[Heroes] The Memory of Trees (Nathan/Peter, NC-17)
Title: The Memory of Trees
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Nathan/Peter
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 5,726 (W)
Warning: You did see the pairing, didn't you? And, uh, underage.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the hot beta who loved it.
Notes: Inspired by one of S2 deleted scenes, in which Nathan mentions a treehouse Peter and he built together, wherein he "got Peter drunk first time".
You lost sight of him in some moment between the toast and the dessert.
He was sitting beside you while your father gave the usual little speech, something about how happy he was to have so many people around and the importance to celebrate the passing of time with the dearest of friends. As if the family holiday wasn’t always scheduled around his birthday just to avoid the friends and relatives of New York. As if it wasn’t your mother who organized the party every year, and your father didn’t just let her do whatever she wanted.
Before this, you remember having seen Peter pour another glass of champagne while your mother’s disapproving eyes fixed on you. You saw him smile to her, with that open, sixteen-year-old smile that in his hands is nothing but an exquisite, refined psychological weapon. His cheeks were vaguely red and his eyes were starting to lose focus - but just vaguely; you could’ve been mistaken.
“It’s for the toast, Ma,” he replied fluently at the unexpressed reproach.
Angela had the faintest hint of a smile. “Certainly.”
If he gets drunk, it’ll be your fault. You think it would be even if you’d stayed in New York. Your mother would call you tomorrow and eventually, after asking you how’s work and whether you think you’ll come for the last two days, she’d tell you just so calmly: “Yesterday your brother got drunk”. And you’d know she considers you directly responsible for any embarrassment Peter might have caused her.
You wait for her to ask you where’s your brother. You wipe the corner of your mouth and turn towards Peter’s seat, like you hadn’t noticed five minutes ago that it’s empty. Shrugging lightly, you excuse yourself from the table.
As soon as you’re out in the garden, you light a cigarette and take some minutes to enjoy the summer night. The fresh air on your face and hands reminds you that you don’t like your cologne as much as you used to anymore; it’s the time to change it. Smoking, instead, is a recent bad habit, probably destined to pass. Peter, currently in his vegan, health fanatic period, enjoys disapproving of it quite a lot, and gives you all the black looks and disgusting pseudoscientific information he can (something about the way your lungs are going to fill with blackish tar clots and explode inside your chest like two squids too full of ink). You find it relatively innocent. You have a healthy life, run five miles every morning, you stopped drinking at all when you joined the Navy. In the bad habits world list, you’re one of the most boring people you’ve ever known.
And it’s not like Peter needs to know it’s a difficult period, between the new office and the new DA and other things. Peter doesn’t need to know everything.
You lean your back against the tree, inhaling lazily. You didn’t call Susan back. You don’t think you will.
“Are you going to stay there and watch the stars for long? I’m getting bored.” Peter’s voice is almost normal, just a little slurred. You don’t look up.
“I’ve got no intention of staining these trousers.”
“Take them off.”
You inhale a bit deeper, trying to finish the cigarette quickly. In a couple of seconds Peter will start whining and put his feet down and threaten he’ll come and carry you in, or something like that.
“You’re smoking,” comments Peter’s voice above your head, vaguely accusatorial.
“No.” You press the cigarette end under your shoe. You observe the stairs for a moment, wondering if some board didn’t go rotten and won’t give way under your weight, then you remember that Peter walked on it before you. Even if Peter’s in his vegan, health fanatic period and he’s thinner than usual, with his ribs almost in sight, the stairs that bore him should bear you too. You reach the little, skew door at the summit, being careful not to touch the handrails with the cuffs of your sleeves or your knees.
The treehouse is small and surely not a masterpiece in engineering, but you and Peter were very proud of it when you finished it, after three months of work, sweat and accidental hammer blows on your fingers. Peter insisted that you tied a ribbon from a handrail to the other at the summit of the stairs and cut it together, like you were inaugurating an auditorium or a museum. Unluckily, there was no ribbon anywhere to be found in the house, so you settled for the packing tape, the large and brown one. Only after you unrolled and fixed the whole reel from one head to the other, you found out there were no scissors either. That time you tore the tape to pieces with a screwdriver, and you didn’t care even when one of the little windows slipped from its frame less than an hour later and you had no tape left to fix it. Peter insisted that you slept there that night, excited and happy like a child. You’d never known such a cold night in late August. You managed to arrange a rusty cot from the basement and buried yourself together under a mountain of blankets, close to each other and unable to sleep, between creakings, sighs and occasional coughs. Peter was twelve.
Peter’s sitting on the floor next to the table with the two chairs, and you’d be tempted to ask him why he’s not using one, if you didn’t know those are the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. The light filters gloomily in through the two closed and dusty windows, light blue and sharp from the square hole in the wall (where the third window was supposed to be, but you never attached it back). Peter’s taken off his jacket, now hanging from the backrest of a chair.
“What’s that?”
Peter lifts the bottle, blinking to read the label in the dim light.
“Ballantine.”
“How many times...”, you step closer, making the boards creak, “Peter, how many times did I tell you not to steal Dad’s scotch?”
“None.”
“Liar.”
“At least I didn’t let them catch me.”
You square your jaw at the thought Peter still remembers that time, when your father found you with your hands in his drinks closet. Peter wasn’t older than five or six, and nobody talked about that anymore in your house. But what really annoys you, deep inside you, is that Peter might’ve learned from you. You’d like your bad habits, past or present ones, to stay just yours.
“Give me that bottle.” You stretch your hand towards him. His cheeks are red and his nape’s against the wall. He studies you warily.
“Go get one for yourself.”
“You’ll never drink it all. You don’t even like it.”
“Wanna bet?”
“No. I don’t want this place to smell like puke forever.” You pull a chair from the table, sitting slowly. You’re close enough to Peter to move his hair from his face, if you just reach out. “Give it to me.”
For a moment Peter seems like he’s considering the possibility that you’ll steal the bottle and take it away to prevent him from drinking. He hands it to you slowly, with a suspicious glance.
Taking what he wants away from him is not the right way to treat Peter; giving it to him in small doses, that’s your way. You swallow a generous sip, washing away the aftertaste of the cigarette.
Peter’s got his shirt open through to the second button and his socks are dirty with soil. “How’s Susan?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’ve not heard from her since before we left.”
“Why?”
You shrug. There’s nothing wrong with her; you just think you met her in the wrong moment. Peter looks at you closely. Somehow he always seem to remember your girlfriends’ names, and a whole lot of useless details about them.
“Different priorities,” you answer, sipping. Peter seems to consider what you said very carefully. When you hand him the scotch back, his lips linger on the bottle’s mouth like something had stopped him in that position, or if he were - those thoughts again - holding your taste before washing it with the scotch.
“That was the last one, Peter,” you advise him when the bottle’s in your hand again.
“Oh, c’mon. You were my age when...”
