Carry on This Way
Title: Carry on This Way
Pairing: Kris/Adam
Word count: 3700
Rating: NC-17
Summary: “I don’t expect to pick up where we left off,” Kris said. (PWP)
Warnings: Angst
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Carry on This Way
“Lights on or off?” Adam asks, and Kris gets stuck right there. Some things are probably better not seen in high definition, but he doesn’t want to miss any of the rest. Maybe if they just open the curtains? No, they might need more light for the trickier parts. What does Adam prefer? Soft focus, Kris is sure. Unselfconscious as Adam is, he’s not going to suck in his stomach or wish he’d hit the stationary bike an extra day a week, but he’s the kind of person who considers candles a staple of everyday life, not just birthdays and power outages. “Beeswax is nice,” he told Kris once. “It smells like warm honey.” Then again, warm honey is too much to expect from this . . . encounter.
“How about a compromise?” Adam suggests. He switches off the bedside lamp, leaving the one in far corner of the room to cast a flattering Photoshop glow. Relieved, Kris waits for him to move on to the next point of negotiation: music, what kind, which side of the bed?
Adam kisses him instead. No warning, except the fact that they’re here together in Kris’s room, at Kris’s invitation, for this very purpose. Not an exploratory kiss, either, but the complete Adam treatment, both hands skimming their way up Kris’s neck to cup his face, yeah, Adam’s an incurable romantic all right, his lips parting Kris’s the way you open a gift when the anticipation is almost as delicious as the prospect of what’s inside. His tongue making love to Kris’s mouth, slow and sliding and wet, the whole masterful nine yards, nothing that Kris hasn’t done himself, and nothing he’s ever had done to him. Kris is gripping Adam’s shoulders, his fingers digging in, probably painfully.
Adam draws back. “Too much?”
Flat on his feet again, Kris is only surprised to realize that he was touching the ground all along. He figures it’s time to assert himself. “Let's try it lying down.”
--
“I don’t expect to pick up where we left off,” he said in the restaurant a scant half-hour earlier, putting down his $15 hamburger without taking a bite, again.
Adam left off poking at a slice of avocado and looked at him bemused. “But you want us to have sex?”
Put that bluntly, it sounded pushy, possibly deluded. Which it was. “I know it’s a lot to ask, believe me, but I’ve only ever been with one person, and-- I’ve always sucked at the hooking-up thing, and now, with guys, it’s a whole new ballgame.” Kris paused, but Adam passed on the opening. Kris had knocked the ball jokes right out of him, apparently. “I don’t even know the rules. Twice the awkward, guaranteed.”
“It might be awkward anyway,” Adam pointed out. “First times tend to be.”
“Awkward with someone . . . someone you trust isn’t the same thing as awkward with a stranger. If I fumble-- ” Lame, he can’t blame Adam for not cracking a smile. “ --we can laugh about it and call a do-over.” At least they could have, before. Kris took a nervous gulp of water, wishing he’d been chickenshit enough to make it bourbon, neat. He was going to beckon the waiter and ask for a bottle if Adam gave him the answer he dreaded. Please don’t get all logical and say it doesn’t have to be a stranger. Please, for the sake of what we used to be to each other, don’t offer to fix me up with one of your friends.
Adam laid down his fork and took Kris’s left hand in both of his. Kris’s ringless left hand. It no longer looked conspicuously bare to Kris, as it must have to Adam, seeing it for the first time. “This suits you even better than those ridiculously tight jeans.”
It was the most tactless thing anyone, including that cameraman from TMZ, had said to Kris about his divorce. It hit him like a full-body fever, sweat-prickling heat under his clothes. “Did you know all along?” he blurted out. “I thought I was being so honest with myself. ‘Yeah, I’m attracted to both girls and guys.’ I congratulated myself for it. But I was just dipping a toe in the water, because I couldn’t take the whole plunge.” Great, on top of everything else, he was putting Adam in a position where he’d feel obliged to defend Kris for hurting him.
The defiant gleam faded from Adam’s eyes. He was the same Adam Kris had met during Hollywood Week, pretty much, his hair sticking up in a million choppy tufts, the way Kris liked it best, nothing but a touch of the inevitable MAC to enhance his face. The face Kris had read in every possible mood, had admired and fantasized about kissing, too many times to count. “No one can have a revelation for you, Kris. You had to figure it out on your own timetable. Don’t listen to anyone who says you should’ve jumped in all at once. Including yourself.”
“But I messed up.” Kris dropped his gaze to their joined hands. “Not just my own life, but other people’s.”
“Life is messy.” Adam spoke with more resignation than sorrow. The familiar protectiveness stirred both hope and guilt in Kris. “I don’t believe for a minute that you took the easy way.” That, at least, was something Kris couldn’t dispute. Easy was the last word he would use to describe the last fourteen months.
Adam squeezed his fingers, reassuring. “If you’re not going to eat that, do you want to go upstairs?” And Kris did, very much.
