Primeval fic: A Slightly Different Approach
Title: A Slightly Different Approach
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Not owning, no money.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: What you really need is to meet in the right circumstances.
AN: So, as always, in my attempts to shift Stephen and Connor to more-than-friends, I have shifted the paradigm with which Stephen looks at Connor. That is, it's a different first impression, based on the theory that Stephen was handling all of Nick's classes for him, because Nick was taking advantage of Stephen to wiggle out of doing his job as professor. Based, of course, on, "Why don't I know you?" "You never show up for classes." So, Stephen's meeting Connor when he can get an opinion of him not based on alien conspiracy theories. Or something like that, anyhow.
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Nick Cutter may have been Stephen's best friend and his boss, but there was only so much of his paperwork Stephen was going to do. After a knock-down, drag out fight, he made Nick teach his own bloody class, and grade his own papers for a change. Of course, this left him the job he'd so strenuously avoided before of answering student questions after the lecture, but at least they wouldn't follow him home.
It was through a month of classes, the relatively small group of students became familiar to him for the questions they'd ask after the lecture when Nick ran away to avoid having to actually do something other than stand at the front of a classroom and expound on theory. In fact, there was only one student there who'd never said a word to him, never seemed to take notes and if Stephen had been teaching, he might never have noticed him. He did, however, because he was free during the lectures to look around and watch the students, picking out the ones only pretending to listen because they were on MSN or some other chat program, the ones who were either not listening or undeniably stupid, as they'd ask for the answers to questions that had been answered in the course of the lecture already, the ones who were the sort of go-getters asking what was going to be on the autumn exams during the first class of the year and the ones who fell in the middle.
He wasn't sure where this one fell, though. He might have had a better bead on it if Nick were the sort to encourage discussion in classes, but the one thing Nick didn't want to hear from was an uninformed student wittering on about something they knew nothing about because they hadn't done the reading.
Curious now, he blocked that one from leaving the first time he wasn't inundated with questions, to ask a question of his own. "I noticed you haven't asked me anything at all over the last two months. Is there anything you wanted to know?"
Dark brown eyes looked up in surprise. "I hadn't asked 'cause there wasn't anything to ask. He's not exactly covering anything revolutionary, is he? They'd been discussing gigantothermy versus endothermy as explanation for migratory behaviour and all back in the late 80s. It was pretty conclusive even back then that it was the only real explanation for the preponderance of evidence."
Stephen blinked. "Well, perhaps, but the question of when and where endothermy developed clearly requires some sort of discussion, since the originating lines for both dinosaurs and mammals need to be discovered-"
"Only if you're going to ignore parallel evolution," the other pointed out. "And given the number of places and times things have evolved the same structures without anything but a really tenuous connection makes any discussions of common ancestry spurious, since we know the archosaurs, and therefore mammals, broke off far earlier from dinosaurs than any sort of leanings to hot bloodedness in reptiles, so it sort of doesn't matter."
It was only natural to keep the conversation going. The student's stance on a great many things wasn't precisely the same as Nick's, but it was well-supported and interesting. Before he knew it, they'd been talking for more than an hour, making the transition from small lecture hall to a bench seat on one of the campus parkettes. They'd got onto the topic dinosaur trackways and the interpretation thereof when the student's mobile went off. With an apologetic look, he answered. "Yeah? Wha'? Oh, hell!" he blurted out. "Tom, I'll see you in class, I'm really sorry, I'll make it up to you, I promise." He hung up and bolted to his feet. "I've got to go," he said. "I was supposed to meet a mate before auditing one of his courses with him, and now I'm only barely going to make it." He scooped up his bag, smiled briefly, and said, "It's been fun, thanks."
When he left, Stephen suddenly realised he didn't even know the student's name still.
He remedied that, that afternoon, looking up the class list and finding out who the man with the dark hair and eyes was. Connor Temple. He made a point after that to make time for the younger man, deliberately accosting him after class, and eventually meeting him for coffee, because as much as he enjoyed arguing evolution with Cutter, he liked a slightly broader circle of interlocutors than one person.
When Cutter got the funding to go on a dig that summer and the usual scramble among the students to be among the privileged to come along came about, Stephen campaigned on Connor's behalf with Nick, and Connor got to come.