“I could drive. And knew when to keep my mouth shut.”
“Like hell,” Peter snorts, reaching out. “C’mon, give it back.”
“What does it mean, ‘Like hell’?”
“What I said.”
You let him take the bottle. His fingers are sweaty on yours. “This is the last one, Peter.”
“So let me enjoy it, right?” He passes the tip of his tongue on the bottle’s mouth, like he were collecting an invisible tiny drop, then he suddenly inclines it and swallows fiercely twice, once after another, and ends up coughing doubled over.
“Hey, Pete. Hey. Easy on that. It’s not soda.”
You wait for the cough to pass, but it seems to last a bit longer than expected, so you stand up and crouch on your heels next to him, patting his back.
“You know what?” Peter coughs, looking up at you with his watery, reddened eyes. “They’ve always loved you more.”
“Please, Pete.”
“Don’t ‘Please, Pete’ me. Dad caught you stealing his scotch? A little slap on your hands. You know what would happen did he catch me? You want to find out?”
“He would blame me for not keeping an eye on you.”
You’re sure Peter would let Dad catch him just to watch the scene.
“Don’t.”
“What?” You take the bottle from his slackened fingers, but you don’t move your hand from his back. Peter doesn’t look really unhappy; angry, rather. But then again, Peter’s angry most of the time.
“Don’t make it your problem again. Don’t start again with the ‘you don’t know how hard it’s on me to be the older bro’ shit. You don’t know how hard it’s on me.” He passes the back of his hand under his nose, sniffing noisily. “You’ve always had it all easy.”
“Peter, you’re drunk.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“What subject? You’re wasted.”
“You’re a jerk.”
“I love you too.”
Peter looks at you straight in the eyes; a firm, absorbed stare, and for a second you’d swear, not drunk at all. It’s the Deep Thoughts stare, when Peter’s eyes look bigger and younger than ever, when something’s upsetting him and he doesn’t want to tell you. But it fades in a moment, leaving just a veil of drunkenness. Maybe you just imagined it.
Peter raises a hand with the sweaty palm and rests it on the side of your neck, slowly, stroking your jawline back and forth with his thumb. You feel the light rubbing of his fingertips against the shaven cheek, his eyes burning your face. He licks his lips.
You move his hand away. (Drunk. He’s drunk.)
“Really?”
“Really what?”
He leans his nape against the wall, closing his eyes for a couple of seconds. When he opens them again he looks a little more sober. “Sit down,” he says patting his hand on the floor at his left. He probably left a palm-shaped print in the dust cover.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not comfortable like that.”
“No, I’m fine.”
Your ankles creak, but you ignore it. The bottle’s still in your hand, half empty, and you don’t think you drank so much. You hope Peter didn’t drink all the rest. You tilt it and swallow twice again, slowly, feeling the alcohol burn your throat. Excellent scotch, really.
Peter didn’t stop staring at you the whole time.
Sighing, you take off your jacket and hang it on the chair next to Peter’s; then you sit on the floor on his side. The scotch flounders inside the bottle with a light slosh, and when Peter reaches out to take it, you hesitate.
“C’mon. I’m already drunk.”
"If you admit it, it means you're not drunk enough."
“Right. Let’s get that fixed, uh?”
He smiles at you with that smug little face that in normal times you would just ignore, but now, for some reason, you find it extremely difficult. “The last one.”
“Last one,” Peter echoes you. After drinking he dutifully gives you the bottle back and tilts his head on his side, to rest his temple on your shoulder.
For a while you content yourself with enjoying the peaceful silence inside the treehouse, broken just by Peter’s breath and yours. When you pass an arm around his shoulders, Peter shifts closer.
“What’s wrong?”
Peter’s got his eyes closed and his breath is regular, so much so that for a moment you suspect he’s fallen asleep on your shoulder. Peter can sleep anywhere, can doze off in the time normal people devote to relax the mind thinking about large open spaces and flying in the sky. You’ve seen him fallen asleep in no longer than a minute or two in your car’s passenger seat, back from a dinner together and once from school, in the middle of the afternoon. That time you surprised yourself looking at him for so long, from the slightly parted halfmoon of his lips to the hand languidly resting on his thigh, that just for a well-trained reflex you didn’t crash into the car before you. When Peter woke up with a start, bouncing back against the seat because of the seat belt, your heart was pounding so hard in your ears you feared he could hear it too, and understand.
It was the first time.
“Nothing.” His tone is low, vaguely sulky.
“Hey, I’m ruining a pair of trousers that cost me two weeks pay for you. Try me.” At some point in the middle of the sentence you think a couple of words got lost, but it doesn’t matter, Peter seems to have caught the gist. He looks up at you and hesitates, licking his lips.
“Dunno. My mouth is too dry.”
“We said the last one, Peter.”
“Next to last.”
“Peter.”
“This really is the last one. I swear, Nathan. Absolutely the last.” He stretches a languid arm over your waist, towards the bottle resting on the floor with your hand closed around the neck. His arm wavers, his fingers touch your belly, then they rest on it uncertainly, moving towards your hip. Peter breathes on your neck a heavy, alcoholic breath, impossibly hot. His lips on your throat, you probably just imagined them. “C'mon,” Peter whispers with a totally unhurried voice, his hand groping blindly in the air, his lips surrounding your ear.
You free your right arm and grab Peter's hand before it has a chance to wander further. This is unexpected. Peter curls against your hip, rubbing the tip of his nose against the little dimple behind your earlobe. This reaction wasn’t expected at all.
“Okay, Peter. The last one.” You shove the bottle in his hand, grateful for the dim light that partly hides you - grateful that Peter’s too lost to notice everything that’s passing inside you. You half close your eyes while Peter’s slippery fingers close around yours and you leave the bottle to his grip. When Peter withdraws his face from your ear, the fresh air passes on your neck and you feel like something’s suddenly missing.
Peter’s face looks annoyed, but not that much.
“It’s just...”, Peter gestures with his empty hand, his eyes fixed somewhere in the door’s direction, “ah, fuck.” He brings the bottle to his mouth, then he thinks again and puts it down without drinking. He rises on his knees, looking at you. “You never take me seriously.”
You blink, your neck still tingling and hot. Tonight you find it more difficult than usual to follow his impossible train of thoughts. “Now what’re you talking about?”
“You think I’m stupid. All of you. But I’m not. I’ve got things in my head. Many things. You’ve got no idea how many things I’ve got in my head.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” you reply, calmly.
“But you never support me. You never did.”
“I did, when you wanted to go to public school.”
“Just because it was yours.”
“The photography course?”
“Mom had already said yes.”
“The two weeks holiday in Italy?”
“I was with you. They’d let me do anything with you.”
You roll your eyes. “Okay, Peter. What do you want?”
