fic: A John McClane Christmas - conclusion to Bad Habits Die Hard series
Happy New Year!
I hope you’ve all been having an excellent holiday season. This is the conclusion of the Bad Habits Die Hard series, and it’s how John and Matt spent theirs. I'm almost sad to see the back of these guys. I've had a lot of fun with this series.
Cheers and best wishes for a kickass 2011,
‘Snick
Title: A John McClane Christmas
Author: persnickett
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: none, but with references to movies one and two
Summary: Look kid, enough alright? For the last time, I don’t hate Christmas.
Notes/Warnings: Hmm...semi-graphic man-sex, Pulaski’s back, shifting POV and...well, there’s 10 000 words.
Disclaimer: For love. Not money. Not mine.
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A John McClane Christmas
______________________________
Matthew Farrell liked Christmas a lot.
But John McClane, who slept next to Matt Farrell, DID NOT.
John hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season.
And Matthew Farrell was determined to find out the reason.
It was a seriously good thing Matt was good with numbers, because -- things blowing up and people pointing guns at him aside -- there was no way he could have ever cut it as a detective.
McClane always said rule number one in the playbook is knowing the right questions to ask.
“It’s the Nakatomi thing isn’t it?”
And a little subtlety probably never hurt either. Shit.
“What?” John turned his head away from the television to look at Matt, where he was sitting next to him on the couch. As a general rule, they didn’t talk when the game was on, but Matt had been waiting for the commercial break so he thought it was safe.
“The Nakatomi thing. The hostage-taking you stopped all the way back in- ”
“I know that, I did it. Is what the Nakatomi thing?”
“The reason. It’s the reason you hate Christmas, isn’t it?”
“What?”
Gunshots were really loud and everything, and sure, John had probably had his share of them go off way too close to his eardrums to be healthy. But still, Matt was pretty sure he wasn’t suddenly losing his hearing. He sighed and repeated himself anyway.
“It’s the reason you hate- ”
“I heard you, kid, I heard. Jesus. I meant what the hell are you talking about, I don’t hate Christmas.”
“People really shouldn’t lie to me you know, I’m dating a cop. I can tell when they’re lying.”
John cocked his head and looked at him sardonically. Matt waited for the left eyebrow to rise in derisive silence. There it went.
See now, John was really good at this. The detective stuff. This look used to scare the shit out of Matt - even if these days it just kind of made him have to fight back a smile.
Matt wasn’t sure, but he could guess that rule number two in the playbook was not to say anything at all. Wait long enough and the perp will crack. They’ll be so overcome with the tension they’ll tell you anything you want to know just to break the unbearable silence. That part of it still worked on Matt. Every time.
“Okay I bet you didn’t know this,” he babbled, just to prove it. “But I’ve been secretly building an Enigma machine to crack your fiendish eyebrow code. See that? Right there? Left brow-raise, approximately 40%. Incline 20 degrees. That means…” Matt paused for dramatic effect, and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You do not deign to dignify my quip with a verbal response. Am I right?”
John didn’t respond, not exactly, but the right eyebrow crept upward to join its mate.
“Ah! Full brow-raise. Confirmation. That’s okay. It wasn’t one of my best. Not A-game material at all. B-list, tops.”
“We done?” John asked, finally.
Matt let loose with the grin he’d been biting down on. Because: Nope.
“Seriously, man, if you don’t hate Christmas then why is this such a big deal? I just think we should get one.”
“We have one,” John said curtly, nodding in the general direction of the hallway and then turning his gaze back to the television.
“That thing? That thing on the front hall table? That is not a Christmas tree, John. Not unless you’re three apples high.”
Nothing. John didn’t even toss him a look of frustration.
“Three apples?” Matt prompted. “Like The Smurfs? Wow, did you like, never watch TV with your kids? I’ll bet you made three-year-old Lucy watch the game with you. She learned the alphabet off the players’ jerseys didn’t she?” Matt leaned forward and swiped his cell off the coffee table. “I have her number right here. I can find out.“
“There’s gonna be nobody but us around here to even see a tree, Matthew.”
Annoy the suspect with inane chatter until they start talking, just to shut you up. Matt was pretty sure they didn’t have that in the super-cop handbook.