Connor was terrible to have along at first. Wheezing along, because while he was slender, he wasn't fit, just malnourished due to student poverty, constantly battling with allergies, Stephen suffered Nick's sardonic, "You asked for him, you got him," looks. The thing was, though, Connor tried to his utmost to keep up, talking a mile a minute about anything and everything, and unlike the others, while he apologised for slowing everyone down, explaining about his asthma and allergies every other breath, he didn't complain. You had to respect that.
It was when the first skeleton was unearthed, amazingly quickly, really, and Cutter was expounding as he did, all about the therapod they'd pulled up, Connor's head tilted and he pulled out a laptop, booting it up, attaching a solar powering little generator to the computer and tapping away. He bit his lip, staying silent, but something was bothering him. "What's wrong?" Stephen asked, looking over Connor's shoulder at the screen, showing drawings and photos of pelvises and toes.
"It's not . . ." Connor frowned, tapped a few keys and shifted the images around to other photos and drawings, squinting back and forth between the fossil on the ground and the computer's monitor. "That's a troodontid," he murmured to Stephen quietly. "At least, I'm pretty sure it is. Look at the angle on the ischium. The way the bodies extend on a therapod's not the same at all as a troodontid, and the toes there . . ." He shook his head. "It doesn't make sense."
Looking between them, Stephen could see what Connor was talking about, and was about to raise a hand to signal Nick when Connor looked at him, "Don't," he pleaded.
There wasn't a chance until much after that for Stephen to corner Connor and ask, "Why didn't you want me letting Nick know he made a mistake?"
"How do I know I'm right?" Connor asked, looking scandalised at the thought. "I mean, he's not some stupid professor like Cochrane that any idiot can see through, I'm probably wrong, and then I'll look like a right idiot trying to tell him that I'm right when I'm not, and-"
"And if you're right, Nick's just informed everyone of something completely wrong, and you should let him know," Stephen encouraged. It was the first time he'd seen Connor wibble. Normally Connor was happy enough to challenge anyone on anything intellectual he knew about, and Stephen had to admit that he had yet to get up a decent counterargument to Connor's aliens theory, save that it was completely stupid. But that wasn't a proper argument, and Connor's fascination with the strange twists of the fossil record and the numbers of times there were animals completely temporally misplaced within the era represented by various strata had the same flavour as Nick's.
"Let me know I'm wrong about what?" came Nick's voice.
Connor yelped and looked terrified. "Nothing. Nothing. I'm probably wrong and Stephen was just trying to get me to tell you my thing I'm probably wrong about, but I won't 'cause I'm probably wrong, so that means you're right, so it doesn't matter."
"Connor thinks you misidentified the fossil this afternoon," Stephen said, overriding Connor's frantically waving arms and mouthed, 'No!'. "He thinks it's a troodontid and not a therapod. He's got a point, too."
The one great thing about Nick was that, while he was always convinced he was right, he always gave you enough rope to hang yourself, and if you proved you were right, he wouldn't hold much of a grudge. "Oh?" He turned to Connor.
A sound remarkably like a whimper emerged from Connor, who seemed to need to gird his loins for this, booted up his laptop and took Nick through his reasons. When he was done, Nick eyed him until Connor cracked, opening his mouth to probably take it all back. Stephen clapped a hand over Connor's mouth, gaining an irritated look from the student. "Don't take it back," Stephen said. "It does Nick good to be told he's wrong once in a while."
"That's what you said about doing paperwork," Nick told him. Then he smiled at Connor, who looked terrified. "It would seem you're right, Temple." Connor sagged in relief. Nick frowned down at the computer. "That's an impressive web site you've found there," he commented.
"That's not a website," Connor explained, cheering up a tad. "It's my database. I've been working on it for eight years now."
Stephen raised an eyebrow as he considered it. "Did you ever do anything else?" he asked, a little aghast. He was known to be a little too focused at times, as was Cutter, but he still played football on weekends and ran and did other things.
"I might've cheated a little," Connor admitted, flushing. "But the firewalls and all on those German universities was just so easy to bypass, I may have sort of hacked them to start."
"When you were fourteen?" Stephen asked, impressed in spite of himself.
Connor shrugged it off, as though international hacking was nothing impressive at all.