All the boldness seem to fade quickly from his eyes, but Peter resists tenaciously under your scrutiny. He shifts back to a sitting position, with his back against the wall, and when he talks he uses a casual tone, like it was nothing important.
“There’s one thing. A Greenpeace march next week. In Washington. Against the nuclear thing. The nuclear weapons. Nuclear war. That stuff.”
You withhold a moan. “Not again, Peter.”
“There, see ?” he snaps back, pointing a finger against you. “I knew you’d say that.”
“Blocking the traffic with a ‘MAKE LOVE NOT WAR’ sign is your highest idea of heroism, isn’t it?”
Peter looks at you and frowns with a very serious expression. “Nuclear war is a serious thing, Nathan.”
“So is getting drunk before twenty-one,” you reply, shaking the scotch bottle meaningfully.
“So, are you coming with me?”
You shake your head, sipping again. “I have to work.”
“It’s on Saturday. Saturday’s your day off.”
“I don’t...”
“And since you dumped Sarah and you don’t have to take her to see Richard III anymore, you can come to Washington with me.”
How the hell does he know?, you wonder, but you’ve got some problem in connecting your thoughts in a coherent speech. The question is there, but it escapes you at the moment. “No way. No. Forget it. I’ve got better things to do than spend five hours in my car and five more waving stupid banners. And anyway,” you put the bottle on the floor, finding it strangely light, “her name’s Susan.”
For some reason Peter doesn’t insist. He crosses his arms on his chest and looks at you out of the corner of his eye, an annoyed grimace on his mouth. “Republican,” he mutters.
He let it go so quickly that you think he’s made up the march thing on the spot just to know your answer. “I may take you to Richard III. You’d learn something.”
“Fuck Richard III. You have to take me out to dinner at least. And I’m sleeping at your place. You tell Mom.”
You smile. You thread your fingers through Peter’s hair, uncovering his eyes, that are shiny and a little sulky. “You won’t make me wait an hour in the street because you have to perm your hair, will you?”
“I won’t even wash it. You happy?”
“So it’s just a one-night stand. Pity. I hoped it was something serious .”
“Depends. If the sex is good...”
It’s just a word, and a very common one too. Yet, from his lips it has a strange effect.
“If?”
“I don’t trust rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“Well.” Peter looks up to the ceiling, counting on his fingers. “Abby, Doris, Brenda, Valerie... Why do your girlfriends have all TV series-like names?”
You frown. You don’t recall a Doris. “And what do they say?”
Peter smiles. “I’ll never tell you.”
This conversation makes you uneasy. It’s a pleasant unease, a sort of tingling at your limbs and a spreading heat irradiating from your stomach, but there’s also that more and more noticeable difficulty to organize your ideas, and the contours of your field of vision blurring and shrinking to Peter’s face, while he keeps watching you. You try to kick out the bad thoughts, but you find it hard to part them from the good ones.
It’s even harder when Peter leans his cheek again on your shoulder, like before, but accompanying it with another hand that rests on your thigh a little above your knee and squeezes it lightly through the trousers’ fabric. Peter’s breath assaults your ear again and this time it’s not your imagination playing tricks on you: a series of quick pecks of his lips draw a line from the side of your neck to your throat, where your Adam’s apple gulps with an extreme effort under his mouth.
“Peter?” The hand on your thigh opens instinctively, as if scared, but then it closes again a little higher, a little more confident. The fingers caress slowly the inner seam of your trousers. “What’re you doing?”
“Mmm. Can't wait till next Saturday.” He looks up at you, a slow, secret smile on his lips. “Just taking a little advance. A little one.”
“No. Peter.” With effort, your hand moves from the floor and grabs his, blocking it. “You’re drunk.”
“You too. Tomorrow we’ll forget it all. God, I want you to touch me.” Peter’s hand slides free from your grip and squeezes your hard-on, as his smile widens and softens.
“I don’t... Peter!” You block him again, harder this time. “Are you crazy?”
“Keep it down,” Peter whispers, kissing the corner of your mouth. His lips are warm and wet and his breath smells like alcohol. “They can hear us.”
You focus for a moment on the outside rather than on Peter’s irregular breath, and what reaches you is a soft, far away chatter, that seems to stop and resume jerkily. You try to catch if there’s your mother’s or your father’s voice looking for you, but you can’t catch anything more than an indistinct buzz.
“Peter, stop it. I’m leaving.”
Peter looks at you like he didn’t hear you. When you move his hands away and get quickly to your feet, in order to turn back and leave him alone, the world starts spinning around and you have to lean against the wall while it steadies back to its proper place.
You can’t be already drunk. You haven’t drunk so much.
“Now we’ll go to bed, okay? Both of us.”
You hear him get to his feet behind you, and unexpectedly pass his arms around your waist and press his chest on your back. For a moment you fear he’ll cling onto you and you’ll fall together, but Peter’s steady on his feet. “Any time," he murmurs. He rises up on tiptoe to whisper it into your ear, and his hard-on presses against you, impossible to ignore.
You turn around too quickly, uncertain whether to slap him or tell him to go to bed, now, but you do neither. Peter tilts his head and leans his lips on yours, just brushing them, but still with that peculiar, reckless arrogance of his. When you don’t react, Peter kisses you more resolutely, parting his lips to caress and squeeze yours and cover them with random kisses from one corner to the other. His lips are softened by the alcohol, the asymmetry imperceptible against your mouth.
You take his face in your hands. It's a terrible idea, you know that. The voices outside seem to fall suddenly silent just for the two of you, just to let Peter's voice sound ridiculously high when he tells you:
“You're not mad, are you?”
His self-confidence fades a bit from his face, like he’s started to realize what he did. He grabs your hands and moves them away from his face. “Are you, Nathan?” He leans his cheek against yours, waiting for you to hug him, and when you do his smell - sweat, shampoo, some deodorant with too sweet a fragrance - penetrates your nostrils like a virus. Peter’s erection rubs against yours, which never calmed down.
“Peter,” you mutter, hoping you’re giving a calm, determined tone to your voice, but it sounds like you’re just mumbling nonsense. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m not,” Peter whispers, licking the small white scar on your jaw.
“I am. Stop it.”
“If you admit it, it means you’re not.”
Then there’s a wall against your back and Peter’s kissing you again, this time with his hands touching and creasing your shirt, with his open mouth and his teeth bumping against yours. You don’t know how, but your hand is on his nape, digging through his hair. His tongue’s in your mouth, and the voices outside are quiet, in a buzzing silence similar to a background of radio static.
“I don’t want to stop, okay? I can’t. I can’t, Nathan,” Peter whispers agitatedly, and you want to stop his hands yet you let them wander freely on your body. You close your eyes, trying to remember the ten good reasons why this is a terrible idea, but Peter kisses you again and you’re unable to go any further the first.
“I love you.”
