Work Text:
*
Zach has always loathed first dates.
Too often he goes on first dates with guys who seem like they’re trying out different versions of themselves on Zach, as if those guys are using their date to figure out who they are as people, instead of who they can be with Zach. Those types of first dates end up making Zach feel like he’s auditioning for the role of himself — except, it’s an audition for the role of himself after he's already finished rehearsals and performed thousands of shows. An audition for a role he’s already landed seems . . . pointless.
“Your superiority complex has a superiority complex,” Chris tells him, barely a mumble into the rim of his to-go coffee cup, after Zach has explained why first dates tend to exhaust him.
They’re walking back to Zach’s place, a few mornings before Zach’s off to New York to settle in for Angels in America rehearsals, and Zach has been recounting last night’s first date with some mouth-breather Kristen had set him up with.
“I just get bored with people too easily. Don’t pretend like you’re not the same way.”
“I’ll pretend like that wasn’t a double negative, maybe.”
Zach gives him a sidelong look as he opens the front door.
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says in his tone that suggests he agrees but hates admitting it. “But it only seems to apply to our sex lives, right? We’re total charmers to, uh, baristas and film crews and — Noah! Hey, boy! Didja miss me? Who wants a treat? Do you want a treat? Ha ha ha good boyyy.”
Zach goes completely soft on people who get that disgustingly excited about Noah. He can feel any argument left in him slipping away the longer he stops to watch his dog throw himself euphorically against Chris’s shins, as Chris crouches down to rub his belly and scritch at his ears and generally ruffle the hell out of Noah’s fur as he writhes around in joy.
“He barely even says hello to me when you show up,” Zach says.
“It’s because he loooves me. Don’t you, Noah? Noahhh.”
“Oh my god, do I need to leave you two alone? Jesus, let me — give me your drink before you spill it, I just cleaned in here.”
Zach plucks the cup out of his hand and places both of their cups on the kitchen countertop. At least Harold greets him, weaving between his legs and mewling, before sprawling on the sunny kitchen floor and promptly ignoring him. When Zach turns back around, Noah takes this opportunity to notice Zach and jump up to full height, resting his paws against Zach’s chest and licking his chin.
“Hey, babe,” Zach murmurs, tipping his head back to avoid doggy tongue in his mouth. “Hey hey hey.” He rubs Noah’s back and indulges him for a moment, before ordering him down and picking up his cup.
“What were we talking about?” Chris wonders, sliding off his flip-flops and taking his own cup. “Your dog induces short-term memory loss.”
They both wander into the living room and sprawl onto the couch, Noah lying down at their feet.
Zach kicks off his own flip-flops, and smirks at him. “I think you were about to list all the ways in which we’re not dicks to people we aren’t dating.”
“Right, right,” Chris says, bobbing his legs together and apart, together and apart, bumping against Zach’s knee with each beat. “We’re regular Hufflepuffs when it comes to friendship.”
“Which . . . would mean something to me if I’d read Harry Potter.”
“Man, don’t even pretend like you don’t know anything about Harry Potter.”
“Sure I do. It’s part of our cultural canon now. But I don’t know about it to the alarming degree of detail you apparently do.”
“Hufflepuffs,” Chris goes on, ignoring him, “are unfailingly loyal, intelligent without being snobs—” He pauses as a smile sneaks up on him, starting on one side of his face and blooming across the other as he adds, “Okay, that last part doesn’t quite describe you, nevermind.”
Zach leans closer to elbow him in the ribs. “Shut up about Harry Potter. This always happens when you’ve been hanging out with your niece and nephew: you start outlining essays on children’s film and literature in casual conversation as if you’re suddenly an expert on the subject.”
“Well,” Chris says, drawing out the word and sinking farther back into the couch. “I wouldn’t say expert, but I am getting pretty—”
“Whatever,” Zach says. “I can’t be like you.”
Chris tenses, draws his legs together again. “And how am I like?”
“In relationships, I mean,” Zach says. “That thing you do where you surround yourself with friends who are at least as intelligent as you are, but almost exclusively date women who are bright and beautiful, sure, but can barely hold an intellectual conversation and aren’t even half as funny as you.”
“Jesus, Zach.” Chris looks so genuinely startled by this, Zach wonders if anybody’s ever actually called bullshit on him regarding his dating patterns. “Burn on my ex-girlfriends much? Tell me what you really think.”
It’s weird. They must’ve had this discussion before — they’ve been friends for over two years by now — but Zach quickly realizes: they haven’t. It’s apparent in not only Chris’s skittish reaction, but in the way the subject feels raw and exposed, like they’d never intended to touch it to begin with, and now that they have, they should maybe be extra careful with it.
Fuck careful. That’s not how they work.
“I think you’re afraid to be with someone who’s more than one thing to you,” Zach says.
“Was that a polite way of calling me a dick?”
“Dude, if I were going to call you a dick, I’d just say, ‘Chris, you’re being a dick about this.’”
Chris tilts his head and gives a considering look. “That’s true. You have done that.”
“Yeah. So believe me when I say, I don’t mean you’re a dick, per se —”
Chris snorts. “There’s the per se.”
“—but I do think you’ve never been in a relationship that’s based on more than sexual chemistry.”
“Hey, just because I don’t become the best of friends with the people I sleep with, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still sleep with them.”
“I’m not— I’m not actually judging you, man. I’m just saying: that’s how you function, and it’s not how I do.”
“You know what I’m going to miss the most while you’re off gallivanting in New York? The lying way you lie.”
“I didn’t say I never do that.” He takes a sip of his cappuccino and meets Chris’s pointed look with an eyeroll. “Okay, fine, I do the same thing a lot, shut up. We’ve already established that we’re both assholes. My point is: At least you see me trying to form relationships, even if most of them end up being flops.”
“Dude, I’ve —” Chris shakes his head and looks down at his knees. “You’re making it sound like I don’t know how to open up and be intimate with someone.” Chris meets his eyes again. “I do, it’s just . . . not something I get to practice all that often. The last time I had a girlfriend who really shook my socks was at Berkeley.”
Zach barks a laugh. “Shook your socks?”
“She put a fire in my belly and a light in my soul. We were like old rock ‘n’ roll or something something young love,” he finishes with a wave of his hand.
Zach fights back a smile at that. “So, what happened?”
“Life happened. We grew up. It’s easier to not fall in love and just fall into someone’s bed when you don’t even know where you’ll be working a few months from now.”
“That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it. Plenty of actors have healthy monogamous relationships despite the schedule.”
“Maybe, but plenty of actors are not me. Man, you know I hate the fucking paparazzi poking their lenses into every detail of my private life. I don’t need them finding even more compelling reasons to stalk me than they already do.”
Zach considers this for a moment, eyes scanning Chris. Chris, who can’t be inconspicuous even when he tries to go undercover by himself, much less try to have an undercover girlfriend on top of that. Chris, who draws attention to himself just by being Chris. On one hand, Zach gets it — they all want a little more privacy than their lifestyle allows them. On the other hand, Zach thinks Chris should give less of a fuck about something that’s out of his control if he wants to continue with this lifestyle.
“So you don’t develop serious relationships anymore because you’re worried about paparazzi?” Zach says. “That’s—”
“No, I haven’t been in any serious relationships for awhile because—” He shrugs. “Because I haven’t. Are you even listening to me?”
“I’m listening to you tell me your sob story about how you’re the first actor who’s had to live with his private life exploited as often as the press can get their hungry hands on it.”
Chris snorts and knocks back the rest of his cappuccino, sets down the cup on the table and crosses his arms, turning his body toward Zach’s. “Okay, asshole, here is what I know: I have consistently awesome sex with confident, gorgeous women with whom I have very little in common, and I have stimulating, often divergent, conversations with friends like you — never the ‘twain shall meet. I’m pretty content with keeping separate things separate, and it has the happy side effect of fending off even more paparazzi interest in the process.”
Zach rolls his eyes. “For now.”
Chris rolls his eyes back at him. “Man, you’re incepting me with worries I don’t need right now. Why plan for any relationships further than now? It’s not like I’m in love and blatantly ignoring it. Then I would welcome your criticism, because that —” He unfolds his arms and sinks back into the couch. “That would be a dick move. For both parties involved.”
Zach buries his toes in the fur of Noah’s back, takes a sip of his cappuccino, and considers that for a moment, trying to identify the weird ache in his chest at the it’s not like I’m in love. There’s something in that, something that Zach can’t linger on without feeling anxious in an old familiar way he’s felt around Chris before, all the more frustrating in its familiarity for how little he can clarify it, like looking through mottled glass and recognizing a familiar shape but being incapable of identifying it.
“Parties, huh,” Zach says, aiming for a tease and tamping down whatever else he’s feeling, because hey, self-deception — ha ha! Definitely not a thing!
Chris narrows his eyes. “You’re just waiting for me to fall in love and prove my bachelor philosophy wrong, aren’t you?”
“No more than you’re trying to prove the rest of us wrong with your ‘bachelor philosophy,’” Zach shoots back, making air quotes with one hand.
“Asshole,” Chris mutters, but cheerfully, the earlier tension seeping out of the room. He rubs at Noah’s head with one of his bare feet and looks around the room, saying, “What are we even doing here? Are we gonna watch something, or are you going to turn my criticism of your love life back around to criticize my lack thereof again?”
“Nah, I think we can move on to a movie.”
“Butch Cassidy?” Chris suggests, eyes lighting up.
“Your affection for that movie never ceases to amuse me,” Zach says, but he’s already juggling the remotes on the multi-button journey to on-demand movies.
“Man, Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s chemistry is flawless, and you know it.”
