they shake the mountains when they dance.
the boys i mean are not refined
Arthur/Eames, PG-13, prompt: " Arthur and Eames have been sleeping together for a while now, but have yet to have a real kiss."
2933 words
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It never fails to impress Eames that no matter how many times he tries, he never quite manages to kiss Arthur. They've been sleeping together for over a year, in between red-eye flights around the world and meeting at designated hotel rooms in a string of forgettable cities.
Strictly speaking, the arrangement is temporary, a matter of convenience and practicality - if nothing else. But there is a certain thrill to it, an element of danger, when Eames slides his hands along Arthur's waist and feels, for a moment, the distinct groove of a handgun attached to his holster.
Of course - Arthur almost never lets Eames anywhere near his gun. And it is probably a metaphor for a lot of things too, like how Arthur never lets Eames kiss him at all. Maybe an issue of priopriety.
Eames finds himself inexplicably drawn to volatile nature of their relationship, the careful way they have to dance around each other to avoid prying eyes and driving each other to the brink, to Arthur, and the way he pulls himself out of his clothes in a blushless striptease, and then later on when he spreads himself against the curves of the mattress, the intricate network of his veins stark against the pale of his skin. And his hair down, falling like feathers, softened by sweat and shampoo.
Eames likes to map every inch of Arthur's skin with his lips, every ridge and curve and newly-healing scar, the bend of his knees.
Occasionally, Arthur lets him but they have yet to make that transition: there is still no kissing involved, even in those moments when, impaired by the fog of sleep and sex, stripped down to the very bone, they've come unbearably close to bridging the distance - Eames' nose pressed to Arthur's cheek, ankles tangled under the covers, until Arthur rolls over and turns away, facing the wall with his back turned to Eames.
Eames doesn't let it get to him, at least not at first. He tells himself it's nothing personal.
Life goes on as usual.
-
It becomes a question of tolerance. They're in Cairo on the precipice of one of the biggest jobs of their careers and Arthur gets shot, twice, in the arm in some dank warehouse twenty miles south of the capital.
The first is a misfire, but both slice clean through his bones. He collapses on the floor, bleeding, clutching his wounds, but manages to take down an enemy by firing a bullet into his neck.
Eames hauls Arthur into the passenger side of the jeep and they drive east to the nearest hospital, through the oppressive desert heat and a sweeping landscape of golden sand dunes. Arthur bleeds all over the leather interior, his face pale and his teeth gritted as Eames calls Cobb for backup on the radio. The connection fizzles out as soon as Eames makes any headway and Cobb's staticky voice fades into nothing more than white noise and frequency.
Eames curses and hits the gas. He touches Arthur's arm gently despite the restless fear seething under his skin, the edges of his fingernails. "Hang in there, Arthur," he says, and when there's no response at all, Eames smiles, wanly, mostly to convince himself that things are going to be okay and pushes back Arthur's hair from his forehead.
Eames doesn't kiss him, despite knowing that he can, but when paramedics rush Arthur to the ER, and the sterile doors close, Eames stands there in the empty hall, fists clenched at his sides, kicking the wall when he turned a corner, wishing that he did.
-
It's a bad morning - too early for any sane person to be awake, and Eames had gone and burnt his tongue on his morning coffee and for the last half hour had been staving off the cold by chainsmoking.
Already the day is off to a terrible start. His throat and nose are sore and he can feel a cold coming, percolating somewhere deep in the nest of his lungs. He's in Sweden in the middle of December, waiting for Arthur to finish a phonecall. They're on a job together, along with Cobb, who will be flying in from Beirut.
Eames leans agains the wall behind his head, stubbing his cigarette and exhaling a plume of smoke. Arthur is still on his cellphone, talking in his business voice. Eames watches the movement of his hands, and studies the tension in his shoulders, the strong line of his jaw. He thinks back to the night before and how different Arthur often is when he comes apart, when he comes loose at a single touch, and the tautness of his muscles unwinds, unspooling like threads. And the taste of his sweat, beading down the warm valley of his spine.
Eames reaches over, turning a little so that his body is curved toward Arthur. Arthur's shoulders are tense when he glances in Eames' direction, eyebrows raised in question, waiting. It feels like this moment could lead to something - steady rush of cars on the road, the stillness and silence of a strange city at six in the morning, a patchwork of streets providing anonymity.
Eames smiles at Arthur as he leans closer, bringing one hand up to coil around Arthur's neck. He pulls Arthur close, pressing his nose to Arthur's ear, smelling him, faintly, in that clear, distilled moment, a whiff of cologne above the palpable warmth of his skin.
Arthur stiffens for a half second, glancing over to him with lips parted in silent question.
Eames isn't sure why he's doing this, or why he's trying so hard. The plan isn't foolproof - there is no plan. He runs his thumbnail down the side of Arthur's neck, scraping the soft skin there.