“Shut up. Okay, Pete? Just shut up.” You rest your hand on his hip and find his bare skin under the lap of his shirt, pulled from his trousers. Peter starts unbuttoning your shirt but you stop him, his fingers already inside the fabric, on your heart.
It shouldn’t be like this - jerking each other off against a wall in his childhood’s playhouse. You should bring him to some comfortable, cosy place; undress him with every care, without haste; watch him while he moves and orgasms under you, and drink in every moment of the transition from brother to something else to brother again. He deserves it. You owe him.
But it’d require a premeditation you don’t want to have; it’d be perfect, but perfection would present you the bill right afterwards, and for the first time in your life you wouldn’t know how to pay it. So it’s better like this - this is the conclusion you reach confusedly, not fully conscious yet; you’ll think about it tomorrow - better like this, standing up in the dust, unable to undress each other, biting each other’s lips to keep silent, frightened that they could walk in on you any moment. The voices outside have been silent for a lifetime now, but how can you be sure they’re gone? Maybe they’re just waiting to catch you with your hands in your brother’s pants.
You cover Peter's mouth with your palm before pulling down the zip of his trousers.
Jail. Dad. Career. Peter reads your hesitation in your heartbeat and kisses the front of your fingers, pressing his hand on yours to push it inside his boxers. Mom. Disappointment. Shame. He lets out a trembling sigh and shifts closer to you, against your fingers and your body pinned to the wall, until his hard-on presses on your thigh and you remove your free hand from his mouth to kiss him again.
You could keep still and let him come in your hand, just rocking his hips and groin toward you. Probably it would be the same to Peter; probably he's just too drunk to notice. Instead you close your fist around his cock, just a little uncomfortable from the different angle, and stroke it slowly up and down.
Peter sighs noisily in your ear and babbles something you don’t quite get but it sounds hot and urgent like he’s already going to come. His hand falls down along your body and grabs your groin through the trousers’ fabric, rubbing it awkwardly with his palm while he tries to follow your rhythm.
“Do you like it? Tell me you do.” Peter’s voice sounds excited and pleading at the same time. “Please, Nathan, tell me you like it. Don’t try to say you don’t. Don’t try to say this isn’t happening, this is nothing, this...”
To your ears it seems like he’s shouting, and instinctively you turn his face around and kiss him to make him be quiet. Your rhythm’s become frantic below, Peter moves and moans and sighs and you watch him in the eyes while you say - very softly, so softly that for all his life he’ll wonder whether he just dreamed it - you want to fuck him. You love him and want to fuck him, because he’s your brother, because he belongs with you, because he belongs to you.
Peter comes, soiling your hand.
Suddenly it’s all very still; your mind’s still numb and doesn’t respond well, but your ears don’t buzz anymore and your sight has cleared. With some effort, you move Peter from your body and stagger towards your jacket still hanging from the chair, taking a handkerchief from the front pocket. You slowly clean your hand, rubbing your palm and fingers with too much energy, until the skin starts tingling. Tomorrow you’ll burn it. You’d burn your hand, if you could.
“Nathan?”
You don’t touch yourself. You plant your nails in the table’s surface not to do it. Peter’s somewhere behind you; you seem to hear the adrenaline rush in his veins, a colourless fluid passing and turning his tissues on like the lights around a Christmas tree.
“You said you weren’t mad.”
You close your eyes. If he touches you now, you don’t know what you could do to him. Peter touches your shoulder and you turn with a snap, pushing the world’s carousel hard again all around you. You try to push him away, but Peter's arms have already grabbed you and keep you still; he hugs your chest, as he used to when he was too short to reach your neck, and leans his chin on your shoulder as he does when he's got to ask for your forgiveness and needs to look for the right words in some place hidden from your eyes. You're still hard against his thigh.
“Go away. Please,” you try, but Peter rubs slowly his body against your erection and you can’t say anything else. He unfastens your belt and undoes your trousers, in perfect silence, and takes your cock in his hand. Your relief is immediate, and even if you don’t want to express it, you can’t hold back a low, guttural moan. You close your fingers around his, and Peter mutters something that sounds like vague triumph and kisses your lips, leaning his right hand on yours upon the table behind you.
When you come in his hand things don’t make any more sense than they did before; for a couple of seconds it seems so, it seems everything’s alright and this is the only right way between the two of you, but your euphoria fades shortly afterwards. This time you just quickly put your clothes in order and try to focus on the far, comforting goal of a fresh shower. The air in the treehouse smells like a nauseating mixture of sex and cheap perfume.
“... Nathan?”
“No. No, okay? Tomorrow.”
Peter’s still between you and the door. “You said you liked it. You said you want to fuck me.”
“For God's sake, Peter, for once, for just fucking once in your life, could you stop making things more difficult for me?” You put your jacket on and pass him by, leaning a hand on the wall and the other on the handle, but when you open the door, you realize that leaving him alone is not a good idea. He could stumble on the stairs and kill himself, or meet your mother and tell her everything you just did. He could.
“C’mon, I’ll walk with you.” You turn back and grab his arm, dragging him outside, even if you don’t need to press him. Peter lets you guide him without resistance, even if when he wavers and clings onto you on the stairs you suspect he did it on purpose.
In the garden there are still some guests enjoying the chill near the flowerbeds, but you avoid them, reaching the house from the rear entrance, the kitchen one. Peter clings with a hand onto your back, not your jacket but your shirt under it. You can feel his warmth through the fabric.
Your plan is to bring Peter to his room, be sure he won’t throw up and then excuse yourself with your parents, saying Peter’s not well and you’ll retire too not to leave him alone. The kitchen’s small and quiet and so is the bedrooms’ hallway. You ask him if he needs to throw up, but Peter shakes his head.
“Nathan...”
He lets himself fall on his back onto the bed, rolling on his side with his clothes and shoes still on. You turn back pretending you didn’t hear.
“I jerk off thinking of you.” You breathe in hard and keep walking, your stomach closed and tight like an oyster. “It’s been three months.”
How many chances are there for such a thing to happen in a normal family? Not just one son, but both of them? You can’t even blame the alcohol anymore.
“Rent some porn,” is all you manage to answer, in an acid, sharp tone that doesn’t belong to you, and you haven’t finished the sentence before you already want to take it back, tell him you’re sorry, tell him it’s just a difficult period but you’ll fix this thing together. But you can’t. You have no idea how to fix it. Your hand still smells like Peter’s come. You can wash it, but your skin’s already absorbed whatever there was to be absorbed. It’s inside you. You should turn all your cells inside out like a sock, change your blood and salts and every atom composing your body, and even like this, it wouldn’t be enough. You’d still know; you’d remember. It’s part of you, now.
The man in the bathroom’s mirror is not you, with the face dripping water and the frowning expression, with the tired and guilty look in the eyes. You comb your hair backwards with your wet hands, then dry yourself and turn off the light.
Maybe, you think before diving back into the sparkling light of the salon, before you go to bed you’ll call Susan.