“If by chemistry, you mean homoerotic subtext, then I sure do know it.”
Chris throws Zach an utterly shameless grin, tilting his head and stretching his arms along the back of couch. He slides his hand up Zach’s neck, wraps his fingers around the nape and gives an affectionate squeeze. “Why else do you think I quoted Paul Newman at you when we first met?”
It pulls Zach back to that moment, how Zach had misguidedly hit on Chris with a blunt, “Fuck. Your eyes are really blue,” because Chris was hot and smiling as they’d introduced themselves on the porch of their trainer’s house in between sessions, and because Zach had lost the ability to come up with cheesy pick-up lines around the time he left college and had found that stating the obvious is at least a conversation starter. Chris had leaned in conspiratorially, joked, “‘If my eyes should ever turn brown, my career is shot to hell,’” to which Zach had grinned, said, “Paul Newman,” and Chris had gripped Zach’s forearm like an anchor, leaning back into laughter.
“You are such an asshole,” Zach says, and because this is an old joke between them (yet, oddly enough, just between them), he adds his usual line, “You really didn’t catch on quickly enough that I was hitting on you.”
“Like I always tell you,” Chris says, his hand still warm on the back of Zach’s neck, thumb beginning to stray across Zach’s hairline, “that’s because you had so little game, I couldn’t even distinguish that feeble attempt at flirtation between the casual way loads of people comment on the freakishly blue state of my eyeballs.”
Zach just laughs, holding Chris’s eyes for a moment longer, trying to swallow down the response he never makes in this part of their script: that when they first met, it took Zach an embarrassingly long time to distinguish between whether Chris was flirting for the sake of flirting or flirting with intent; that there’s a part of Zach that still finds that line blurred and bewildering, despite the unavoidable fact of Chris’s heterosexuality.
As Zach re-focuses on the search for their movie, Chris’s hand gives another squeeze, then slips down to the back of the couch. Zach’s neck feels abruptly cold, his head a bit off-balance, and for a second, Zach has to fight the impulse to lean back into the crook of Chris’s arm.
After a moment, Chris bumps their knees together again, and lets his leg come to a rest, warm and solid against Zach’s.
“None of you has ever even been in my New York apartment,” Zach says, opening two beers with the bottle opener attached to the doorframe between his kitchen and living room. “How could it be weird without them if you’ve never even been here with them?”
“While technically true, you’re missing my point.” Chris turns off Zach’s iPhone and sets it on the coffee table. “Even though you’re ostensibly treating this place as a temporary thing, it is so obviously you—” He gestures vaguely at the earth-tones of the couch and throw-pillows (glaringly free of pet hair), the abstract photography framed on the walls, the antique shelves stocked haphazardly with scripts, novels, DVDs, records, his banjo propped in the corner. “—and it’s weird seeing a home of yours that doesn’t include your animals.”
Zach clutches both beers in one hand and uses the other to shoo Chris’s legs off his half of the couch. “Well, it’s a good thing I have you here now to take up my whole couch and drool on my pillows then, isn’t it?”
“Baby, you love it when I drool on your pillows,” Chris says with a leer as he sits up.
“Yeah, that’s why I invited you to stay with me this weekend instead of getting a hotel — the sensual powers of your drool on my upholstery,” Zach says drily, passing Chris his beer and picking up his phone. He snorts when he sees the order confirmation. “You ordered yourself a veggie burger . . .” He gives Chris a look as he sits down beside him. “. . . with bacon.”
“Sometimes I like my vegetables best in burger form, man,” Chris says, shrugging as he takes a long pull from his beer.
Zach laughs, letting his eyes linger briefly on Chris’s lips around the neck of the bottle. They haven’t turned on a light in the living room yet, and the setting sun glowing through the window lends a warm atmosphere to the room. Zach’s eyes catch on the way it highlights the different shades of blonde in Chris’s stubble.
He swallows and looks away, taking a sip of his own beer and setting his phone back on the table.
“You’re sure you don’t want to go out tonight?” Zach says.
“Dude. I just ordered us burgers. We are going nowhere,” Chris says, laying a firm hand on Zach’s knee as if to brace him against the couch.
“I mean, after dinner — you don’t want to go to a bar or catch a show or something?”
“Nah,” Chris says, leaving his hand on Zach’s knee like he’s forgotten it’s there. Zach very carefully does not move. “We can go out after your show tomorrow. I’ve seen New York before. New York and I are good for now. You and I, on the other hand, have not seen each other in months, so I demand some quality Zach and Chris time. We need, like, Spork therapy, but for you and me.”
Zach turns his face away to hide his grin, then turns back with a straight, “Zachtopher therapy?”
Chris licks his lip thoughtfully, tries, “Chrisary counseling?”
They both scrunch their noses and burst out laughing simultaneously. Zach’s body curls forward as Chris’s curves back, his hand on Zach’s knee raising to scratch the side of his own face, brushing across Zach’s shoulder en route.
“Never try to mash our names together again. That was painful.”
“Phonetically painful,” Zach says, nodding.
“‘Phonetically p—’” Chris repeats, cutting himself short in a puff of laughter. “Yeah, man.” He shakes his head and takes another long pull of his beer.
Zach stretches out his legs and sits a little lower in the couch, relaxing into the slow work of the booze, as Chris rises from the couch to wander over to Zach’s bookshelves. He crouches down and drags his fingers over the brittle corners of old record cases.
“How are these organized?” he asks, squinting at the row between little sips of beer.
“Autobiographically.”
Chris snort-laughs, looking over his shoulder at Zach. “Really, John Cusack?”
“It didn’t feel pretentious when I was drunk and nostalgic at 3am,” Zach says, shrugging.
“So, tell me a story, Zachary,” Chris says, hand hovering back and forth until he picks a record at random near the beginning. He holds up Queen’s A Night at the Opera and raises his eyebrows expectantly.
“My brother gave that to me right after I came out to him,” Zach says, and he can’t help but smile. “He told me he didn’t know any other gay dudes he could set me up on dates with, but the least he could do was introduce famous gay musicians to my turntable.”
The edges of Chris’s eyes crinkle at that before he puts the record back and pulls out another about two-thirds toward the end of the row: Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
“Stole it from an ex-boyfriend,” Zach says shortly.
“That was a terrible story,” Chris says, not looking up from the page of liner notes he’s slid out from the case. “Go on.”
Zach sighs. “He was a bartender-slash-musician. We met while I was living in Galway. It was basically a month-long relationship of spending our days off together writing shitty songs and fucking each other stupid, and for whatever reason, we’d usually end up filling his apartment with this album and having long, meandering discussions about Anne Frank.”
Chris looks up from the liner notes and smirks. “My college girlfriend and I once spent all weekend listening to Dylan Thomas poetry recordings and going down on each other,” he says, then absently licks his lower lip and turns back to the shelf. “Man, I wish I’d brought my guitar along. We could banjo-guitar jam together.”
“The melodic soundings of The Band That’ll Never Be,” Zach jokes, even as his breathing feels a little difficult for a second, his eyes getting distracted by Chris’s wet lower lip, then his jawline, then his exposed throat, chest hair, clavicle: two buttons open on his ivory henley, its contrast against Chris’s tan skin, and how unexpectedly homesick for LA that tan makes Zach at the outset of a Manhattan winter.
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t knock my back-up plan,” Chris drawls, and Zach snorts, looks away from Chris’s throat and back to his fingers.
Chris pulls another album off the shelf, this one near the end. He doesn’t say anything, just lets out a low, appreciative hmm, and sets his empty beer bottle on the bookshelf. Zach watches the effortless control of Chris’s muscles as he slides the record out of its case, balances it between thumb and middle finger, then carefully transfers the rounded edges to his index fingers and fits the vinyl onto the turntable. He adjusts the needle, and they both breathe into the silence just before the piano starts up and Nina Simone’s voice oozes into the room.
Zach blinks, and Chris has turned back to him, meeting his eyes in the diminishing evening light. “What about this one? What’s its story?”
“It was the first record I bought when I moved here last spring. Got it at a record shop near the Flat Iron.”
Chris nods, turns to look at the spinning record, then turns back to Zach. “And who’d you listen to this with?” he says, voice unexpectedly quiet, like Zach’s answer matters.
“No one,” Zach says, just as quietly. “It was just me and Nina in my cozy apartment.”
Chris smiles softly at him and lets the music wind between them for a moment.
The building door buzzes just as Chris opens his mouth to say something. Zach can see him shift gears in a blink, turning from Zach to the door with a delighted, “Burgers!”
Zach laughs out the tension in his body and stands. “I got it.”
“This music calls for bourbon more than beer,” Chris says, as they brush past each other.
Zach presses a button to let the delivery person upstairs. “There’s a bottle in the—”
“Got it!” Chris says from the kitchen. “What am I, new?”
Turning on the living room light, Zach adds, “And there are tumblers in the cabinet above—”
“Got ‘em!” Chris says, and Zach feels inexplicably warm at how he doesn’t have to play host to Chris. Apparently, Chris fits himself so seamlessly into Zach’s space, he even fits into the new and uncharted corners of Zach’s apartment.
This scares Zach, more than a little, that level of intimacy with each other’s lives. It’s irrational and impossible, but somewhere along the line, his friendship with Chris has become the relationship to which he compares all other relationships. It’s not usually a conscious thing, it’s just that when Zach starts dating someone new (and the guy isn’t terrible, and the sex is acceptable) but then he and Chris hang out and fall back into sync with each other — well.
Zach’s gone on a couple dates with a perfectly decent guy he’d been debating calling again after Chris goes back to LA, but right now, standing at the door watching Chris, Zach can’t for the life of him remember why. Chris’s sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, pouring them each a couple fingers of bourbon, neat, appearing as at home in Zach’s kitchen as he is in his own.