“You’re not gonna want to put out milk and cookies too, are ya kid?” John went on. “Because if you are I’m afraid I got some bad news for ya...”
“John McClane, and he’s here all week ladies and gents,” Matt announced to an imaginary, yet adoring, audience. “Don’t forget to tip your waitress.”
John grabbed the remote and muted the television. Obviously he was about to say something serious. Matt would have to figure out what it was about his tone just now that had made John go there.
“I’m just surprised, is all. Didn’t expect you to be so gung-ho about the holidays.”
Oh. That. Matt’s…family stuff.
“I know. Weird, huh? It’s cheesy and manipulative and completely consumerist, but I just kind of love Christmas. The massive and unnecessary surplus of sugary junk food, the tens of millions of little twinkle lights burning non-renewable resources.”
John was watching him carefully now, and Matt turned toward him and tucked his legs up under himself. He wasn’t squirming under the scrutiny, he was just…getting comfortable. So they could…talk.
“I think maybe it’s just because, well, usually when school let out my mother would ship me off to spend the whole Christmas break with my grandpa. I guess…most of my best memories are from around this time of year.” Matt shrugged, trying for nonchalant and probably just ending up with jerky and uncomfortable. “And it’s not officially Christmas until you have a tree.”
John reached forward and smoothed some of Matt’s hair back from where it was apparently covering his face on instinct. Okay so maybe he was squirming just a little.
Damn, John really was good at this detective stuff.
“Okay,” he was saying, one big, warm hand cupping the side of Matt’s face.
“Okay?” Matt repeated, cautiously. “Does that mean like, okay, okay? Or just, like, ‘okay’? Because I’m…”
Matt never got to finish his question, but John was tipping Matt’s chin up and leaning forward for a kiss, so he figured he had his answer.
It wasn’t their usual. John was gentler than normal, brushing their lips together soft and slow. It was nice, but Matt liked the other way too. Urgent and hot and…yeah. But this was nice. Very nice.
“You know this is blackmail, doncha?” John asked, in a slow, molten-sounding tone when he stopped.
Matt just smiled into their next kiss, which sure enough, was a little firmer this time. Maybe he wouldn’t have made such a terrible detective at all.
~o~
John looked around and tried to remember how he’d gotten roped into this. He’d more or less sworn never to come back here again. The trees dangling from the ceiling put him in mind of a case he worked in 2001 -- tracking a delivery van to a meat locker that turns out to be packed to the gills with lazily swinging mob corpses isn’t something a guy forgets too fast.
He blew on his hands impatiently. This place wasn’t any warmer, either.
Matt popped in and out of view through the eerie severed forest, each time waving his mitten-clad hands excitedly and calling for John to follow him to the perfect tree. Every time he caught up to the kid though, Matt was already disappearing again to go and examine another, even more perfect, specimen.
John looked at the evergreen branches swaying slowly in front of his face and thought back to the last time he’d bought a tree here.
John blinked a couple times and looked away from the Christmas tree. Didn’t know why he’d even bothered to decorate it. Those lights were a grade A pain in the ass.
There were no gifts to put under it either. He’d mailed them off to California days ago when Holly had called to tell him about the change of plans.
John should have been ready for this shit by now. There was just something about his luck this time of year. If his mother-in-law was going to have a stroke, of course this would be when it would hit her. And it was natural for the kids to want to spend what could be their Grammy’s last Christmas close by.
He felt like a prize asshole for being this moody -- hell, mopey even -- about it, but just seemed like no matter what John did, no matter how fuckin’ hard he tried, there was always a change of plans. Like the one he was hearing about right now.
“Australia,” John repeated into the phone. Australia. John would need an atlas to be sure, but he could guess there wasn’t a place in the world a kid could get, that was further away from his folks back in the good old U S of A, than Australia. “That’s a hell of a trip, Chief. What happened, you got a girl out there?”
There was a beat’s silence and then a muffled noise that might have been a snort.
“Typical.” Jack sounded suddenly and, for all that John could figure out, irrationally angry. But that seemed to be happening a lot these days.
John wasn’t crazy about the new attitude his boy seemed to be developing, but this was Christmas, and things had to be tense enough over there already. He tried to keep his tone neutral.
“Typical. What’s typical?”