"Arthur," he begins to say.
They stand perfectly still for a long moment, until Arthur blinks and turns away.
This sets a wave of kinetic energy, and just like that it's gone, the moment dissolves in a flurry of movements: a laughing passerby on the street, the blare of a car horn, and Arthur pushing himself off the wall, propelled by his elbows, upsetting Eames' balance.
Eames nearly trips but he manages to catch himself in time. He watches Arthur walk away from him and toward the end of the street where Arthur pockets his cellphone to shake someone's hand.
There's Cobb too, with a duffel bag.
Eames raises his hand and waves.
-
Cobb invites Eames to the wedding. He gets an email one day when he's lying low in Barcelona after a heist, and the subject line reads reads: you are cordially invited to...
The wedding's beautiful. It's a beach wedding in Hawaii - drinks all around in sparkling glasses and the deep blue-green of the sea against the backdrop of cliffs and sailboats. It rains after the ceremony and everyone runs for cover, grabbing their shoes and heading back inside the hotel, laughing and yelling.
Eames watches the rain pitter-patter down the soil from the balcony. The reception is just starting behind him. A band is playing but Eames can't hear anything through the noise of the rain. He turns just in time to see Mal and Cobb in the middle of the room, slowdancing in their bare feet, their heads bowed and pushed together.
Eames leans against the wall, finishing his drink. He looks up when Arthur appears at his elbow, dressed down to slacks and a cardigan. In the low light of the room, Eames can barely make out anything but the definitions of his face, the slope of his nose, the darkness of his eyes.
"What are you doing here?" Arthur asks.
Watching Mal and Cobb kiss makes Eames feel like a voyeur but he does it anyway, and gets caught up in the moment. He shrugs one shoulder. "Cobb invited me." he laughs. "And I didn't have anything better to do," he continues. He could tell the truth, that he went just so he could see Arthur again, but Eames would rather sound irreverent than desperate and sad. It's been five weeks since they last saw each other in a bullet train in Tokyo. No postcards or phonecalls, nothing.
Eames sighs. He feels far too disillusioned for these old word sentiments. He cracks one eye open when the band plays another sad, slow song, something in French, suitably to Arthur's taste. He crosses his arms, looking back out to the dance floor where people are pairing up and sliding against one another.
"You're not even going to ask me to dance?" Eames asks, smirking when Arthur bristles next to him.
"Don't be ridiculous." Arthur says. "Here?" He takes a sip of his drink, wincing when it sears his throat. Arthur's face looks soft in the light even when his forehead is creased in thought. It's that moment that Eames realizes, with a vaguely tiring sense of scale, that they aren't those people, that they will never be those people, because Mal and Cobb fit the bill but certainly not the two of them.
They don't kiss. Maybe they will never kiss. Maybe they will spend their whole lives chasing after each other from continent to continent and fuck each other in hotel beds, not knowing what it feels like for their mouths to meet.
Eames can argue earnestly against the truth all he wants but he knows deep down what they aren't. He makes a vague gesture with his hand, wishing, for a second, that he had a cigarette just to have something to hold between his fingers.
"I'm bored already," he says, finally, putting down his drink.
This is, of course, a lie but Arthur doesn't call him out on it.
-
Eames constantly berates himself for these moments of weakness. They'd slept together again while on the job, after Arthur called him while he was in St. Petersburg. They happened to be in the same city so Eames thought why the hell not?
He checked into a hotel and waited, showered while he was waiting, waited some more in the bar downstairs, nursing the same drink for over an hour.
He isn't as miserable as he often pretends to be. Despite the lack of kissing, he's happy with Arthur. Maybe not happy but - accepting of certain universal truths, the gun metaphor and Arthur's tendency to turn away from him when he leans close enough to kiss.
With the kind of life he leads, Eames has no room for complications. Personal attachments are an exploitable weakness; they drag you down, quick. Look what happened to Cobb.
Often times Eames wakes up to empty beds in the mornings, nothing but the memory of the night before and remnants of Arthur's smell still lingering on the bedsheets, the heat of his skin.
Normally, Eames doesn't have a problem with this; they aren't romantically involved and he has no right to demand things from Arthur. But he sees the way Arthur gets sometimes around Cobb or Mal - less on guard, more generous with his affections - and can't help but feel that old kick of jealousy.
Eames has never seen Arthur in the morning after, and he's read somewhere before that it is the single most intimate thing in the world: it's not the sex that is embarrassingly private, but the morning that follows after the deed has been done and all the layers have been stripped away. That moment you realize your own nakednes.
One morning, Eames is surprised to find Arthur still in his bed. They are in San Fransisco where the fog rolls heavy and thick and Arthur is still asleep with the blankets coiled around his legs.