The delivery person knocks on the door, and Zach startles back to reality.
Zach takes their meal to the kitchen counter, brushing against Chris in the doorway as Chris is carrying their bourbon into the living room. Taking down two plates, Zach starts arranging their burgers and fries and assorted dips, humming low to himself as “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” fills the apartment.
“Hey, we could use some water, too,” he calls out, turning, just as Chris ambles back into the kitchen, saying, “I’ve got it,” and steps right into Zach’s space to reach the cabinet above him for glasses.
Zach inhales sharply as their torsos press together, and turns his head minutely so his nose doesn’t brush Chris’s neck as Chris stretches up to rifle around the cabinet, as if he’s looking for the perfect glasses, rather than just grabbing the first two he sees. Their bare feet are crowding each other, Chris’s chest is warm and rising-falling steadily against Zach’s, and Zach doesn’t even realize he’s raising a hand to steady Chris’s waist, until Chris is stepping back, a tall glass in each hand.
He’s grinning, face a little pink, as he brandishes the glasses and meets Zach’s eyes.
Zach pretends like the hand he’d lifted was meant for one of the glasses. He side-steps to the sink and tries to take it from Chris’s hand, but Chris says, “Nope!” and steps forward to hip-check Zach away from the sink, calmly filling their glasses with water as Zach startles into laughter.
“Why are you so keen to play host in my own home?”
Chris turns off the faucet and holds out a glass to Zach. “Are you complaining?”
“Yeah, I hate when people serve me things,” Zach says dryly, letting their fingers overlap as he takes the glass.
Chris snorts, grabs his plate, and turns back to the living room. “Just let it happen, man.”
Zach picks up his own plate and follows him to the couch.
“This smells fucking decadent,” Chris says, pointing up at him with a fry.
Zach hums in agreement and sits down beside him, perhaps a little closer than he’d intended, feeling the homesick heat of their thighs against each other. He steals a few fries off Chris’s plate.
“I love this part coming up,” Chris says, playfully jabbing his elbow into Zach’s at the french fries burglary and gesturing toward the record player with a little tilt of his head.
“When she sort of scat-sings into a lyric?” Zach lets himself nudge Chris back while Chris busies himself with tearing open ketchup packets and squirting them onto their plates.
“Yeah, it’s—” Chris pauses to lick some of the ketchup mess off his fingers, and Zach’s eyes automatically drop to Chris’s mouth, before making himself turn and take a big bite of his burger. “She sounds so sure of what she wants,” Chris says, sounding almost wistful.
Zach swallows the bite and side-eyes him. “Of course you visit me when you’re having a maudlin weekend.”
Chris just huffs a warm laugh, says, “You know what I mean,” and takes a bite of his stupid bacon veggie burger.
They both listen to it happen, that final stretch of “I Put a Spell on You.”
“Yeah,” Zach murmurs, as the song fades out. Then, a bit more loudly, “Hey, I think I hear it now. I don’t know how I hadn’t listened to it that way before.”
By the end of the first week of this routine that they’ve been clinging to in the face of impending busier schedules, Zach begins to let himself into Chris’s house to wake him up.
This morning, Zach crosses his arms and leans against the doorway to Chris’s bedroom, watching Chris prop himself up on one elbow, rubbing at his face, all scrunched up and unpleasant, groaning the sounds of a guy whose sleep was anything but restful.
He blinks awake at Zach. Well, awake is a relative term.
“Doorways,” he mumbles after a few more blinks, mouth thick with morning.
Zach’s lips twitch, trying not to find this picture endearing. “Doorways?”
“Yeah, doorways. Man, way back at Berkeley, I had—” He yawns, fist covering his mouth for a moment and falling back onto the pillow, folding his arms behind his head to prop himself up a little. Zach, still sleepy himself, gets distracted by the smooth lines of Chris’s arm muscles in that position. “I had this narrative professor who was obsessed with the differences between doors in genre fiction.”
“What, like, the differences between the round wooden door of Winnie the Pooh’s home or the automatic woosh of the metal doors in the Enterprise?”
“Not exactly. Uh, it was more about how people interacted with doors. Like, the sentence She walked through the door could mean different things depending upon who the character is in whose book.”
“Well, duh. Context changes everything.”
“It’s more than that, though. She walked through the door in Hemingway could be a simple, succinct sentence — the beginning of something that’s probably pretty misogynistic but still basically just a woman walking through a door. But in Joyce or Woolf, she walked through the door could be the beginning of a run-on sentence where you get so lost you can’t find your way out, picturing a woman walking through a door, uh, imbued with her own memories.” Chris props himself back up on his elbows, eyes lighting up. “But the best part is, she walked through the door in, say, Ursula K. LeGuin or Neil Gaiman poses the question in fantasy fiction: Did she walk through the portal of the door, or did she walk, like . . . physically through the door?”
The muscles of Zach’s face struggle against a smile for a second. “I was not expecting a half-awake English Lit lecture before seven in the morning,” he says, tone more fond than he’d intended.
“The hilarious thing about your life is you probably should have expected it,” Chris says, grinning sleepily, then trailing off into a yawn, not even bothering to cover his mouth this time.
Zach ducks his head into a laugh, un-crosses, then re-crosses his arms.
“That professor had a lot to say about doorways,” Chris continues.
Zach looks up, watching Chris sit up at the edge of the bed and stretch, flexing from the arches of his feet to his fingertips. “There’s more, huh.”
“Yes, Zachary, look sharp,” Chris says, shooting a look over his shoulder and affecting his impression of Zach’s mom — an impression that is just plain inaccurate since he’s only met Zach’s mom, like, twice, and he’s shit at Pittsburghese.
Chris stands up and turns toward Zach. He’s only wearing a threadbare blue t-shirt and a pair of white briefs, but even so, it’s the nakedness of his hairy legs that seems unexpectedly intimate in the morning light of his bedroom.
Zach swallows, refuses to lower his eyes from Chris’s face again.
“Doorways have a lot of metaphoric potential,” Chris continues. “Doors themselves, depending on if they’re opened or closed, obviously can represent the difference between being welcome or rejected. And moving through a doorway is, of course, about a passage into something new — but that’s more about the interaction with the thing, not the thing itself, you know? I’ve always seen doorways as more of a metaphor for hesitation.”
Chris gestures toward where Zach’s still leaning against the doorway.
“And that’s not like you, man,” he says. “When you know what you want, you go for it. You don’t tend to want something and not voice it. You know? If you wanted a piece of chocolate cake, you would’ve taken it already, not hemmed and hawed about the pros and cons of it all.”
Right, Zach thinks. I wouldn’t have been friends with it for almost four years without fucking it if that’s what I really wanted to do.
“I’ve always admired that about you,” Chris says, smile going soft for a moment. “Among other things.”
He looks so vulnerable, standing there in just a t-shirt and underwear, sleepily and earnestly extolling Zach’s virtues. Zach’s back to the old list of things about Chris that scare him.
“Get some clothes on, c’mon, so we can beat the sun,” Zach says rather than any sort of response to that, and walks away before he can see Chris’s reaction.
Their run is pretty standard, for them. It’s just their usual route through the hilly neighborhood, setting a steady pace, except for the steeper hills when they sprint against each other; loser’s in charge of breakfast.
Zach welcomes their morning runs not as a time for self-reflection, but as a time to avoid it. He focuses on his breathing, the burn of his muscles, the way the sunrise paints the gardens and rooftops in pastels.
If, occasionally, his thoughts stray, it’s only natural, having such an attractive running partner: When Chris pulls ahead of him, Zach’s gaze catches on the swish of Chris’s shorts pulling taut around his ass, or when they match each other’s strides, the way Chris’s eyes always look brightest when he manages to catch Zach’s eyes mid-way through their route. Zach tries not to dwell on the feeling that he’s already so soothed by the familiar rhythms of their breaths beside each other, he almost wishes they had the sort of life schedules to do this every morning, ad infinitum.
Chris loses all of their uphill sprints.
“Strawberry-kale yogurt smoothies, poached eggs, and pancakes,” he decides as he leans over to pick up the newspaper and let them into his house. “We can stand to do pancakes every once in awhile, right?” He turns to Zach, then immediately answers himself. “We’re doing pancakes.”
“About time,” Zach says, smirking and rolling his eyes. “You’ve been waxing poetic about pancakes all week.” They toe off their sneakers and peel off their socks in the air conditioned house. “I’ll do coffee and smoothies.”
“There’s some fresh kale from the garden in the fridge,” Chris says. “I picked some yesterday.”
“Of course you did,” Zach teases, shaking his head as he puts the kettle on for the French press.
Ignoring him, Chris reaches for the flour jar just as Zach’s reaching for the coffee cannister. Their arms crisscross over the countertop, Zach’s wrist accidentally skimming the hair on Chris’s forearm.
Chris jerks back his arm as if he’d been shocked and rubs at the spot with his opposite hand.
Still energized and carefree from their run, Zach raises an eyebrow at Chris’s jumpy reaction and slowly drags the coffee cannister toward himself.
Catching Zach’s eye, Chris shakes his head, mumbles, “Uh, just— ticklish,” and reaches for the flour jar again.
“Weirdo,” Zach says affectionately and playfully bumps his hip against Chris’s hip.
He expects Chris to nudge him back, react in the easy way they usually exist in each other’s space, but instead Chris completely stills beside him for a long moment, then slowly shrugs his shoulders and offers a strange sort of half-laugh.
