Pinto Round Robin - Divalicious, Chapter 6/10
Title: Divalicious, Chapter 6/10
Author: nolikereally (also known as elise_the_great)
Beta: ewinfic, beedlebarg, and planet_pinto all looked at this, but don't blame them if anything's wrong.
Pairing: Chris/Zach (with a strong dose of Churban)
Rating: NC-17 with lots of cockery.
Word Count: 9,799 (oh lord)
Disclaimer: I don't even know these people, I just cast them in roles for my own sick entertainment.
Summary: AU - Zach is developing a reputation in the business for being an out-of-control diva. John's head of his management team and, in a last ditch attempt to save Zach's career, brings in Chris, the PA from hell, to whip Zach into shape.
Author’s Notes: (courtesy of beedlebarg): Thanks to Courtney Love for the Barbra quote. This is part one of a Pinto Round Robin, completing a prompt that was voted on in my LJ out of a list of 4. There's a further 9 4 authors waiting in line to write a chapter per week until the story's finished, at which point I'll also post a master list. Most chapters aren't intended to be as long as this one but I'm trying to set things up. I'd really appreciate it if everyone keeps the writers enthused and engaged in the story by providing feedback as we go, TIA. Enjoy.
It was well past lunchtime, and Chris had already been driving for an hour, but every time he pulled out his phone to reply to that text, his stomach twisted. Chris. Last night was a disaster. We need to talk. Cho.
See, it wasn’t like he’d never had a client go apeshit on his watch. He was good, but nobody was that good, and eventually you were going to have some wannabe starlet self-annihilate despite all your efforts. Sometimes, if you were really good (and Chris was), you could save them even after something like that, but…
…there was always the Interview afterward, where you spent three hours explaining to your employers why their precious darling wasn’t an instant fix. Chris fucking hated the Interview.
And it wouldn’t even have been that bad, okay, but first of all Chris was starving, and it was hard to cow anybody with confidence when you were shaky and sweating; second of all, not only had he failed to cure Zach of being a walking disaster, he’d fucked him.
He had fucked Zach. After telling him he wouldn’t. It went beyond breach of professionalism and hit Chris right in the gut, made him choke his steering wheel until his fingers ached. He had lost all credibility with Zach, and he’d lost the biggest bargaining chip Zach had handed him thus far (and make no mistake, it was all about bargaining with the client), and some horrible nagging part of his brain kept reminding him that he’d lost control of himself.
It wasn’t-he took a deep breath and forced himself to admit the truth-it wasn’t like he hadn’t participated. Yeah, Zach had jumped him, and yeah, he was pretty sure he would never get the coffee out of his ears, but he’d gone along with it. Hell, he’d more than gone along with it. God damn Zach for looking at him like that, for letting him-for begging him-
Chris tore himself away from that line of thought. The real question, he told himself, was how to get back Zach’s respect. Even if Zach had… had let him do that, it was a pretty significant lapse of control on Chris’s part, and now Zach knew exactly how to make Chris do what he wanted.
He was just going to have to be a total hardass. No more flirting, no more compliments, no more lightweight shit, none of this collaborative nonsense. Zach thought he was so fucking special and unique, so entitled- Chris was just going to have to prove him wrong.
And once he had Zach cut down to size, he could find a chink, some kind of leverage, and he’d have Zach dancing on a string.
Bolstered by new determination, Chris texted Cho back-Meet you at the office in twenty-and even managed to chug a drive-through smoothie on the way.
*
Chris always tried to look on the bright side. Thank God Zoe’s not here.
Really, that was quite a bright side. Chris kept his million-watt smile plugged in-show no weakness- but inside he started up his mantra: You can do this. You are the best.
John Cho steeped his fingers on the desk, face a mask of ageless disapproval. “I was informed,” he began, “that you were the best.” Was he a mind reader? Chris filed that under ‘possible, but not likely,’ and sat down in the lone chair with a show of confidence and ease, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward with clasped hands. It was a classic ‘listening’ pose, and with any luck it would encourage John to keep going and give him something to work with. John had a way of pinning you to the spot with a caustic bitchface until you spat up everything you’d thought in a week.
“What I’m seeing instead, Mr. Pine,” oh thank God, “is my client, harassing and verbally assaulting not only vulnerable populations that he is supposed to be advocating for, but also a wide variety of elected officials. I’m not sure what the money jar stunt was about, but the fact remains that you put him up on that stage, and this morning I had two phone calls from Warner Bros. about the potential complications on a contract I worked very hard to initiate.”
Behind him stood Karl, nonchalantly looking out the window, just rumpled enough with his open collar and careful air of not killing you to make John’s suit look razor-edged by contrast. Oh, thought Chris. This is a good cop, bad cop thing. Oh thank God.
John finally wound down and fixed Chris with a glare that said: you may speak now, peon. So Chris sat back comfortably (a neat trick, because the chair was awful) and crossed his arms.
“I believe my contract clearly states that you will not interfere with my methods?”
“If you don’t fulfill your part of the contract, I’m sure I can find someone around here to break it. Tall, long black hair, capable of snapping your slim little legs-“
Karl’s backbone stiffened just a little, barely noticeable if you weren’t watching. Trouble in paradise? Great. “Look,” said Chris, cranking up the genuine, “I really don’t want you to get in trouble with your higher-ups-” he threw in an obvious glance at Karl, and didn’t miss John’s bristling up- “so I’ll tell you straight: Zach’s a pretty serious case, but his behavior last night wasn’t just him throwing his weight around.
“If you wanna get inside somebody’s head,” he continued, “you need to find a lever, a chink, and you have to exploit that for all it’s worth. I found Zach’s chink, and he’s running scared. Because it’s scary when somebody has your number and you know it. One minute you’re in control of everything, and the next, some little shit of an underling’s telling you what to do.” Pause. “Right, Karl?”
Oh man. That hit a nerve. Even John gave Karl’s tightening shoulders a nervous glance.
Then Karl relaxed, leaning back into that cocky stance, and he drawled without turning: “I hear Zach’s not the only one with a weakness.”
“Excuse me?” Chris felt his skin prickle with goosebumps.
But Karl didn’t say anything else for a moment, just turned and sauntered to stand beside John’s chair. John’s lips turned white, and he clasped his hands on the desk even tighter, spine ramrod-stiff.
“Zach seems to think that you’ve got a little crush on him,” said Karl, through a too-genial smile. He propped his elbow on the back of John’s chair and put his weight on it, so that the chair leaned to one side slightly and John had to adjust his posture to avoid sliding. “He was pretty vocal when I cornered him last night. Says you’re… how did he put it, John?”
“So into him,” lipped John, without moving the rest of his face. Chris watched, fascinated, as Karl shifted his weight and John somehow pulled his shoulder away just as Karl’s hip would have brushed it.
“Yeah, that’s it. What was the rest of it?”
“He… You said he said a lot of things,” said John, and Chris barely kept his face straight. He’d never seen John so uncomfortable. So much for good cop.
“No, no, I can’t remember all of it, what did he say exactly? Chris would…?” Karl’s smile broadened but didn’t quite reach his eyes.
John looked down at his clasped hands. “…Suck down every inch of his dick,” he muttered. “And choke on it. And like choking on it,” he finished, with an air of desperation.
Karl clapped him on the shoulder, hand resting just a moment too long, and John flinched but didn’t pull away. Chris would have smirked if he hadn’t been too busy stuffing down the awful rage and panic that erupted in his chest.
“He said that, did he,” Chris finally grated out. “I’ll be sure and mention that to him during our session tomorrow. As for here and now, we had quite a nice discussion this afternoon, and I can promise you that at no point did I, in fact, suck Zach’s dick.” Although he did quite a number on mine. “I appreciate you keeping me posted. However, there will be no repeats of last night.” Or this morning.
“Righto, then,” said Karl, leaning forward to offer a handshake so that his shadow fell across John’s face. “We’ll look forward to your… improved performance.”
*
Afterward, Chris sat in his car for another hour, parked, with the air conditioning going full blast. Ozone be damned, Chris secretly hoped that the exhaust smell meant he was getting carbon monoxide poisoning.
So, yeah, Zach had made a fool of him. What had Chris expected? He’d known going in that Zach was a narcissistic asshole who lived for attention. It must have driven him nuts when Chris turned him down that day in the office. Zach was used to getting everything (and everyone) he wanted, wasn’t he?
What he needed, Chris thought grimly, was a damn sharp lesson in exactly how little attention he deserved. Which meant that Chris was going to have to somehow keep the sessions going, keep undermining Zach’s ego, until Zach was totally under control. Chris’s control. And Chris was going to have to keep a tight rein on his attraction to Zach.
With Karl’s taunts still ringing in his ears, Chris reflected that it might not be such a difficult thing to do, now.
*
From where Zach was sitting, it sure as hell looked like breaking and entering. Not that he could have pressed charges or anything, but he had deliberately not got up and opened the door when they knocked, and now the door was open (he could see the blue daylight reflecting off the tiles in the foyer) and Cho, Urban and Saldana were standing in his loft.
None of them looked even slightly put off by his baggy boxers/fluffy blanket combo. In fact, they all looked absolutely pissed, which Zach was kind of expecting but which still filled him with fight-or-flight jitters.
“Can I help you,” Zach finally said, in his archest tone, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
Urban sat down, a lazy sprawl in the only chair, within arm’s reach of Zach. Saldana and Cho stood too close for his comfort-Saldana with the poise of a waterbird preparing to spear a fish, and Cho with a nettled air of general pique.
“I’ll stand up, if you want to sit,” offered Zach, mainly because he couldn’t think with them towering over him, and because he really didn’t want to be close enough to Urban for any sort of grabbing or hurting. Nobody replied to that either, although Cho shifted from foot to foot the way a normal person would if they were nervous. (Long experience had taught Zach that Cho was not only never nervous, but also always dangerous.)
The worst part was that, even though he’d never been told off by all three of them in concert before, Zach already knew how this script went. They would stare at him in silence until he was squirming, let him say a few stupid things until he was frustrated and his voice went all high-pitched, and then take turns tearing him apart until he finally gave up and did the only thing that worked. He could already feel the hysterical screeches, the cursing and violence, fizzing up in him like a shaken soda.
This time, though, they must have been extra-specially angry, because they didn’t make him wait long. Cho broke off the icy glare to glance at Urban, and Urban crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes and went right into it:
“Zach, we have been doing our absolute fucking best to save your ungrateful ass. Do you have any idea how much you’ve cost the company in lost revenues? Do you know how much we spent trying to bail you out?”
Zach refused to crane his neck to make eye contact; he could see Urban just fine out of the corner of his eye.
“You seem to have this idea that we’re paying you to breathe, kid. Just because you can throw your weight around with caterers and extras and hell, Anton, whatever the fuck you told him that made him cry in the bathroom for an hour-and nice job, by the way, he’s a good kid and you must be one hell of a fucked-up asshole to enjoy making people like him suffer-the point is, you’re not fooling us. When we started working with you, Zach, I thought we were gonna get along great, I thought you seemed like a nice kid-kinda geeky, quiet-and somehow in the last year you’ve gone from the nice kid to this fucking tornado of abuse and irresponsibility.”
Zach’s eyes stung and he picked at a coffee stain on the blanket. “Fuck you, Urban, you’re not exactly a beacon of sweetness and light either, and nobody even recognizes your face. When was the last time you posed for-”
Urban wasn’t having it. “Zach! Zach, shut up. Listen. I may be an asshole, but at least I look out for my own.” He glanced up, and Zach followed his eyes: Cho was studiously looking at the floor now, and Saldana rolled her eyes and tapped her toe. “You know John and I hate each other’s fucking guts, but you don’t see us trying to get each other fired, because we aren’t assholes. You don’t see Zoe pouring drinks on JJ for being an annoying twat, do you? Zach, look at me.”