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Nathan/Peter
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 5,726 (W)
Warning: You did see the pairing, didn't you? And, uh, underage.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the hot beta who loved it.
Notes: Inspired by one of S2 deleted scenes, in which Nathan mentions a treehouse Peter and he built together, wherein he "got Peter drunk first time".
You lost sight of him in some moment between the toast and the dessert.
He was sitting beside you while your father gave the usual little speech, something about how happy he was to have so many people around and the importance to celebrate the passing of time with the dearest of friends. As if the family holiday wasn’t always scheduled around his birthday just to avoid the friends and relatives of New York. As if it wasn’t your mother who organized the party every year, and your father didn’t just let her do whatever she wanted.
Before this, you remember having seen Peter pour another glass of champagne while your mother’s disapproving eyes fixed on you. You saw him smile to her, with that open, sixteen-year-old smile that in his hands is nothing but an exquisite, refined psychological weapon. His cheeks were vaguely red and his eyes were starting to lose focus - but just vaguely; you could’ve been mistaken.
“It’s for the toast, Ma,” he replied fluently at the unexpressed reproach.
Angela had the faintest hint of a smile. “Certainly.”
If he gets drunk, it’ll be your fault. You think it would be even if you’d stayed in New York. Your mother would call you tomorrow and eventually, after asking you how’s work and whether you think you’ll come for the last two days, she’d tell you just so calmly: “Yesterday your brother got drunk”. And you’d know she considers you directly responsible for any embarrassment Peter might have caused her.
You wait for her to ask you where’s your brother. You wipe the corner of your mouth and turn towards Peter’s seat, like you hadn’t noticed five minutes ago that it’s empty. Shrugging lightly, you excuse yourself from the table.
As soon as you’re out in the garden, you light a cigarette and take some minutes to enjoy the summer night. The fresh air on your face and hands reminds you that you don’t like your cologne as much as you used to anymore; it’s the time to change it. Smoking, instead, is a recent bad habit, probably destined to pass. Peter, currently in his vegan, health fanatic period, enjoys disapproving of it quite a lot, and gives you all the black looks and disgusting pseudoscientific information he can (something about the way your lungs are going to fill with blackish tar clots and explode inside your chest like two squids too full of ink). You find it relatively innocent. You have a healthy life, run five miles every morning, you stopped drinking at all when you joined the Navy. In the bad habits world list, you’re one of the most boring people you’ve ever known.
And it’s not like Peter needs to know it’s a difficult period, between the new office and the new DA and other things. Peter doesn’t need to know everything.
You lean your back against the tree, inhaling lazily. You didn’t call Susan back. You don’t think you will.
“Are you going to stay there and watch the stars for long? I’m getting bored.” Peter’s voice is almost normal, just a little slurred. You don’t look up.
“I’ve got no intention of staining these trousers.”
“Take them off.”
You inhale a bit deeper, trying to finish the cigarette quickly. In a couple of seconds Peter will start whining and put his feet down and threaten he’ll come and carry you in, or something like that.
“You’re smoking,” comments Peter’s voice above your head, vaguely accusatorial.
“No.” You press the cigarette end under your shoe. You observe the stairs for a moment, wondering if some board didn’t go rotten and won’t give way under your weight, then you remember that Peter walked on it before you. Even if Peter’s in his vegan, health fanatic period and he’s thinner than usual, with his ribs almost in sight, the stairs that bore him should bear you too. You reach the little, skew door at the summit, being careful not to touch the handrails with the cuffs of your sleeves or your knees.
The treehouse is small and surely not a masterpiece in engineering, but you and Peter were very proud of it when you finished it, after three months of work, sweat and accidental hammer blows on your fingers. Peter insisted that you tied a ribbon from a handrail to the other at the summit of the stairs and cut it together, like you were inaugurating an auditorium or a museum. Unluckily, there was no ribbon anywhere to be found in the house, so you settled for the packing tape, the large and brown one. Only after you unrolled and fixed the whole reel from one head to the other, you found out there were no scissors either. That time you tore the tape to pieces with a screwdriver, and you didn’t care even when one of the little windows slipped from its frame less than an hour later and you had no tape left to fix it. Peter insisted that you slept there that night, excited and happy like a child. You’d never known such a cold night in late August. You managed to arrange a rusty cot from the basement and buried yourself together under a mountain of blankets, close to each other and unable to sleep, between creakings, sighs and occasional coughs. Peter was twelve.
Peter’s sitting on the floor next to the table with the two chairs, and you’d be tempted to ask him why he’s not using one, if you didn’t know those are the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. The light filters gloomily in through the two closed and dusty windows, light blue and sharp from the square hole in the wall (where the third window was supposed to be, but you never attached it back). Peter’s taken off his jacket, now hanging from the backrest of a chair.
“What’s that?”
Peter lifts the bottle, blinking to read the label in the dim light.
“Ballantine.”
“How many times...”, you step closer, making the boards creak, “Peter, how many times did I tell you not to steal Dad’s scotch?”
“None.”
“Liar.”
“At least I didn’t let them catch me.”
You square your jaw at the thought Peter still remembers that time, when your father found you with your hands in his drinks closet. Peter wasn’t older than five or six, and nobody talked about that anymore in your house. But what really annoys you, deep inside you, is that Peter might’ve learned from you. You’d like your bad habits, past or present ones, to stay just yours.
“Give me that bottle.” You stretch your hand towards him. His cheeks are red and his nape’s against the wall. He studies you warily.
“Go get one for yourself.”
“You’ll never drink it all. You don’t even like it.”
“Wanna bet?”
“No. I don’t want this place to smell like puke forever.” You pull a chair from the table, sitting slowly. You’re close enough to Peter to move his hair from his face, if you just reach out. “Give it to me.”
For a moment Peter seems like he’s considering the possibility that you’ll steal the bottle and take it away to prevent him from drinking. He hands it to you slowly, with a suspicious glance.
Taking what he wants away from him is not the right way to treat Peter; giving it to him in small doses, that’s your way. You swallow a generous sip, washing away the aftertaste of the cigarette.
Peter’s got his shirt open through to the second button and his socks are dirty with soil. “How’s Susan?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’ve not heard from her since before we left.”
“Why?”
You shrug. There’s nothing wrong with her; you just think you met her in the wrong moment. Peter looks at you closely. Somehow he always seem to remember your girlfriends’ names, and a whole lot of useless details about them.
“Different priorities,” you answer, sipping. Peter seems to consider what you said very carefully. When you hand him the scotch back, his lips linger on the bottle’s mouth like something had stopped him in that position, or if he were - those thoughts again - holding your taste before washing it with the scotch.
“That was the last one, Peter,” you advise him when the bottle’s in your hand again.
“Oh, c’mon. You were my age when...”
“I could drive. And knew when to keep my mouth shut.”
