blanket and the sheets from where Jennifer had meticulously tucked them under the mattress. Brian remembered Justin’s brief stint as a go-go dancer, and how he would wake up in the morning to find Justin hogging all of the blankets into a giant nest around himself, the pillows stacked over his head and the sheets a rumpled mess.
Brian slouched in the doorway. “I miss it, too,” he said after a long time.
Justin made a noise with his teeth that sounded like Close, but no cigar.
“After the show is done, come back here. For good.”
It clearly wasn’t what Justin had been expecting. He paused halfway in the act of taking off his jeans to glance up, puzzled, at Brian in the semi-darkness.
“What?” he asked quietly. “But you’re the one who told me to go. You’re the one who fucking pushed me out the door -“
“I know what I did,” Brian cut in. “And now I’m taking it back. You got what you wanted out of there. Now you can live here.”
“Why does my arrangement bother you so much?” Justin asked after a second’s hesitation. “Why can’t we be normal if I switch off? How come it’s got to be me here and nowhere else, set in stone?”
“Because I know you,” Brian said simply. “The longer you’re away, the more attractive you find other…opportunities.” He loaded the word and let it hang heavily in the dark room. He could feel the heat of Justin’s embarrassed fury.
“If I haven’t found someone after two years, don’t you think I never will?”
“No. I don’t.”
Justin squirmed out of the wet jeans and left them on the floor. He sat down on top of the blankets and considered the pile of clothes.
“Do you promise you’ll stop being a fucking asshole about everything if I agree to stop living there?” Justin asked.
Brian shook his head, and the despair in Justin’s eyes reached astronomical levels.
“I can’t promise to stop making disparaging comments on your wardrobe,” he said. “Or the disgusting things you willingly ingest, or the shitty shampoo you use on your hair. And I will never let you cook with an electric skillet in my kitchen again, point unarguable.”
When Justin finally came to terms with the fact that Brian was being sarcastic, he weakly retorted, “The grease fire wasn’t that big.”
Brian crossed the room and pulled his shirt over his head. “Not until you threw all that damn water on it,” he said, and kissed Justin.
Justin’s mother came home two days later with her rich businessman husband. Justin was supposed to return to New York the same day, but he had been unwilling to compromise on his new deal with Brian just yet, so they had stayed in his mother’s fresh-smelling house. They had completely finished off the meager alcohol supply she had begun and ordered take-out twice, even though they never finished it either time. When she came home, Styrofoam boxes littered all the surfaces, and paper plates and chopsticks marked the trails they had made as they fucked in the various places the small condo offered.
The newlyweds trudged into the living room lugging baggage and feeling exhausted with jetlag, wanting just to fall into bed and be done with it, only to find Brian and Justin sprawled on the couch, Brian still in his two-day-old clothes and Justin fast asleep with his head on Brian’s chest. Brian was flipping through the channels on the husband’s 50-inch plasma TV, the last bottle of beer nestled in the couch cushions by the hand resting on Justin’s back.
“Brian!” Jennifer spluttered when she took in the scene. The husband flushed an interesting purple color and garbled whatever words he had wanted to say. “Don’t tell me you two are back together again,” she groaned.
“My sincerest apologies,” Brian said, and toasted her with the beer.