Zach had been looking at Cho, whose expression had solidified into something unidentifiable, but now he looked at Urban, hiding his rising urge to scream behind his snootiest mask. “Yes sir?”
“Zach, you are not that special. Do you remember what you told me about Mr. Pine last night?”
Zach froze, a sudden strange fear twisting inside him. He hadn’t even done anything wrong, had he? Not with Chris. It was Chris that was in trouble for this, not him, right? So why did he feel like he’d been caught with his pants down, so to speak? He nodded, just a little, jerkily.
“You want to know what Mr. Pine thought about that?”
I don’t fucking care, Zach wanted to say, and it occurred to him that if they knew what Chris had done-what Zach had worked so hard to get him to do-
“He was disgusted, Zach. You should have seen his face. He came in there to stick up for you, to tell us you were doing better. He’s a good guy, Zach.”
Zach’s hands shook, and he clenched them on the blanket, clutching the coffee stain. If he concentrated, he could still feel the weight of Chris’s cock on his tongue, taste the salt of him, and he knew that if he said one fucking word it would be over. Saldana and Cho and Urban would leave him alone and go tear Chris apart, and Chris would probably never work again, which would be justice for the cold empty spot in Zach’s bed, and Zach would never have to deal with him again, and they would never…. that would never happen again.
“Yeah,” choked out Zach, “he’s a good guy.”
Urban leaned back and gave him a little space, for which Zach was grateful. “Righto, then. I think we’ve got exactly one more chance for you. We’re gonna have to get rid of Pine, of course, because god knows he’s doing fuck-all to help you, but if you think you can go for just a month without-”
A scream had begun swelling in Zach’s throat at the word Pine, and Zach threw himself upright, almost knocking Cho backward and dropping the blanket entirely. “The fuck,” he screeched, and it didn’t seem to faze them, so he stomped his foot and kept on: “The fuck do you think you’re doing, coming in my goddamn fucking house without my permission and fucking threatening me? Fuck you! Fuck all of you, I don’t fucking need you, I’m calling the fucking police and telling them you broke into my fucking house-”
“We didn’t break into your house, Mr. Quinto,” said Saldana, her voice absolutely icy. “I think you’ll find that you left the door halfway open earlier.”
“I don’t know,” said a voice from the foyer, “the doorjamb’s sticking out about three inches.” And there was Chris, eyes flinty blue, arms crossed with that deceptively unthreatening air that always made Zach want to behave lest he get in trouble. Zach could have sobbed, if he weren’t so out of breath from screaming.
“Mr. Pine,” said Urban, standing up. “We were just talking about you.”
“I heard,” replied Chris. “The door was open. Zach, may I see you for a moment? Alone?”
*
It was a new experience for Zach, going from full-on bitchfit to contrite silence in a matter of seconds, but he was even more confused when Chris grabbed him by the elbow and hustled him into the coat closet, closing the door quietly behind them.
“What the fuck-” began Zach, because while his coat closet was of course spotless it was also pretty small and dark. “Turn on the fucking-”
Chris beat him to it, yanking on the chain so that they were suddenly bathed in harsh yellow light. It made Zach’s eyes smart, so if he was blinking and squinting it totally wasn’t because he was avoiding Chris’s glare.
“Okay, first of all,” Zach tried again, “thanks for bailing my ass out in there, but-”
“First of all,” Chris hissed, “I hear you’ve been saying really interesting things about me.”
“No, no no no, I said-okay, I said some stuff, but it wasn’t-” Dammit, was his voice getting all high and whiny again? Okay, maybe he’d been picking up some bad vocal habits. Zach struggled to keep his voice manly and calm, because he was not going to give Chris the pleasure of-ungh, okay, this closet really was small, because he could feel Chris’s hot breath falling across his face, and what was he saying?
“Did you tell them about what we did?” Chris practically spat the words at him, and Zach forgot himself and looked directly into those blazing blue eyes and despite the ugly amber light he felt his mouth fall open a little as he shook his head.
“No! No, I didn’t, and anyway it’s not like you have to worry about it, since it was so disgusting I’m sure it’ll never happen again and don’t fucking interrupt me, why did you drag me into this closet if you’re so paranoid about them thinking we’re-we’re-”
Chris shrugged a little, tilted his head to one side: “It amazes me, Zach, which contexts you’re comfortable saying ‘fucking’ in and which you aren’t. And to answer your question, I don’t want them overhearing this conversation, and you aren’t exactly dressed for the great outdoors.”
Zach looked down at himself-he’d somehow dropped the blanket, and god why hadn’t he thrown those boxers away years ago-and found himself actually blushing, something he hadn’t done since his first big break. It wasn’t fair that Chris affected him so powerfully, made him want to be confident and respected, when Chris had little more than a passing interest.
And he knew it was little more than a passing interest, because if any of the other gentlemen of Zach’s intimate acquaintances past had found themselves in a closet this small with him, they would be sucking his cock now instead of grinding their jaw. Yeah, Chris was gonna kill him.
“All right,” he said, pulling his eyes away again. “Thanks for stepping in, even though I had it totally under control, and I promise I didn’t describe your O-face to Cho.”
“That’s not why we’re in here,” said Chris, and his voice was dark and forceful and gravelly enough that for a moment Zach thought that maybe-
“We’re in here because you seem to think that you have some kind of power over me,” said Chris. “Somehow you got the idea that I am interested in you, sexually or personally, and I need to tell you right now that you’re fucking wrong. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a fun time once your mouth is full, but you need to get it through your head right fucking now that you are nobody special, Quinto.” Chris stepped forward, Zach guessed probably trying to intimidate him, but there wasn’t much room to step anyway and he ended up with his gray slacks pressed up against Zach’s naked thighs and his body so close to Zach’s that the warm smooth scent of his skin just-god. And he kept going, that gorgeous mouth spilling words that slapped into Zach with such force that he couldn’t feel them at first.
“Listen: you have a pretty face and a great body, but so do thousands of other hopefuls in LA, and at least a couple hundred can fake talent. Right now, Zach, there are probably about three people in the world that care about you at all, and you’re really challenging my ability in that regard, so.” Chris broke off suddenly, looking like he hadn’t meant to let that last slip. Zach congratulated himself on not letting his face blurt out all of his feelings before his mouth could:
“You care about me?”
Chris sighed, a concession on the field of battle. “In a mercenary, want-to-strangle-you-way, I do.” Zach’s stomach shouldn’t have flipped like it did. “But let’s get this straight, Zach. I’m not your boyfriend, I’m not your mom, I’m not even your personal assistant any more. What I am is the last person not directly related to you by blood that gives a fuck if you make it or die in a gutter, do you understand? So you better get your shit together before I fucking leave.”
Zach went to bite back a snotty retort and realized that there wasn’t one waiting for him, and for a moment he felt lost because when people said shit like this to him he always, always had something to say back. Even Urban couldn’t take that away from him. And even while he stood there with his mouth open, something heavy and thick and viscous welled up inside him, some entirely new kind of hurt, and Zach sort of lost it and shoved Chris pretty hard, right in the solar plexus.
Bad idea. “Zach,” growled Chris, who hadn’t gone far because of all the jackets hanging up in there. He grabbed Zach’s arm and twisted it up over his head until Chris’s face was too close to his own to see and every breath rasped in his ears. “Are you that desperate to get a reaction out of me? Because you are about to get a reaction.”
And Zach was pissed, because fuck it, his arm hurt. “Get your fucking hands off me,” he snarled back, still painfully aware that he was keeping his voice down even though one shout would bring the house (or at least its less invited occupants) down around their ears.
“No, I think you’re gonna stay like this for a minute,” replied Chris, and Zach heard the flick of his tongue on stay and god dammit that was not sexy, it was not. “Your mistake, Zach, is that you think you can make me do things I don’t want to do. Guess what? You can’t.” A rough shove, and now the whole length of their bodies was pressed together, the swell of each breath pressing into Zach’s abdomen. Chris’s shoe dug into Zach’s instep, and Zach turned his face away.
“In fact,” Chris said, “you’re going to start doing what I say, what I want. Because I only want what’s best for you, Zach, you stuck-up fucker, look at me when I’m talking to you-” but of course Zach couldn’t only look at him, he had to kiss him too, and it was a pretty damn good kiss (because Zach is a pretty damn good kisser, and he’s proud of it) until Chris bit the fuck out of his lip and pulled back with a low throaty laugh like he’d won something. “No, I’m not going to kiss you. And don’t start that whine up, either, or I’ll throw you out of this closet and walk away and never look back. Yeah, I see your eyes getting wide. So listen up, Zach, you just sit here and look at me and don’t you fucking break eye contact once, you hear me?”
This was torture, Zach realized, and broke eye contact immediately, squirming until his shoulder wrenched, and then squealing when Chris shook him hard by his pinned arm. “This is weird, Chris, let me go-”
“I knew you couldn’t handle it,” said Chris in disgust, and dropped his arm. Zach slumped back against the wall. “Fine, then. Get out of here. Go fuck up the rest of your life.”
Something kindled, not quite sexual but damn close, in the pit of Zach’s belly. He didn’t quite un-slump, but he found himself meeting Chris’s eyes, even if his jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt.
“I said go,” started Chris, but then he seemed to understand what Zach’s eyes were saying (which was nuts, Chris really was good, because Zach had no idea what the fuck he was feeling), and then he clamped his hand on Zach’s shoulder and shoved him back upright on the wall, locking eyes like he meant business. “You think you can do this?” His other hand rested, heavy and cupped, over the front of Zach’s boxers. “Even if it’s not how you want it?”
“Yeah,” said Zach, and although he would have said ‘yeah’ to an amputation if Chris would keep touching him like that, he kept his eyes on Chris’s, clinging for dear life to that tenuous contact.
Then Chris was on him. The places where his fingers dug into Zach’s shoulder hurt fiercely and then went numb after a minute, and Chris drove his hand against Zach’s groin by grinding it with his own hips (so not fair, Zach couldn’t even feel if Chris was as turned on as he was) and that hurt too, but fuck it was a good hurt. He lost his breath, opened his mouth to gasp for it, and realized a few seconds later that he was beyond gasping and in his mouth the tip of his tongue was pressing hard against the back of his teeth and god was he still making eye contact with Chris? Keep looking at Chris-keep-looking-
The hand disappeared entirely and eye contact disappeared into Chris’s shoulder as Chris fucked up against his leg with sharp angry strokes. It didn’t quite hit Zach where he needed it, but it was better than nothing. Zach started to keen and Chris bit him. Hard, on the shoulder.
“Fuck,” complained Zach, yanked back from the brink, and went to shove Chris again. But Chris made a smug I-knew-it sound and pulled back, so Zach whined again and let Chris bite him this time, wincing even though now the friction really was good and god he wanted to come so bad…
“Please,” he said, just barely getting the word out. Chris unlatched his teeth from Zach’s shoulder and Zach could hear him smile (lips stretching over teeth and wet tongue, just the slightest hint of stubble-scrape), but instead of answering he hooked his thumb under the band of Zach’s boxers and pulled. Zach’s cock sprang free (well, as free as it could be, crushed between them like that).
It took Chris only a moment longer to get his own belt and slacks open, and Zach scrabbled at Chris’s waist frantically, pushing the whole mass of crumpled cloth down until he could get his hands on Chris’s ass. At the first brush of cotton-bound (but very definite) bulge against the head of Zach’s cock, he felt his knees start to buckle, and two seconds later he was incredibly glad to have Chris’s weight holding him up against the wall because now his entire cock was nestled against Chris’s (god damn Chris’s underwear, by the way, but this was better than nothing by a long shot).
“Spit on your hand,” rasped Chris. It took Zach a moment to parse this, but Chris was impatient: “Get your fucking hand wet,” he clarified. “Suck on your fingers.”