--
Adam gravitates to the left side of the bed, no surprise to Kris, who’s watched him burrow in for the night and blink awake in the morning. Kris has even shared a bed with him, though never like this, with intent instead of a headphone splitter cord and two feet of safe space between them. What they’re doing now should feel about as dangerous as a junior high makeout session, and Kris’s hormones have definitely regressed ten-plus years, but grinding fully dressed against Adam is killing him. Adam’s mouth is killing him. Adam’s moves, deliberate thrusts that find their mark every time. Stray whiffs of his cologne, the same old citrusy stuff, little aphrodisiac bursts of memory. Tiny bumps on his shirt putting tiny dents in Kris as they roll over to the right side. “Where do you even buy a t-shirt with crystals on it?”
“Um. Tokyo.” Adam lifts his arms so Kris can yank it off. His shoulders are broad enough to block the memory of all the months they spent apart, all those impersonal calls and texts. His chest is sturdy and his nipples are pinkish and pretty and quick to respond to Kris’s tongue. Hottest of all is his aptitude for pleasure, his luxurious sigh as he sinks into it like a warm bath, cradling Kris’s head. It’s one thing to see that roll of his hips onstage--I’m made for this--another to straddle it, ride it, to know that if they were naked, he could nudge Adam’s thighs open and Adam would let him--
“Holy shit.” Kris flops onto his back, panting harder than after a run. “I’m like, right there.”
“This could be a problem,” Adam agrees, gratifyingly breathless himself.
Kris blames the insufficiency of oxygen to his brain for his next words. “When was the last time for you?”
Adam doesn’t answer right away. There’s an ample window for Kris to rediscover common sense and say, Wait, never mind. “In Atlanta. September. A guy I met a club. No expectations on either side, just . . . fun.”
Kris plows through the red light, because he’s a crappy friend and his own worst enemy. “What did you do with him?” Whatever it was, maybe he can write his own name over it, do it harder, louder, and for twice as long.
Adam’s eyes are locked on his. Even without knowing Adam well enough to unpack a footnote’s worth of information from a second of his silence, Kris would’ve gotten the message: Do you really want to do this? Hell no, resoundingly. “Blowjobs,” Adam says finally, and Kris’s competitive spirit deflates. At his current skill level--virgin--the only distinctions he’s likely to earn are clumsier, messier, and more active gag reflex. Not that he isn’t eager to try, but he’s too much a musician to delude himself that eagerness is any substitute for practice. Eagerness might get you a bless-your-heart smile before you’re booted out of the audition, that’s all.
Adam rubs the pad of his thumb over Kris’s dejected lower lip. Back and forth, again and again, anything but appeasing. “I wonder how many hours I spent thinking about this. Just pushing you up against the nearest wall and biting it.” Conversationally, he adds, “Do I get to ask you?”
Between Adam’s thumb and the subject of blowjobs, Kris’s remaining brain cells don’t stand a chance. His lips are parting involuntarily, shamelessly, and he doesn’t care. He hopes it looks slutty as hell. He hopes it’s driving Adam beyond distraction. “With Katy. Not near the end, either.”
“No wonder you asked me to help you out.” Kris must be the picture of begging need, to have Adam so riveted. “You must be pretty desperate by now.”
“Uh. Yeah, pretty m-- ” It ends on a moan as Adam leans in and licks at his open mouth. You could tie Adam’s hands behind his back, Kris thinks, surrendering, and it wouldn’t even slow him down. He’d just swallow you up. Though Kris wouldn’t actually mind if Adam’s hands roamed farther afield than his own zipper. “Getting a bit confining,” Adam explains.
Kris recovers enough to snort at the don’t-be-alarmed tone. “I’m not afraid of your dick.”
“OK, that’s . . . that’ll help.” Adam presses his face to Kris’s shoulder and vibrates, with suppressed dick-slapping innuendo, no doubt. “So you can take everything off,” Kris finishes, and Adam doesn’t find that so funny.
But even with all their clothes on the floor, he’s aggravatingly well-behaved. “How’d you lose weight on tour? It’s not fucking fair.” He strokes Kris’s hipbone, ignoring the unsubtle twitches that invite him to take the detour that’s right there, come on. “And how did I ever survive being around this all time? Wait, I remember.” There’s a smirk in his voice, wicked. “Twice a day, sometimes.”
The hypnotic arcs of his black-tipped fingers transport Kris back there, to the wonder of seeing his own reflection in Adam’s gaze, an object of desire. And no ordinary desire, but a rare blend of tenderness and raw unapologetic lust, concentrated, the faintest hint enough to tell Kris how it would be. How Adam would press the softest of kisses to the nape of his neck before bending him over.
“Do it now,” Kris says hoarsely. “Jerk off for me now. Not all the way, just show me.”