“You. And your macho bullshit. No, John, I’m not doing this for a girl.”
“No, Dad,” John corrected his youngest. “And watch that language when you talk to your old man, huh?”
“Did it ever occur to you, DAD, that I might be doing this because I got a full scholarship? That maybe I applied for it? You know what most parents are when their kids call to tell them they got into an International College Program? Proud!”
“What? I’m pr-“
“You know what else, before you ask? No, dad, I never did make the football team. I haven’t even tried out since sophomore year! I bet you don’t even know that, do you? You don’t know anything about my life. We haven’t talked in three months, dad.”
Well, fuck. A shit load more convincing than it rightfully should take to get his own kid to call him ‘dad’ and now John just wished he would stop.
“I just told you I made it into one of the best Colleges globally in my top field of study, and what do you want to talk about?”
“Hey, hey, slow down kiddo, I didn’t - “
“How many chicks I’ve scored with! Forget it. I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry I can’t be a perfect carbon copy of you, and go to school right next door in Jersey, okay?”
There was the sound of commotion into the phone, like a rustle of clothing being tugged in a silent scuffle. John could probably stop wondering whether Lucy was in the room with him.
“But I’m sure as hell not sorry I’m not YOU,” his son went on. If I wanted to be a backward, blue-collar, card-carrying conservative Neanderthal with control issues, I’d enter the fucking academy.”
Merry fuckin’ Christmas. John unclenched his left hand, where his fingers had curled into the palm tight enough to whiten his knuckles and leave little half-moons from his fingernails. He breathed.
“…Nobody’s saying you have to be a cop, Junior.” In fact, God fucking forbid.
“Oh my God,” came the reply. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you. It’s Jack!!”
John knew from experience that the phones his kids used these days didn’t make that satisfying, resounding click sound when they hung up on him, but it didn’t stop him from saying “Chief?” and “Junior?” and “Jack, dammit!” into the receiver before he slammed the phone into the handset himself.
John went back to staring at the Christmas tree. He’d forgotten to turn the fucking lights on.
~o~
Matt wrinkled his nose and sipped delicately from his glass.
“Ugh. It’s Dulles, isn’t it?”
His complete-lack-of-tact approach had worked before. Why mess with a winning strategy?
Unfortunately, this time John seemed pretty happy to bulldoze right over Matt’s masterfully planned out line of questioning.
“If you don’t like that shit, why are you still drinking it?” John made a growling sound and shook out the string of Christmas tree lights he looked like he was preparing to go three rounds with.
Matt took another sip, and then gave a full body shudder.
“Because. It’s a tradition,” he said, totally reasonably. “It’s not officially Christmas until somebody drinks eggnog and you won’t step up.” He put down his glass and picked up the needle and thread for the popcorn strings he was working on. Read: mostly playing keep-away with Bullitt and the bowl of popcorn. “It’s Dulles, right? The airport? When Holly’s plane- “
“Matt. I was there. I remember. Alright?”
Matt moved the bowl of popcorn from the coffee table to the couch cushion, and hopefully out of dog-snout range.
“You couldn’t have stopped it you know, that plane going down…you did everything-“
John put up a silencing hand. He could only spare one. The lights seemed to be trying to get him in a figure-four.
“I’ve already had enough head-shrinking at the Department on the subject to make me nuts, okay? So thanks, but I’m good here. It’s not Dulles.”
“’It’s not Dulles’, means it’s something. You said ‘it’, there’s an it. I knew it. Tell me the ‘it.’”
Score. Matt totally could have been a detective.
“Enough with the ‘it’. I do not hate Christmas, alright?” John made a forceful suggestion that the lights commit a certain sexual act that even Matt refused to try. And he liked to think he was pretty open minded.
“Really? This is you not hating things? I’d hate to be the guy you do hate then, because if you like all this shit...”
John saved Matt the trouble of finishing that sentence by letting out another string of curses that was longer than the string of lights he was wrestling with. It had somehow managed to wrap itself around Bullitt’s obliviously wagging tail.
The whole thing was actually kind of impressive.
“I don’t hate Christmas, just these lights,” John said again.
Actually there were a few more words in there Matt didn’t care to repeat. He wasn’t even sure he had the vocabulary to do it with. And regardless of whether or not Christmas tree lights could actually have a mother, he was pretty sure it wasn’t fair to drag her into it.