It was all Zach could do, with his whole body arching into the friction of Chris’s cock and his arms hampered by Chris pressing against him, but he struggled a hand free and with his eyes rolling up in a delirium of pleasure he crammed his fingers into his mouth.
And promptly bit them as Chris continued: “When you have them wet enough, get your asshole open. Stretch it out.” Yeah, Zach was biting his fingers as hard as he could to hold back what felt like an imminent orgasm, but it didn’t help much because now Chris was biting his shoulder again and it all blurred together into one massive overload of skin and teeth. The head of Chris’s cock had escaped from his briefs and Zach couldn’t tell who was dripping more, him or Chris, but things were starting to get slick and he just-oh god, he wasn’t going to be able to hold it together.
He did have the presence of mind, fortunately, to get his fingers soaked, because if Chris was going to fuck him again, he definitely wanted plenty of prep. (God, it wasn’t like Chris was the biggest he’d ever been with, but he fucked like he wanted it to hurt, like he expected Zach to be able to take anything he dished out, and fuck if that didn’t make Zach ache-hungry even more.)
“Ungh,” said Zach, and Chris took his meaning, because he shifted enough to let Zach reach down between them and start probing at his own opening. Zach thrust up into the air between them, feeling the loss of friction almost painfully, only to be completely drowned in sensation a second later when Chris rode against him again, crushing Zach’s cock between his arm and Chris’s hip. Okay, yeah, Chris was definitely very into this, because he was leaving wet smears up and down Zach’s forearm with every stroke and holy shit Zach wasn’t going to last like this, not with Chris making strangely sweet little moans in his ear and Zach’s fingers buried in his own ass, stretching him open and swollen and ready-
With a curse, Chris suddenly stiffened and came hard, spattering sticky warmth across Zach’s chest and belly. Zach groaned and almost followed him, but even still panting and shuddering Chris had the presence of mind to reach down and clamp his fingers hard on the base of Zach’s cock.
Zach almost screamed, or would have almost screamed if he wasn’t trembling through a not-orgasm that left his open asshole clutching wildly around his fingers. It took him a few more seconds to realize that Chris had just pulled down one of his favorite jackets to wipe himself off with, and before he could get his breath to protest (he really really liked that jacket) Chris had his pants back up and was fastening his belt.
“But-” Zach wiped his fingers on his boxers, body still tight as a wire. He was fucking burning for something in his ass, which was crazy because he didn’t like getting fucked, right? Right?
Then why did he feel so hollow and sick when Chris walked out with a muttered reminder to “behave,” leaving him gasping and leaking against the wall?
*
For the third time that day, Chris found himself driving aimlessly.
He’ll be fine, he’d said. Which is more than I can say for you assholes unless you stop fucking around on my turf. And you can tell Ms. Saldana- who’d already left, god knew when- that this is still my business, and it is personal now.
Care to tell us what all that was about?
That, Mr. Urban, was me trying to repair the damage that you gentlemen did, barging in here like a bunch of thugs and undoing all the work I’ve been putting into this kid.
We didn’t-
Cho, shut up. Mr. Pine, your methods weren’t exactly working. We just told him like it is: he’s a disaster and we’re about sick of it.
Mr. Urban, unless I miss my guess, you don’t even know what the fuck therapeutic communication is. Now, while your methods may work admirably on Mr. Cho here, who as you can see is definitely not thinking about killing you right now, you will never find a single therapist who specializes in telling people exactly what they think is wrong with them.”
Chris finally parked on the highest ground he could find, behind a bagel place whose vacant backlot was empty except for a dumpster, and looked down over the tops of the strip malls at the smoggy edges of the sunset. He felt… well, not good exactly, but he felt like he’d won something.
Now you guys are going to get up and walk out of here, and you’re not going to bother Zach in the front closet because he’s busy crying, you’re just going to leave and not come back without knocking first.
Crying?
Looks like you made quite an impression, dickheads. He fucking hates you all, by the way, and it’s going to take me weeks to convince him that just because you said it to his face doesn’t make it a load of horseshit.
The sun went down faster than Chris thought it would. Yeah, he’d won something back there, all right. And he might have given in, okay, just a little bit, but the too-sweet flickers of memory (how Zach had felt against him, how he’d made Chris want to fuck him all over again) were easily balanced by others (how easily Zach had yielded, how he’d let Chris bite him, how he’d looked when Chris dropped the dirty jacket at his feet) and Chris was confident that he could keep the upper hand now.
There wouldn’t be any more touching, now. Zach was going to do what he said from here out. Zach was his.
*
As for Zach, he’d jacked off until he was sore, once in the closet and twice on the sofa (thank god the others had left with Chris) with his fingers in his ass and his lip bleeding between his teeth, and still he felt empty. Lying there with his chafed cock still half-stirring, Zach was forced to admit: he would have done goddamn near anything to have Chris fuck him right now. He couldn’t believe Chris had just left like that.
No, really, the worst part wasn’t the persistent tightness in his balls, or the red bruises on his shoulder where Chris had bitten him. The worst of it was that Chris hadn’t given a fuck what Zach wanted, what Zach thought. It made him want to drum his heels on the floor and screech until everyone for miles was scurrying for cover.
Which was when it dawned on him: it wasn’t just Chris’s body, or just Chris’s hands on his body (and listen here, cock, you can just lie back down for now), that he wanted. It wasn’t even just Chris’s attention, even though god knew he’d been called an attention whore at least a thousand times.
No, what he wanted was Chris’s respect. He wanted Chris to listen when he spoke.
It threw him back to high school, to giving Jordan that beej in his truck because Jordan had refused to talk to him for a week, and then Jordan throwing him out and driving away when it was over. It made him think of being eighteen and at college and alone, taking acting classes and trying not to scream when his prof turned to the rest of the class during his monologue and started talking.
It made him remember his first real role, the heady suffusion of everyone staring at him, people hanging on his every word and asking him what he thought about things. And it dragged him through the awful crash afterward, when the blush of his first success faded and the only people who listened to him were paid to, and the only way to get anybody to really look at him was to throw something and watch the caterers and assistants rush nervously around him.
He was so lost in thought that when he heard Anton’s timid knock at the door, it took him a few seconds to yell for him to come in, and longer than that to remember texting Anton to bring him some food and a latte.
It was almost another half hour before he realized, picking aimlessly at kung pao chicken with his latte cooling nearby, that he’d actually thanked Anton.
Well, fuck it. He was sick of this game. None of them cared about him at all, if he was honest with himself, not even twitchy little Anton who jumped to his orders. Just Chris. And Chris despised him for his tantrums and his bossiness and-yeah, Zach was going to have to admit it-for being so goddamn easy.
Even thinking about the closet made Zach’s ears burn with shame. He was obviously going to have to burn the whole damn closet and sheetrock over the door, because there was no way he could hang his outerwear in there now, imagining what he must have looked like with his dick dripping and his fingers up his ass while Chris walked away whistling. (Normally, of course, that image would have been hot as fuck because Zach was gorgeous, but the part with Chris walking away sort of tainted the whole thing.)
The kung pao chicken was congealing to the side of the carton. Zach gazed into it morosely, trying not to draw comparisons with clotting pools of blood from gaping chest wounds, and faced the truth: he could keep Anton and his ilk in line and jumping, or he could win Chris’s respect. He was going to have to choose.
Chris was way hotter than Anton.
*
Two months passed, and the balmy weather took a turn for what passed as chilly in LA. Zach made appearances at fundraisers, showed up sober and prepared for interviews, and (with great effort) even listened to other people talk at parties. It was hard, and the more polite he was the more fake everyone else acted, but Chris was always there with his carefully controlled face and his measured nods and his blazing smiles that fooled everyone but Zach.
If Zach had worried that it would be hard to keep things chaste, his worries were unfounded. Chris didn’t make another move on him, and they seemed to have an unspoken pact not to touch, and Zach made a point of backing away or going somewhere else when they were alone or too close. The more he held himself aloof, the calmer Chris seemed, confident and supremely in control of himself. It helped Zach a lot, made him feel saner and safer to have Chris being so steady even on the other side of the building.
But it also hurt, to see how easily Chris resisted him, and how rarely he caught Chris looking at him below the eyes. Yeah, having Chris treat him like an adult was awesome, and Chris had taken to giving him these slow approving nods from across the room that set off a fountain of sparks in Zach’s chest, but he had kind of hoped-well, it would have been great if they could have had sex again without Chris thinking he was an idiot.
And Zach had taken to jacking off in the coat closet at least once a week. He still hadn’t washed the jacket, which somehow kept a slight smell of Chris (and of dried jizz but man, what could you do). And the longer Chris went without touching him, the more of a luxury that half-remembered scent was.
*
By anybody’s standards, the night had been a success. By Chris’s standards for Zach, it had been a miracle, and now Chris was kicking back with a hard-earned scotch on the rocks while Zach flashed his most winning smile and gave a speech to a room full of people he’d already charmed thoroughly.
“I know I’m dazzling,” he was saying, on a segue from some earlier joke, “but you know, I wasn’t always this gorgeous.” Another polite pause for titters. “That’s why we’re here tonight, ladies and gentlemen. I think we can all look back to a time when we weren’t as wealthy or beautiful or confident as we are now, and for a lot of us, those memories are painful. I, for instance, was a skinny dork with a ferocious unibrow. I know you don’t believe that-” More laughter.
“But the fact is, friends, there are millions of kids just as awkward as I was, some of them a lot worthier than I am, who are living with the fear that things will never improve. I personally did things I’m not proud of, things I still regret, because I was afraid to be invisible, afraid to be myself. People, not just my peers but teachers and professors, made it clear to me that I wasn’t worth listening to, and I’m still working through the consequences of that.
Fortunately for me, I grew up pretty well.” Zach gestured at his torso, barely concealed by a fashionable but incredibly ugly paisley shirt that did nothing to disguise how perfect his body was. “A lot of those kids will too, if they can make it, but what they all have in common with me- and, I suspect, with your teenage selves as well- is that they can’t see the future. Most of them think that this is as good as it gets, and they’ll be bullied and ignored and despised for the rest of their lives. Some of them, convinced of that fact, will end their lives.”
The room was silent. Chris couldn’t read Zach’s face; normally he’d be reveling in the attention, but Zach seemed conflicted, more vulnerable than performing. Chris jumped just a little as Zach turned to make eye contact with him over the heads of the privileged throng.
“What you’re doing tonight, the support you’re giving to this cause, will give these lost ones hope. You are soldiers in a war that is near and dear to my heart, and I thank you. I hope that someday the young people whose lives are changed and even saved will be standing where I am, to thank you as well.”
He sat back down to thunderous applause, and Chris clapped too, wishing wildly that he could have gone back in time and found young Zach and made it all okay.
*
That night found them in Zach’s loft, with the few glittery clingers-on calling cabs and giggling their way down the hall to the elevator. Zach hit the shower almost as soon as they were gone, and Chris shrugged off his suit coat and set to making himself some toast. Normally he would have just gone home after a night this late and done post-conference with Zach later to evaluate his behavior, but something in Zach’s speech had set his mind working, and Chris felt that Zach needed to know tonight how well he’d done.
It shook him a little, knowing more about Zach’s personal history, and realizing that there were wheels turning in Zach’s head that Chris didn’t know about. He’d prided himself on maintaining control, keeping Zach on the straight and narrow, but he was beginning to suspect that he didn’t know everything.
The toaster was broken, so he was still pan-frying toast when Zach emerged from the bathroom in yoga pants, toweling his hair vigorously.
“You did a good job tonight,” said Chris casually, watching Zach out of the corner of his eye.