“Like hell,” Peter snorts, reaching out. “C’mon, give it back.”
“What does it mean, ‘Like hell’?”
“What I said.”
You let him take the bottle. His fingers are sweaty on yours. “This is the last one, Peter.”
“So let me enjoy it, right?” He passes the tip of his tongue on the bottle’s mouth, like he were collecting an invisible tiny drop, then he suddenly inclines it and swallows fiercely twice, once after another, and ends up coughing doubled over.
“Hey, Pete. Hey. Easy on that. It’s not soda.”
You wait for the cough to pass, but it seems to last a bit longer than expected, so you stand up and crouch on your heels next to him, patting his back.
“You know what?” Peter coughs, looking up at you with his watery, reddened eyes. “They’ve always loved you more.”
“Please, Pete.”
“Don’t ‘Please, Pete’ me. Dad caught you stealing his scotch? A little slap on your hands. You know what would happen did he catch me? You want to find out?”
“He would blame me for not keeping an eye on you.”
You’re sure Peter would let Dad catch him just to watch the scene.
“Don’t.”
“What?” You take the bottle from his slackened fingers, but you don’t move your hand from his back. Peter doesn’t look really unhappy; angry, rather. But then again, Peter’s angry most of the time.
“Don’t make it your problem again. Don’t start again with the ‘you don’t know how hard it’s on me to be the older bro’ shit. You don’t know how hard it’s on me.” He passes the back of his hand under his nose, sniffing noisily. “You’ve always had it all easy.”
“Peter, you’re drunk.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“What subject? You’re wasted.”
“You’re a jerk.”
“I love you too.”
Peter looks at you straight in the eyes; a firm, absorbed stare, and for a second you’d swear, not drunk at all. It’s the Deep Thoughts stare, when Peter’s eyes look bigger and younger than ever, when something’s upsetting him and he doesn’t want to tell you. But it fades in a moment, leaving just a veil of drunkenness. Maybe you just imagined it.
Peter raises a hand with the sweaty palm and rests it on the side of your neck, slowly, stroking your jawline back and forth with his thumb. You feel the light rubbing of his fingertips against the shaven cheek, his eyes burning your face. He licks his lips.
You move his hand away. (Drunk. He’s drunk.)
“Really?”
“Really what?”
He leans his nape against the wall, closing his eyes for a couple of seconds. When he opens them again he looks a little more sober. “Sit down,” he says patting his hand on the floor at his left. He probably left a palm-shaped print in the dust cover.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not comfortable like that.”
“No, I’m fine.”
Your ankles creak, but you ignore it. The bottle’s still in your hand, half empty, and you don’t think you drank so much. You hope Peter didn’t drink all the rest. You tilt it and swallow twice again, slowly, feeling the alcohol burn your throat. Excellent scotch, really.
Peter didn’t stop staring at you the whole time.
Sighing, you take off your jacket and hang it on the chair next to Peter’s; then you sit on the floor on his side. The scotch flounders inside the bottle with a light slosh, and when Peter reaches out to take it, you hesitate.
“C’mon. I’m already drunk.”
"If you admit it, it means you're not drunk enough."
“Right. Let’s get that fixed, uh?”
He smiles at you with that smug little face that in normal times you would just ignore, but now, for some reason, you find it extremely difficult. “The last one.”
“Last one,” Peter echoes you. After drinking he dutifully gives you the bottle back and tilts his head on his side, to rest his temple on your shoulder.
For a while you content yourself with enjoying the peaceful silence inside the treehouse, broken just by Peter’s breath and yours. When you pass an arm around his shoulders, Peter shifts closer.
“What’s wrong?”
Peter’s got his eyes closed and his breath is regular, so much so that for a moment you suspect he’s fallen asleep on your shoulder. Peter can sleep anywhere, can doze off in the time normal people devote to relax the mind thinking about large open spaces and flying in the sky. You’ve seen him fallen asleep in no longer than a minute or two in your car’s passenger seat, back from a dinner together and once from school, in the middle of the afternoon. That time you surprised yourself looking at him for so long, from the slightly parted halfmoon of his lips to the hand languidly resting on his thigh, that just for a well-trained reflex you didn’t crash into the car before you. When Peter woke up with a start, bouncing back against the seat because of the seat belt, your heart was pounding so hard in your ears you feared he could hear it too, and understand.
It was the first time.
“Nothing.” His tone is low, vaguely sulky.
“Hey, I’m ruining a pair of trousers that cost me two weeks pay for you. Try me.” At some point in the middle of the sentence you think a couple of words got lost, but it doesn’t matter, Peter seems to have caught the gist. He looks up at you and hesitates, licking his lips.
“Dunno. My mouth is too dry.”
“We said the last one, Peter.”
“Next to last.”
“Peter.”
“This really is the last one. I swear, Nathan. Absolutely the last.” He stretches a languid arm over your waist, towards the bottle resting on the floor with your hand closed around the neck. His arm wavers, his fingers touch your belly, then they rest on it uncertainly, moving towards your hip. Peter breathes on your neck a heavy, alcoholic breath, impossibly hot. His lips on your throat, you probably just imagined them. “C'mon,” Peter whispers with a totally unhurried voice, his hand groping blindly in the air, his lips surrounding your ear.
You free your right arm and grab Peter's hand before it has a chance to wander further. This is unexpected. Peter curls against your hip, rubbing the tip of his nose against the little dimple behind your earlobe. This reaction wasn’t expected at all.
“Okay, Peter. The last one.” You shove the bottle in his hand, grateful for the dim light that partly hides you - grateful that Peter’s too lost to notice everything that’s passing inside you. You half close your eyes while Peter’s slippery fingers close around yours and you leave the bottle to his grip. When Peter withdraws his face from your ear, the fresh air passes on your neck and you feel like something’s suddenly missing.
Peter’s face looks annoyed, but not that much.
“It’s just...”, Peter gestures with his empty hand, his eyes fixed somewhere in the door’s direction, “ah, fuck.” He brings the bottle to his mouth, then he thinks again and puts it down without drinking. He rises on his knees, looking at you. “You never take me seriously.”
You blink, your neck still tingling and hot. Tonight you find it more difficult than usual to follow his impossible train of thoughts. “Now what’re you talking about?”
“You think I’m stupid. All of you. But I’m not. I’ve got things in my head. Many things. You’ve got no idea how many things I’ve got in my head.”
“I don’t think you’re stupid,” you reply, calmly.
“But you never support me. You never did.”
“I did, when you wanted to go to public school.”
“Just because it was yours.”
“The photography course?”
“Mom had already said yes.”
“The two weeks holiday in Italy?”
“I was with you. They’d let me do anything with you.”
You roll your eyes. “Okay, Peter. What do you want?”
All the boldness seem to fade quickly from his eyes, but Peter resists tenaciously under your scrutiny. He shifts back to a sitting position, with his back against the wall, and when he talks he uses a casual tone, like it was nothing important.