Adam complies instantly, so willing to follow Kris’s script for his Big Initiation Experience. He begins by licking his own palm like it's an erogenous zone, relishing, performing for his rapt audience of one. And then the encore, the best part, his sweet acknowledging smile. “Fast, slow?”
Kris tracks the leisurely southward progress of Adam’s hand. “The way-- ” Adam reaches his destination, and Kris gets lost. “The way you usually do it.”
“Slow to start.” Lots of pressure in his grip, sliding friction making Kris’s own cock strain in response. “Your face, Kris.”
Kris bites his lip and manages not to babble out, I love how big you are, it’s so you, I love how much you are. But he reaches out, he has to, and Adam’s hand covers his. Speeding up now. Kris isn’t taking notes, he’d sooner forget the shape of his guitar in his arms than the shape of Adam’s cock in his hand, long and thick and slightly curved. So hot, flushed with live energy and wet to ease their way, and all because of Kris, because he . . .
“Kris, I can’t-- ”
“Just, more, keep going-- ” It’s Kris who can’t take it as Adam guides him up over the head and squeezes down on the most sensitive spot, can’t contain it, can’t hold back the groan that surges through him along with more than a year of longing, can’t even keep his eyes open, can’t.
He swims out of sluggish darkness to feel his belly quivering under the warm strokes of Adam's tongue, neat methodical stripes. He’s levitating--no, Adam is lifting him the last inch, the better to feed on him. Releasing him to rove higher, fastening his mouth over a stray drop and marking the spot for good measure, a blood-red bloom where the skin stretches taut and vulnerable over Kris’s ribs. His cock bumps Kris’s thigh, huge, and his eyes, when he raises them to Kris’s, are no longer the brightest things in the room. They’re black and drugged. “Can I come on you?”
“Come in me,” Kris says thickly.
Adam isn’t too far gone to grab at what he believes in handling with care. “We don’t have to do that. You should work your way up to it.”
“I’m pretty worked up already.” If Kris can’t feel his arms and legs, it’s because his cock still has a monopoly on his blood supply. His pulse beats heavy there, demanding.
“I’ll take care of you.” Adam licks into Kris’s navel to demonstrate, and yeah, Kris can see how that would work. Especially when Adam drags his tongue flat over the coarse hair below, twice, three times, as though he’s savoring the texture. “Besides, I don’t have anything.”
Kris shivers as Adam blows air over the damp trail he left, persuasive powers in full effect. “I do.”
Adam’s quick frown could signal jealousy over the implication--that a Kris armed with condoms and K-Y is a Kris who’s going to close the deal with somebody, sooner or later--or simple reluctance. “It’s what I want,” Kris says. Let me back under your skin, let me share mine with you. “If it’s not too much trouble. Or too . . . intimate or whatever.”
This earns him a raised eyebrow, Adam’s shorthand for Please, you can’t be serious. “It’s not.” And either he means it, or he still hasn’t learned to string together the words no and Kris. A few minutes later, he’s saying, “See? No trouble at all.”
Staring down, Kris decides that the second light would’ve been OK after all. “Well, sure it’s fun for me,” he pants. “You’re taking it pretty seriously.” Adam’s using a ridiculous amount of lube, so much that it’s making filthy lip-smacking sounds, and he keeps asking Kris if he’s comfortable. Comfortable is a bus engine rumbling you to sleep, or the second quarter on a couch-sprawling Saturday afternoon. Not being worshipped and filled with electricity and introduced to your body’s secret superpowers. Kris laughs, high on discovery, and feels the clenching, little spasms inside. “Whoa, that was . . . interesting.”
“For me, too.” Adam smiles at him, prodigious in his patience as well as his gay sex prep skills.
“I really appreciate this.”
“How about this?” Adam withdraws his fingers to the tips and holds them motionless. Catching on, Kris slides down, tentative, and then he gets it and goes for it, fucking down in earnest. Once he’s found a rhythm, Adam joins in, thrusting in counterpoint. The demonstration is graphic enough by itself; Kris doesn’t need Adam to say, “Now imagine it’s my cock in you,” like he’s imagining it. “I’ll embarrass myself again,” he objects feebly, but he’s obeying, and practically thrashing on the bed.
“Don’t be embarrassed. You were gorgeous. You’re gorgeous now, even more than I-- ” Adam breaks off, too late. Kris can guess what he didn’t intend to reveal. That he’s thought about this recently, against his better judgment, maybe against his will. That Kris is his bad habit, each lapse followed by regret, by the bittersweet of what might have been, as nourishing as air.
Adam stills with him. “Did I hurt you?” He eases his fingers out, careful, and Kris silences his own protest at the loss. Does making it right mean letting go?
“No.” Deliberately, Kris pitches his voice low, so Adam will feel it low in his body. “You were gorgeous, cleaning me up like that. What if I’d let you come on me? Would you have done it then, licked it off?”