Zach didn’t reply right away, tossing his towel over the folding screen that loosely defined ‘bedroom space’ as opposed to ‘rest-of-the-loft’ space and heading for the sofa.
“You haven’t really told me much about when you were a teenager,” Chris tried again. “Sounds like you had a fairly hard time of it.”
“Yeah,” said Zach, “it was rough in parts. Not really that bad, though, all things considered.”
Chris could spot a cop-out when he saw one. “You felt invisible, huh?” He plated the toast and came around the counter to eat it, standing to Zach’s side instead of directly in front of him so that Zach wouldn’t feel interrogated.
“Yeah. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to pay attention to me. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I ended up walking home.” Zach picked aimlessly at his fingernails. “I still can’t stand it when I feel like people don’t take me seriously.”
“For what it’s worth, Zach, I don’t think anybody could have heard you speak tonight and not taken you seriously.”
“At least I didn’t pour anything on them, right?” Zach laughed, but there was something brittle in it, and Chris felt his self-control slipping.
“Why? Did you have the urge to?”
“A couple of times. Mr. DeLeon seems to think that if he acts like he’s better than me, I’ll come running and jump right down his pants. And, I mean, he’s pretty hot, I might have been interested if…”
Chris stopped listening for a few moments to calm himself down, because the thought of Zach letting some bimbo like Mario DeLeon leave bite marks on him made Chris want to kill somebody.
“…so, I dunno, maybe I should start getting over that if I ever want to get laid again, because honestly I’m not seeing a lot of options around here.”
Safer topic. Do not let yourself get out of hand, Chris. “Everyone really liked your speech, by the way.”
“I hope so. I hope they get it, you know? There were a lot of airheads in that room. I don’t… it’s not so important that they enjoyed it as that they understood.”
Chris finished his toast and stepped closer to the sofa, until Zach was within arm’s reach. He smelled like fruity shampoo, and Chris soaked it in while he responded: “Oh really?” and listened while Zach rambled about how important it really was and how much he hoped they had been paying attention. It made Chris’s chest hurt, listening to Zach talking like this, pouring out his heart without the usual pretension and posturing. It felt… intimate. Real.
And this close, he could feel the residual shower-heat rolling off Zach’s skin, and see the faint pinkness that remained on his chest from what must have been really hot water. Chris’s fingers twitched. Just this once. It’ll be like a reward for him, for both of you, surely you’ve earned it.
So Chris interrupted Zach: “You’ve done really well, Zach. I’m proud of you.” And he reached out and clasped Zach’s bare shoulder with his hand, not too tightly, allowing himself just a moment to savor the feeling of skin.
Zach stiffened under his hand, face blanking, nostrils flaring.
“Whoa,” said Chris, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” replied Zach in an absolutely neutral tone.
Chris realized two things at once: first, his hand was still there, and he well past the congratulatory-squeeze phase of shoulder-touching, and second, the last time he had touched Zach’s shoulder this way-
He wondered for a split second if it had bruised, how long the bruises had lasted, and then he yanked his hand away.
Silence reigned for a few minutes. Zach stared fiercely at his own fingernails, and Chris wanted to smack himself, but finally settled for coming around to sit at the other end of the sofa, very pointedly not touching Zach.
“You okay?” Chris finally said again.
“Yeah.”
“Talk to me, Zach. If you don’t want me to do that again, I won’t.”
“No, I-” Zach paused, looked up from his hands, looked back down, and sighed heavily. “I just wasn’t expecting it. You… you’re really careful not to touch me, lately.”
“I haven’t wanted to make you uncomfortable.” Chris was doing his damnedest to be cool and detached, but he absolutely could not look Zach in the face. The pads of his fingers tingled as if they’d been burned.
“You-uh-it wouldn’t make me uncomfortable,” said Zach, getting a little pink in the face. “I just, I know it’s important to you that we, that we not, and I wanted to respect that.” He swallowed hard, then forged ahead. “It’s more important to me that you respect me. I can do without, without that-”
“You can say it, you know,” cut in Chris. “I’m not going to get mad.”
“Say what?” Zach looked at him, and the weight of his glance pulled Chris into full eye contact.
Chris smiled, awkwardly, helplessly. “Fuck,” he said.
Zach blushed like a schoolboy and jerked his head back down, furrowing his brows. “Yeah,” he said. “It wasn’t, last time, it made me feel like shit. I was pretty fucking mad at you, actually.”
Understandable. Chris actually felt pretty bad about it, or rather he felt bad about how much satisfaction he’d taken from it. “It was a dick move, I gotta admit.”
“Or not a dick move.” Zach laughed, and it sounded a lot easier than Chris would have expected. “Really, though, doing stuff- fucking you always seems to make me hate myself, and I feel like you have all the cards anyway, and, I don’t know.” He trailed off. “I get the idea that you don’t like me at all, if you want honesty. I can deal with that, as long as you don’t treat me like nothing.”
For a few minutes, which they spent in silence, Chris thought he might actually be sick. Finally he attempted a joke: “Well, you were a major fucking brat.”
Zach laughed (it sounded just a little bit like tears) and leaned over to shove Chris’s shoulder. “And you’re a major fucking jerk, dickhole.”
Chris caught his hand before he could withdraw it, laughing back at him: “Bitch, you don’t get to talk to me like that,” and shoved him right back, and then they were wrestling on the sofa. Zach almost got the upper hand, but Chris shimmied and flipped him and then he was lying on top, a laugh dying in his throat as he looked down at Zach.
“Fuck you, you always have to be on top,” complained Zach, and Chris kissed the words right out of his mouth, curling his tongue up to Zach’s palate before Zach even realized he was being kissed.
“Umph,” said Zach, and his eyes flickered closed. His hands, clamped to his sides by Chris’s dead grip on his wrists, relaxed.
“Oh, god,” said Chris fervently, when he came up for air, “I sincerely hope you don’t think I’ll disrespect you for this,” and released Zach’s arms to free his own hands for groping. By the way Zach’s fingers curled into his hair, and the way he moaned into Chris’s mouth while his other hand found Chris’s hip, it didn’t seem that he had any problems with the situation.
It could have been two minutes or thirty by the time Chris sat up, gasping. “Zach, I don’t want to be a dick about this, but I think we’ve proven that it’s a really bad idea.”
“If you walk off and leave me like this again, I’ll fucking eat your balls in a stew,” replied Zach, languid and golden all sprawled out on the sofa, chest hair mussed and light marks starting to show on his neck from Chris’s teeth.
“Please,” said Chris, “last time I left you your ass was gaping and you were about to shoot your load. You don’t look that bad off to me.”
“I’m not letting it get to that point again without assurances,” said Zach. “If I’m going to finger myself until I’m wide open for you, you’re goddamn well going to fuck me raw.”
“Point taken,” said Chris. “Bed?”
*
They knocked the screen over, getting to the bed, and then when Zach went fumbling for the lube he knocked that over, and finally Chris dragged him back to the middle of the bed and held him down with his full weight on Zach’s legs so he couldn’t move and set to licking him. Zach fucking yowled when Chris’s tongue swept across his pucker, and it didn’t take him long to start bucking and struggling to get more tongue-on-ass contact, so Chris had to forcibly hold him down while he delicately swirled around the entrance, never quite touching until Zach was pleading for his life. Then he stabbed and Zach bucked extra-hard and Chris slapped his asscheek hard, twice.
“Don’t fucking do that,” gasped Zach, “I swear to god I’ll fucking come right now.”
“Oh, is that how it is,” crooned Chris, and set back to jabbing at Zach’s asshole with his tongue, spanking when Zach moved and fucking daring him to come: “Because if you get off before I fuck you I will honest-to-god bruise your ass.”
All of which made Zach wail and arch and beg. Chris didn’t even consider stopping (except for tongue breaks, which he spent taunting Zach) until he had two fingers in Zach’s ass alongside his tongue and suddenly Zach went very still, trembling, and barked a warning: “Stop-fuck-”
Well. Chris sat back, looking at his handiwork: Zach, starting to relax again but still shaking, white pressure marks on his hips from Chris’s hands and sharp handprints from the spankings, asshole loose and shining with spit and twitching.
“You are so fucked now,” said Chris, shifting to push Zach’s legs apart. “I am going to tear your ass apart with my dick, you understand? If you thought I fucked you hard before, I’m going to make you fucking cry now.”
Zach nodded, fast and short, like his courage was failing him, so Chris slapped each asscheek twice more for good measure and, slicking his cock with spit, lowered himself on Zach from behind and let his cock rest in the length of Zach’s crack.
To his credit, Zach lay still, breathing fast but keeping his eyes closed. Chris thrust, once, letting the shaft of his cock rub against Zach’s entrance, and leaned his face down to bite Zach’s shoulder and delight in the shudder that ran through him.
“Anything you wanna say before I plow you open?”
Zach gasped, licked his lips, and bucked his ass upward just a bit. “I-Chris-”
“What?” Chris drew back a little, barely listening, and positioned the head of his cock just so.
“Next time I wanna fuck you,” said Zach. Chris went perfectly still.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” he said, trying to keep his voice level.
Zach opened his eyes and tried to crane his neck a little farther, not quite able to see Chris’s face. “This is twice for you,” he said. “Not fucking fair. I want to be on top next time.”
A shadow fell across Chris’s vision. He tried, for just a second, to picture it: Zach penetrating him, Zach holding him down like this, Zach in charge-
He felt like he was falling for a moment. It was just fucking not going to happen. Zach had begged him for this, okay, that was fine because Chris was still in control of himself, but Zach could beg all he wanted for that and there was just no way. “No. Absolutely not.”
“I bet I can get you to change your mind,” said Zach with a little wriggle that he no doubt meant to be appealing, but Chris’s mind went red and he pushed and the head of his cock split Zach open faster than he’d meant to. Zach cried out, but Chris grunted and kept pushing, hard, until he couldn’t get any deeper and Zach was squirming now for a different reason, making sharp whimpering gasps. “Fuck,” said Zach, “that-ugh, that hurts.”
“I told you it was going to be rough,” said Chris, his voice grating. “Can you take it?”
Zach just nodded, and Chris pulled back and slammed into him again, this time getting a yelp. “FUCK.”
“I said, can you take it? Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I can! I- fuck- I can, please, god Chris, fuck.”
The heat was incredible, Zach’s skin was smooth and warm and rich as cream, and Chris tore into him with a vengeance, riding him until Zach had to put a hand on the headboard to keep from ramming his scalp into it. Zach begged and whined and moaned and keened, scrabbling at the sheets, and finally Chris fell exhausted onto him, pulled him over on his side, wrapped one arm around his waist and one hand around his cock, and rammed him furiously, jacking Zach’s cock until it spattered the bed with clear droplets.
“Please-fuck-please-Chris-“ Zach couldn’t seem to be quiet, and some distant part of Chris knew that this was way too much, but Zach was still arching and his dick was rock-hard in Chris’s hand and every mewl out of his mouth fed Chris’s wrath and sent him slamming back in even harder, trying to crush the very soul out of Zach with every thrust, trying to erase anything that thought it could make Chris do anything.
At last, Zach went silent again, stiff and arching, and this time Chris wrung him through it, letting Zach pour over his hands in pearly ribbons and biting the fuck out of his shoulder while he did. And as Zach’s bruised asshole clamped down hard around him, Chris felt himself slipping as well, and the rush overtook him and threw him down and drowned him in a glorious red roar of conquest and satisfaction.
When he came to himself, Zach was looking at him, neck twisted uncomfortably to gauge his face. “Chris?” His voice sounded uncertain.
“Yeah, Zach,” sighed Chris, and pressed a kiss to the back of Zach’s neck so that he would relax. Which he did, lying blissfully in Chris’s arms and drifting off to sleep.
“Never going to happen,” murmured Chris into the scruff of Zach’s nape, although the blinding fury seemed miles away.