“There’s one thing. A Greenpeace march next week. In Washington. Against the nuclear thing. The nuclear weapons. Nuclear war. That stuff.”
You withhold a moan. “Not again, Peter.”
“There, see ?” he snaps back, pointing a finger against you. “I knew you’d say that.”
“Blocking the traffic with a ‘MAKE LOVE NOT WAR’ sign is your highest idea of heroism, isn’t it?”
Peter looks at you and frowns with a very serious expression. “Nuclear war is a serious thing, Nathan.”
“So is getting drunk before twenty-one,” you reply, shaking the scotch bottle meaningfully.
“So, are you coming with me?”
You shake your head, sipping again. “I have to work.”
“It’s on Saturday. Saturday’s your day off.”
“I don’t...”
“And since you dumped Sarah and you don’t have to take her to see Richard III anymore, you can come to Washington with me.”
How the hell does he know?, you wonder, but you’ve got some problem in connecting your thoughts in a coherent speech. The question is there, but it escapes you at the moment. “No way. No. Forget it. I’ve got better things to do than spend five hours in my car and five more waving stupid banners. And anyway,” you put the bottle on the floor, finding it strangely light, “her name’s Susan.”
For some reason Peter doesn’t insist. He crosses his arms on his chest and looks at you out of the corner of his eye, an annoyed grimace on his mouth. “Republican,” he mutters.
He let it go so quickly that you think he’s made up the march thing on the spot just to know your answer. “I may take you to Richard III. You’d learn something.”
“Fuck Richard III. You have to take me out to dinner at least. And I’m sleeping at your place. You tell Mom.”
You smile. You thread your fingers through Peter’s hair, uncovering his eyes, that are shiny and a little sulky. “You won’t make me wait an hour in the street because you have to perm your hair, will you?”
“I won’t even wash it. You happy?”
“So it’s just a one-night stand. Pity. I hoped it was something serious .”
“Depends. If the sex is good...”
It’s just a word, and a very common one too. Yet, from his lips it has a strange effect.
“If?”
“I don’t trust rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“Well.” Peter looks up to the ceiling, counting on his fingers. “Abby, Doris, Brenda, Valerie... Why do your girlfriends have all TV series-like names?”
You frown. You don’t recall a Doris. “And what do they say?”
Peter smiles. “I’ll never tell you.”
This conversation makes you uneasy. It’s a pleasant unease, a sort of tingling at your limbs and a spreading heat irradiating from your stomach, but there’s also that more and more noticeable difficulty to organize your ideas, and the contours of your field of vision blurring and shrinking to Peter’s face, while he keeps watching you. You try to kick out the bad thoughts, but you find it hard to part them from the good ones.
It’s even harder when Peter leans his cheek again on your shoulder, like before, but accompanying it with another hand that rests on your thigh a little above your knee and squeezes it lightly through the trousers’ fabric. Peter’s breath assaults your ear again and this time it’s not your imagination playing tricks on you: a series of quick pecks of his lips draw a line from the side of your neck to your throat, where your Adam’s apple gulps with an extreme effort under his mouth.
“Peter?” The hand on your thigh opens instinctively, as if scared, but then it closes again a little higher, a little more confident. The fingers caress slowly the inner seam of your trousers. “What’re you doing?”
“Mmm. Can't wait till next Saturday.” He looks up at you, a slow, secret smile on his lips. “Just taking a little advance. A little one.”
“No. Peter.” With effort, your hand moves from the floor and grabs his, blocking it. “You’re drunk.”
“You too. Tomorrow we’ll forget it all. God, I want you to touch me.” Peter’s hand slides free from your grip and squeezes your hard-on, as his smile widens and softens.
“I don’t... Peter!” You block him again, harder this time. “Are you crazy?”
“Keep it down,” Peter whispers, kissing the corner of your mouth. His lips are warm and wet and his breath smells like alcohol. “They can hear us.”
You focus for a moment on the outside rather than on Peter’s irregular breath, and what reaches you is a soft, far away chatter, that seems to stop and resume jerkily. You try to catch if there’s your mother’s or your father’s voice looking for you, but you can’t catch anything more than an indistinct buzz.
“Peter, stop it. I’m leaving.”
Peter looks at you like he didn’t hear you. When you move his hands away and get quickly to your feet, in order to turn back and leave him alone, the world starts spinning around and you have to lean against the wall while it steadies back to its proper place.
You can’t be already drunk. You haven’t drunk so much.
“Now we’ll go to bed, okay? Both of us.”
You hear him get to his feet behind you, and unexpectedly pass his arms around your waist and press his chest on your back. For a moment you fear he’ll cling onto you and you’ll fall together, but Peter’s steady on his feet. “Any time," he murmurs. He rises up on tiptoe to whisper it into your ear, and his hard-on presses against you, impossible to ignore.
You turn around too quickly, uncertain whether to slap him or tell him to go to bed, now, but you do neither. Peter tilts his head and leans his lips on yours, just brushing them, but still with that peculiar, reckless arrogance of his. When you don’t react, Peter kisses you more resolutely, parting his lips to caress and squeeze yours and cover them with random kisses from one corner to the other. His lips are softened by the alcohol, the asymmetry imperceptible against your mouth.
You take his face in your hands. It's a terrible idea, you know that. The voices outside seem to fall suddenly silent just for the two of you, just to let Peter's voice sound ridiculously high when he tells you:
“You're not mad, are you?”
His self-confidence fades a bit from his face, like he’s started to realize what he did. He grabs your hands and moves them away from his face. “Are you, Nathan?” He leans his cheek against yours, waiting for you to hug him, and when you do his smell - sweat, shampoo, some deodorant with too sweet a fragrance - penetrates your nostrils like a virus. Peter’s erection rubs against yours, which never calmed down.
“Peter,” you mutter, hoping you’re giving a calm, determined tone to your voice, but it sounds like you’re just mumbling nonsense. “You’re drunk.”
“I’m not,” Peter whispers, licking the small white scar on your jaw.
“I am. Stop it.”
“If you admit it, it means you’re not.”
Then there’s a wall against your back and Peter’s kissing you again, this time with his hands touching and creasing your shirt, with his open mouth and his teeth bumping against yours. You don’t know how, but your hand is on his nape, digging through his hair. His tongue’s in your mouth, and the voices outside are quiet, in a buzzing silence similar to a background of radio static.
“I don’t want to stop, okay? I can’t. I can’t, Nathan,” Peter whispers agitatedly, and you want to stop his hands yet you let them wander freely on your body. You close your eyes, trying to remember the ten good reasons why this is a terrible idea, but Peter kisses you again and you’re unable to go any further the first.
“I love you.”
“Shut up. Okay, Pete? Just shut up.” You rest your hand on his hip and find his bare skin under the lap of his shirt, pulled from his trousers. Peter starts unbuttoning your shirt but you stop him, his fingers already inside the fabric, on your heart.