Adam brushes a glancing kiss over Kris’s belly. “Well . . . ” He’s considering the question, playing along. “First I would’ve spread it where I wanted it. And then-- ” His mouth slides hot down the length of Kris’s cock. Playing dirty. With a strangled cry, Kris drives into it, too rough, too much. In Adam’s place, he’d be choking, but Adam just, he-- “No, don’t, I’ll-- ”
“Do you want to taste me?”
Kris rears up to meet him halfway, wanting everything, Adam’s taste, his weight, the exact width of Adam’s hips holding his thighs apart snug and perfect. “Condom,” Adam says indistinctly, the one argument stronger than Kris’s determination to eat him whole. Kris ransacks the nightstand drawer and comes up empty. “Shit, fricking-- Never mind, they got wedged behind the Bible.”
Adam subsides against Kris’s shoulder again. This time his laughter has an overwrought edge. “It’s OK,” Kris says, patting his hair. “Those passages don’t mean what stupid people think they mean. Can I?” He rips the foil without waiting for permission.
“Are you sure you want to do this? I’ll probably last about five minutes.”
“I’ll take it.” Kris spreads on the lube, following Adam’s instructions to use a lot, no, seriously, a lot. “Feels so good,” Adam says, dreamy, and Kris looks up to see a matching softness in his expression.
“I understand why you have to do this,” Adam said to Kris fourteen months ago. “Being single is the best thing for me at this point,” he said to the media, in one of the dozens or hundreds of interviews Kris has watched and replayed obsessively in his head since. “I don’t have the energy to go chasing after a relationship right now,” he said in answer to the question Kris had no right to ask, during one of their periodic phone conversations--not realizing, for all his self-awareness, how his choice of words betrayed him. “This song is about what it feels like when someone hands your heart back to you, and all you can do is stand there holding it,” he said onstage night after night, miraculously without bitterness, as dark liner streaked the curve of his cheek.
“You deserve so much,” Kris tells him now, throat tight. “Someone who appreciates you. Someone who would lay down their coat over a puddle for you to walk on.”
Adam raises that dubious eyebrow, but his smile is bright. “We’re not talking about a really nice coat, I hope.”
“A really nice one. Leather, with lots of studs and . . . what’s that word?” Adam is as slippery as he’s going to get, so Kris hooks a leg over him. Only one way to find out if it’s enough.
“Um, I can’t think of any words right now.” But Adam finds a few to press on Kris, an offering too sincere to refuse. “Tell me to stop at any time. Any time, Kris.”
Adam is poignantly gentle. His cock isn’t. His cock takes Kris over. Slippery, yes, the skin of latex no barrier to the heat that spreads between them, a burn in there somewhere, a stretch outside, where Adam’s fingers massage soothingly. “The way you’re just opening for me,” Adam whispers, and Kris has heard prayers that sound less reverent. “Sorry, you’re probably like, What the fuck-- ”
“No, I . . . ” It’s not quite easy, but it’s intuitive. Even the leg-spreading part, which had seemed potentially like a concession, more so than letting another person inside him. Neither makes him feel weak, or submissive, or anything but grateful for what he can receive, and what he can give in return. “I’m glad,” he says inadequately. A boost of his hips finishes what Adam began, and Adam makes a small startled sound, like Kris just shoved him and he’s teetering on a high ledge. Kris catches him and hugs him tight, and if his eyes are wet, well, that doesn’t make him less of a man either.
“I need a minute,” Adam breathes in his ear. “Do you need a minute?” They take a minute, and Kris takes it in: Adam is right here, where Kris himself ends, and not yet close enough; Adam’s heart is banging against his, crazy BPMs, faster than club music. Too fast to dance to, but they will.
Adam rocks a little, testing. Kris moves with him, and the last piece of the revelation falls into place. You’re just you, nothing special, and then you meet someone and you’re put in context. You’re one side of an equation, half of a balance: your instinct and his introspection, your deadpan and his overflowing laugh, your three-dollar belt and his rhinestone handcuffs. Your body and his body. “I missed you,” Adam says, choked, and there it is, finally, out in the open. Fourteen months ago, Kris did what he had to do, and said goodbye.
“Adam, I lied. I do want us to pick up where we left off.”
“I know.”
“I told you not to wait for me, but I hoped you would.” Kris is done with being noble. He will tie Adam’s hands behind his back, if that's what it takes.
Adam nuzzles at secret tender places under Kris’s jaw as he pushes deep. “I did, baby. Wasn’t it obvious?”
“I hurt you.”
“It was my choice. I don’t regret it.”
“I hate that guy in Atlanta.” Kris locks his legs around Adam’s waist, in case Adam has any ideas about going back there, or anywhere.
“I was all set to hate some imaginary guy. The guy who was your first. Because I-- ”
“You.” Kris arches up to swear it with his whole body: You’ll never have to chase me. “Don’t stop,” he says, a plea, and Adam answers, “I won’t, Kris, not ever.”
--End--
Note: Title borrowed from "Senorita" by Justin Timberlake.
