Fic: Life Drawing 7/? PG-13 J2
model!verse
PG-13
Summary: The morning after the night before.
The movie ends and Jared grins. It’s cheesy in some ways, full of plot holes and procedural errors, but the theme of brotherhood, of “us against the world,” is so intense it always gives him a rush. He turns, to see what Jensen thought, and his grin goes sideways, rueful and tender.
Jensen is out cold, man. His glasses are in his hand, fingers so loose he’s about to drop them on the floor. His eyes are closed, his beautiful lips just slightly parted.
Jensen's asleep on Jared’s narrow bed, and nothing Jared has ever seen has looked so right.
He should wake Jensen up, he’s pretty sure, but he has no idea how. He wants to sit and draw him until morning, but he doesn’t have permission and it seems like a huge violation of trust.
He watches Jensen sleep until the credits are almost over. He doesn’t want it to be suddenly quiet in the room so he gets a soft-sounding CD started on repeat to pick up where the movie lets off, and Jensen doesn’t stir.
He doesn’t want Jensen to go, and as much as he might want to, he can’t join him on the bed. In the end, he goes down the hall, gets some spare bedding out of the closet and makes himself a pallet on the floor.
He feels like he’s eight again, sleepovers and popcorn and staying up late. He’d forgotten how freakin’ hard the floor is though, and how useless the folded quilt is to make it softer. He’s dozing instead of sleeping when he hears the faint sound of his mother’s alarm going off, and it’s been a while since they got up early to make breakfast, just the two of them.
He gets up and Jensen doesn’t move. Sadie looks up from where she’s snuggled up against his back, tail thumping, but she seems happy where she is, and Jared shuts the door behind himself.
He’s got the pancake batter mixed up and the skillet hot by the time his mom finishes her shower and comes downstairs.
“You’re up early, JT,” she says, touching his shoulder on her way to the coffee maker. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” says Jared, pouring the batter, “Yeah, everything’s great.” If he hadn’t wanted to have this conversation, he shouldn’t have come downstairs at all. “Just, you know, I was gonna wake Jensen up if I didn’t stop fidgeting so I thought I’d do something productive with my time.”
His mom glances up at the ceiling like she has mom-vision and can see through the floor of his room and yeah, the thought of his mom watching through the walls isn’t going to fade very soon.
“Jensen stayed in your room.” She doesn’t really make it a question. “With you.”
“Yeah,” Jared says, “Well not really. I mean I was there. And he was there. And he fell asleep and I slept on the floor. It wasn’t like that. We weren’t--you know. We weren’t doing anything dirty.”
He flips the pancake too early and it breaks in half over his spatula.
“Jared,” his mom says, so supportive it’s silly, “I’ll tell you the same thing we told your brother when he started bringing girls home. Well. If he’d been in college at the time and bringing home boys.”
Jared pokes the pancake, willing it to burst into flame or something to end this conversation.
“It’s okay for Jensen to stay overnight,” Sharon says, “It’s okay, if you like each other and respect each other and are safe about it, for you to have sex. Just make sure the door’s locked and the stereo is up and nobody else has to hear it.”
Oh, God, forget the pancake; Jared thinks his face is about to spontaneously combust. Jensen and sex and his bedroom door are just not appropriate conversation topics for the kitchen. Not.
“Mom,” he whines, “We didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” she says, “I just want you to know that it’s okay if you do, that it’s not wrong or dirty.”
Jared dishes up the pancake and sprays oil on the pan for the next. He tries not to be grumpy with his mother. “We just--we’re not there yet. I don’t even know if Jensen thinks like that, you know? If he’s--interested.”
“There’s nothing wrong with slow,” his mother reminds him, and then she’s off retelling the story of how her and Gerry met and all Jared has to do is cook and listen.
------
Jensen knows, before he even opens his eyes, that he’s not home. The sound of the air-conditioner is wrong, the smell of the pillow under his head is not his smell, the bed under him isn’t the dorm-mattress he’s used to. He blinks awake, still disoriented by some dream he can’t make sense of. The sketch-book wallpaper of Jared’s room reminds him where he is, and it takes him a few seconds to process that the light shining through the window is the sun and that means it’s morning and crap, he’s so screwed.