Author: nolikereally (also known as elise_the_great)
Beta: ewinfic, beedlebarg, and planet_pinto all looked at this, but don't blame them if anything's wrong.
Pairing: Chris/Zach (with a strong dose of Churban)
Rating: NC-17 with lots of cockery.
Word Count: 9,799 (oh lord)
Disclaimer: I don't even know these people, I just cast them in roles for my own sick entertainment.
Summary: AU - Zach is developing a reputation in the business for being an out-of-control diva. John's head of his management team and, in a last ditch attempt to save Zach's career, brings in Chris, the PA from hell, to whip Zach into shape.
Author’s Notes: (courtesy of beedlebarg): Thanks to Courtney Love for the Barbra quote. This is part one of a Pinto Round Robin, completing a prompt that was voted on in my LJ out of a list of 4. There's a further 9 4 authors waiting in line to write a chapter per week until the story's finished, at which point I'll also post a master list. Most chapters aren't intended to be as long as this one but I'm trying to set things up. I'd really appreciate it if everyone keeps the writers enthused and engaged in the story by providing feedback as we go, TIA. Enjoy.
It was well past lunchtime, and Chris had already been driving for an hour, but every time he pulled out his phone to reply to that text, his stomach twisted. Chris. Last night was a disaster. We need to talk. Cho.
See, it wasn’t like he’d never had a client go apeshit on his watch. He was good, but nobody was that good, and eventually you were going to have some wannabe starlet self-annihilate despite all your efforts. Sometimes, if you were really good (and Chris was), you could save them even after something like that, but…
…there was always the Interview afterward, where you spent three hours explaining to your employers why their precious darling wasn’t an instant fix. Chris fucking hated the Interview.
And it wouldn’t even have been that bad, okay, but first of all Chris was starving, and it was hard to cow anybody with confidence when you were shaky and sweating; second of all, not only had he failed to cure Zach of being a walking disaster, he’d fucked him.
He had fucked Zach. After telling him he wouldn’t. It went beyond breach of professionalism and hit Chris right in the gut, made him choke his steering wheel until his fingers ached. He had lost all credibility with Zach, and he’d lost the biggest bargaining chip Zach had handed him thus far (and make no mistake, it was all about bargaining with the client), and some horrible nagging part of his brain kept reminding him that he’d lost control of himself.
It wasn’t-he took a deep breath and forced himself to admit the truth-it wasn’t like he hadn’t participated. Yeah, Zach had jumped him, and yeah, he was pretty sure he would never get the coffee out of his ears, but he’d gone along with it. Hell, he’d more than gone along with it. God damn Zach for looking at him like that, for letting him-for begging him-
Chris tore himself away from that line of thought. The real question, he told himself, was how to get back Zach’s respect. Even if Zach had… had let him do that, it was a pretty significant lapse of control on Chris’s part, and now Zach knew exactly how to make Chris do what he wanted.
He was just going to have to be a total hardass. No more flirting, no more compliments, no more lightweight shit, none of this collaborative nonsense. Zach thought he was so fucking special and unique, so entitled- Chris was just going to have to prove him wrong.
And once he had Zach cut down to size, he could find a chink, some kind of leverage, and he’d have Zach dancing on a string.
Bolstered by new determination, Chris texted Cho back-Meet you at the office in twenty-and even managed to chug a drive-through smoothie on the way.
*
Chris always tried to look on the bright side. Thank God Zoe’s not here.
Really, that was quite a bright side. Chris kept his million-watt smile plugged in-show no weakness- but inside he started up his mantra: You can do this. You are the best.
John Cho steeped his fingers on the desk, face a mask of ageless disapproval. “I was informed,” he began, “that you were the best.” Was he a mind reader? Chris filed that under ‘possible, but not likely,’ and sat down in the lone chair with a show of confidence and ease, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward with clasped hands. It was a classic ‘listening’ pose, and with any luck it would encourage John to keep going and give him something to work with. John had a way of pinning you to the spot with a caustic bitchface until you spat up everything you’d thought in a week.
“What I’m seeing instead, Mr. Pine,” oh thank God, “is my client, harassing and verbally assaulting not only vulnerable populations that he is supposed to be advocating for, but also a wide variety of elected officials. I’m not sure what the money jar stunt was about, but the fact remains that you put him up on that stage, and this morning I had two phone calls from Warner Bros. about the potential complications on a contract I worked very hard to initiate.”
Behind him stood Karl, nonchalantly looking out the window, just rumpled enough with his open collar and careful air of not killing you to make John’s suit look razor-edged by contrast. Oh, thought Chris. This is a good cop, bad cop thing. Oh thank God.
John finally wound down and fixed Chris with a glare that said: you may speak now, peon. So Chris sat back comfortably (a neat trick, because the chair was awful) and crossed his arms.
“I believe my contract clearly states that you will not interfere with my methods?”
“If you don’t fulfill your part of the contract, I’m sure I can find someone around here to break it. Tall, long black hair, capable of snapping your slim little legs-“
Karl’s backbone stiffened just a little, barely noticeable if you weren’t watching. Trouble in paradise? Great. “Look,” said Chris, cranking up the genuine, “I really don’t want you to get in trouble with your higher-ups-” he threw in an obvious glance at Karl, and didn’t miss John’s bristling up- “so I’ll tell you straight: Zach’s a pretty serious case, but his behavior last night wasn’t just him throwing his weight around.
“If you wanna get inside somebody’s head,” he continued, “you need to find a lever, a chink, and you have to exploit that for all it’s worth. I found Zach’s chink, and he’s running scared. Because it’s scary when somebody has your number and you know it. One minute you’re in control of everything, and the next, some little shit of an underling’s telling you what to do.” Pause. “Right, Karl?”
Oh man. That hit a nerve. Even John gave Karl’s tightening shoulders a nervous glance.
Then Karl relaxed, leaning back into that cocky stance, and he drawled without turning: “I hear Zach’s not the only one with a weakness.”
“Excuse me?” Chris felt his skin prickle with goosebumps.
But Karl didn’t say anything else for a moment, just turned and sauntered to stand beside John’s chair. John’s lips turned white, and he clasped his hands on the desk even tighter, spine ramrod-stiff.
“Zach seems to think that you’ve got a little crush on him,” said Karl, through a too-genial smile. He propped his elbow on the back of John’s chair and put his weight on it, so that the chair leaned to one side slightly and John had to adjust his posture to avoid sliding. “He was pretty vocal when I cornered him last night. Says you’re… how did he put it, John?”
“So into him,” lipped John, without moving the rest of his face. Chris watched, fascinated, as Karl shifted his weight and John somehow pulled his shoulder away just as Karl’s hip would have brushed it.
“Yeah, that’s it. What was the rest of it?”
“He… You said he said a lot of things,” said John, and Chris barely kept his face straight. He’d never seen John so uncomfortable. So much for good cop.
“No, no, I can’t remember all of it, what did he say exactly? Chris would…?” Karl’s smile broadened but didn’t quite reach his eyes.
John looked down at his clasped hands. “…Suck down every inch of his dick,” he muttered. “And choke on it. And like choking on it,” he finished, with an air of desperation.
Karl clapped him on the shoulder, hand resting just a moment too long, and John flinched but didn’t pull away. Chris would have smirked if he hadn’t been too busy stuffing down the awful rage and panic that erupted in his chest.
“He said that, did he,” Chris finally grated out. “I’ll be sure and mention that to him during our session tomorrow. As for here and now, we had quite a nice discussion this afternoon, and I can promise you that at no point did I, in fact, suck Zach’s dick.” Although he did quite a number on mine. “I appreciate you keeping me posted. However, there will be no repeats of last night.” Or this morning.
“Righto, then,” said Karl, leaning forward to offer a handshake so that his shadow fell across John’s face. “We’ll look forward to your… improved performance.”
*
Afterward, Chris sat in his car for another hour, parked, with the air conditioning going full blast. Ozone be damned, Chris secretly hoped that the exhaust smell meant he was getting carbon monoxide poisoning.
So, yeah, Zach had made a fool of him. What had Chris expected? He’d known going in that Zach was a narcissistic asshole who lived for attention. It must have driven him nuts when Chris turned him down that day in the office. Zach was used to getting everything (and everyone) he wanted, wasn’t he?
What he needed, Chris thought grimly, was a damn sharp lesson in exactly how little attention he deserved. Which meant that Chris was going to have to somehow keep the sessions going, keep undermining Zach’s ego, until Zach was totally under control. Chris’s control. And Chris was going to have to keep a tight rein on his attraction to Zach.
With Karl’s taunts still ringing in his ears, Chris reflected that it might not be such a difficult thing to do, now.
*
From where Zach was sitting, it sure as hell looked like breaking and entering. Not that he could have pressed charges or anything, but he had deliberately not got up and opened the door when they knocked, and now the door was open (he could see the blue daylight reflecting off the tiles in the foyer) and Cho, Urban and Saldana were standing in his loft.
None of them looked even slightly put off by his baggy boxers/fluffy blanket combo. In fact, they all looked absolutely pissed, which Zach was kind of expecting but which still filled him with fight-or-flight jitters.
“Can I help you,” Zach finally said, in his archest tone, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
Urban sat down, a lazy sprawl in the only chair, within arm’s reach of Zach. Saldana and Cho stood too close for his comfort-Saldana with the poise of a waterbird preparing to spear a fish, and Cho with a nettled air of general pique.
“I’ll stand up, if you want to sit,” offered Zach, mainly because he couldn’t think with them towering over him, and because he really didn’t want to be close enough to Urban for any sort of grabbing or hurting. Nobody replied to that either, although Cho shifted from foot to foot the way a normal person would if they were nervous. (Long experience had taught Zach that Cho was not only never nervous, but also always dangerous.)
The worst part was that, even though he’d never been told off by all three of them in concert before, Zach already knew how this script went. They would stare at him in silence until he was squirming, let him say a few stupid things until he was frustrated and his voice went all high-pitched, and then take turns tearing him apart until he finally gave up and did the only thing that worked. He could already feel the hysterical screeches, the cursing and violence, fizzing up in him like a shaken soda.
This time, though, they must have been extra-specially angry, because they didn’t make him wait long. Cho broke off the icy glare to glance at Urban, and Urban crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes and went right into it:
“Zach, we have been doing our absolute fucking best to save your ungrateful ass. Do you have any idea how much you’ve cost the company in lost revenues? Do you know how much we spent trying to bail you out?”
Zach refused to crane his neck to make eye contact; he could see Urban just fine out of the corner of his eye.
“You seem to have this idea that we’re paying you to breathe, kid. Just because you can throw your weight around with caterers and extras and hell, Anton, whatever the fuck you told him that made him cry in the bathroom for an hour-and nice job, by the way, he’s a good kid and you must be one hell of a fucked-up asshole to enjoy making people like him suffer-the point is, you’re not fooling us. When we started working with you, Zach, I thought we were gonna get along great, I thought you seemed like a nice kid-kinda geeky, quiet-and somehow in the last year you’ve gone from the nice kid to this fucking tornado of abuse and irresponsibility.”
Zach’s eyes stung and he picked at a coffee stain on the blanket. “Fuck you, Urban, you’re not exactly a beacon of sweetness and light either, and nobody even recognizes your face. When was the last time you posed for-”
Urban wasn’t having it. “Zach! Zach, shut up. Listen. I may be an asshole, but at least I look out for my own.” He glanced up, and Zach followed his eyes: Cho was studiously looking at the floor now, and Saldana rolled her eyes and tapped her toe. “You know John and I hate each other’s fucking guts, but you don’t see us trying to get each other fired, because we aren’t assholes. You don’t see Zoe pouring drinks on JJ for being an annoying twat, do you? Zach, look at me.”