That evening, Stephen headed to the tent he shared with Nick, noted that Connor was apparently watching Star Wars in the tent he'd somehow wangled for himself. He poked a head in for a moment. "How'd you manage this?" He gestured to indicate Connor's solitude.
Making a face, Connor said, "I'd tell you, but then I would be killed, and I really don't want to think about it anyhow."
Two tents over, one female voice and two male ones started making some very filthy sounds and Stephen said, "Suddenly, I think I can guess."
"I'm hoping not to hear any more," Connor said. "They may be quiet enough not to be heard on the other side of the campsite, but . . ."
Stephen had crouched beside him, and they both turned to face each other at just the wrong moment, and Stephen found himself nose to nose with Connor, noting the dark eyes and light stubble, and felt an unreasonable urge to see what it might feel like against his skin.
He pulled away, trying not to look like it was sudden, because he'd been seduced by his thesis advisor and he didn't want to do the same sort of thing to Connor.
"So, I'll see you tomorrow, then," he said hastily, heading back to the tent he was sharing with Nick, knowing that nothing would quell his libido like sharing tent space with the man whose wife he'd slept with.
Connor found the dinosaur trackway the next day. Connor read it like a pro, adeptly separating out the effects of erosion and other natural forces that would have obscured it from the distortions caused by the shifting of weight through the animal's steps. He was crouched there, breaking it all down, really seeing it, in that way that Stephen had rarely found in anyone, not needing it all explained, just understanding the tracks, and the want from the night before reappeared. They were alone for the moment, Connor having been plying a tape measure while everyone else was staring at the troodontid, and Stephen couldn't help it.
He leaned in and kissed Connor, who immediately buried his fingers in Stephen's hair, dropping the tape measure and ignoring the tools and everything he was scattering as he drew himself against Stephen. It wasn't until he found his suddenly hard cock being pressed into Connor's hip that Stephen realised what they were doing. "Wait," he gasped, pulling away. "We can't."
"Right," Connor panted. "Anyone could come by," he said, nodding. The erection Connor was sporting almost made Stephen forget his intentions, because he wanted to see it, strip Connor out of his clothes and just . . .
"It's not that," Stephen said, shaking his head. "I'm Cutter's assistant, Connor. You're still a student. As much as I want, and trust me, I want this, it's unethical."
Connor stepped back. "Right," he said, nodding slowly. "I-"
"When you've finished your viva. When you've got the degree," Stephen told him, wanting him to understand, "If we're both still available then . . ." he left it hanging.
A nod of understanding. Stephen pulled away, and left without a word to get back to Cutter. If he stuck around, they'd just wind up all over each other again.
After that trip it was a torment. Because once Cutter had somehow managed to provide Connor the reassurance that, as long as he had decent supporting evidence for his theories, they'd be treated as being as valid as anything else, Connor became Nick's favourite student. Brilliant, willing to cross swords with Nick over evolution, Stephen couldn't even get away from Connor.
It was all made worse by Nick's certainty they'd had a falling out and were in some sort of either jealous feud or that Connor's less than outdoorsy nature had put Stephen off him or something. This had the effect of Stephen counting the days until Connor was done his viva and Stephen would finally be able to drag him off somewhere and shag him like he'd been imagining since that aborted kiss.
Then Connor arrived at the office with his silly tabloid, insisting that they look into it. Nick, with all the subtlety of a hippo in a souvenir shop, arranged for them to be squashed together in the back seat of the Hilux by stuffing things they wouldn't need into the front seat and all over half of the back. The whole ride Connor convulsively clutched his bag to his lap, and Stephen was painfully aware of the fact that his whole side was pressed into Connor, and when they hit that bloody huge pothole, Connor's scramble for balance managed to land a hand on Stephen's cock, causing the older man to bite back a groan.
They were both flustered, and it wasn't until they ran into the bloody cow in the tree that Stephen managed to bring himself to some semblance of concentration. Then there was the prehistoric tortoise and he finally was able to forget about Connor, save as a colleague, equally as amazed at it all as he was. The whole thing was just full of distractions from Connor, and Stephen focussed on tracking the predator, whatever it was, followed Connor's advice about the approximate size, the environment it was from and all that, tracking it to the school.
For all that Connor had bravely followed him through the door and into the school after the thing, Stephen didn't fully understand what it meant to have Connor along, until Connor tripped over his own feet in the hall in front of the gorgonopsid, landing sprawled on his back, a terrified look on his face.