Pairing: Kris/Adam
Word count: 3700
Rating: NC-17
Summary: “I don’t expect to pick up where we left off,” Kris said. (PWP)
Warnings: Angst
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Carry on This Way
“Lights on or off?” Adam asks, and Kris gets stuck right there. Some things are probably better not seen in high definition, but he doesn’t want to miss any of the rest. Maybe if they just open the curtains? No, they might need more light for the trickier parts. What does Adam prefer? Soft focus, Kris is sure. Unselfconscious as Adam is, he’s not going to suck in his stomach or wish he’d hit the stationary bike an extra day a week, but he’s the kind of person who considers candles a staple of everyday life, not just birthdays and power outages. “Beeswax is nice,” he told Kris once. “It smells like warm honey.” Then again, warm honey is too much to expect from this . . . encounter.
“How about a compromise?” Adam suggests. He switches off the bedside lamp, leaving the one in far corner of the room to cast a flattering Photoshop glow. Relieved, Kris waits for him to move on to the next point of negotiation: music, what kind, which side of the bed?
Adam kisses him instead. No warning, except the fact that they’re here together in Kris’s room, at Kris’s invitation, for this very purpose. Not an exploratory kiss, either, but the complete Adam treatment, both hands skimming their way up Kris’s neck to cup his face, yeah, Adam’s an incurable romantic all right, his lips parting Kris’s the way you open a gift when the anticipation is almost as delicious as the prospect of what’s inside. His tongue making love to Kris’s mouth, slow and sliding and wet, the whole masterful nine yards, nothing that Kris hasn’t done himself, and nothing he’s ever had done to him. Kris is gripping Adam’s shoulders, his fingers digging in, probably painfully.
Adam draws back. “Too much?”
Flat on his feet again, Kris is only surprised to realize that he was touching the ground all along. He figures it’s time to assert himself. “Let's try it lying down.”
--
“I don’t expect to pick up where we left off,” he said in the restaurant a scant half-hour earlier, putting down his $15 hamburger without taking a bite, again.
Adam left off poking at a slice of avocado and looked at him bemused. “But you want us to have sex?”
Put that bluntly, it sounded pushy, possibly deluded. Which it was. “I know it’s a lot to ask, believe me, but I’ve only ever been with one person, and-- I’ve always sucked at the hooking-up thing, and now, with guys, it’s a whole new ballgame.” Kris paused, but Adam passed on the opening. Kris had knocked the ball jokes right out of him, apparently. “I don’t even know the rules. Twice the awkward, guaranteed.”
“It might be awkward anyway,” Adam pointed out. “First times tend to be.”
“Awkward with someone . . . someone you trust isn’t the same thing as awkward with a stranger. If I fumble-- ” Lame, he can’t blame Adam for not cracking a smile. “ --we can laugh about it and call a do-over.” At least they could have, before. Kris took a nervous gulp of water, wishing he’d been chickenshit enough to make it bourbon, neat. He was going to beckon the waiter and ask for a bottle if Adam gave him the answer he dreaded. Please don’t get all logical and say it doesn’t have to be a stranger. Please, for the sake of what we used to be to each other, don’t offer to fix me up with one of your friends.
Adam laid down his fork and took Kris’s left hand in both of his. Kris’s ringless left hand. It no longer looked conspicuously bare to Kris, as it must have to Adam, seeing it for the first time. “This suits you even better than those ridiculously tight jeans.”
It was the most tactless thing anyone, including that cameraman from TMZ, had said to Kris about his divorce. It hit him like a full-body fever, sweat-prickling heat under his clothes. “Did you know all along?” he blurted out. “I thought I was being so honest with myself. ‘Yeah, I’m attracted to both girls and guys.’ I congratulated myself for it. But I was just dipping a toe in the water, because I couldn’t take the whole plunge.” Great, on top of everything else, he was putting Adam in a position where he’d feel obliged to defend Kris for hurting him.
The defiant gleam faded from Adam’s eyes. He was the same Adam Kris had met during Hollywood Week, pretty much, his hair sticking up in a million choppy tufts, the way Kris liked it best, nothing but a touch of the inevitable MAC to enhance his face. The face Kris had read in every possible mood, had admired and fantasized about kissing, too many times to count. “No one can have a revelation for you, Kris. You had to figure it out on your own timetable. Don’t listen to anyone who says you should’ve jumped in all at once. Including yourself.”
“But I messed up.” Kris dropped his gaze to their joined hands. “Not just my own life, but other people’s.”
“Life is messy.” Adam spoke with more resignation than sorrow. The familiar protectiveness stirred both hope and guilt in Kris. “I don’t believe for a minute that you took the easy way.” That, at least, was something Kris couldn’t dispute. Easy was the last word he would use to describe the last fourteen months.
Adam squeezed his fingers, reassuring. “If you’re not going to eat that, do you want to go upstairs?” And Kris did, very much.