Zach had been looking at Cho, whose expression had solidified into something unidentifiable, but now he looked at Urban, hiding his rising urge to scream behind his snootiest mask. “Yes sir?”
“Zach, you are not that special. Do you remember what you told me about Mr. Pine last night?”
Zach froze, a sudden strange fear twisting inside him. He hadn’t even done anything wrong, had he? Not with Chris. It was Chris that was in trouble for this, not him, right? So why did he feel like he’d been caught with his pants down, so to speak? He nodded, just a little, jerkily.
“You want to know what Mr. Pine thought about that?”
I don’t fucking care, Zach wanted to say, and it occurred to him that if they knew what Chris had done-what Zach had worked so hard to get him to do-
“He was disgusted, Zach. You should have seen his face. He came in there to stick up for you, to tell us you were doing better. He’s a good guy, Zach.”
Zach’s hands shook, and he clenched them on the blanket, clutching the coffee stain. If he concentrated, he could still feel the weight of Chris’s cock on his tongue, taste the salt of him, and he knew that if he said one fucking word it would be over. Saldana and Cho and Urban would leave him alone and go tear Chris apart, and Chris would probably never work again, which would be justice for the cold empty spot in Zach’s bed, and Zach would never have to deal with him again, and they would never…. that would never happen again.
“Yeah,” choked out Zach, “he’s a good guy.”
Urban leaned back and gave him a little space, for which Zach was grateful. “Righto, then. I think we’ve got exactly one more chance for you. We’re gonna have to get rid of Pine, of course, because god knows he’s doing fuck-all to help you, but if you think you can go for just a month without-”
A scream had begun swelling in Zach’s throat at the word Pine, and Zach threw himself upright, almost knocking Cho backward and dropping the blanket entirely. “The fuck,” he screeched, and it didn’t seem to faze them, so he stomped his foot and kept on: “The fuck do you think you’re doing, coming in my goddamn fucking house without my permission and fucking threatening me? Fuck you! Fuck all of you, I don’t fucking need you, I’m calling the fucking police and telling them you broke into my fucking house-”
“We didn’t break into your house, Mr. Quinto,” said Saldana, her voice absolutely icy. “I think you’ll find that you left the door halfway open earlier.”
“I don’t know,” said a voice from the foyer, “the doorjamb’s sticking out about three inches.” And there was Chris, eyes flinty blue, arms crossed with that deceptively unthreatening air that always made Zach want to behave lest he get in trouble. Zach could have sobbed, if he weren’t so out of breath from screaming.
“Mr. Pine,” said Urban, standing up. “We were just talking about you.”
“I heard,” replied Chris. “The door was open. Zach, may I see you for a moment? Alone?”
*
It was a new experience for Zach, going from full-on bitchfit to contrite silence in a matter of seconds, but he was even more confused when Chris grabbed him by the elbow and hustled him into the coat closet, closing the door quietly behind them.
“What the fuck-” began Zach, because while his coat closet was of course spotless it was also pretty small and dark. “Turn on the fucking-”
Chris beat him to it, yanking on the chain so that they were suddenly bathed in harsh yellow light. It made Zach’s eyes smart, so if he was blinking and squinting it totally wasn’t because he was avoiding Chris’s glare.
“Okay, first of all,” Zach tried again, “thanks for bailing my ass out in there, but-”
“First of all,” Chris hissed, “I hear you’ve been saying really interesting things about me.”
“No, no no no, I said-okay, I said some stuff, but it wasn’t-” Dammit, was his voice getting all high and whiny again? Okay, maybe he’d been picking up some bad vocal habits. Zach struggled to keep his voice manly and calm, because he was not going to give Chris the pleasure of-ungh, okay, this closet really was small, because he could feel Chris’s hot breath falling across his face, and what was he saying?
“Did you tell them about what we did?” Chris practically spat the words at him, and Zach forgot himself and looked directly into those blazing blue eyes and despite the ugly amber light he felt his mouth fall open a little as he shook his head.
“No! No, I didn’t, and anyway it’s not like you have to worry about it, since it was so disgusting I’m sure it’ll never happen again and don’t fucking interrupt me, why did you drag me into this closet if you’re so paranoid about them thinking we’re-we’re-”
Chris shrugged a little, tilted his head to one side: “It amazes me, Zach, which contexts you’re comfortable saying ‘fucking’ in and which you aren’t. And to answer your question, I don’t want them overhearing this conversation, and you aren’t exactly dressed for the great outdoors.”
Zach looked down at himself-he’d somehow dropped the blanket, and god why hadn’t he thrown those boxers away years ago-and found himself actually blushing, something he hadn’t done since his first big break. It wasn’t fair that Chris affected him so powerfully, made him want to be confident and respected, when Chris had little more than a passing interest.
And he knew it was little more than a passing interest, because if any of the other gentlemen of Zach’s intimate acquaintances past had found themselves in a closet this small with him, they would be sucking his cock now instead of grinding their jaw. Yeah, Chris was gonna kill him.
“All right,” he said, pulling his eyes away again. “Thanks for stepping in, even though I had it totally under control, and I promise I didn’t describe your O-face to Cho.”
“That’s not why we’re in here,” said Chris, and his voice was dark and forceful and gravelly enough that for a moment Zach thought that maybe-
“We’re in here because you seem to think that you have some kind of power over me,” said Chris. “Somehow you got the idea that I am interested in you, sexually or personally, and I need to tell you right now that you’re fucking wrong. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a fun time once your mouth is full, but you need to get it through your head right fucking now that you are nobody special, Quinto.” Chris stepped forward, Zach guessed probably trying to intimidate him, but there wasn’t much room to step anyway and he ended up with his gray slacks pressed up against Zach’s naked thighs and his body so close to Zach’s that the warm smooth scent of his skin just-god. And he kept going, that gorgeous mouth spilling words that slapped into Zach with such force that he couldn’t feel them at first.
“Listen: you have a pretty face and a great body, but so do thousands of other hopefuls in LA, and at least a couple hundred can fake talent. Right now, Zach, there are probably about three people in the world that care about you at all, and you’re really challenging my ability in that regard, so.” Chris broke off suddenly, looking like he hadn’t meant to let that last slip. Zach congratulated himself on not letting his face blurt out all of his feelings before his mouth could:
“You care about me?”
Chris sighed, a concession on the field of battle. “In a mercenary, want-to-strangle-you-way, I do.” Zach’s stomach shouldn’t have flipped like it did. “But let’s get this straight, Zach. I’m not your boyfriend, I’m not your mom, I’m not even your personal assistant any more. What I am is the last person not directly related to you by blood that gives a fuck if you make it or die in a gutter, do you understand? So you better get your shit together before I fucking leave.”
Zach went to bite back a snotty retort and realized that there wasn’t one waiting for him, and for a moment he felt lost because when people said shit like this to him he always, always had something to say back. Even Urban couldn’t take that away from him. And even while he stood there with his mouth open, something heavy and thick and viscous welled up inside him, some entirely new kind of hurt, and Zach sort of lost it and shoved Chris pretty hard, right in the solar plexus.
Bad idea. “Zach,” growled Chris, who hadn’t gone far because of all the jackets hanging up in there. He grabbed Zach’s arm and twisted it up over his head until Chris’s face was too close to his own to see and every breath rasped in his ears. “Are you that desperate to get a reaction out of me? Because you are about to get a reaction.”
And Zach was pissed, because fuck it, his arm hurt. “Get your fucking hands off me,” he snarled back, still painfully aware that he was keeping his voice down even though one shout would bring the house (or at least its less invited occupants) down around their ears.
“No, I think you’re gonna stay like this for a minute,” replied Chris, and Zach heard the flick of his tongue on stay and god dammit that was not sexy, it was not. “Your mistake, Zach, is that you think you can make me do things I don’t want to do. Guess what? You can’t.” A rough shove, and now the whole length of their bodies was pressed together, the swell of each breath pressing into Zach’s abdomen. Chris’s shoe dug into Zach’s instep, and Zach turned his face away.
“In fact,” Chris said, “you’re going to start doing what I say, what I want. Because I only want what’s best for you, Zach, you stuck-up fucker, look at me when I’m talking to you-” but of course Zach couldn’t only look at him, he had to kiss him too, and it was a pretty damn good kiss (because Zach is a pretty damn good kisser, and he’s proud of it) until Chris bit the fuck out of his lip and pulled back with a low throaty laugh like he’d won something. “No, I’m not going to kiss you. And don’t start that whine up, either, or I’ll throw you out of this closet and walk away and never look back. Yeah, I see your eyes getting wide. So listen up, Zach, you just sit here and look at me and don’t you fucking break eye contact once, you hear me?”
This was torture, Zach realized, and broke eye contact immediately, squirming until his shoulder wrenched, and then squealing when Chris shook him hard by his pinned arm. “This is weird, Chris, let me go-”
“I knew you couldn’t handle it,” said Chris in disgust, and dropped his arm. Zach slumped back against the wall. “Fine, then. Get out of here. Go fuck up the rest of your life.”
Something kindled, not quite sexual but damn close, in the pit of Zach’s belly. He didn’t quite un-slump, but he found himself meeting Chris’s eyes, even if his jaw was clenched tight enough to hurt.
“I said go,” started Chris, but then he seemed to understand what Zach’s eyes were saying (which was nuts, Chris really was good, because Zach had no idea what the fuck he was feeling), and then he clamped his hand on Zach’s shoulder and shoved him back upright on the wall, locking eyes like he meant business. “You think you can do this?” His other hand rested, heavy and cupped, over the front of Zach’s boxers. “Even if it’s not how you want it?”
“Yeah,” said Zach, and although he would have said ‘yeah’ to an amputation if Chris would keep touching him like that, he kept his eyes on Chris’s, clinging for dear life to that tenuous contact.
Then Chris was on him. The places where his fingers dug into Zach’s shoulder hurt fiercely and then went numb after a minute, and Chris drove his hand against Zach’s groin by grinding it with his own hips (so not fair, Zach couldn’t even feel if Chris was as turned on as he was) and that hurt too, but fuck it was a good hurt. He lost his breath, opened his mouth to gasp for it, and realized a few seconds later that he was beyond gasping and in his mouth the tip of his tongue was pressing hard against the back of his teeth and god was he still making eye contact with Chris? Keep looking at Chris-keep-looking-
The hand disappeared entirely and eye contact disappeared into Chris’s shoulder as Chris fucked up against his leg with sharp angry strokes. It didn’t quite hit Zach where he needed it, but it was better than nothing. Zach started to keen and Chris bit him. Hard, on the shoulder.
“Fuck,” complained Zach, yanked back from the brink, and went to shove Chris again. But Chris made a smug I-knew-it sound and pulled back, so Zach whined again and let Chris bite him this time, wincing even though now the friction really was good and god he wanted to come so bad…
“Please,” he said, just barely getting the word out. Chris unlatched his teeth from Zach’s shoulder and Zach could hear him smile (lips stretching over teeth and wet tongue, just the slightest hint of stubble-scrape), but instead of answering he hooked his thumb under the band of Zach’s boxers and pulled. Zach’s cock sprang free (well, as free as it could be, crushed between them like that).
It took Chris only a moment longer to get his own belt and slacks open, and Zach scrabbled at Chris’s waist frantically, pushing the whole mass of crumpled cloth down until he could get his hands on Chris’s ass. At the first brush of cotton-bound (but very definite) bulge against the head of Zach’s cock, he felt his knees start to buckle, and two seconds later he was incredibly glad to have Chris’s weight holding him up against the wall because now his entire cock was nestled against Chris’s (god damn Chris’s underwear, by the way, but this was better than nothing by a long shot).
“Spit on your hand,” rasped Chris. It took Zach a moment to parse this, but Chris was impatient: “Get your fucking hand wet,” he clarified. “Suck on your fingers.”