Zach shoots him a baffled look, but Chris is already moving away with the flour to the kitchen island countertop beside the stove, and he isn’t looking at Zach. Trying to tamp down the irrational spark of embarrassment he feels for letting himself indulge in that sort of innocent flirtation, Zach turns and hides his flushed face in the refrigerator, searching for the smoothie ingredients.
They prepare their meal in silence for awhile. The silence, in and of itself, is not unusual — Zach has always appreciated the quiet bouts of their companionship as much as the banter — but this silence does not feel at ease. Chris flips some pancakes and stacks them on two plates. Zach blends together a perfect pair of smoothies and measures out coffee grounds. Once the water boils, he pours it into the French press, sets a timer, and leans back against the counter, crossing his arms and fixing his eyes on Chris.
He’s poised with a wooden spoon above a pot where he’s attempting to poach eggs. (They go through this every time it’s Chris’s turn to cook breakfast, and they usually end up tasting vinegary bites of gelatinous goo with too-runny insides before tossing out the eggy mess and digging into the rest of the meal.)
“Um,” Zach says, which is a perfectly intelligent conversation starter. He clears his throat. “I actually read this study about doorways and memory the other day.”
“Yeah?” Chris says, not looking up from the eggs. The lights above the stove bring out the little clusters of silver-grey hairs in his beard.
“Yeah, some psychologists found that walking through a door really does cause immediate short-term memory loss.”
“Huh.”
“It’s fascinating,” Zach says, “how such a casual physical passage into something else can affect your memory like that—” He snaps his fingers. “—right?”
Chris sets down the spoon and covers the pot, as if already resigned to another failed egg experiment, and leans against the countertop beside Zach, crossing his arms over his chest, mirroring Zach’s pose. He doesn’t meet Zach’s eyes, and Zach resists the urge to slide closer to him, to feel the warmth and steadiness of Chris’s shoulder against his own.
It feels oddly like eavesdropping whenever Zach sees Chris like this: a version of himself that is quiet, and then quieter still; static and listening. Every smile Zach can provoke from Chris in this state feels like a gift, pulling them up to the surface of their thoughts.
“There’s so much potential for literary mindfuckery in that,” Chris says, finally.
Zach starts to grin, his gaze caught on Chris’s crossed arms, on the place where Chris’s fingers are resting against his bicep. “Yeah?” he says and tilts his head toward Chris, trying to catch his eye.
“Yeah,” Chris says, head bowed, gaze considering the tile floor. “If walking through a door can make you forget whatever you were just doing, then what if, uh, some dystopian society took advantage of that fact.”
“You mean . . . in fiction, right.”
“Yeah, obviously in fiction,” Chris says, glancing over and rolling his eyes. Zach feels inexplicably more at ease from it. “Doorway metaphors, remember?”
“Back to Metaphor 101 with Professor Pine?” Zach says, lips stretching fully into a smile.
“You love it,” Chris mumbles, nudging him, then raises his voice back to a steady lecturing cadence. “Doorways can also represent waiting.” He lifts one hand and gestures inarticulately for a moment, before sliding the arm back across his chest, saying, “You know: being stuck in between one moment and the next.”
“Yes, Christopher, I am familiar with waiting,” Zach says, and it shouldn’t cost him anything, to say that, but his fingertips inexplicably twinge at the sentiment.
“Right.” Chris is back to staring at the tile mosaic beneath their bare feet. “What if there were some crazy technologically advanced society that could control peoples’ interactions with doorways — make doorways, sort of, an event horizon of memory loss on a grand scale, not just short-term, and—I don’t know, what if you were in the middle of doing something vital when you approached a threshold? And then you cross it, and you never remember what it was, and that ruins your life?”
Zach tries to parse this idea for a moment before concluding, “I think you’re thinking too hard about this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris laughs. “The guy playing Captain Kirk is still the person least likely to write a viable science fiction script, I know.”
“Y’know,” Zach says, “for such an instinctive person, you also spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the same things over and over.”
Chris shrugs slowly. “You know me, man: Paradox City.”
“Yeah, I do know you,” Zach says, tone leaving no room for argument, because he can tell that Chris is about to quiet in on himself again and he doesn’t know why, but he does know that he can talk at him until the brain chatter quiets, even a little.
Startled, Chris turns to meet his eyes, and Zach just starts talking. “I know you, man. I know— I know that you forgive yourself less than anyone else I know, and yet you usually understand better than most how to balance self-improvement over self-absorption.”
Chris flushes and shakes his head, bowing his gaze back to the floor.
“Hey, no—” Zach turns to face him fully, reaching out a hand toward Chris’s elbow. “Chris.” He retracts his hand before it makes contact. “I know that for such a privileged person, your sense of entitlement is refreshingly proportionate with the amount of work you put into something, and — and you’re smart, you really think about things, but not in a contrived way — like, your half-awake English Lit lectures just because? We both know it’s never ‘just because’ anything, is it.”
Chris finally looks back up at him, watching him intently.
Zach suddenly feels like he’s getting himself into dangerous territory. “And, um—” He thinks desperately for a way to not reveal himself so much. “You’re also really bad at cooking eggs.”
Chris’s eyes crinkle at the edges, and he drops his head in a genuine laugh.
“No, seriously,” Zach says, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the stove. “Those eggs are fucking done, man.”
“Oh shit!” Chris rushes over to them and grimaces as he lifts the lid. He turns sheepishly back to Zach. “Just smoothies and pancakes?”
The timer goes off. “And coffee,” Zach adds, nodding. He presses down the plunger of the French press and pours them each a wide mouth mug as Chris brings their pancakes to the table and returns for the smoothies.
Zach doesn’t try to stop the way he and Chris squeeze through the doorway to the dining room at the same time — hips and shoulders and elbows jostling together — but then again, neither does Chris.
“A Romulan?” Karl says, angling his head closer to Chris in an attempt to hear him more clearly over the din of the bar. “Are you really trying to tell a Star Trek joke?”
Chris casually flips him off, saying, “No — a Roman. A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers—” He raises his index and middle fingers into a V. “—and orders five beers.”
Zach scrunches his nose and laugh-groans, because apparently even the way Chris tells a bad joke is something he finds funny, while everyone else just groans and boos at Chris.
The two of them are pressed together, knee to shoulder, in a pub booth during a night off from filming the sequel. Karl, John, Zoe, Simon, and Alice are all crowded around their little table at an English pub Simon had dragged them all to, claiming homesickness (“even for an obviously Hollywoodified version of Englishness”) and the desire for Alice to bond with some of their mad bunch.
“Yeah, yeah. Can any of you jerks do better?” Chris says, eyebrows raised in a challenge.
“Can any of us do better at telling a bad joke or telling any joke?” John asks.
“Bad one. Only bad ones,” Chris says.
“Oh, I’ve got one!” Alice says, slamming her empty vodka soda down on the table.
“Let’s hear it then,” Simon says, crooking his fingers in a bring it on gesture.
“Right. So.” Alice clears her throat, then meets each of their eyes in turn as she tells it: “Three nuns are walking up the road when a man appears and flashes them. The first nun — has a stroke. The second nun — has a stroke. But the third nun — doesn’t touch it.”
Zoe and Simon burst out laughing, but the rest of them make a show of booing and tossing coasters in Alice’s general direction. She handles it with aplomb, just turning to giggle with Zoe, and throws her own coaster in the direction of Chris and Zach, who continue booing the longest.
“What about some legitimately funny jokes?” Simon says, looking around the table.
“Says the professional funny person,” John says.
“I can’t just be funny on cue, you know that’s not how it works.”
“Aw, Simon, it’s okay,” Chris says, reaching an arm around Simon’s shoulders and giving him a squeeze, then fluidly leaning back into Zach. “We’ll still love you even if you’ve lost your sense of humor.”
“Speaking of legitimately funny jokes,” Zoe says, fluttering her hand at Chris.
“What?” he says.
“Oh you know: the way you hug people,” she says, and everyone laughs knowingly, except for Chris and Zach who exchange puzzled looks.
“What’s so funny about the way I hug people?” Chris asks.
“We’ve said it before and we’ll probably have to remind you again,” Zoe says, rolling her eyes. “Your hugs are so — so regal.”
“Robotic,” Karl adds.
“Whoa, I wouldn’t go that far.” Simon holds up a hand. “It’s just that your technique is a little too . . .”
“Prudish,” John says solemnly.
Simon nods. “Yes — that!”
Chris’s jaw drops open, but Zach can tell he’s just barely suppressing laughter. “Prudish?”
Simon stands up and tugs Chris by the arm to stand up beside him. “Let’s deconstruct and demonstrate, shall we?”
John and Karl pull the table back a little bit to give them space. Zach leans back into Zoe so he can see around Chris’s ass better.
“Go on, give me a hug.” Simon extends his arms expectantly.
Zach can see rather than hear the way Chris laughs at that, his shoulders shaking, footing swaying a little.
“You got it, buddy,” Chris says, and then promptly scoots his ass directly into Zach’s face, because apparently Chris backs out the lower half of his body in equal measure to how far he wraps up the other person in the upper half of the embrace.
“That is one jouncy booty,” Karl calls out, laughing heartily.
“This is not the proper way to hug a man,” Simon says over Chris’s shoulder.
“Shoving your ass in someone else’s face is not the proper way to hug anyone,” Zach protests, spluttering at the taste of denim on his lips, grabbing hold of Chris’s hips, and firmly shoving them away from his face.
He can feel Chris’s abdominal muscles jump a little beneath his fingers. Chris lets go of Simon, drops one of his hands to cover the back of Zach’s hand, and twists to look down at him, a bewildered smile growing on his face.