--
Adam gravitates to the left side of the bed, no surprise to Kris, who’s watched him burrow in for the night and blink awake in the morning. Kris has even shared a bed with him, though never like this, with intent instead of a headphone splitter cord and two feet of safe space between them. What they’re doing now should feel about as dangerous as a junior high makeout session, and Kris’s hormones have definitely regressed ten-plus years, but grinding fully dressed against Adam is killing him. Adam’s mouth is killing him. Adam’s moves, deliberate thrusts that find their mark every time. Stray whiffs of his cologne, the same old citrusy stuff, little aphrodisiac bursts of memory. Tiny bumps on his shirt putting tiny dents in Kris as they roll over to the right side. “Where do you even buy a t-shirt with crystals on it?”
“Um. Tokyo.” Adam lifts his arms so Kris can yank it off. His shoulders are broad enough to block the memory of all the months they spent apart, all those impersonal calls and texts. His chest is sturdy and his nipples are pinkish and pretty and quick to respond to Kris’s tongue. Hottest of all is his aptitude for pleasure, his luxurious sigh as he sinks into it like a warm bath, cradling Kris’s head. It’s one thing to see that roll of his hips onstage--I’m made for this--another to straddle it, ride it, to know that if they were naked, he could nudge Adam’s thighs open and Adam would let him--
“Holy shit.” Kris flops onto his back, panting harder than after a run. “I’m like, right there.”
“This could be a problem,” Adam agrees, gratifyingly breathless himself.
Kris blames the insufficiency of oxygen to his brain for his next words. “When was the last time for you?”
Adam doesn’t answer right away. There’s an ample window for Kris to rediscover common sense and say, Wait, never mind. “In Atlanta. September. A guy I met a club. No expectations on either side, just . . . fun.”
Kris plows through the red light, because he’s a crappy friend and his own worst enemy. “What did you do with him?” Whatever it was, maybe he can write his own name over it, do it harder, louder, and for twice as long.
Adam’s eyes are locked on his. Even without knowing Adam well enough to unpack a footnote’s worth of information from a second of his silence, Kris would’ve gotten the message: Do you really want to do this? Hell no, resoundingly. “Blowjobs,” Adam says finally, and Kris’s competitive spirit deflates. At his current skill level--virgin--the only distinctions he’s likely to earn are clumsier, messier, and more active gag reflex. Not that he isn’t eager to try, but he’s too much a musician to delude himself that eagerness is any substitute for practice. Eagerness might get you a bless-your-heart smile before you’re booted out of the audition, that’s all.
Adam rubs the pad of his thumb over Kris’s dejected lower lip. Back and forth, again and again, anything but appeasing. “I wonder how many hours I spent thinking about this. Just pushing you up against the nearest wall and biting it.” Conversationally, he adds, “Do I get to ask you?”
Between Adam’s thumb and the subject of blowjobs, Kris’s remaining brain cells don’t stand a chance. His lips are parting involuntarily, shamelessly, and he doesn’t care. He hopes it looks slutty as hell. He hopes it’s driving Adam beyond distraction. “With Katy. Not near the end, either.”
“No wonder you asked me to help you out.” Kris must be the picture of begging need, to have Adam so riveted. “You must be pretty desperate by now.”
“Uh. Yeah, pretty m-- ” It ends on a moan as Adam leans in and licks at his open mouth. You could tie Adam’s hands behind his back, Kris thinks, surrendering, and it wouldn’t even slow him down. He’d just swallow you up. Though Kris wouldn’t actually mind if Adam’s hands roamed farther afield than his own zipper. “Getting a bit confining,” Adam explains.
Kris recovers enough to snort at the don’t-be-alarmed tone. “I’m not afraid of your dick.”
“OK, that’s . . . that’ll help.” Adam presses his face to Kris’s shoulder and vibrates, with suppressed dick-slapping innuendo, no doubt. “So you can take everything off,” Kris finishes, and Adam doesn’t find that so funny.
But even with all their clothes on the floor, he’s aggravatingly well-behaved. “How’d you lose weight on tour? It’s not fucking fair.” He strokes Kris’s hipbone, ignoring the unsubtle twitches that invite him to take the detour that’s right there, come on. “And how did I ever survive being around this all time? Wait, I remember.” There’s a smirk in his voice, wicked. “Twice a day, sometimes.”
The hypnotic arcs of his black-tipped fingers transport Kris back there, to the wonder of seeing his own reflection in Adam’s gaze, an object of desire. And no ordinary desire, but a rare blend of tenderness and raw unapologetic lust, concentrated, the faintest hint enough to tell Kris how it would be. How Adam would press the softest of kisses to the nape of his neck before bending him over.
“Do it now,” Kris says hoarsely. “Jerk off for me now. Not all the way, just show me.”