The next few minutes were a blur of shouting, of being chased and of seeing the creature bearing down on him, and the certainty that he was going to die.
He woke to Connor's anxious voice calling his name, hands carefully patting him down, probably in search of injury. When he sat up, Connor asked, frantic, "How do you feel? Should you be sitting up yet? It hit you pretty hard."
"I'm alright," he informed Connor after a quick mental check of himself. Nothing was hurting unduly, he didn't feel muzzy-headed, Connor had begun to kiss him in something like an ecstasy of relief . . .
Just as suddenly, Connor stopped. "We've . . ." he swallowed, staring at Stephen, breathing hard, and Stephen could feel fingers at his waist flexing, as though the small movement was all that was keeping Connor from flinging himself at Stephen totally. "We'd best find the gorgonopsid. It's gone."
"Right,' Stephen agreed.
It was far later that evening, and that girl, Abby Maitland, had driven herself home in a mini, Stephen had offered Connor a lift home after dropping Nick off, and now they were outside Connor's cheap rental flat now. "Thanks for saving my life today," Connor said to him.
That tore it. He'd never quite know how they got from the car to the flat, the whole journey was in flashes to him. Memories of Connor struggling with door keys, warm lips and stinging stubble, the way Connor's eyes rolled back in his head when Stephen pressed him into the wall, letting Connor writhe under him, wantonly rubbing his cock against Stephen's.
Then they were through the door, shedding clothing the whole way down the hall, a brief delay as they both stripped off boots and trousers and everything else, too needy to care about much but touching each other as much as possible. Stephen found some petroleum jelly on the bedside table and looked no further as he coated his fingers liberally and slid one into Connor's arse. Connor tensed, then Stephen had to remind himself not to hurt Connor as the younger man began wiggling about, pressing his arse towards Stephen.
Another finger, and now he found Connor's prostate, making Connor groan eagerly. His slow gyrations made Stephen tense, then struggle not to give in again.
"Stephen, please," Connor whimpered as the third finger was carefully introduced in order to make sure Connor was prepared.
He was forced to pull away, rifling quickly through his wallet for a condom, and being terribly distracted from the search by the way Connor had plastered himself to Stephen's back, cupping a hand around Stephen's cock and sucking on his throat. Somehow he kept his fingers on the little package, even when fingers tightened fractionally on him and a thumb rubbed over the head of his erection, making him fumble his wallet, sending it to the floor. Connor laughed in his ear and he whipping about, taking a small revenge in wrapping his hand around Connor, making him squeak, buck his hips and fall over in one graceless moment that gave Stephen the space to roll the condom on and liberally coat it with their makeshift lubricant.
Then he was on Connor, easing in past the ring of muscle and feeling heat and tightness wrapping around him, hearing Connor say his name over and over again, blanketing the student's back and feeling his orgasm rushing up on him like the hilux on that archosaur. He got a hand on Connor's cock, managed to stroke once before Connor was coming, still bucking back onto Stephen who lasted through two more thrusts before his mind went blank.
They both collapsed to the bed, Stephen pulling out and tying off the condom on a sort of autopilot. "I was so scared I'd lost you," Connor told him suddenly, rolling over to face the older man. "When you went flying out that door . . . I was so sure you were . . . it was going to . . ."
Stephen gave a shaky laugh in reply. "When you fell over in that hallway I thought the same."
"What now?" Connor asked. "I mean, we don't . . . the university'll still be pretty unhappy if we're together." He shot Stephen an inquiring look, "Do you want to keep this quiet? I mean, just until I finish my degree? We'll just not let on-"
"No," Stephen said definitely. He'd had it with sneaking about eight years before and he wasn't going to do it again. "I'll make a move away from being Nick's assistant. I'll explain to him, he'll understand."
"Stephen." Connor looked shocked, "You can't quit your job over me, that's . . . you can't!"
They argued about it for about a week, at the end of which Cutter was proved right that the temporal anomalies were a long-term thing and Stephen promptly wangled himself a permanent paying job at the Home Office for when he got out of hospital, which solved all their problems.
At least until Claudia insisted on attempting to appropriate Connor as her sassy gay friend, which role he took to like a duck to treacle and led to poor bewildered Connor hiding out in Stephen's new office. Which wasn't really a problem for them, actually.