Zach opens his mouth to say something playful or— or anything— but all that comes out is a breath he’d been holding. He slides his hand out from beneath Chris’s, pushes his big Vulcan eyebrow-covering glasses up his nose, and pulls both hands safely back into his own lap. Everybody else appears to have found Chris’s actions hilarious and paid no mind to Zach’s lingering hands; Zoe’s laughing so hard against Zach’s shoulder he swears he can feel tears through his shirt.
Chris turns and sits back down, not quite touching Zach this time.
“Ohh no you don’t,” Simon says and pulls him back up. He peers around Chris at Zach and says, “You, too.”
“Excuse me?” Zach says.
“You need to help demonstrate to Chris the proper way to hug a man.”
“Why, because I’m gay?” Zach says, rolling his eyes. It’d been general knowledge amongst his castmates during the last shoot, but this time around, he’s publicly out. There’d been a small part of him that’d wondered if he’d be treated differently on this shoot.
“No.” Simon exaggeratedly rolls his eyes back at him. “Because I have no complaints about your hugging technique.”
“Wait, do gay men have some secret hugging skill we’re not aware of?” Karl asks mock-seriously.
“Yeah, you didn’t know?” Zach says, leaning forward. He makes a face that he hopes conveys how embarrassed he is for Karl.
“Stand up,” Simon says, all business.
Zach sighs and stands.
“Right. So. Go on then.” Simon makes a shooing motion at them.
Zach angles Chris an apologetic smile.
Chris just shrugs and leans forward, wrapping his arms around Zach and pressing the top halves of their bodies together. He doesn’t move the lower half of his body, and Zach can’t really thrust his body forward elegantly to meet him, so they just stand like that with an obtuse triangle of space between their bodies.
Chris awkwardly pats Zach’s back a couple times.
Zach breathes a laugh in his ear, and Chris matches it, murmuring, “I don’t know, man, Simon’s making me self-conscious. I am not drunk enough for this.”
“Dude, how had I never noticed what an awkward hugger you are before?” Zach tells him as they pull apart.
Chris’s face is flushed, and he’s chewing distractedly on his bottom lip.
“Why don’t you want your junk touching?” Simon asks.
“Never be afraid of junk against junk,” John says.
“Pressing your crotch against another man’s crotch shows an unparalleled degree of self-confidence,” Karl says definitively.
“This was not even on my radar as a male problem,” Alice says, fascinated.
“I feel like I’m watching a strange, human variation on an Animal Planet documentary,” Zoe says.
“Oh for—” Zach hears from Simon before he feels Simon shove him and Chris back together as if they’re action figures he’s forcing to play with each other.
This time they both trip at the abrupt force, and their bodies fit flush together. Zach wraps his arms around Chris’s shoulders — one palm flat between his shoulder blades, the other one stretched along his ribs, feeling the rhythm of Chris’s breathing as it stutters and starts up again — and Chris’s arms come up around Zach’s waist. His hands drift around Zach’s lower back before settling warmly, shifting their bodies minutely closer.
There’s this long moment that’s probably not actually as long as it feels to Zach, in which Chris has burrowed his forehead in the crook of Zach’s neck and shoulder, and Zach’s basically nuzzling Chris’s hair, and he can feel Chris’s breath against his clavicle through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, and — and Zach lets his eyes close.
“Now that is how you hug a man,” Simon calls out.
Zach’s eyes fly open.
He’s not sure which of them tenses first, but suddenly their bodies don’t fit. Zach wants to diffuse the intimacy, do something like grab Chris’s ass and make a joke like the rest of them, but instead he lets go and steps back, almost falling down into Zoe’s lap in his haste.
“Uh,” Chris says, blinking, face still red, chewing on his lip again. His hands are hanging awkwardly at his sides, palms out, like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do next.
Zach notices the section of Chris’s hair just above his ear that Zach’s nose and lips had ruffled. He swallows, adjusts his haircut-hiding beanie cap, and turns to his drink, only to find it empty.
“Everybody for another round?” he says, pleased with the evenness of his voice as he climbs over Zoe’s legs to get to the bar.
On his way, Zach hears Simon announce, “See, Christopher, now you know how to hug a man so well you scare him away!”
It hits Zach then, there, in a Californian English pub, surrounded by drunken strangers with his castmates at his back; it hits him with such force and swiftness, he’s appalled he’d never recognized this particular brand of fear before.
So. That’s what this is.
Zach has never been the sort of person who gets crushes — well, in point of fact, he tends to flat-out refuse to get crushes. Sure, he gets the obviously unattainable infatuations with creative forces like John Cameron Mitchell or Alan Cumming, but when it comes to the sort of heart-drawn-around-his-name, mental anthology of touches, more wet dreams than he’ll ever admit to crush — the sort that happens on a person who exists in Zach’s daily life — he simply does not allow his affections to veer off and linger that way. At least, he hadn’t let himself do that — until he’d started to become friends with Chris.
And now, here he is with these feelings he’d resigned himself to years ago, and he has to go and recognize that although he used to define it as a simple crush, over the years it has snuck up on him into something so much more than I want him. He can barely let himself think the words, but he sure as hell feels them. And once the feeling’s settled in, clarified and calcified, Zach’s not sure how he’ll be able to ignore it. The sum of those three words has taken up residence, matriculated in the space where all of his thoughts about Chris go, and now all of those Chris-thoughts are pouncing on the chance to mingle, shaking hands, shoving one another, quickly building into a fray that culminates in a much louder feeling in his head than each of those thoughts on their own has ever warranted.
Zach has been content to fall headlong into his fledgling relationship with Jon, oblivious to the depth of (his side of) his friendship with Chris. And yet it is a terrifying relief to put a name (however imprecise, however impossible the reciprocation) to what he’s felt for Chris for a long time, regardless of whatever he’s beginning to cultivate with Jon.
He makes it to the bar.
After rattling off everybody’s drinks to the bartender, he braces his forearms on the edge of the bar and spaces out at the little bins of garnishes while he waits.
Somebody cups a palm around his elbow.
“Hey,” Chris says when Zach looks up, startled. He’s right there, just a smidge too close, like usual, lips starting to spread into a smile, crow’s feet crinkling from his eyes.
Zach rubs his chin on his shoulder and doesn’t look away. “Hey?”
Chris just nods, and keeps nodding for a second too long, eyes not leaving Zach’s, hand still warm on Zach’s elbow.
As Zach tries to figure out how to react to that, the bartender cuts in with, “Want to add all this to your tab?” and Zach turns to deal with that instead, even though all he can think of is Chris’s hand still inexplicably on his elbow.
When he turns back to Chris a moment later, saying, “Help me with these drinks?” Chris mutters under his breath, “Jesus Christ,” and tugs on Zach’s elbow, getting Zach to straighten up and face him.
He adds, more audibly, “Yeah, just— uh,” hooks an arm around Zach’s neck, and pulls Zach into another hug. He crowds their feet, pressing the fronts of their bodies close together, like he’s trying to prove something.
Zach’s breath catches, then starts, with difficulty.
Chris’s arms wrap more tightly around Zach’s shoulders. “We’re good?” he says into Zach’s ear. He sounds uncertain about that for the first time in — well, Zach can’t think of a time he wasn’t certain about that.
“Why wouldn’t we be good?” Zach says, tuning down the Chris-noise in his head, and raising his arms awkwardly around Chris’s back.
“Okay,” Chris says, as if that’s a legitimate answer, then steps away and holds up his hand for their currency of approval through high-fives.
Zach slaps it, still in a bit of a daze.
“Okay,” Chris repeats, then turns to help Zach with their drinks.
Zach is lying awake in bed next to Jon, who’s been fast asleep ever since they’d fucked a couple hours ago.
before I sleep, he texts back to Chris, cursing their alternating schedules on alternate coasts — Chris had just been in New York shooting Jack Ryan, but now he’s back in Los Angeles. And here Zach is, setting up camp in Massachusetts for Glass Menagerie, feeling the miles between two little text messages, the timezone hours to go until Chris catches up to Zach’s 3am, at which time Zach will still be three hours ahead: the unknown days to go until they’ll see one another again, the impossible distance between who they are and who they could be and who they can never be to each other.
Fuck what late nights do to Zach’s thought processes.
“Who’s texting you so late?” Jon says, voice groggy, rolling over to tangle his legs with Zach’s, comb his fingers through Zach’s hair.
“It’s just Chris,” Zach murmurs, tucking the phone under his pillow and closing his eyes at the soothing feeling of being pet.
“It’s cute how he pretends to forget about timezones,” Jon grumbles, already sounding like he’s slipping back into sleep. His hand stills on Zach’s head and falls limp to the pillow.
Zach noses Jon’s jaw and presses a kiss there. Of all the guys Zach’s dated seriously, Jon’s one of the few who doesn’t feel irrationally threatened by Zach’s close friendships, and yet it’s also the only relationship in which Zach feels guilty about his lingering attraction to Chris. If he ever actually admitted to this, Jon would probably tell him that he’d have to be blind not to notice how hot Chris is, that being physically attracted to his straight friend is basically the same sort of unattainable attraction as when they were teenagers lusting after movie stars — and yet. It’s late nights lying in bed like this that make Zach feel guilty, because it’s always meant more than that to him, regardless of how impossible the reality remains.
Zach’s phone vibrates under his pillow.
cleave
cleave? he texts back, at a loss after staring at the glow in the darkness of his bedroom for a long moment.
v. 1. to cling to. 2. to divide. One of a handful of English words that is its own antonym.
it is not late enough by you to be texting me non-sequiturs.
it’s always time for non-sequiturs
ha. stop trying to win at linguistic fisticuffs. you’ll never be the victor.
pistols at dawn, you braggart!