Matt moved the bowl back to the coffee table, and got up to help disentangle their over-stimulated dog.
Of course, by the time he’d accomplished that, John had managed to wrap the lights around his own ankle at least twice, and the bowl of popcorn was suddenly and mysteriously empty. Bullitt looked up at Matt and licked his chops gratefully.
Yeah, Matt was done. He threw up his hands and got the hell out of the room. He had to go make some more fucking popcorn now, anyway.
~o~
It had only taken him an hour and fifteen minutes, but John got the damn lights on the motherfucking tree.
“Awesome.”
Matt came in from the hallway. He was holding a rather large glass of eggnog in one hand and clutching a fresh bowl of popcorn in the other. Bullitt was on his heels, with a spellbound gaze fixed firmly on the bowl.
“This calls for a celebration,” Matt said, holding the glass out for John to take. John looked at him.
“What? What is that? Right brow-raise. Folded arms. You want me to beg? This is me begging. Please, please, please just drink some of this God-awful shit. I bought two whole fucking cartons of it.”
“If you’re thinking of taking up sales, don’t quit your day job, kid.”
“You know,” Matt said, thoughtfully. “This stuff has like 1000 calories per glass. There’s enough energy in here for a lot of mistletoe-related holiday cheer.”
John took the glass, and added “bribery” to his mental tally of the kid’s list of crimes for the season. They’d have to work out a suitable punishment after the eggnog.
John took a sip of his drink and admired his handiwork on the tree. He savoured the creamy flavour, the aromatic overtones of allspice and nutmeg -- not to mention the healthy dose of rum Matt added, God bless him. It wasn’t that John didn’t care for the stuff, he was known to indulge at Christmas all the time.
It was just that the last time hadn’t been so pretty.
John had called back to try and smooth things over with Jack after a few minutes, but some guy answered the phone. Some guy named Mark. Told him Holly was upstairs with Jack and she’d call him once they got him to calm down.
By the time she did, he’d probably had a bit too much time to get sore, and maybe even a little belligerent, about it.
“I didn’t tell you about Mark because it’s still new,” Holly sighed, when he asked about it. “Nobody’s trying to keep you in the dark, John. If something serious starts happening, you’ll know.”
“He’s in our house, with my kids on Christmas. Sounds pretty serious to me, Hol.”
Our house. Fuck. It hadn’t been ‘their house’ for seven years.
“John.” John knew this tone. Soft, but definitely not sweet. Firm. This was Holly’s ‘I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed’ tone. “Have you been drinking?”
He considered lying, but what the fuck was the point, anyway?
“M’alright. Just eggnog,” he said, truthfully. He was pretty sure it was no more slurred than his usual Brooklyn drawl. John scrubbed a hand over his face, and tried to think steadying thoughts.
Holly was quiet for a second before she responded. He could picture her, standing there in the sunny terra cotta kitchen, looking down at her hand resting on the counter. Holly stopped wearing her ring years ago, John knew. He’d finally taken his off last year.
“Just…maybe don’t call the kids back until you’ve had a little more time between eggnogs, okay?”
John nodded in resignation. Then he remembered. “Yeah,” he said into the phone. “Yeah.”
“Merry Christmas, John.”
“Sure,” he said. And then, even though he couldn’t be certain Holly was still on the line, “Merry Christmas, Hol.”
John drained his glass and got up to turn the tree lights off. That was the last of the eggnog but there was still half a bottle of rum.
~o~
Rule number three in the playbook should probably be something like ‘approaching your quarry in a comfortable environment can increase cooperation’. Or, if your quarry is John McClane, just let him get in the door before you bombard him with questions in the hallway.
John had his coat off, but his shoulder holster was still on. He had that sort of worn-down look that said he’d had the kind of day you didn’t ask about. But it was late, and Lucy was coming into town day after tomorrow, and if Matt wanted her to bring in groceries for Christmas dinner, well, he had to know now.
Of course, the conversation just ended up in the same place as always.
“Look kid, enough alright? For the last time, I don’t hate Christmas.”