Go to the Primeval Archive Page
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Not owning, no money.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: What you really need is to meet in the right circumstances.
AN: So, as always, in my attempts to shift Stephen and Connor to more-than-friends, I have shifted the paradigm with which Stephen looks at Connor. That is, it's a different first impression, based on the theory that Stephen was handling all of Nick's classes for him, because Nick was taking advantage of Stephen to wiggle out of doing his job as professor. Based, of course, on, "Why don't I know you?" "You never show up for classes." So, Stephen's meeting Connor when he can get an opinion of him not based on alien conspiracy theories. Or something like that, anyhow.
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Nick Cutter may have been Stephen's best friend and his boss, but there was only so much of his paperwork Stephen was going to do. After a knock-down, drag out fight, he made Nick teach his own bloody class, and grade his own papers for a change. Of course, this left him the job he'd so strenuously avoided before of answering student questions after the lecture, but at least they wouldn't follow him home.
It was through a month of classes, the relatively small group of students became familiar to him for the questions they'd ask after the lecture when Nick ran away to avoid having to actually do something other than stand at the front of a classroom and expound on theory. In fact, there was only one student there who'd never said a word to him, never seemed to take notes and if Stephen had been teaching, he might never have noticed him. He did, however, because he was free during the lectures to look around and watch the students, picking out the ones only pretending to listen because they were on MSN or some other chat program, the ones who were either not listening or undeniably stupid, as they'd ask for the answers to questions that had been answered in the course of the lecture already, the ones who were the sort of go-getters asking what was going to be on the autumn exams during the first class of the year and the ones who fell in the middle.
He wasn't sure where this one fell, though. He might have had a better bead on it if Nick were the sort to encourage discussion in classes, but the one thing Nick didn't want to hear from was an uninformed student wittering on about something they knew nothing about because they hadn't done the reading.
Curious now, he blocked that one from leaving the first time he wasn't inundated with questions, to ask a question of his own. "I noticed you haven't asked me anything at all over the last two months. Is there anything you wanted to know?"
Dark brown eyes looked up in surprise. "I hadn't asked 'cause there wasn't anything to ask. He's not exactly covering anything revolutionary, is he? They'd been discussing gigantothermy versus endothermy as explanation for migratory behaviour and all back in the late 80s. It was pretty conclusive even back then that it was the only real explanation for the preponderance of evidence."
Stephen blinked. "Well, perhaps, but the question of when and where endothermy developed clearly requires some sort of discussion, since the originating lines for both dinosaurs and mammals need to be discovered-"
"Only if you're going to ignore parallel evolution," the other pointed out. "And given the number of places and times things have evolved the same structures without anything but a really tenuous connection makes any discussions of common ancestry spurious, since we know the archosaurs, and therefore mammals, broke off far earlier from dinosaurs than any sort of leanings to hot bloodedness in reptiles, so it sort of doesn't matter."
It was only natural to keep the conversation going. The student's stance on a great many things wasn't precisely the same as Nick's, but it was well-supported and interesting. Before he knew it, they'd been talking for more than an hour, making the transition from small lecture hall to a bench seat on one of the campus parkettes. They'd got onto the topic dinosaur trackways and the interpretation thereof when the student's mobile went off. With an apologetic look, he answered. "Yeah? Wha'? Oh, hell!" he blurted out. "Tom, I'll see you in class, I'm really sorry, I'll make it up to you, I promise." He hung up and bolted to his feet. "I've got to go," he said. "I was supposed to meet a mate before auditing one of his courses with him, and now I'm only barely going to make it." He scooped up his bag, smiled briefly, and said, "It's been fun, thanks."
When he left, Stephen suddenly realised he didn't even know the student's name still.
He remedied that, that afternoon, looking up the class list and finding out who the man with the dark hair and eyes was. Connor Temple. He made a point after that to make time for the younger man, deliberately accosting him after class, and eventually meeting him for coffee, because as much as he enjoyed arguing evolution with Cutter, he liked a slightly broader circle of interlocutors than one person.
When Cutter got the funding to go on a dig that summer and the usual scramble among the students to be among the privileged to come along came about, Stephen campaigned on Connor's behalf with Nick, and Connor got to come.