Zach tries to muffle a giggle in the pillow, turning away from Jon. if you start just picking out words at random from shakespeare again, i call that an automatic forfeit.
your face is an automatic forfeit.
very mature, christopher. do you need a bedtime story with that childish comeback?
once upon a time, fuck you.
and they lived happily ever insomnious.
There’s such a long pause after that text, Zach almost puts his phone down and tries for sleep again, but then:
to be continued...
He falls asleep staring at the ellipses, carefully willing his mind blank.
More often than not, if Zach finds him alone, Chris is eating and reading, or eating and texting, or eating and laughing at, apparently, nothing in particular because never let it be said that Chris isn’t a weird dude. Sometimes, though, Zach catches Chris writing. Watching Chris scribbling in notebooks or typing away on his laptop — ink smudges on the heel of his hand, indents just below his wrist from frantic laptop typing, tongue licking his lip every few minutes — indicates to Zach how far in love or frustrated Chris is with whatever stories he’s bringing to life with his words.
(He’s even charmed by the way Chris jots down notes in the margins of scripts, notes that read like a college freshman, which, Zach suspects, are there just to make Chris giggle to himself. Zach swore he saw a jaunty “man vs nature” in the margin of the volcano scene at the beginning of Chris’s copy of Into Darkness during the first script reading.)
“I’ll probably never Franco this shit and try to publish, but I like the process, you know?” Chris had said once, after Zach nagged him into confiding what form of writing he usually works in.
“I’m not even going to touch the fact that you just used James Franco as a verb,” Zach had said, rolling his eyes and making Chris bark a laugh. “So, just short stories then? Any screenplays?”
“Nah, nothing finished yet,” Chris had said, neck flushing as he’d dipped his head back to his tablet. He’d looked back up a moment later, smirking. “You’ll be the first to know if I’ve got something for your house to produce,” he’d added with a wink. Zach had just rolled his eyes.
Today, when Zach approaches Chris while he’s writing, it doesn’t take him long to realize that he’s not actually writing anything at all; just using the pen to make oblong shapes in the newspaper.
They’ve finished with their interviews for the day and are killing time before they’ll meet up for drinks with everybody else tonight. Before this press tour began, they hadn’t spent any time together in months, and after this press tour ends, they’ll be even more frequently drifting to opposite coastlines. So, instead of taking some time apart after a long morning of non-stop answering questions beside each other, Zach and Chris have done what they usually do at this point in a press tour: split ways just long enough for one of them to grab a newspaper and the other to grab some food.
Carrying a pair of teas and salads, Zach comes to a stop where Chris is sitting on the ledge along the Thames, completely ignoring the bench a few feet in front of him, pen in hand and newspaper in his lap, his legs dangling over the stone pathway.
“Are you—”
“Yep,” Chris says distractedly, tapping the end of the pen against the corner of his mouth where his tongue’s poking out.
“—doing a word search?”
“Can you find anywhere on this page where two Ps are beside each other? I cannot find pineapple.”
“A word search, dude? Really?”
Chris looks up, squinting into the sun behind Zach. “Why do you keep saying word search with such disdain?”
“Finding given words in a block of comic sans letters involves zero intellectual aptitude.”
“Snob,” Chris says fondly.
“Says the English major.”
“Says the Theatre major.”
“Says the professional thespian.”
“Says the— oh, I found pineapple!” He carefully circles the word, then looks up at Zach through his eyelashes, grinning. “Word searches help exercise your synapses like any other puzzle,” he argues, “but you are correct: they don’t involve much problem solving or intellectual curiosity. They’re the lazy man’s word puzzle.”
“You’re not exactly a lazy man, Mister Christopher I’m-going-to-crack-open-Ulysses-and-read-dozens-of-new-scripts-and-act-in-a-feature-and-work-out-at-least-twice-a-day-and-somehow-still-have-time-for-a-social-life Pine.”
Chris laughs, sitting up straight and tucking the pen behind his ear. The newspaper rustles against the weight of his other hand. “Maybe.” His smile softens. “But I am a sentimental man, and when I saw this next to our usual crossword puzzle, I couldn’t help but remember I used to do these with my Nana when I was a kid.”
“I used to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy with my grandparents,” he tells Chris, voice softer than he’d expected.
“Totally the word search and crossword puzzle of television,” Chris says, making Zach laugh.
Chris gives Zach one of his private, content smiles.
Zach makes himself turn away. He sets down Chris’s lunch on one side of Chris and his own lunch a bit farther on the other side, and hoists himself up between the two. His hand curls around the rim of the ledge between their thighs, the stone cool beneath his palm, a little damp on his fingers.
“Thanks for lunch,” Chris says, and casually drops his hand on top of Zach’s as his other hand reaches for his tea. The shock of warmth sinks into Zach’s skin as Chris’s palm settles on the back of his hand, fingers sliding between Zach’s knuckles, as if this is something they do all the —
“That’s still pretty hot,” Zach says to the tea.
“Uh-huh,” Chris says, patting Zach’s hand as if he hadn’t essentially been holding it unnecessarily a second ago. He retrieves it to peel off the lid of his tea and blow across the steaming surface.
Zach watches Chris’s lips for a moment too long. He knows that Chris lives with the anxious threat of paparazzi just under his skin whenever he’s in public, so it throws Zach off balance whenever Chris touches him in public as if they are in private. It’s an intimacy Zach’s never been sure what to make of.
Lifting his hand from the stone, he scoots closer to Chris — half proving to himself that he can, half because it’ll be easier to share the newspaper that way. He pulls out a mechanical pencil from his jacket pocket, hunches closer to the crossword puzzle, and clears his throat. “Go ahead and finish your word search. I’ll commence with our crossword.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says easily, setting down his tea and plucking the pen from behind his ear. He taps it against Zach’s pencil. “Lemme know when you need my assistance.”
“Right. I’d be lost without you,” Zach says mock-wistfully. “That’s why I’m the one killing it at J.J.’s press tour word game, instead of flirting doggishly with every female interviewer we meet.”
“Doggishly?” Chris says, and Zach can feel his laughter ripple between their shoulders, no space between them.
Zach thinks of that particular way Chris flirts with women: the would-be-suave innuendo, the flushed skin and goofy frat boy bounce of a laugh he pulls when he’s a little embarrassed but hopes they’ll be charmed by it. Zach thinks of those times when he and Chris have sat side by side and Chris has flirted outrageously with their interviewer, while Zach turns away, rolling his eyes and running fingers through his hair, then turning back and re-adjusting his hairstyle, tossing out a snarky comment and rolling his eyes again.
“I’m going to need to bill you for optical nerve damage someday,” Zach says.
“I don’t even know why I hang out with you, you jerk,” Chris says, laughing even harder, but he shifts the newspaper so the pages overlap his thigh and Zach’s.
“Who else would finish your half-ass attempts at the Sunday crossword?” Zach says, already filling in an answer.
Chris snorts, nudging Zach’s elbow with his own. He lets their arms stay pressed together, left-handed and right-handed quietly working in tandem.
Zach’s phone vibrates with a text just as Chris is proclaiming himself Master of All Word Searches a long while later.
“Oh, I’m so proud of you,” Zach says drily, reaching his free hand into his jacket pocket for his phone.
“You totally should be,” Chris says, already leaning closer into Zach’s space to inspect his progress on the crossword.
The message is from Jon: a photo of him, Noah, and Skunk making sad eyes; no caption.
It’s a punch in the gut, both because the irregularity of their too-often long-distance relationship has started dragging at them both and the last time they’d talked all they’d done was argue about opening up their relationship, and because this past week of soaking up almost every waking moment with Chris has brought back, with an excruciating force, Zach’s old habit of comparing every relationship to his friendship with Chris.
None of that is fair: You can’t compare an unrequited, impossible something with a friend to a real romantic relationship with a partner, rich with beautiful complexities and inescapable flaws and sex that doesn’t just take place in a daydream fantasyland. And yet — sometimes his and Chris’s too-short endless hours of conversation and laughter and quiet company get mixed up in this occasional look in Chris’s eyes that makes Zach think, for a second, If I didn’t know better . . .
Chris gives a triumphant ha! and weaves his arm beneath Zach’s to reach the crossword.
Zach blinks away from the photo of his boyfriend and his dogs to watch Chris’s delicate, deliberate pencil marks spell out the answer. The inside of Chris’s elbow presses warmly along the back of Zach’s as he tries to shove Zach away from filling in the answer before him, as if there’s even a danger of Zach trying that while he’s distracted.
“Told you so,” Chris says, leaving his arm flush against Zach’s own as he turns a smug grin to Zach, face a little too close at this angle.
“Told me you could answer one five-letter word?” Zach says, trying to regain his balance. He slips his phone back into his pocket and unweaves his arm from Chris’s, but he allows himself a playful nudge. “Color me astounded.”
“Jackass,” Chris mutters, nudging him back.
“No, but that might be the seven-letter word for fifteen down,” Zach teases.
Chris snorts.
Neither of them moves apart to even touch their food until the sun has almost set, lamp posts and the Eye and the Parliament buildings’ lights all blinking on around them, and they have to squint a little in the half-light to complete the whole puzzle.
One of his favorite quieter spots quickly becomes The High Line, despite not being allowed to bring Noah and Skunk up there in the gardens. He’s found a long wooden bench set between a trellis wall and a row of trees, almost-but-not-quite hidden, with the Hudson’s subtly salty wind at his back and Tenth Avenue traffic below the other side of the foliage before him. This stretch of browning-green textured autumnal gardens along the park is soothing with its sporadic bursts of purples and golds, especially in the evening when the park is less peopled.
Being single again feels a lot less desperate than it did when he was younger.