“Okay. You said that before, and I believe you, I do,” Matt said, hands up in the air to show he wasn’t gunning for an argument. “But then, John, seriously, help me out here. Why is it every time it comes up I sense a definite…resistance? And you know resistance is futile.”
Okay, at least McClane seemed to get that one. His eyes flicked to Matt’s own and softened a little around the edges like they might start to crinkle any second.
“It is,” Matt went on, coaxing John’s coat out of his hand and hanging it on one of the hooks on the wall next to them. “I’m patient. No, okay so I’m not always -- I’m persistent, okay? Persistent is the word I was looking for. If you…just…oh hell John, can you just tell me what’s going on with you?”
John let his big shoulders slump a little, and let a lot of air out through his nose in a kind of heavy sighing thing he did when Matt had him cornered and he was forced into being cooperative.
“Listen, I don’t hate anything. It’s just always this big buildup, big hoopla, blah blah fuckity-blah, everybody gets all worked up trying to make everything all perfect for this one big day, and then some unexpected shit happens and there’s a change of plans.”
“Change of plans?”
“Yeah, change of plans. Like say you get terrorists instead of a turkey dinner, or instead of stockings by the fire, you get hijackers. Instead of fruitcake you get…divorced.”
“Divorced? You got divorced on Christmas?” Because that would explain pretty much everything.
“No.”
Matt might never get used to just how much ‘you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me’ McClane could pack into a single syllable.
“…But the fights we had every year sure as hell didn’t help.” John put one hand up across his eyes to squeeze at his temples, and leaned wearily against the wall with the other.
“Look, kid,” John put down the hand that was covering his face and looked right at him with those penetrating eyes he had. “Holly and me had plans. A lot of plans, and not one of ‘em turned out the way we wanted. You just…gotta learn to roll with the punches. You can’t plan out your whole life, kid, shit just doesn’t work that way. Life just grabs you by the balls when you aren’t expecting it. And then-- ”
“It sneaks up on you in the hallway at 3 am and surprise-molests you until you have a heart attack?”
John was still leaning against the wall and Matt took advantage of his position to slide himself in under his arm the way he had that very first time he’d worked up the courage to try and put a move on him. It hadn’t been that long ago, Matt supposed, a few months maybe. It felt like a lifetime though. A lifetime of rehab and recipes and getting a freakin’ dog with somebody. Of sharing a bed with somebody. Sharing it with John McClane. Sometimes it still felt a little unreal.
“Yeah, sometimes that happens too.”
John wrapped his arms around Matt’s hips the way he had that first night. One corner of his mouth curved up in that crooked little half smile that always derailed Matt’s train of thought. So Matt kept talking before he ended up stranded at I Really Need to be Biting That station. End of the line.
“Well I hate to tell you this, but I had kinda planned that out. Well not the heart attack part. But the molesting part? Yeah. Definitely premeditated.”
Uh oh, he was already starting to correct himself. That meant this conversation was definitely headed off the rails. If he wasn’t careful, a shit-ton of babble without whole lot of sense to it was going to follow.
“And then what happened to your little plan?” John murmured down at him. “Ran smack into the McClane curse.”
Come on, did McClane really believe he was cursed? Actually Matt wasn’t sure he could argue with that. …Not with John’s fingers creeping up under the hem of his shirt and dancing over his skin like that, anyway.
“Well, okay, yes that sucked. But we dealt. We rolled with the punches, just like you said. And I hate to take all the credit -- even though, come on, I brought it that day -- but if it hadn’t have been for my brilliant plan, where would we be?”
Oh yeah. Hyper-babble mode engaged. He couldn’t help it. John’s fingers were tracing tight little circles over his hips.
“I’d be back in Camden,” he turbo-chatted. “If I could even find a place, and you’d be …God knows where, surfing on another plane wing? Swinging from another exploding building? In the hospital again? Because we both know you wouldn’t be just hanging around here. Which, by the way, happens to be right under some mistletoe…no. Wait. I had a point, I did, I had a…hmmm…”
John’s hands slid around to palm the skin of his lower back. But no, Matt could do this, he could finish his thought. He totally had this.
“The point is. No, plans don’t always go the way we…plan them. But if you don’t plan anything - if you plan nothing. Well then, that’s what’ll happen.”
“Very wise. You get that out of a fortune cookie?”