Connor was terrible to have along at first. Wheezing along, because while he was slender, he wasn't fit, just malnourished due to student poverty, constantly battling with allergies, Stephen suffered Nick's sardonic, "You asked for him, you got him," looks. The thing was, though, Connor tried to his utmost to keep up, talking a mile a minute about anything and everything, and unlike the others, while he apologised for slowing everyone down, explaining about his asthma and allergies every other breath, he didn't complain. You had to respect that.
It was when the first skeleton was unearthed, amazingly quickly, really, and Cutter was expounding as he did, all about the therapod they'd pulled up, Connor's head tilted and he pulled out a laptop, booting it up, attaching a solar powering little generator to the computer and tapping away. He bit his lip, staying silent, but something was bothering him. "What's wrong?" Stephen asked, looking over Connor's shoulder at the screen, showing drawings and photos of pelvises and toes.
"It's not . . ." Connor frowned, tapped a few keys and shifted the images around to other photos and drawings, squinting back and forth between the fossil on the ground and the computer's monitor. "That's a troodontid," he murmured to Stephen quietly. "At least, I'm pretty sure it is. Look at the angle on the ischium. The way the bodies extend on a therapod's not the same at all as a troodontid, and the toes there . . ." He shook his head. "It doesn't make sense."
Looking between them, Stephen could see what Connor was talking about, and was about to raise a hand to signal Nick when Connor looked at him, "Don't," he pleaded.
There wasn't a chance until much after that for Stephen to corner Connor and ask, "Why didn't you want me letting Nick know he made a mistake?"
"How do I know I'm right?" Connor asked, looking scandalised at the thought. "I mean, he's not some stupid professor like Cochrane that any idiot can see through, I'm probably wrong, and then I'll look like a right idiot trying to tell him that I'm right when I'm not, and-"
"And if you're right, Nick's just informed everyone of something completely wrong, and you should let him know," Stephen encouraged. It was the first time he'd seen Connor wibble. Normally Connor was happy enough to challenge anyone on anything intellectual he knew about, and Stephen had to admit that he had yet to get up a decent counterargument to Connor's aliens theory, save that it was completely stupid. But that wasn't a proper argument, and Connor's fascination with the strange twists of the fossil record and the numbers of times there were animals completely temporally misplaced within the era represented by various strata had the same flavour as Nick's.
"Let me know I'm wrong about what?" came Nick's voice.
Connor yelped and looked terrified. "Nothing. Nothing. I'm probably wrong and Stephen was just trying to get me to tell you my thing I'm probably wrong about, but I won't 'cause I'm probably wrong, so that means you're right, so it doesn't matter."
"Connor thinks you misidentified the fossil this afternoon," Stephen said, overriding Connor's frantically waving arms and mouthed, 'No!'. "He thinks it's a troodontid and not a therapod. He's got a point, too."
The one great thing about Nick was that, while he was always convinced he was right, he always gave you enough rope to hang yourself, and if you proved you were right, he wouldn't hold much of a grudge. "Oh?" He turned to Connor.
A sound remarkably like a whimper emerged from Connor, who seemed to need to gird his loins for this, booted up his laptop and took Nick through his reasons. When he was done, Nick eyed him until Connor cracked, opening his mouth to probably take it all back. Stephen clapped a hand over Connor's mouth, gaining an irritated look from the student. "Don't take it back," Stephen said. "It does Nick good to be told he's wrong once in a while."
"That's what you said about doing paperwork," Nick told him. Then he smiled at Connor, who looked terrified. "It would seem you're right, Temple." Connor sagged in relief. Nick frowned down at the computer. "That's an impressive web site you've found there," he commented.
"That's not a website," Connor explained, cheering up a tad. "It's my database. I've been working on it for eight years now."
Stephen raised an eyebrow as he considered it. "Did you ever do anything else?" he asked, a little aghast. He was known to be a little too focused at times, as was Cutter, but he still played football on weekends and ran and did other things.
"I might've cheated a little," Connor admitted, flushing. "But the firewalls and all on those German universities was just so easy to bypass, I may have sort of hacked them to start."
"When you were fourteen?" Stephen asked, impressed in spite of himself.
Connor shrugged it off, as though international hacking was nothing impressive at all.
That evening, Stephen headed to the tent he shared with Nick, noted that Connor was apparently watching Star Wars in the tent he'd somehow wangled for himself. He poked a head in for a moment. "How'd you manage this?" He gestured to indicate Connor's solitude.