“God, you sound even older than we actually are when you say shit like that,” Chris says over the phone, because Zach had hardly cracked open a new book of short stories before Chris had called him just to say hi, which is Zach & Chris for this conversation is going to be way longer than is probably necessary because get the two of them talking and they never want to hang up.
“Fuck you, I’m closer to forty than you are, ergo I get to bitch about being old as much as I want,” Zach snaps, but he’s smiling, and knows Chris can tell when all he gets in return is a snort of laughter over the line.
“Man, my only old person complaint is that, when I was a kid, I was under the impression that the older I got, the more in control I’d get to be of eating whatever shit I wanted.”
Zach can’t help but giggle. “God, I bet you were the neediest fucking kid, weren’t you.”
“Fuck you,” Chris says, laughing. “I just wanted to eat so many marshmallows and other crap like that, but my parents did not agree with my kid logic that eating marshmallows every day would train my body to think they were actually healthy for me.”
Zach giggles even harder.
“So,” Chris goes on, “I promised myself that when I grew up, I’d let myself eat all the sweets my parents never let me eat when I was a kid.”
“Problem is, now your body can handle that shit even less than it could back then.”
“Exactly! It’s bullshit.” He sounds so cranky, Zach’s cheeks hurt a little from grinning indulgently.
“I just want a fucking cookie, is that so much to ask?” Chris bemoans. “Like, a homemade my-sister-sent-these-in-a-care-package gooey chocolate chip cookie the size of my face.” He lets that sink in, then breaths a far too sexual, “Fuck. That never used to sound decadent until I started doing these fucking cleanses.”
“Then just go have a fucking cookie so we can get back to talking about my love life.”
Chris laughs. “I can’t! It’d just spiral from there, and then my cleanse would’ve been for nothing.”
“What would it spiral into? You subsisting solely on a diet of cookies?”
“Yes! My days would be filled with, uh, White Russians and chocolate chip cookies, every waking hour. You’d fly back here in the spring to find me passed out drunk-naked on a mountain of cookies, crumbs caught in my chest hair, and melty chocolate carnage lining my lips.”
Zach actually has to pull the phone away from his ear to fold in on himself laughing. “Chris. Chris,” he says, when he picks himself back up. “Please do that just so I can have an actual photograph of that tableaux.”
Chris groans longingly, but quickly devolves into laughter as Zach does a subdued Cookie Monster om nom nom impersonation.
“Never thought I’d be grateful you’re not around,” Chris says.
“You wound me,” Zach says, smirking through the pang in his chest. It passes quickly enough.
“If you being here with me meant you’d be force-feeding me cookies? Yeah, it’s better for both of us we’re apart right now. Where are you anyway? I keep hearing weird shit in the background.”
“I’m sitting on The High Line. Sorta between the river and traffic, so there’s wind. Sirens. Et cetera.”
“Et cetera,” Chris murmurs with a soft chuckle.
“Yeah, it’s pretty peaceful actually.”
“Dude, isn’t that, like, in the sky though? And it’s cold?”
“It’s October.” Zach rolls his eyes. “It’s hardly cold, Christopher. Unlike you, I was raised in the Northeast and actually know what real cold feels like. I’d call this refreshing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says, and they fall into companionable silence for a moment.
Zach fondly remembers the first time the two of them had experienced a New York autumn together: Zach had worn a light scarf and jacket, some fingerless gloves and a beanie — essentially what he’s wearing right now — but Chris had bundled up in thick leather gloves and coat, wool scarf, hat pulled down past his eyebrows. They’d fallen into a steady rhythm of Chris bitching about the wind and Zach teasing him, as they’d wandered between theatres and bars, parks and bookshops and cafes, Chris’s hotel rooms and Zach’s apartments. . . . He might actually be consolidating all of his memories of Chris in New York into one memory.
(Actually, the last time he’d seen Chris was a couple months ago, in the midst of the humidity of August and Zach’s rehearsals and Chris’s Jack Ryan pick-ups. Zach had been freshly reeling from the end of his relationship with Jon, and Chris had shown up at Zach’s apartment before he’d shipped out to London for Into the Woods. He’d given Zach one of his old Hilariously Impersonal Chris Hugs — somehow still comforting in its familiarity — and spent hours at the Tompkins Square dog park with Zach and Noah and Skunk, listening to whatever Zach needed to say.)
Zach watches two young dudes walk past him, holding hands and gazing fresh-eyed around them at the cityscape. He feels another pang in his chest.
“Maybe I’m lying to myself,” he says softly.
“Wait, what? Come on, man,” Chris drawls. “What could you possibly be lying to yourself about?”
Zach’s quiet for a moment, fiddling with the pages of the book in his lap. “You know when you were a kid, and you got a cut that scabbed over, and all you wanted to do was pick at the scab before everything was healed?”
“Replace when you were a kid with last week, and yes, I know what you mean, go on,” Chris says.
Zach huffs a laugh. “Yeah, well, so you give in. You pick at it. And you pick and you pick and it’s disgusting, it starts bleeding, and you’re right back where you started, only sort of worse, because you could’ve prevented it this time.”
“Yeah,” Chris says softly, instead of laughing at Zach’s extended metaphor like he probably should be.
“I know I just need to wait for this scab of mine and Jon’s breakup to peel off in good time, but . . .” Zach pauses for a deep breath, exhales slowly through his nose. “I know I’ll get to the point where I’m all healed and ready, with nothing but a scar, but I’m getting impatient. I just want to skip ahead to the part where I like being single, or where I know that getting involved with someone new could actually be a good idea.”
Chris is silent for a while, and Zach can picture him sitting on his deck in the afternoon sunlight, contemplating that as he rests his chin in his fist, thumb absently stroking his scruffy jawline. Then he remembers that Chris is actually in London, so Zach doesn’t know where to picture him.
“Please don’t tell me I should adhere to a relationship philosophy more like yours,” Zach half-jokes. “I mean, we both know I’m no stranger to finding the prettiest new guy to fuck and keep around for awhile, but I can’t just . . . I can’t just that.”
Chris sounds thoughtful and dead sincere when he responds. “I’m not sure I’m up for adhering to my old patterns anymore either. So, uh, no, that’s not the advice I want to give you.”
“Wait, what? Did you start dating someone you’re actually smitten with?” Zach teases, attempting to cover how floored he is by that revelation.
“Okay, one: smitten is a hilarious word — why is it such a hilarious word?”
“Because it rhymes with mitten and kitten, which are both adorable?”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“What’s two?”
“Huh?”
“You said one. That implies there’s a two.”
“Oh, right. Two.” Chris pauses. “No, I’m not . . . dating anyone. I’ve just been re-examining a lot of things with my therapist for, uh — for a long time now. And the way I’ve been approaching relationships is one of them.”
There is still a very short list of things about Chris that scare Zach, and right now, asking him to elaborate on that is suddenly, irrevocably, the number one thing he is too terrified to do. The scab would open too soon and, suddenly, blood everywhere.
“Are you finally admitting that you don’t want to live as a bachelor forever?” Zach says, because apparently he’s a masochist.
Chris heaves a melodramatic sigh. “The sex is less awesome than it used to be.”
“Wow, sounds terrible.”
“It’s a real hardship,” Chris says, deadpan.
After a beat, Zach hears whiny attempts at sad notes in his ear.
“You’ve unpacked your tiny violin, haven’t you,” Zach says, smirking.
Chris huffs a laugh. “Felt appropriate.”
“Well, go on then, put it away properly.”
Zach pictures Chris miming the storage of his imaginary tiny violin, and their laughter joins up together over the line. Zach’s about to excuse himself back to his book, chase away any more conversations about their lack of love lives, when Chris says, voice gentler than Zach’s heard it in a long time, “I am still sorry about Jon, man.”
“Oh god, don’t—” Zach’s chest feels tight, the wind making his eyes water. He tugs his hat down a little farther and pulls his knees to his chest. “It’s not even about him. Well — no, that’s not — I miss him. But it’s not only about him. I guess I’d forgotten how breaking up with someone who a part of me still cares about makes me feel at ends about basically everything in my life. You know?”
“It’s a question that leads to more questions,” Chris murmurs, “and really, really convoluted answers.”
Zach laughs despite himself. “You could say that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know how that goes.”
“What, was your question to yourself: ‘Why do I need to break up with my casual sex life?’”
“Um . . . something like that.” Chris’s amused tone sounds a bit off. “It was more like I had an answer but didn’t know how to sort through the questions.”
Zach waits for an elaboration on that, but none is forthcoming. “Haven’t we had a discussion about how much we are not allowed to do the cryptic one-liner thing?”
“You called it tacky, yes.” Zach can hear the hint of genuine amusement in Chris’s tone now.
“Yeah, so,” Zach says, smirking, “stop being such a tacky bitch.”
“I will be a tacky bitch if I want to be,” Chris says, laughing.
Zach rests his forehead on his bent knees and lets the sound of Chris’s laughter warm him in the autumn breeze. “Fine. Be cryptic,” he murmurs into the windless pocket of space he’s created for himself.
“Yeah,” Chris says, voice feeling even closer now that Zach’s cocooning himself from city sounds. “Deal with it.”
“You deal with it.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Neither does your face, but I don’t call you on that.” They’re obviously just bickering to stay on the line at this point, but Zach just closes his eyes and lets it happen.
“Yes, you do, you totally do. It’s always, Chris, put that away, you’re scaring the cat, or, Chris, considering the proportions of your neck to your head, it’s amazing anybody let you into show business in the first place, or—”
“That is not even a thing I have ever said to you!” Zach says, laughing. “Your internal critic is such a jerk.”