He doesn’t-- he can’t even begin to figure out what he should be doing. This is so new it’s alien to him. What the hell was Jared thinking? Why would he let this happen? There are blankets on the floor, and Jensen feels sick at the idea of Jared sleeping on the floor instead of kicking Jensen out.
It doesn’t make sense, and Jensen can feel the first shivers of a monumental freak-out starting. He forces himself to take a steady breath and then another. He needs sense. He needs something solid.
There’s a phone on the nightstand. He hasn’t asked, and it’s not his phone, but he picks it up anyway. He listens for a second to the dial tone, and then he dials Garrett’s number.
It’s early, but Garrett’s “Hello?” sounds wide awake when he picks up.
“Hey,” Jensen says, feeling stupid and incompetent. “Um. Morning.”
“Jen?” Garrett’s voice shifts, becomes more tense. “Where the hell are you? You didn’t come home.”
Jensen's stomach twists around again. “I’m--Jared’s place. I--there was a movie. I fell asleep.”
It’s quiet for a moment, and Jensen can hear Garrett taking a deep breath. “But you’re okay? He didn’t--you’re okay?”
Jensen swallows. His clothes are all still on. He doesn’t feel different. He doesn’t feel hurt. “I’m okay,” he says.
“Did ya have fun?” Garrett asks, that little hopeful smile in his voice.
The wave of panic starts to recede. He’s okay. This isn’t bad. This is Jared’s room, and nothing bad is going to happen here.
“I had fun,” Jensen whispers, feeling somehow guilty about it. “We went to Sonic and the park, and then we came back here to watch a movie.” Jensen had near-perfect scores on the verbal portion of the SATs, and talking about this reduces him to the vocabulary of a fifth-grader. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into the phone, “For--you know. Not coming home.”
Garrett makes a little laugh-noise. “You’re an adult, Jensen. If you want to sleep over at your new boyfriend’s house, you’re allowed.”
Jensen can feel the flush rising in his cheeks at the very thought.
“Need a ride or anything?” Garrett asks, and Jensen shakes his head.
“No,” he says, belatedly, “I don’t think so. I’ll call you in half an hour if I do?”
“Sure,” says Garrett. “Jen--be careful, okay?”
“I will,” says Jensen, he’s just not sure how to do so.
Jensen hangs up the phone and makes the bed. Sadie mills around the room, and when he sits down again, unsure what to do next, what’s the normal thing to do next, she goes to the door and paws at it, whining these pitiful little whimpers. He can’t let the dog be sad, so he opens it for her. Then it seems wrong to just let her wander the house with nobody else aware that she’s loose, so he pulls his hoodie up around his face and follows her down the stairs.
Sadie follows her nose to the kitchen and Jensen follows Sadie. Jared’s standing at the sink in a loose t-shirt and soft cotton sleep-pants and Jensen feels a shiver go through him, a want, a hunger that he’s never faced before. He opens his mouth to say something, to let Jared know he’s there, but the dog beats him to it, nudging Jared’s leg with her nose.
Jared turned, dish soap on his hands and a wet streak across his left cheek. He sees Jensen and he smiles. It cuts Jensen like the sweetest knife, like something too beautiful to be real. It takes his breath, and Jensen chews on his lower lip and swallows hard before he can manage to draw air. His voice is hoarse, unlike his own at all as he manages a one-word greeting.
“Hey yourself,” says Jared back. He looks sleepy, Jensen thinks. He still can’t believe the other man slept on the floor instead of his own bed.
“I--“ Jensen starts, “I--do I need to get a ride back to campus?”
“Nah,” says Jared, “I’ll take you back. You have to go now, or you want breakfast first?”
Jensen's gut clenches with indecision as he tries to decide which is best: to insult Jared’s hospitality if he means the offer, or be an inconvenience if Jared is just asking out of politeness. The skillet is in the dish drainer, like everyone else has already eaten, and he feels guilty that Jared would offer to re-dirty it just for him.
The lingering scent of pancakes and bacon settle Jensen's problem for him; his stomach rumbles and Jared grins and Jensen's sure Jared wants him to say yes.