Adam complies instantly, so willing to follow Kris’s script for his Big Initiation Experience. He begins by licking his own palm like it's an erogenous zone, relishing, performing for his rapt audience of one. And then the encore, the best part, his sweet acknowledging smile. “Fast, slow?”
Kris tracks the leisurely southward progress of Adam’s hand. “The way-- ” Adam reaches his destination, and Kris gets lost. “The way you usually do it.”
“Slow to start.” Lots of pressure in his grip, sliding friction making Kris’s own cock strain in response. “Your face, Kris.”
Kris bites his lip and manages not to babble out, I love how big you are, it’s so you, I love how much you are. But he reaches out, he has to, and Adam’s hand covers his. Speeding up now. Kris isn’t taking notes, he’d sooner forget the shape of his guitar in his arms than the shape of Adam’s cock in his hand, long and thick and slightly curved. So hot, flushed with live energy and wet to ease their way, and all because of Kris, because he . . .
“Kris, I can’t-- ”
“Just, more, keep going-- ” It’s Kris who can’t take it as Adam guides him up over the head and squeezes down on the most sensitive spot, can’t contain it, can’t hold back the groan that surges through him along with more than a year of longing, can’t even keep his eyes open, can’t.
He swims out of sluggish darkness to feel his belly quivering under the warm strokes of Adam's tongue, neat methodical stripes. He’s levitating--no, Adam is lifting him the last inch, the better to feed on him. Releasing him to rove higher, fastening his mouth over a stray drop and marking the spot for good measure, a blood-red bloom where the skin stretches taut and vulnerable over Kris’s ribs. His cock bumps Kris’s thigh, huge, and his eyes, when he raises them to Kris’s, are no longer the brightest things in the room. They’re black and drugged. “Can I come on you?”
“Come in me,” Kris says thickly.
Adam isn’t too far gone to grab at what he believes in handling with care. “We don’t have to do that. You should work your way up to it.”
“I’m pretty worked up already.” If Kris can’t feel his arms and legs, it’s because his cock still has a monopoly on his blood supply. His pulse beats heavy there, demanding.
“I’ll take care of you.” Adam licks into Kris’s navel to demonstrate, and yeah, Kris can see how that would work. Especially when Adam drags his tongue flat over the coarse hair below, twice, three times, as though he’s savoring the texture. “Besides, I don’t have anything.”
Kris shivers as Adam blows air over the damp trail he left, persuasive powers in full effect. “I do.”
Adam’s quick frown could signal jealousy over the implication--that a Kris armed with condoms and K-Y is a Kris who’s going to close the deal with somebody, sooner or later--or simple reluctance. “It’s what I want,” Kris says. Let me back under your skin, let me share mine with you. “If it’s not too much trouble. Or too . . . intimate or whatever.”
This earns him a raised eyebrow, Adam’s shorthand for Please, you can’t be serious. “It’s not.” And either he means it, or he still hasn’t learned to string together the words no and Kris. A few minutes later, he’s saying, “See? No trouble at all.”
Staring down, Kris decides that the second light would’ve been OK after all. “Well, sure it’s fun for me,” he pants. “You’re taking it pretty seriously.” Adam’s using a ridiculous amount of lube, so much that it’s making filthy lip-smacking sounds, and he keeps asking Kris if he’s comfortable. Comfortable is a bus engine rumbling you to sleep, or the second quarter on a couch-sprawling Saturday afternoon. Not being worshipped and filled with electricity and introduced to your body’s secret superpowers. Kris laughs, high on discovery, and feels the clenching, little spasms inside. “Whoa, that was . . . interesting.”
“For me, too.” Adam smiles at him, prodigious in his patience as well as his gay sex prep skills.
“I really appreciate this.”
“How about this?” Adam withdraws his fingers to the tips and holds them motionless. Catching on, Kris slides down, tentative, and then he gets it and goes for it, fucking down in earnest. Once he’s found a rhythm, Adam joins in, thrusting in counterpoint. The demonstration is graphic enough by itself; Kris doesn’t need Adam to say, “Now imagine it’s my cock in you,” like he’s imagining it. “I’ll embarrass myself again,” he objects feebly, but he’s obeying, and practically thrashing on the bed.
“Don’t be embarrassed. You were gorgeous. You’re gorgeous now, even more than I-- ” Adam breaks off, too late. Kris can guess what he didn’t intend to reveal. That he’s thought about this recently, against his better judgment, maybe against his will. That Kris is his bad habit, each lapse followed by regret, by the bittersweet of what might have been, as nourishing as air.
Adam stills with him. “Did I hurt you?” He eases his fingers out, careful, and Kris silences his own protest at the loss. Does making it right mean letting go?
“No.” Deliberately, Kris pitches his voice low, so Adam will feel it low in his body. “You were gorgeous, cleaning me up like that. What if I’d let you come on me? Would you have done it then, licked it off?”