Making a face, Connor said, "I'd tell you, but then I would be killed, and I really don't want to think about it anyhow."
Two tents over, one female voice and two male ones started making some very filthy sounds and Stephen said, "Suddenly, I think I can guess."
"I'm hoping not to hear any more," Connor said. "They may be quiet enough not to be heard on the other side of the campsite, but . . ."
Stephen had crouched beside him, and they both turned to face each other at just the wrong moment, and Stephen found himself nose to nose with Connor, noting the dark eyes and light stubble, and felt an unreasonable urge to see what it might feel like against his skin.
He pulled away, trying not to look like it was sudden, because he'd been seduced by his thesis advisor and he didn't want to do the same sort of thing to Connor.
"So, I'll see you tomorrow, then," he said hastily, heading back to the tent he was sharing with Nick, knowing that nothing would quell his libido like sharing tent space with the man whose wife he'd slept with.
Connor found the dinosaur trackway the next day. Connor read it like a pro, adeptly separating out the effects of erosion and other natural forces that would have obscured it from the distortions caused by the shifting of weight through the animal's steps. He was crouched there, breaking it all down, really seeing it, in that way that Stephen had rarely found in anyone, not needing it all explained, just understanding the tracks, and the want from the night before reappeared. They were alone for the moment, Connor having been plying a tape measure while everyone else was staring at the troodontid, and Stephen couldn't help it.
He leaned in and kissed Connor, who immediately buried his fingers in Stephen's hair, dropping the tape measure and ignoring the tools and everything he was scattering as he drew himself against Stephen. It wasn't until he found his suddenly hard cock being pressed into Connor's hip that Stephen realised what they were doing. "Wait," he gasped, pulling away. "We can't."
"Right," Connor panted. "Anyone could come by," he said, nodding. The erection Connor was sporting almost made Stephen forget his intentions, because he wanted to see it, strip Connor out of his clothes and just . . .
"It's not that," Stephen said, shaking his head. "I'm Cutter's assistant, Connor. You're still a student. As much as I want, and trust me, I want this, it's unethical."
Connor stepped back. "Right," he said, nodding slowly. "I-"
"When you've finished your viva. When you've got the degree," Stephen told him, wanting him to understand, "If we're both still available then . . ." he left it hanging.
A nod of understanding. Stephen pulled away, and left without a word to get back to Cutter. If he stuck around, they'd just wind up all over each other again.
After that trip it was a torment. Because once Cutter had somehow managed to provide Connor the reassurance that, as long as he had decent supporting evidence for his theories, they'd be treated as being as valid as anything else, Connor became Nick's favourite student. Brilliant, willing to cross swords with Nick over evolution, Stephen couldn't even get away from Connor.
It was all made worse by Nick's certainty they'd had a falling out and were in some sort of either jealous feud or that Connor's less than outdoorsy nature had put Stephen off him or something. This had the effect of Stephen counting the days until Connor was done his viva and Stephen would finally be able to drag him off somewhere and shag him like he'd been imagining since that aborted kiss.
Then Connor arrived at the office with his silly tabloid, insisting that they look into it. Nick, with all the subtlety of a hippo in a souvenir shop, arranged for them to be squashed together in the back seat of the Hilux by stuffing things they wouldn't need into the front seat and all over half of the back. The whole ride Connor convulsively clutched his bag to his lap, and Stephen was painfully aware of the fact that his whole side was pressed into Connor, and when they hit that bloody huge pothole, Connor's scramble for balance managed to land a hand on Stephen's cock, causing the older man to bite back a groan.
They were both flustered, and it wasn't until they ran into the bloody cow in the tree that Stephen managed to bring himself to some semblance of concentration. Then there was the prehistoric tortoise and he finally was able to forget about Connor, save as a colleague, equally as amazed at it all as he was. The whole thing was just full of distractions from Connor, and Stephen focussed on tracking the predator, whatever it was, followed Connor's advice about the approximate size, the environment it was from and all that, tracking it to the school.
For all that Connor had bravely followed him through the door and into the school after the thing, Stephen didn't fully understand what it meant to have Connor along, until Connor tripped over his own feet in the hall in front of the gorgonopsid, landing sprawled on his back, a terrified look on his face.