“Can I help?” he asks, still trying to feel his way through the maze of options. Garrett’s mom always appreciated it when he’d offer, so it feels like the right thing to say. “I’m not good at the cooking part, but I can finish the dishes for you.”
Jared smiles again and shrugs. “If you want to. You could sit back and enjoy being a guest, y’know.”
Jensen slides his sleeves up his forearms, pushes the hood back from his face. He steps forward and Jared surrenders the spot in front of the sink. “I don’t--I don’t have a kitchen,” he tries to explain, “So there’ll never be a time when you can be my guest like this, so it’s not fair.”
Jared reaches around him to grab the pan and bowl out of the rack. He’s quiet for a while as he mixes up another batch of batter and fries a few strips of bacon. “Sometimes things don’t have to be fair,” he offers at last, “Sometimes it’s okay to let somebody be nice, just ‘cause they feel like it.”
Jensen worries at his lip with his teeth and mulls the thought over. He wants, for probably the second time in his life, to be the person that someone wants to keep around. He thinks it wouldn’t be so hard, if Jared wanted stuff from him, if he wanted presents or work or free modeling or even--even sex. He could give it, or decide the cost’s too high. To just sit, to let Jared do for him, he’s not sure how that would work.
He rinses a glass under clean water, holds it up to check for orange juice pulp. “Maybe next time,” he says without looking at Jared, way after Jared’s probably given up on Jensen answering at all.
A fresh pour of pancake batter sizzles in the remnants of bacon grease, and then Jared pauses, spatula in hand. Jensen dares a glance out of the corner of his eye and Jared’s grinning.
“So you’re saying there’ll be a next time.”
Jensen's lips twist and twitch with the effort of not smiling back. He scrubs a fork with a fury it doesn’t deserve.
“I--Just--I never said that,” he sputters.
Jared laughs, but it’s the good kind, not cruel or mocking. “So. This next time that might not happen. You like omelettes?”
Jensen stares down at his soapy hands and surrenders to the feeling that maybe he can have this, maybe this will work. Not that he can bring himself to risk it all by defining what ‘this’ is, exactly.
“Yeah,” he breathes. The smile slips from his control, spreading across his lips all on its own. “I might even not wash the dishes afterwards.”
PG-13
Summary: The morning after the night before.
The movie ends and Jared grins. It’s cheesy in some ways, full of plot holes and procedural errors, but the theme of brotherhood, of “us against the world,” is so intense it always gives him a rush. He turns, to see what Jensen thought, and his grin goes sideways, rueful and tender.
Jensen is out cold, man. His glasses are in his hand, fingers so loose he’s about to drop them on the floor. His eyes are closed, his beautiful lips just slightly parted.
Jensen's asleep on Jared’s narrow bed, and nothing Jared has ever seen has looked so right.
He should wake Jensen up, he’s pretty sure, but he has no idea how. He wants to sit and draw him until morning, but he doesn’t have permission and it seems like a huge violation of trust.
He watches Jensen sleep until the credits are almost over. He doesn’t want it to be suddenly quiet in the room so he gets a soft-sounding CD started on repeat to pick up where the movie lets off, and Jensen doesn’t stir.
He doesn’t want Jensen to go, and as much as he might want to, he can’t join him on the bed. In the end, he goes down the hall, gets some spare bedding out of the closet and makes himself a pallet on the floor.
He feels like he’s eight again, sleepovers and popcorn and staying up late. He’d forgotten how freakin’ hard the floor is though, and how useless the folded quilt is to make it softer. He’s dozing instead of sleeping when he hears the faint sound of his mother’s alarm going off, and it’s been a while since they got up early to make breakfast, just the two of them.
He gets up and Jensen doesn’t move. Sadie looks up from where she’s snuggled up against his back, tail thumping, but she seems happy where she is, and Jared shuts the door behind himself.
He’s got the pancake batter mixed up and the skillet hot by the time his mom finishes her shower and comes downstairs.
“You’re up early, JT,” she says, touching his shoulder on her way to the coffee maker. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” says Jared, pouring the batter, “Yeah, everything’s great.” If he hadn’t wanted to have this conversation, he shouldn’t have come downstairs at all. “Just, you know, I was gonna wake Jensen up if I didn’t stop fidgeting so I thought I’d do something productive with my time.”