The narrowness of his shoulders is startling up close; the shape he makes under the covers makes something heavy and solid settle in the pit of Eames' stomach. He reaches out, hand outstretched, and is about to press a kiss to the slope of Arthur's back when Arthur stirs and rolls onto his back. His eyes open and he blinks slowly against the light that filters in from the street outside.
"What time is it?" he asks. His voice is hoarse, marked with the same kind of exhaustion that Eames feels as he reaches for his watch on the bedside table.
He shrugs and flicks his eyes up the ceiling. "Too early," he says vaguely, without bothering to check his watch. When Arthur throws him a confused look, he just smiles weakly and hands Arthur his watch.
"7:15." Arthur grunts and rolls onto side to grab his shoes from the floor. "Why did you let me sleep in? I'm late for my flight."
Eames laughs. "Do you want me to be honest?"
"What?" Arthur asks.
"Nothing," Eames laughs. He leans back on his elbows and watches as Arthur dresses with the same graceful efficiency with which he did everything. Arthur combs his hair with his fingers and then shrugs into his wrinkled jacket. He turns - just barely so that Eames catches his face reflected in the mirror.
"I'm going now." Arthur says. He nods, picks up his bag from the foot of the bed, and hesitates briefly.
It will be so easy, Eames thinks, to just lean across the bed and grab Arthur by the lapels of his shirt, kiss him the way sailors kissed their wives farewell. But he steels himself and collapses back on his elbows on the bed, waving flippantly when Arthur heads out the door.
"You forgot your watch!" Eames calls out after him, but Arthur has already left.
-
He winds up, through no fault of his own, at Arthur's doorstep at three in the morning, jet-lagged and unshaven. It's been half a year since Mal died, and Cobb has been in hiding ever since.
"What are you doing here?" Arthur says at the door.
Eames slept in the cab on the way over. His clothes are wrinkled from the ten hour flight and the two hour cab ride. He thought about what to say while climbing up the six flights of stairs to Arthur's apartment but then couldn't come up with anything that did not sound overblown or trite.
He's a little out of breath, and maybe even a little bit cranky. "I have a job in Mombasa," Eames says.
They stand in silence for awhile. Eames continues, so he doesn't look like the crazy man he feels he is, standing out there in the hall with bags at his feet. "It pays well." he says finally. And then: "I wanted to see you."
"Why?" Arthur says. His arms are crossed in a gesture of defense.
"Why not?" asks Eames. "You're embarrassed." He smiles wanly. "Look at you, embarrassed."
"This is embarrassing." Arthur says. "Of course I'm embarrassed. Christ. What are you doing here, Eames?"
"I want," Eames says and then stops short. He licks his bottom lip and sighs before reaching over and pulling Arthur forward by the wrist. Arthur is in the middle of protesting but Eames just ignores him and cups the back of his head, pressing their mouths together.
They don't move at first. Arthur breathes heavily, eyes wide in the dark. Eames watches the subtle shift in his expression, the ferocity of his shock receding, making room for something else. Finally, Arthur exhales a moment and moves his lips and leans in close. Eames feels the static brush of Arthur's eyelash against his cheek and Arthur's teeth digging into his bottom lip ever so faintly. The kiss doesn't last very long but it makes Eames' throat fill up with thirst.
It's everything and nothing he ever hoped it would be. It feels good, like the first time he ever loaded a gun, or stole his first car. That brief kick of adrenaline, combined with the knowledge that he'd done something perversely dangerous - except this time the feeling settles deep in the marrow of his bones, like electricity.
Arthur pulls away, his mouth parted and wet. Eames is seized with the momentary urge to hug him by the doorway and that's what he does in a fit of bravery.
It takes a second or two, but then Arthur hugs him back, his arms curled loosely around Eames' waist. They stay like that for another minute, and Eames breathes in Arthur's smell, the scent of warm skin, and a hint of his cologne in the soft folds of his neck. The smell brings Eames back to the first time they met at Cambridge and the dusty light that seeped between the bookshelves Arthur stood against ten years ago as a college freshman. It's a good memory, and even now it makes Eames smile in the dark.
Arthur's arms curve ever so slightly around the small of Eames' back. Minimal effort - but the sentiment is there. Arthur digs his nose into Eames' neck, laughing so gently it sounds like a wet little sob, but then he steps back, and his eyes are soft and his jaw is loose but in a way that makes things suddenly startlingly clear: they've been all right all along.
"So what do you really want?" Arthur asks. He steps away from the door, pushing it open.
Eames shrugs, because he wants a lot of things, and most of them are hard to articulate at this crazy hour. He sits at the kitchen table, smiling up at Arthur, resting his weight on his elbows.
"Coffee," he says with a sigh. "Please."
It's a good start as well as any.