One of John’s thumbs smoothed over the little groove and notch of his spine. Matt shivered a little at the icy-warm tingling that spread slowly out from the point of that contact, and he was pretty sure at this distance John could feel it. Busted.
Yeah, there was no point just stubbornly pressing the argument, was there? He let John pull him a little closer and fit their mouths together. He soaked in the warmth and the familiar gun-oil and Old Spice smell of him, revelled in the solid, protective frame John’s body made around him.
For now. Because this? Was so not over.
~o~
Matt really was being persistent. He had already gone all sort of soft and pliant in John’s arms, but the kid could be kind of squirmy some times and this was one of them.
Matt had managed to wriggle out of their kiss, sort of cock his head to the side, and pull back enough to doggedly repeat his questions about Lucy buying them a turkey, and how bad making a few little plans could seriously be. His fingers were still twisted in the fabric of John’s shirt, eyes slightly glassy and unfocused. Matt was just about as undone as John was, but the only trouble with distracting Matt this way, was that it left John vulnerable to attack, too.
It wasn’t like he didn’t want Matt to understand this, but he didn’t have the slightest fucking clue how to explain.
Matt was young. And John had done the math -- more times than he’d like to think about.
“Listen,” he said, tugging gently at Matt’s earlobe to make sure he did. “It’s just the way shit works. Having plans eventually means disappointment.” And if John couldn’t deliver, how long would it be before Matt got fed up with it? “And disappointment means arguments. I mean sure, right now it’s all puppies and picket fences…”
“Wait. You’re planning on building me a picket fence?” Matt interrupted.
“You gonna pretend like you don’t want one?”
“Not the point.” Matt gave a sly little smile and stroked his fingers over the place on John’s chest where he’d been crushing wrinkles into his shirt. “The point is…isn’t that a plan in your head, Detective McClane?”
Matt raised his hand to tap at John’s temple and then slid it around the side of his head and down to rub rhythmically at the back of his neck.
John shouldn’t be smiling. This wasn’t really funny. He’d been down this road before, and Matthew hadn’t. Things never stayed this way. And if John had thought it was tough the first go-round...
“Think about it kid, ten years from this right here, I’ll be a senior citizen. You’ll barely be forty.”
Hell, by the time Matt reached the age John was at right now, John would be pushing 80.
And that was the best case scenario.
“And you’ll still be calling me ‘kid’, won’t you? Ten years. Wow McClane, who’s the compulsive planner now?”
Ten years still seemed like ages to Matt. Boy, did he have an education coming.
“I’m serious,” John pressed. “I’ve been there kid, I know what it’s like. I had my whole life planned out when I was your age -- a shit load of big ideas. And when they didn’t happen…” John trailed off.
“But I’m not you,” Matt said, when it was clear John didn’t have the words. “And I’m definitely not Holly.”
The kid couldn’t resist. He pressed his still-very-aroused crotch to John’s thigh, and they grinned at each other conspiratorially like a pair of teenagers.
“And, hi, math geek?” Matt continued, shaking his hair out of his face so John could look at him -- as if it was the first time or something. Jesus, the kid was cute. “I’ve run the numbers you’re talking about, John. I know they don’t add up to anything easy. But seriously, what’s ever easy with you? I mean look at this, I’m just trying to get a fucking turkey here, and you’re practically giving me the Miranda treatment.”
“Remain silent? You?”
“I mean it. I get where you’re coming from, yeah. It’s not like I have everything planned out. But I do know what I want and the only way you get it is by making a plan and at least trying to follow through. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in ten years, I’m just trying to figure out what’ll go down at dinner in a couple of days. But I can tell you that -- right now? When I think about ten years from today, or hell, make it twenty -- what I don’t have are any plans to go anywhere you’re not going to be.”
They didn’t talk like this very often, but whenever Matt said shit like that it made John’s chest go soft and his dick get hard.
It wasn’t what most would probably think of as romantic, but they were in the very spot they’d had their first kiss, gently lit by the tiny lights on the Christmas tree trickling into the hall from the living room, and John didn’t think it was a mistake that this was the spot Matt had chosen for the mistletoe.