His mom glances up at the ceiling like she has mom-vision and can see through the floor of his room and yeah, the thought of his mom watching through the walls isn’t going to fade very soon.
“Jensen stayed in your room.” She doesn’t really make it a question. “With you.”
“Yeah,” Jared says, “Well not really. I mean I was there. And he was there. And he fell asleep and I slept on the floor. It wasn’t like that. We weren’t--you know. We weren’t doing anything dirty.”
He flips the pancake too early and it breaks in half over his spatula.
“Jared,” his mom says, so supportive it’s silly, “I’ll tell you the same thing we told your brother when he started bringing girls home. Well. If he’d been in college at the time and bringing home boys.”
Jared pokes the pancake, willing it to burst into flame or something to end this conversation.
“It’s okay for Jensen to stay overnight,” Sharon says, “It’s okay, if you like each other and respect each other and are safe about it, for you to have sex. Just make sure the door’s locked and the stereo is up and nobody else has to hear it.”
Oh, God, forget the pancake; Jared thinks his face is about to spontaneously combust. Jensen and sex and his bedroom door are just not appropriate conversation topics for the kitchen. Not.
“Mom,” he whines, “We didn’t do anything.”
“I know,” she says, “I just want you to know that it’s okay if you do, that it’s not wrong or dirty.”
Jared dishes up the pancake and sprays oil on the pan for the next. He tries not to be grumpy with his mother. “We just--we’re not there yet. I don’t even know if Jensen thinks like that, you know? If he’s--interested.”
“There’s nothing wrong with slow,” his mother reminds him, and then she’s off retelling the story of how her and Gerry met and all Jared has to do is cook and listen.
------
Jensen knows, before he even opens his eyes, that he’s not home. The sound of the air-conditioner is wrong, the smell of the pillow under his head is not his smell, the bed under him isn’t the dorm-mattress he’s used to. He blinks awake, still disoriented by some dream he can’t make sense of. The sketch-book wallpaper of Jared’s room reminds him where he is, and it takes him a few seconds to process that the light shining through the window is the sun and that means it’s morning and crap, he’s so screwed.
He doesn’t-- he can’t even begin to figure out what he should be doing. This is so new it’s alien to him. What the hell was Jared thinking? Why would he let this happen? There are blankets on the floor, and Jensen feels sick at the idea of Jared sleeping on the floor instead of kicking Jensen out.
It doesn’t make sense, and Jensen can feel the first shivers of a monumental freak-out starting. He forces himself to take a steady breath and then another. He needs sense. He needs something solid.
There’s a phone on the nightstand. He hasn’t asked, and it’s not his phone, but he picks it up anyway. He listens for a second to the dial tone, and then he dials Garrett’s number.
It’s early, but Garrett’s “Hello?” sounds wide awake when he picks up.
“Hey,” Jensen says, feeling stupid and incompetent. “Um. Morning.”
“Jen?” Garrett’s voice shifts, becomes more tense. “Where the hell are you? You didn’t come home.”
Jensen's stomach twists around again. “I’m--Jared’s place. I--there was a movie. I fell asleep.”
It’s quiet for a moment, and Jensen can hear Garrett taking a deep breath. “But you’re okay? He didn’t--you’re okay?”
Jensen swallows. His clothes are all still on. He doesn’t feel different. He doesn’t feel hurt. “I’m okay,” he says.
“Did ya have fun?” Garrett asks, that little hopeful smile in his voice.
The wave of panic starts to recede. He’s okay. This isn’t bad. This is Jared’s room, and nothing bad is going to happen here.
“I had fun,” Jensen whispers, feeling somehow guilty about it. “We went to Sonic and the park, and then we came back here to watch a movie.” Jensen had near-perfect scores on the verbal portion of the SATs, and talking about this reduces him to the vocabulary of a fifth-grader. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into the phone, “For--you know. Not coming home.”
Garrett makes a little laugh-noise. “You’re an adult, Jensen. If you want to sleep over at your new boyfriend’s house, you’re allowed.”
Jensen can feel the flush rising in his cheeks at the very thought.
“Need a ride or anything?” Garrett asks, and Jensen shakes his head.
“No,” he says, belatedly, “I don’t think so. I’ll call you in half an hour if I do?”