The next few minutes were a blur of shouting, of being chased and of seeing the creature bearing down on him, and the certainty that he was going to die.
He woke to Connor's anxious voice calling his name, hands carefully patting him down, probably in search of injury. When he sat up, Connor asked, frantic, "How do you feel? Should you be sitting up yet? It hit you pretty hard."
"I'm alright," he informed Connor after a quick mental check of himself. Nothing was hurting unduly, he didn't feel muzzy-headed, Connor had begun to kiss him in something like an ecstasy of relief . . .
Just as suddenly, Connor stopped. "We've . . ." he swallowed, staring at Stephen, breathing hard, and Stephen could feel fingers at his waist flexing, as though the small movement was all that was keeping Connor from flinging himself at Stephen totally. "We'd best find the gorgonopsid. It's gone."
"Right,' Stephen agreed.
It was far later that evening, and that girl, Abby Maitland, had driven herself home in a mini, Stephen had offered Connor a lift home after dropping Nick off, and now they were outside Connor's cheap rental flat now. "Thanks for saving my life today," Connor said to him.
That tore it. He'd never quite know how they got from the car to the flat, the whole journey was in flashes to him. Memories of Connor struggling with door keys, warm lips and stinging stubble, the way Connor's eyes rolled back in his head when Stephen pressed him into the wall, letting Connor writhe under him, wantonly rubbing his cock against Stephen's.
Then they were through the door, shedding clothing the whole way down the hall, a brief delay as they both stripped off boots and trousers and everything else, too needy to care about much but touching each other as much as possible. Stephen found some petroleum jelly on the bedside table and looked no further as he coated his fingers liberally and slid one into Connor's arse. Connor tensed, then Stephen had to remind himself not to hurt Connor as the younger man began wiggling about, pressing his arse towards Stephen.
Another finger, and now he found Connor's prostate, making Connor groan eagerly. His slow gyrations made Stephen tense, then struggle not to give in again.
"Stephen, please," Connor whimpered as the third finger was carefully introduced in order to make sure Connor was prepared.
He was forced to pull away, rifling quickly through his wallet for a condom, and being terribly distracted from the search by the way Connor had plastered himself to Stephen's back, cupping a hand around Stephen's cock and sucking on his throat. Somehow he kept his fingers on the little package, even when fingers tightened fractionally on him and a thumb rubbed over the head of his erection, making him fumble his wallet, sending it to the floor. Connor laughed in his ear and he whipping about, taking a small revenge in wrapping his hand around Connor, making him squeak, buck his hips and fall over in one graceless moment that gave Stephen the space to roll the condom on and liberally coat it with their makeshift lubricant.
Then he was on Connor, easing in past the ring of muscle and feeling heat and tightness wrapping around him, hearing Connor say his name over and over again, blanketing the student's back and feeling his orgasm rushing up on him like the hilux on that archosaur. He got a hand on Connor's cock, managed to stroke once before Connor was coming, still bucking back onto Stephen who lasted through two more thrusts before his mind went blank.
They both collapsed to the bed, Stephen pulling out and tying off the condom on a sort of autopilot. "I was so scared I'd lost you," Connor told him suddenly, rolling over to face the older man. "When you went flying out that door . . . I was so sure you were . . . it was going to . . ."
Stephen gave a shaky laugh in reply. "When you fell over in that hallway I thought the same."
"What now?" Connor asked. "I mean, we don't . . . the university'll still be pretty unhappy if we're together." He shot Stephen an inquiring look, "Do you want to keep this quiet? I mean, just until I finish my degree? We'll just not let on-"
"No," Stephen said definitely. He'd had it with sneaking about eight years before and he wasn't going to do it again. "I'll make a move away from being Nick's assistant. I'll explain to him, he'll understand."
"Stephen." Connor looked shocked, "You can't quit your job over me, that's . . . you can't!"
They argued about it for about a week, at the end of which Cutter was proved right that the temporal anomalies were a long-term thing and Stephen promptly wangled himself a permanent paying job at the Home Office for when he got out of hospital, which solved all their problems.
At least until Claudia insisted on attempting to appropriate Connor as her sassy gay friend, which role he took to like a duck to treacle and led to poor bewildered Connor hiding out in Stephen's new office. Which wasn't really a problem for them, actually.
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