John looked at Matt, who was still kneading his neck lightly and flicking his gaze searchingly over John’s face, like he was serious about learning to read it like a code. The dark of his eyes stood out like coals against the ash white of his skin in this light. It seemed like maybe he was done talking for a while. John spread his hands across Matthew’s back and leaned forward to pick up where they’d left off.
Matt responded eagerly, rubbing against him with his body, his mouth, his hands. Those hands were everywhere. Matt had dispensed with half their clothing before John suggested, breathlessly, that they move the party to the bedroom.
“Are you kidding me?” Matt grated, flattening his back against the wall and pulling John up against him. “I’ve been trying to get you to fuck me right here since September.”
John groaned, as those words went straight to his dick without asking his say-so. He attacked Matt’s mouth again with renewed intensity -- opening and pushing in, crushing his body against Matt’s like he could crawl inside of him and leave a piece of himself there the rest of their lives.
“Lube. My bag,” Matt panted, nodding his head at his laptop bag hanging from the coat hooks next to them.
“Jesus. You really have been trying to make this happen for months haven’t ya? You know you could have just said so.”
“I just did. Look, do you want to talk about it or are you gonna grab my bag?”
The kid was definitely done talking for a while.
At first John thought it would be awkward but Matt had obviously been thinking about this for some time and had the mechanics worked out.
He managed to lose the rest of their clothing and still keep his back to that wall. He hiked one leg up over John’s hip, and around his back, drawing him forward so the heat of their skin pressed together everywhere and their cocks slid enthusiastically over each other.
He demanded John’s fingers so he could coat them liberally with the slick gel they’d retrieved from Matt’s bag. Then he guided John’s hand under his raised thigh, biting his lip and moaning happily as John’s fingers stroked questingly into his cleft.
Matt got bossy like this quite a bit, and John didn’t mind in the least. It didn’t usually last long anyhow, before Matt’s vocabulary for giving commands dwindled into cursing and a very limited few words -- like harder and right there and, of course, John’s name.
Sure enough, John had only gotten as far as two fingers working him gently open, before Matt was grinding down against John’s hand and using his teeth to worry a sensitive trail along the line of John’s jaw and down his neck.
“Now,” Matt was saying repeatedly. He got a little more emphatic each time, until the third or fourth one was an actual growl through gritted teeth.
John kissed him one last time and relented, pulling his fingers away slowly, so he could squeeze more of the slippery liquid from the little tube to coat himself properly. As impatient as Matt was being -- and as much as that got John’s motor revving -- if Matt had been wanting this as long as he said he did, John wanted to do it right.
He went as slow as he could, with Matt wrapped around him and gasping words of encouragement until he was buried in him to the very root, and Matt was done with slow.
With both arms holding himself up over John’s shoulders, he was using that leg behind John’s hips to show him how he wanted it, motion matching the words on his lips -- harder, faster, yes. Until, once again, his words tapered off into a litany of curses followed by the simple, repeated chant of his name. John knew his cue and pushed a hand between them to tug and squeeze like Matt liked.
Matt was clenching around him, and coming with his teeth closed over the tendon running from John’s neck to his shoulder. And that was more than enough.
John felt his rhythm go erratic, the heel of his fist hitting the wall above Matt’s head. Hips, stuttering and snapping forward while his spine made like it was melting and colored lights throbbed behind his eyelids.
Matt sagged a little in his arms as their bodies uncoiled and came back to them. He brought both feet to the floor, and dropped his forehead to John’s chest, panting and spent.
No, maybe it wasn’t what most would think of as romantic. And John could barely rasp the words out between sucking in ragged, raw breaths, but it was worth saying none the less:
“Fuck but I love you, kid.”
It wasn’t something they said too often, John realized, when Matt looked up at him with surprise in his eyes.
“Love you too,” Matt told him, pushing his mouth against John’s again in a long, firm press of lips that was only partly a kiss, but mostly several kinds of promise. “You really have no idea.”
Matt stroked his hand lovingly over the back of John’s head a few times before he spoke again.
“Okay. Now let go of me and -- hey where did your pants end up? We need to make a shopping list for Lucy before you pass out in bed. We are making a list for a turkey dinner, right?”
Christ, John was still half hard and nestled comfortably inside of him. So much for romance. The kid was moving on from blackmail and bribery, right up to extortion.
~o~
part 2 - the thrilling conclusion