It was all Zach could do, with his whole body arching into the friction of Chris’s cock and his arms hampered by Chris pressing against him, but he struggled a hand free and with his eyes rolling up in a delirium of pleasure he crammed his fingers into his mouth.
And promptly bit them as Chris continued: “When you have them wet enough, get your asshole open. Stretch it out.” Yeah, Zach was biting his fingers as hard as he could to hold back what felt like an imminent orgasm, but it didn’t help much because now Chris was biting his shoulder again and it all blurred together into one massive overload of skin and teeth. The head of Chris’s cock had escaped from his briefs and Zach couldn’t tell who was dripping more, him or Chris, but things were starting to get slick and he just-oh god, he wasn’t going to be able to hold it together.
He did have the presence of mind, fortunately, to get his fingers soaked, because if Chris was going to fuck him again, he definitely wanted plenty of prep. (God, it wasn’t like Chris was the biggest he’d ever been with, but he fucked like he wanted it to hurt, like he expected Zach to be able to take anything he dished out, and fuck if that didn’t make Zach ache-hungry even more.)
“Ungh,” said Zach, and Chris took his meaning, because he shifted enough to let Zach reach down between them and start probing at his own opening. Zach thrust up into the air between them, feeling the loss of friction almost painfully, only to be completely drowned in sensation a second later when Chris rode against him again, crushing Zach’s cock between his arm and Chris’s hip. Okay, yeah, Chris was definitely very into this, because he was leaving wet smears up and down Zach’s forearm with every stroke and holy shit Zach wasn’t going to last like this, not with Chris making strangely sweet little moans in his ear and Zach’s fingers buried in his own ass, stretching him open and swollen and ready-
With a curse, Chris suddenly stiffened and came hard, spattering sticky warmth across Zach’s chest and belly. Zach groaned and almost followed him, but even still panting and shuddering Chris had the presence of mind to reach down and clamp his fingers hard on the base of Zach’s cock.
Zach almost screamed, or would have almost screamed if he wasn’t trembling through a not-orgasm that left his open asshole clutching wildly around his fingers. It took him a few more seconds to realize that Chris had just pulled down one of his favorite jackets to wipe himself off with, and before he could get his breath to protest (he really really liked that jacket) Chris had his pants back up and was fastening his belt.
“But-” Zach wiped his fingers on his boxers, body still tight as a wire. He was fucking burning for something in his ass, which was crazy because he didn’t like getting fucked, right? Right?
Then why did he feel so hollow and sick when Chris walked out with a muttered reminder to “behave,” leaving him gasping and leaking against the wall?
*
For the third time that day, Chris found himself driving aimlessly.
He’ll be fine, he’d said. Which is more than I can say for you assholes unless you stop fucking around on my turf. And you can tell Ms. Saldana- who’d already left, god knew when- that this is still my business, and it is personal now.
Care to tell us what all that was about?
That, Mr. Urban, was me trying to repair the damage that you gentlemen did, barging in here like a bunch of thugs and undoing all the work I’ve been putting into this kid.
We didn’t-
Cho, shut up. Mr. Pine, your methods weren’t exactly working. We just told him like it is: he’s a disaster and we’re about sick of it.
Mr. Urban, unless I miss my guess, you don’t even know what the fuck therapeutic communication is. Now, while your methods may work admirably on Mr. Cho here, who as you can see is definitely not thinking about killing you right now, you will never find a single therapist who specializes in telling people exactly what they think is wrong with them.”
Chris finally parked on the highest ground he could find, behind a bagel place whose vacant backlot was empty except for a dumpster, and looked down over the tops of the strip malls at the smoggy edges of the sunset. He felt… well, not good exactly, but he felt like he’d won something.
Now you guys are going to get up and walk out of here, and you’re not going to bother Zach in the front closet because he’s busy crying, you’re just going to leave and not come back without knocking first.
Crying?
Looks like you made quite an impression, dickheads. He fucking hates you all, by the way, and it’s going to take me weeks to convince him that just because you said it to his face doesn’t make it a load of horseshit.
The sun went down faster than Chris thought it would. Yeah, he’d won something back there, all right. And he might have given in, okay, just a little bit, but the too-sweet flickers of memory (how Zach had felt against him, how he’d made Chris want to fuck him all over again) were easily balanced by others (how easily Zach had yielded, how he’d let Chris bite him, how he’d looked when Chris dropped the dirty jacket at his feet) and Chris was confident that he could keep the upper hand now.
There wouldn’t be any more touching, now. Zach was going to do what he said from here out. Zach was his.
*
As for Zach, he’d jacked off until he was sore, once in the closet and twice on the sofa (thank god the others had left with Chris) with his fingers in his ass and his lip bleeding between his teeth, and still he felt empty. Lying there with his chafed cock still half-stirring, Zach was forced to admit: he would have done goddamn near anything to have Chris fuck him right now. He couldn’t believe Chris had just left like that.
No, really, the worst part wasn’t the persistent tightness in his balls, or the red bruises on his shoulder where Chris had bitten him. The worst of it was that Chris hadn’t given a fuck what Zach wanted, what Zach thought. It made him want to drum his heels on the floor and screech until everyone for miles was scurrying for cover.
Which was when it dawned on him: it wasn’t just Chris’s body, or just Chris’s hands on his body (and listen here, cock, you can just lie back down for now), that he wanted. It wasn’t even just Chris’s attention, even though god knew he’d been called an attention whore at least a thousand times.
No, what he wanted was Chris’s respect. He wanted Chris to listen when he spoke.
It threw him back to high school, to giving Jordan that beej in his truck because Jordan had refused to talk to him for a week, and then Jordan throwing him out and driving away when it was over. It made him think of being eighteen and at college and alone, taking acting classes and trying not to scream when his prof turned to the rest of the class during his monologue and started talking.
It made him remember his first real role, the heady suffusion of everyone staring at him, people hanging on his every word and asking him what he thought about things. And it dragged him through the awful crash afterward, when the blush of his first success faded and the only people who listened to him were paid to, and the only way to get anybody to really look at him was to throw something and watch the caterers and assistants rush nervously around him.
He was so lost in thought that when he heard Anton’s timid knock at the door, it took him a few seconds to yell for him to come in, and longer than that to remember texting Anton to bring him some food and a latte.
It was almost another half hour before he realized, picking aimlessly at kung pao chicken with his latte cooling nearby, that he’d actually thanked Anton.
Well, fuck it. He was sick of this game. None of them cared about him at all, if he was honest with himself, not even twitchy little Anton who jumped to his orders. Just Chris. And Chris despised him for his tantrums and his bossiness and-yeah, Zach was going to have to admit it-for being so goddamn easy.
Even thinking about the closet made Zach’s ears burn with shame. He was obviously going to have to burn the whole damn closet and sheetrock over the door, because there was no way he could hang his outerwear in there now, imagining what he must have looked like with his dick dripping and his fingers up his ass while Chris walked away whistling. (Normally, of course, that image would have been hot as fuck because Zach was gorgeous, but the part with Chris walking away sort of tainted the whole thing.)
The kung pao chicken was congealing to the side of the carton. Zach gazed into it morosely, trying not to draw comparisons with clotting pools of blood from gaping chest wounds, and faced the truth: he could keep Anton and his ilk in line and jumping, or he could win Chris’s respect. He was going to have to choose.
Chris was way hotter than Anton.
*
Two months passed, and the balmy weather took a turn for what passed as chilly in LA. Zach made appearances at fundraisers, showed up sober and prepared for interviews, and (with great effort) even listened to other people talk at parties. It was hard, and the more polite he was the more fake everyone else acted, but Chris was always there with his carefully controlled face and his measured nods and his blazing smiles that fooled everyone but Zach.
If Zach had worried that it would be hard to keep things chaste, his worries were unfounded. Chris didn’t make another move on him, and they seemed to have an unspoken pact not to touch, and Zach made a point of backing away or going somewhere else when they were alone or too close. The more he held himself aloof, the calmer Chris seemed, confident and supremely in control of himself. It helped Zach a lot, made him feel saner and safer to have Chris being so steady even on the other side of the building.
But it also hurt, to see how easily Chris resisted him, and how rarely he caught Chris looking at him below the eyes. Yeah, having Chris treat him like an adult was awesome, and Chris had taken to giving him these slow approving nods from across the room that set off a fountain of sparks in Zach’s chest, but he had kind of hoped-well, it would have been great if they could have had sex again without Chris thinking he was an idiot.
And Zach had taken to jacking off in the coat closet at least once a week. He still hadn’t washed the jacket, which somehow kept a slight smell of Chris (and of dried jizz but man, what could you do). And the longer Chris went without touching him, the more of a luxury that half-remembered scent was.
*
By anybody’s standards, the night had been a success. By Chris’s standards for Zach, it had been a miracle, and now Chris was kicking back with a hard-earned scotch on the rocks while Zach flashed his most winning smile and gave a speech to a room full of people he’d already charmed thoroughly.
“I know I’m dazzling,” he was saying, on a segue from some earlier joke, “but you know, I wasn’t always this gorgeous.” Another polite pause for titters. “That’s why we’re here tonight, ladies and gentlemen. I think we can all look back to a time when we weren’t as wealthy or beautiful or confident as we are now, and for a lot of us, those memories are painful. I, for instance, was a skinny dork with a ferocious unibrow. I know you don’t believe that-” More laughter.
“But the fact is, friends, there are millions of kids just as awkward as I was, some of them a lot worthier than I am, who are living with the fear that things will never improve. I personally did things I’m not proud of, things I still regret, because I was afraid to be invisible, afraid to be myself. People, not just my peers but teachers and professors, made it clear to me that I wasn’t worth listening to, and I’m still working through the consequences of that.
Fortunately for me, I grew up pretty well.” Zach gestured at his torso, barely concealed by a fashionable but incredibly ugly paisley shirt that did nothing to disguise how perfect his body was. “A lot of those kids will too, if they can make it, but what they all have in common with me- and, I suspect, with your teenage selves as well- is that they can’t see the future. Most of them think that this is as good as it gets, and they’ll be bullied and ignored and despised for the rest of their lives. Some of them, convinced of that fact, will end their lives.”
The room was silent. Chris couldn’t read Zach’s face; normally he’d be reveling in the attention, but Zach seemed conflicted, more vulnerable than performing. Chris jumped just a little as Zach turned to make eye contact with him over the heads of the privileged throng.
“What you’re doing tonight, the support you’re giving to this cause, will give these lost ones hope. You are soldiers in a war that is near and dear to my heart, and I thank you. I hope that someday the young people whose lives are changed and even saved will be standing where I am, to thank you as well.”
He sat back down to thunderous applause, and Chris clapped too, wishing wildly that he could have gone back in time and found young Zach and made it all okay.
*
That night found them in Zach’s loft, with the few glittery clingers-on calling cabs and giggling their way down the hall to the elevator. Zach hit the shower almost as soon as they were gone, and Chris shrugged off his suit coat and set to making himself some toast. Normally he would have just gone home after a night this late and done post-conference with Zach later to evaluate his behavior, but something in Zach’s speech had set his mind working, and Chris felt that Zach needed to know tonight how well he’d done.
It shook him a little, knowing more about Zach’s personal history, and realizing that there were wheels turning in Zach’s head that Chris didn’t know about. He’d prided himself on maintaining control, keeping Zach on the straight and narrow, but he was beginning to suspect that he didn’t know everything.
The toaster was broken, so he was still pan-frying toast when Zach emerged from the bathroom in yoga pants, toweling his hair vigorously.
“You did a good job tonight,” said Chris casually, watching Zach out of the corner of his eye.
Zach didn’t reply right away, tossing his towel over the folding screen that loosely defined ‘bedroom space’ as opposed to ‘rest-of-the-loft’ space and heading for the sofa.