“Sure,” says Garrett. “Jen--be careful, okay?”
“I will,” says Jensen, he’s just not sure how to do so.
Jensen hangs up the phone and makes the bed. Sadie mills around the room, and when he sits down again, unsure what to do next, what’s the normal thing to do next, she goes to the door and paws at it, whining these pitiful little whimpers. He can’t let the dog be sad, so he opens it for her. Then it seems wrong to just let her wander the house with nobody else aware that she’s loose, so he pulls his hoodie up around his face and follows her down the stairs.
Sadie follows her nose to the kitchen and Jensen follows Sadie. Jared’s standing at the sink in a loose t-shirt and soft cotton sleep-pants and Jensen feels a shiver go through him, a want, a hunger that he’s never faced before. He opens his mouth to say something, to let Jared know he’s there, but the dog beats him to it, nudging Jared’s leg with her nose.
Jared turned, dish soap on his hands and a wet streak across his left cheek. He sees Jensen and he smiles. It cuts Jensen like the sweetest knife, like something too beautiful to be real. It takes his breath, and Jensen chews on his lower lip and swallows hard before he can manage to draw air. His voice is hoarse, unlike his own at all as he manages a one-word greeting.
“Hey yourself,” says Jared back. He looks sleepy, Jensen thinks. He still can’t believe the other man slept on the floor instead of his own bed.
“I--“ Jensen starts, “I--do I need to get a ride back to campus?”
“Nah,” says Jared, “I’ll take you back. You have to go now, or you want breakfast first?”
Jensen's gut clenches with indecision as he tries to decide which is best: to insult Jared’s hospitality if he means the offer, or be an inconvenience if Jared is just asking out of politeness. The skillet is in the dish drainer, like everyone else has already eaten, and he feels guilty that Jared would offer to re-dirty it just for him.
The lingering scent of pancakes and bacon settle Jensen's problem for him; his stomach rumbles and Jared grins and Jensen's sure Jared wants him to say yes.
“Can I help?” he asks, still trying to feel his way through the maze of options. Garrett’s mom always appreciated it when he’d offer, so it feels like the right thing to say. “I’m not good at the cooking part, but I can finish the dishes for you.”
Jared smiles again and shrugs. “If you want to. You could sit back and enjoy being a guest, y’know.”
Jensen slides his sleeves up his forearms, pushes the hood back from his face. He steps forward and Jared surrenders the spot in front of the sink. “I don’t--I don’t have a kitchen,” he tries to explain, “So there’ll never be a time when you can be my guest like this, so it’s not fair.”
Jared reaches around him to grab the pan and bowl out of the rack. He’s quiet for a while as he mixes up another batch of batter and fries a few strips of bacon. “Sometimes things don’t have to be fair,” he offers at last, “Sometimes it’s okay to let somebody be nice, just ‘cause they feel like it.”
Jensen worries at his lip with his teeth and mulls the thought over. He wants, for probably the second time in his life, to be the person that someone wants to keep around. He thinks it wouldn’t be so hard, if Jared wanted stuff from him, if he wanted presents or work or free modeling or even--even sex. He could give it, or decide the cost’s too high. To just sit, to let Jared do for him, he’s not sure how that would work.
He rinses a glass under clean water, holds it up to check for orange juice pulp. “Maybe next time,” he says without looking at Jared, way after Jared’s probably given up on Jensen answering at all.
A fresh pour of pancake batter sizzles in the remnants of bacon grease, and then Jared pauses, spatula in hand. Jensen dares a glance out of the corner of his eye and Jared’s grinning.
“So you’re saying there’ll be a next time.”
Jensen's lips twist and twitch with the effort of not smiling back. He scrubs a fork with a fury it doesn’t deserve.
“I--Just--I never said that,” he sputters.
Jared laughs, but it’s the good kind, not cruel or mocking. “So. This next time that might not happen. You like omelettes?”
Jensen stares down at his soapy hands and surrenders to the feeling that maybe he can have this, maybe this will work. Not that he can bring himself to risk it all by defining what ‘this’ is, exactly.
“Yeah,” he breathes. The smile slips from his control, spreading across his lips all on its own. “I might even not wash the dishes afterwards.”