Adam brushes a glancing kiss over Kris’s belly. “Well . . . ” He’s considering the question, playing along. “First I would’ve spread it where I wanted it. And then-- ” His mouth slides hot down the length of Kris’s cock. Playing dirty. With a strangled cry, Kris drives into it, too rough, too much. In Adam’s place, he’d be choking, but Adam just, he-- “No, don’t, I’ll-- ”
“Do you want to taste me?”
Kris rears up to meet him halfway, wanting everything, Adam’s taste, his weight, the exact width of Adam’s hips holding his thighs apart snug and perfect. “Condom,” Adam says indistinctly, the one argument stronger than Kris’s determination to eat him whole. Kris ransacks the nightstand drawer and comes up empty. “Shit, fricking-- Never mind, they got wedged behind the Bible.”
Adam subsides against Kris’s shoulder again. This time his laughter has an overwrought edge. “It’s OK,” Kris says, patting his hair. “Those passages don’t mean what stupid people think they mean. Can I?” He rips the foil without waiting for permission.
“Are you sure you want to do this? I’ll probably last about five minutes.”
“I’ll take it.” Kris spreads on the lube, following Adam’s instructions to use a lot, no, seriously, a lot. “Feels so good,” Adam says, dreamy, and Kris looks up to see a matching softness in his expression.
“I understand why you have to do this,” Adam said to Kris fourteen months ago. “Being single is the best thing for me at this point,” he said to the media, in one of the dozens or hundreds of interviews Kris has watched and replayed obsessively in his head since. “I don’t have the energy to go chasing after a relationship right now,” he said in answer to the question Kris had no right to ask, during one of their periodic phone conversations--not realizing, for all his self-awareness, how his choice of words betrayed him. “This song is about what it feels like when someone hands your heart back to you, and all you can do is stand there holding it,” he said onstage night after night, miraculously without bitterness, as dark liner streaked the curve of his cheek.
“You deserve so much,” Kris tells him now, throat tight. “Someone who appreciates you. Someone who would lay down their coat over a puddle for you to walk on.”
Adam raises that dubious eyebrow, but his smile is bright. “We’re not talking about a really nice coat, I hope.”
“A really nice one. Leather, with lots of studs and . . . what’s that word?” Adam is as slippery as he’s going to get, so Kris hooks a leg over him. Only one way to find out if it’s enough.
“Um, I can’t think of any words right now.” But Adam finds a few to press on Kris, an offering too sincere to refuse. “Tell me to stop at any time. Any time, Kris.”
Adam is poignantly gentle. His cock isn’t. His cock takes Kris over. Slippery, yes, the skin of latex no barrier to the heat that spreads between them, a burn in there somewhere, a stretch outside, where Adam’s fingers massage soothingly. “The way you’re just opening for me,” Adam whispers, and Kris has heard prayers that sound less reverent. “Sorry, you’re probably like, What the fuck-- ”
“No, I . . . ” It’s not quite easy, but it’s intuitive. Even the leg-spreading part, which had seemed potentially like a concession, more so than letting another person inside him. Neither makes him feel weak, or submissive, or anything but grateful for what he can receive, and what he can give in return. “I’m glad,” he says inadequately. A boost of his hips finishes what Adam began, and Adam makes a small startled sound, like Kris just shoved him and he’s teetering on a high ledge. Kris catches him and hugs him tight, and if his eyes are wet, well, that doesn’t make him less of a man either.
“I need a minute,” Adam breathes in his ear. “Do you need a minute?” They take a minute, and Kris takes it in: Adam is right here, where Kris himself ends, and not yet close enough; Adam’s heart is banging against his, crazy BPMs, faster than club music. Too fast to dance to, but they will.
Adam rocks a little, testing. Kris moves with him, and the last piece of the revelation falls into place. You’re just you, nothing special, and then you meet someone and you’re put in context. You’re one side of an equation, half of a balance: your instinct and his introspection, your deadpan and his overflowing laugh, your three-dollar belt and his rhinestone handcuffs. Your body and his body. “I missed you,” Adam says, choked, and there it is, finally, out in the open. Fourteen months ago, Kris did what he had to do, and said goodbye.
“Adam, I lied. I do want us to pick up where we left off.”
“I know.”
“I told you not to wait for me, but I hoped you would.” Kris is done with being noble. He will tie Adam’s hands behind his back, if that's what it takes.
Adam nuzzles at secret tender places under Kris’s jaw as he pushes deep. “I did, baby. Wasn’t it obvious?”
“I hurt you.”
“It was my choice. I don’t regret it.”
“I hate that guy in Atlanta.” Kris locks his legs around Adam’s waist, in case Adam has any ideas about going back there, or anywhere.
“I was all set to hate some imaginary guy. The guy who was your first. Because I-- ”
“You.” Kris arches up to swear it with his whole body: You’ll never have to chase me. “Don’t stop,” he says, a plea, and Adam answers, “I won’t, Kris, not ever.”
--End--
Note: Title borrowed from "Senorita" by Justin Timberlake.