It shouldn’t be like this - jerking each other off against a wall in his childhood’s playhouse. You should bring him to some comfortable, cosy place; undress him with every care, without haste; watch him while he moves and orgasms under you, and drink in every moment of the transition from brother to something else to brother again. He deserves it. You owe him.
But it’d require a premeditation you don’t want to have; it’d be perfect, but perfection would present you the bill right afterwards, and for the first time in your life you wouldn’t know how to pay it. So it’s better like this - this is the conclusion you reach confusedly, not fully conscious yet; you’ll think about it tomorrow - better like this, standing up in the dust, unable to undress each other, biting each other’s lips to keep silent, frightened that they could walk in on you any moment. The voices outside have been silent for a lifetime now, but how can you be sure they’re gone? Maybe they’re just waiting to catch you with your hands in your brother’s pants.
You cover Peter's mouth with your palm before pulling down the zip of his trousers.
Jail. Dad. Career. Peter reads your hesitation in your heartbeat and kisses the front of your fingers, pressing his hand on yours to push it inside his boxers. Mom. Disappointment. Shame. He lets out a trembling sigh and shifts closer to you, against your fingers and your body pinned to the wall, until his hard-on presses on your thigh and you remove your free hand from his mouth to kiss him again.
You could keep still and let him come in your hand, just rocking his hips and groin toward you. Probably it would be the same to Peter; probably he's just too drunk to notice. Instead you close your fist around his cock, just a little uncomfortable from the different angle, and stroke it slowly up and down.
Peter sighs noisily in your ear and babbles something you don’t quite get but it sounds hot and urgent like he’s already going to come. His hand falls down along your body and grabs your groin through the trousers’ fabric, rubbing it awkwardly with his palm while he tries to follow your rhythm.
“Do you like it? Tell me you do.” Peter’s voice sounds excited and pleading at the same time. “Please, Nathan, tell me you like it. Don’t try to say you don’t. Don’t try to say this isn’t happening, this is nothing, this...”
To your ears it seems like he’s shouting, and instinctively you turn his face around and kiss him to make him be quiet. Your rhythm’s become frantic below, Peter moves and moans and sighs and you watch him in the eyes while you say - very softly, so softly that for all his life he’ll wonder whether he just dreamed it - you want to fuck him. You love him and want to fuck him, because he’s your brother, because he belongs with you, because he belongs to you.
Peter comes, soiling your hand.
Suddenly it’s all very still; your mind’s still numb and doesn’t respond well, but your ears don’t buzz anymore and your sight has cleared. With some effort, you move Peter from your body and stagger towards your jacket still hanging from the chair, taking a handkerchief from the front pocket. You slowly clean your hand, rubbing your palm and fingers with too much energy, until the skin starts tingling. Tomorrow you’ll burn it. You’d burn your hand, if you could.
“Nathan?”
You don’t touch yourself. You plant your nails in the table’s surface not to do it. Peter’s somewhere behind you; you seem to hear the adrenaline rush in his veins, a colourless fluid passing and turning his tissues on like the lights around a Christmas tree.
“You said you weren’t mad.”
You close your eyes. If he touches you now, you don’t know what you could do to him. Peter touches your shoulder and you turn with a snap, pushing the world’s carousel hard again all around you. You try to push him away, but Peter's arms have already grabbed you and keep you still; he hugs your chest, as he used to when he was too short to reach your neck, and leans his chin on your shoulder as he does when he's got to ask for your forgiveness and needs to look for the right words in some place hidden from your eyes. You're still hard against his thigh.
“Go away. Please,” you try, but Peter rubs slowly his body against your erection and you can’t say anything else. He unfastens your belt and undoes your trousers, in perfect silence, and takes your cock in his hand. Your relief is immediate, and even if you don’t want to express it, you can’t hold back a low, guttural moan. You close your fingers around his, and Peter mutters something that sounds like vague triumph and kisses your lips, leaning his right hand on yours upon the table behind you.
When you come in his hand things don’t make any more sense than they did before; for a couple of seconds it seems so, it seems everything’s alright and this is the only right way between the two of you, but your euphoria fades shortly afterwards. This time you just quickly put your clothes in order and try to focus on the far, comforting goal of a fresh shower. The air in the treehouse smells like a nauseating mixture of sex and cheap perfume.
“... Nathan?”
“No. No, okay? Tomorrow.”
Peter’s still between you and the door. “You said you liked it. You said you want to fuck me.”
“For God's sake, Peter, for once, for just fucking once in your life, could you stop making things more difficult for me?” You put your jacket on and pass him by, leaning a hand on the wall and the other on the handle, but when you open the door, you realize that leaving him alone is not a good idea. He could stumble on the stairs and kill himself, or meet your mother and tell her everything you just did. He could.
“C’mon, I’ll walk with you.” You turn back and grab his arm, dragging him outside, even if you don’t need to press him. Peter lets you guide him without resistance, even if when he wavers and clings onto you on the stairs you suspect he did it on purpose.
In the garden there are still some guests enjoying the chill near the flowerbeds, but you avoid them, reaching the house from the rear entrance, the kitchen one. Peter clings with a hand onto your back, not your jacket but your shirt under it. You can feel his warmth through the fabric.
Your plan is to bring Peter to his room, be sure he won’t throw up and then excuse yourself with your parents, saying Peter’s not well and you’ll retire too not to leave him alone. The kitchen’s small and quiet and so is the bedrooms’ hallway. You ask him if he needs to throw up, but Peter shakes his head.
“Nathan...”
He lets himself fall on his back onto the bed, rolling on his side with his clothes and shoes still on. You turn back pretending you didn’t hear.
“I jerk off thinking of you.” You breathe in hard and keep walking, your stomach closed and tight like an oyster. “It’s been three months.”
How many chances are there for such a thing to happen in a normal family? Not just one son, but both of them? You can’t even blame the alcohol anymore.
“Rent some porn,” is all you manage to answer, in an acid, sharp tone that doesn’t belong to you, and you haven’t finished the sentence before you already want to take it back, tell him you’re sorry, tell him it’s just a difficult period but you’ll fix this thing together. But you can’t. You have no idea how to fix it. Your hand still smells like Peter’s come. You can wash it, but your skin’s already absorbed whatever there was to be absorbed. It’s inside you. You should turn all your cells inside out like a sock, change your blood and salts and every atom composing your body, and even like this, it wouldn’t be enough. You’d still know; you’d remember. It’s part of you, now.
The man in the bathroom’s mirror is not you, with the face dripping water and the frowning expression, with the tired and guilty look in the eyes. You comb your hair backwards with your wet hands, then dry yourself and turn off the light.
Maybe, you think before diving back into the sparkling light of the salon, before you go to bed you’ll call Susan.