“You haven’t really told me much about when you were a teenager,” Chris tried again. “Sounds like you had a fairly hard time of it.”
“Yeah,” said Zach, “it was rough in parts. Not really that bad, though, all things considered.”
Chris could spot a cop-out when he saw one. “You felt invisible, huh?” He plated the toast and came around the counter to eat it, standing to Zach’s side instead of directly in front of him so that Zach wouldn’t feel interrogated.
“Yeah. I spent a lot of time trying to get people to pay attention to me. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I ended up walking home.” Zach picked aimlessly at his fingernails. “I still can’t stand it when I feel like people don’t take me seriously.”
“For what it’s worth, Zach, I don’t think anybody could have heard you speak tonight and not taken you seriously.”
“At least I didn’t pour anything on them, right?” Zach laughed, but there was something brittle in it, and Chris felt his self-control slipping.
“Why? Did you have the urge to?”
“A couple of times. Mr. DeLeon seems to think that if he acts like he’s better than me, I’ll come running and jump right down his pants. And, I mean, he’s pretty hot, I might have been interested if…”
Chris stopped listening for a few moments to calm himself down, because the thought of Zach letting some bimbo like Mario DeLeon leave bite marks on him made Chris want to kill somebody.
“…so, I dunno, maybe I should start getting over that if I ever want to get laid again, because honestly I’m not seeing a lot of options around here.”
Safer topic. Do not let yourself get out of hand, Chris. “Everyone really liked your speech, by the way.”
“I hope so. I hope they get it, you know? There were a lot of airheads in that room. I don’t… it’s not so important that they enjoyed it as that they understood.”
Chris finished his toast and stepped closer to the sofa, until Zach was within arm’s reach. He smelled like fruity shampoo, and Chris soaked it in while he responded: “Oh really?” and listened while Zach rambled about how important it really was and how much he hoped they had been paying attention. It made Chris’s chest hurt, listening to Zach talking like this, pouring out his heart without the usual pretension and posturing. It felt… intimate. Real.
And this close, he could feel the residual shower-heat rolling off Zach’s skin, and see the faint pinkness that remained on his chest from what must have been really hot water. Chris’s fingers twitched. Just this once. It’ll be like a reward for him, for both of you, surely you’ve earned it.
So Chris interrupted Zach: “You’ve done really well, Zach. I’m proud of you.” And he reached out and clasped Zach’s bare shoulder with his hand, not too tightly, allowing himself just a moment to savor the feeling of skin.
Zach stiffened under his hand, face blanking, nostrils flaring.
“Whoa,” said Chris, “you okay?”
“Yeah,” replied Zach in an absolutely neutral tone.
Chris realized two things at once: first, his hand was still there, and he well past the congratulatory-squeeze phase of shoulder-touching, and second, the last time he had touched Zach’s shoulder this way-
He wondered for a split second if it had bruised, how long the bruises had lasted, and then he yanked his hand away.
Silence reigned for a few minutes. Zach stared fiercely at his own fingernails, and Chris wanted to smack himself, but finally settled for coming around to sit at the other end of the sofa, very pointedly not touching Zach.
“You okay?” Chris finally said again.
“Yeah.”
“Talk to me, Zach. If you don’t want me to do that again, I won’t.”
“No, I-” Zach paused, looked up from his hands, looked back down, and sighed heavily. “I just wasn’t expecting it. You… you’re really careful not to touch me, lately.”
“I haven’t wanted to make you uncomfortable.” Chris was doing his damnedest to be cool and detached, but he absolutely could not look Zach in the face. The pads of his fingers tingled as if they’d been burned.
“You-uh-it wouldn’t make me uncomfortable,” said Zach, getting a little pink in the face. “I just, I know it’s important to you that we, that we not, and I wanted to respect that.” He swallowed hard, then forged ahead. “It’s more important to me that you respect me. I can do without, without that-”
“You can say it, you know,” cut in Chris. “I’m not going to get mad.”
“Say what?” Zach looked at him, and the weight of his glance pulled Chris into full eye contact.
Chris smiled, awkwardly, helplessly. “Fuck,” he said.
Zach blushed like a schoolboy and jerked his head back down, furrowing his brows. “Yeah,” he said. “It wasn’t, last time, it made me feel like shit. I was pretty fucking mad at you, actually.”
Understandable. Chris actually felt pretty bad about it, or rather he felt bad about how much satisfaction he’d taken from it. “It was a dick move, I gotta admit.”
“Or not a dick move.” Zach laughed, and it sounded a lot easier than Chris would have expected. “Really, though, doing stuff- fucking you always seems to make me hate myself, and I feel like you have all the cards anyway, and, I don’t know.” He trailed off. “I get the idea that you don’t like me at all, if you want honesty. I can deal with that, as long as you don’t treat me like nothing.”
For a few minutes, which they spent in silence, Chris thought he might actually be sick. Finally he attempted a joke: “Well, you were a major fucking brat.”
Zach laughed (it sounded just a little bit like tears) and leaned over to shove Chris’s shoulder. “And you’re a major fucking jerk, dickhole.”
Chris caught his hand before he could withdraw it, laughing back at him: “Bitch, you don’t get to talk to me like that,” and shoved him right back, and then they were wrestling on the sofa. Zach almost got the upper hand, but Chris shimmied and flipped him and then he was lying on top, a laugh dying in his throat as he looked down at Zach.
“Fuck you, you always have to be on top,” complained Zach, and Chris kissed the words right out of his mouth, curling his tongue up to Zach’s palate before Zach even realized he was being kissed.
“Umph,” said Zach, and his eyes flickered closed. His hands, clamped to his sides by Chris’s dead grip on his wrists, relaxed.
“Oh, god,” said Chris fervently, when he came up for air, “I sincerely hope you don’t think I’ll disrespect you for this,” and released Zach’s arms to free his own hands for groping. By the way Zach’s fingers curled into his hair, and the way he moaned into Chris’s mouth while his other hand found Chris’s hip, it didn’t seem that he had any problems with the situation.
It could have been two minutes or thirty by the time Chris sat up, gasping. “Zach, I don’t want to be a dick about this, but I think we’ve proven that it’s a really bad idea.”
“If you walk off and leave me like this again, I’ll fucking eat your balls in a stew,” replied Zach, languid and golden all sprawled out on the sofa, chest hair mussed and light marks starting to show on his neck from Chris’s teeth.
“Please,” said Chris, “last time I left you your ass was gaping and you were about to shoot your load. You don’t look that bad off to me.”
“I’m not letting it get to that point again without assurances,” said Zach. “If I’m going to finger myself until I’m wide open for you, you’re goddamn well going to fuck me raw.”
“Point taken,” said Chris. “Bed?”
*
They knocked the screen over, getting to the bed, and then when Zach went fumbling for the lube he knocked that over, and finally Chris dragged him back to the middle of the bed and held him down with his full weight on Zach’s legs so he couldn’t move and set to licking him. Zach fucking yowled when Chris’s tongue swept across his pucker, and it didn’t take him long to start bucking and struggling to get more tongue-on-ass contact, so Chris had to forcibly hold him down while he delicately swirled around the entrance, never quite touching until Zach was pleading for his life. Then he stabbed and Zach bucked extra-hard and Chris slapped his asscheek hard, twice.
“Don’t fucking do that,” gasped Zach, “I swear to god I’ll fucking come right now.”
“Oh, is that how it is,” crooned Chris, and set back to jabbing at Zach’s asshole with his tongue, spanking when Zach moved and fucking daring him to come: “Because if you get off before I fuck you I will honest-to-god bruise your ass.”
All of which made Zach wail and arch and beg. Chris didn’t even consider stopping (except for tongue breaks, which he spent taunting Zach) until he had two fingers in Zach’s ass alongside his tongue and suddenly Zach went very still, trembling, and barked a warning: “Stop-fuck-”
Well. Chris sat back, looking at his handiwork: Zach, starting to relax again but still shaking, white pressure marks on his hips from Chris’s hands and sharp handprints from the spankings, asshole loose and shining with spit and twitching.
“You are so fucked now,” said Chris, shifting to push Zach’s legs apart. “I am going to tear your ass apart with my dick, you understand? If you thought I fucked you hard before, I’m going to make you fucking cry now.”
Zach nodded, fast and short, like his courage was failing him, so Chris slapped each asscheek twice more for good measure and, slicking his cock with spit, lowered himself on Zach from behind and let his cock rest in the length of Zach’s crack.
To his credit, Zach lay still, breathing fast but keeping his eyes closed. Chris thrust, once, letting the shaft of his cock rub against Zach’s entrance, and leaned his face down to bite Zach’s shoulder and delight in the shudder that ran through him.
“Anything you wanna say before I plow you open?”
Zach gasped, licked his lips, and bucked his ass upward just a bit. “I-Chris-”
“What?” Chris drew back a little, barely listening, and positioned the head of his cock just so.
“Next time I wanna fuck you,” said Zach. Chris went perfectly still.
“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” he said, trying to keep his voice level.
Zach opened his eyes and tried to crane his neck a little farther, not quite able to see Chris’s face. “This is twice for you,” he said. “Not fucking fair. I want to be on top next time.”
A shadow fell across Chris’s vision. He tried, for just a second, to picture it: Zach penetrating him, Zach holding him down like this, Zach in charge-
He felt like he was falling for a moment. It was just fucking not going to happen. Zach had begged him for this, okay, that was fine because Chris was still in control of himself, but Zach could beg all he wanted for that and there was just no way. “No. Absolutely not.”
“I bet I can get you to change your mind,” said Zach with a little wriggle that he no doubt meant to be appealing, but Chris’s mind went red and he pushed and the head of his cock split Zach open faster than he’d meant to. Zach cried out, but Chris grunted and kept pushing, hard, until he couldn’t get any deeper and Zach was squirming now for a different reason, making sharp whimpering gasps. “Fuck,” said Zach, “that-ugh, that hurts.”
“I told you it was going to be rough,” said Chris, his voice grating. “Can you take it?”
Zach just nodded, and Chris pulled back and slammed into him again, this time getting a yelp. “FUCK.”
“I said, can you take it? Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I can! I- fuck- I can, please, god Chris, fuck.”
The heat was incredible, Zach’s skin was smooth and warm and rich as cream, and Chris tore into him with a vengeance, riding him until Zach had to put a hand on the headboard to keep from ramming his scalp into it. Zach begged and whined and moaned and keened, scrabbling at the sheets, and finally Chris fell exhausted onto him, pulled him over on his side, wrapped one arm around his waist and one hand around his cock, and rammed him furiously, jacking Zach’s cock until it spattered the bed with clear droplets.
“Please-fuck-please-Chris-“ Zach couldn’t seem to be quiet, and some distant part of Chris knew that this was way too much, but Zach was still arching and his dick was rock-hard in Chris’s hand and every mewl out of his mouth fed Chris’s wrath and sent him slamming back in even harder, trying to crush the very soul out of Zach with every thrust, trying to erase anything that thought it could make Chris do anything.
At last, Zach went silent again, stiff and arching, and this time Chris wrung him through it, letting Zach pour over his hands in pearly ribbons and biting the fuck out of his shoulder while he did. And as Zach’s bruised asshole clamped down hard around him, Chris felt himself slipping as well, and the rush overtook him and threw him down and drowned him in a glorious red roar of conquest and satisfaction.
When he came to himself, Zach was looking at him, neck twisted uncomfortably to gauge his face. “Chris?” His voice sounded uncertain.
“Yeah, Zach,” sighed Chris, and pressed a kiss to the back of Zach’s neck so that he would relax. Which he did, lying blissfully in Chris’s arms and drifting off to sleep.
“Never going to happen,” murmured Chris into the scruff of Zach’s nape, although the blinding fury seemed miles away.