Chris laughs. “No, I swear you said that, like — one time when we were drunk?”
“Chris. The shit we wax poetic about when we’re shitfaced together makes so little sense, it’d be embarrassing if only we could remember more of it.”
“Nah, that’s just your excuse for being such a dicksmudge to me whenever you’re really just drunk and pissed off about something else.”
“A dicksmudge? Where do you even come up with these insults?”
“Oh I don’t know — maybe in that brain inside my disproportionately large head?”
“No, no, it’s your neck that’s spectacularly wide in relation to your head. There’s not really anything wrong with your head.”
“Ha! So you do remember making fun of my neck!”
“I promise you, I don’t,” Zach says. “However, I never said I hadn’t thought about making fun of it before.”
Chris laughs, and Zach grins into the sound of it.
“Listen, man,” Chris says after a beat. “I should probably—”
“Right,” Zach interrupts. “I’ve also got—”
“Of course,” Chris says, and Zach knows he’s nodding, can even picture Chris catching himself nodding then abruptly stopping when he remembers Zach can’t see him.
Zach takes in another beat of Chris’s breathing, of muffled Manhattan street sounds, of Zach’s own pulse in his ears.
He sits up, the wind rushing back between their voices.
“We’ll talk again soon,” Chris says.
“Yeah, soon,” Zach says, already looking forward to it.
Really, the only problem is those sorts of mornings are not as consistent as Zach would like them to be. There are a couple weeks shortly after he gets back in which Zach and Chris each have professional responsibilities they can’t ignore — potential projects, production meetings, rehearsals, auditions, god so many auditions — and they need to forego their mornings together. It’s — fine. It’s what happens. Zach went for months without this, what’s a couple more weeks?
“I feel like I haven’t eaten a decent breakfast in weeks, man,” Chris greets him over the phone one morning. He’s obviously set on speakerphone, the tonality too distant and atmospheric to be handheld.
“And that’s my fault, how?” Zach says, also over speakerphone. They’re both stuck in traffic, driving to separate meetings.
“Your eggs,” Chris says, like that’s an explanation.
“Your inability to cook a decent egg in any variation is literally the greatest mystery of our time,” Zach says, because it is.
“So come over and teach me, for Christ’s sake,” Chris says.
“Yeah, next time we actually get a simultaneous free morning,” Zach mutters, clenching his fists on the wheel as traffic finally starts moving again.
“No, I mean—” Chris puts that thought on hold to shout through his (undoubtedly closed) tinted window, No please after you, you fucking dickwad, at some other driver. “I mean,” Chris says, returning to Zach, “you should come over for dinner some night this week. I promise: no exercise, all food. You can teach me how to cook eggs or — whatever.”
Which is how Zach finds himself in Chris’s kitchen the following night, fumbling through a relatively simple shakshuka recipe together, and happily scarfing down the acceptable result.
“Told you so,” Zach says, later, when they’re loading the dishwasher. “Even you are capable of a decent recipe involving eggs.”
“You did no such thing,” Chris says. “It was all, ‘Chris, don’t touch the eggs,’ and, ‘Chris, are you seriously trying to cook eggs again.’ You’ll give a guy a crisis of confidence.”
“If you based your self-worth on your ability to cook eggs properly? Then, yeah, I admit it: I’m an asshole.”
Chris laughs, shutting the dishwasher and starting it up.
They both go quiet. Zach leans against the opposite countertop, crosses his arms and just looks at Chris: He’s hoisting himself up on the island countertop, dangling his legs and tangling his hands together in his lap, staring down at them.
“So, hey. I’ve been figuring some shit out,” Chris says after a moment.
Zach shifts on his feet and resettles. “About eggs?” he says, because why not.
It gets Chris to look at him, roll his eyes. “Quit it with the eggs. No. I just — I need you to know, I’ve been discussing some shit with my therapist a lot the past few—” Chris’s eyes shift away. “—while.”
Years? Zach tries to translate. Months? At least that long — he recalls the conversation they’d had back in the fall, about questions and answers and changing lifestyles. “Discussing what exactly?”
“Re-examining.” Chris shrugs slowly, in the way that shows he’s actually deeply invested in this but too nervous to fully show it. “Taking a closer look at the things in my life I take for granted. Like, even down to the basics — do I still like running, or do I do it only because it’s the most convenient form of exercise I’ve been doing for years? Yes, yes I do still like running — I love the way it feels, waking up my whole body. Or there’s the big question: Is acting still the thing I want to dedicate my career to? Yes, it is, one hundred percent.”
That makes Zach smile, remembering the early stages of their friendship: In the ongoing getting-to-know-you, when they’d first talked about when they were kids and what they’d wanted to be when they grew up. Chris had waxed poetic about wanting to be everything he’d seen in the movies — not act out those lives in make-believe like his actor parents, but actually live them in the real world. Zach can still remember, with near-perfect clarity, the way Chris had said, Instead, I make-believe I’m somebody else for money, and there aren’t any consequences to pretending to live those lives. Sometimes it feels like the coward’s choice, acting. And Zach had gotten so frustrated with him for undervaluing his choices, they’d gotten into their first serious argument.
“But it’s more than that even,” Chris continues. “It’s like, I look at aspects of myself I’ve rejected at other stages in my life, and I reconsider them. Like, uh—” Chris’s eyes cut away for a moment, dart back. “Like, my sexuality.”
Something heavy settles in Zach’s chest with a great big thump.
“Or, uh—” Chris carries on, oblivious. “You know how when you were a kid, brussel sprouts were like satan’s insult to your olfactory glands, but now they’re like emeralds from the gods?”
“I actually loved brussel sprouts when I was a kid,” Zach hears himself say, distracted by the feeling that a never is quietly turning into a maybe.
“Oh shut up, you weirdo, that’s not the—”
“Are you—” Zach laughs, an abrupt, incredulous thing. “Are you comparing sexuality to taste buds?”
“Yeah! Why not?”
“Do you really need me to list some differences there to understand that imperfect analogy?”
“Asshole,” Chris mutters, obviously just out of habit. “My point is: tastes change. So, it’s sort of illogical to think that just because I didn’t find dudes particularly stimulating ten, fifteen years ago, why should that mean I continue to be turned off by them?”
“Because . . . you’re straight,” Zach says, because it’s not the only thing that has stopped Zach all these years, but it was the first and most clear-cut thing.
“Look, man, it’s not like guys repulse me. I’ve never been, like, actively turned off by every dude ever, regardless of how aesthetically pleasing they are. I mean, I can appreciate John Cho in a suit — doesn’t mean I’d like to fuck the guy. Guys just generally don’t do it for me the way women tend to do. But— it’s like, uh—” Chris makes some aborted motion with his hands, shaping out some space in the air, then freezing. His heel thunks against the cabinet a couple times, and his hands reanimate. “I’m not sure you can truly know everything about your sexuality until you put it into action. That’s a thing I’m really starting to believe the more I’ve been examining these things.”
“Do you really think that applies to everyone though? I kissed a couple girls in high school and if anything it just helped to confirm how much I do not want to have sex with women.”
“That’s just it though!”
“No, but I didn’t need to do that to know I was gay.”
“But did you even like those girls? I mean, were they just random classmates, or were they friends of yours?”
“Why should that make a difference?”
“It makes all the difference, Zachary. Because when I — when you — feel something for someone as a complete human being, the level of sexuality attached to that person is ontologically different from someone you don’t feel a damn thing for.”
“So, by that logic, you’re saying if I started kissing my close female friends I’d, what, shift my sexuality into a Kinsey Five?”
“No! Well— uh.” Chris rubs a hand along his stubbly jaw and looks away, considering, then back at Zach. “Maybe? No— it’s a case by case situation.”
“Where is this coming from?”
Chris shrugs slowly. “I’ve just been ruminating on it, is all.” He pauses for a second, then says, like he really wants to know, “Do you think Rumi inspired the term ‘ruminate’ or that he caught the wave on that when he started thinking really hard about shit?”
“Fuck Rumi.” Zach’s actually kind of pissed off now. This particular never was never supposed to change into a maybe and he doesn’t trust the sudden shift.
“Whoa, dude, Rumi was the b—”
“You did your bit of experimenting at Berkeley, Chris,” Zach says, ignoring him. “You are firmly a Kinsey Zero. We know this. That is a thing that we have always known.”
“Well.” Chris chews on his lip and slides his hands down his thighs, rubs his palms nervously against his knees, the denim well-worn. “Well, what if my sexuality weren’t as simple as that? What if I’ve, maybe, admitted to myself that I’m actually, like, a Kinsey Zero-Point-One?”
Zach pinches the bridge of his nose. “Are we seriously discussing this?”
Now Chris looks pissed off, glaring back at him. “Yes, asshole, we are seriously discussing this. Why are you being like this? Is it really so appalling to you that I could be just a little bit gay?”
“Chris!” Zach raises his eyebrows, running a hand a bit shakily through his hair. He crosses his arms tightly across his chest. “All empirical evidence points to you being straight.”
“Zach, all empirical evidence is incomplete.”
“How?”
Chris flails his arms up. “Because I’ve never kissed—” His shoulders sag, arms dropping along with his voice. “—you.” He says it again, more subdued, eyes not leaving Zach’s. “I’ve never kissed you.”
Zach’s crossed arms tighten. The sharpness of that maybe that’d thumped into Zach’s chest earlier starts to spread and circulate throughout his entire body, and all at once, the only thing he can think of is Chris’s lips.
“What if—” Chris stops himself, shakes his head minutely. His tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip, and Zach’s eyes follow the familiar tic. “So, I’ve got this hypothesis. I’ve found a lot of support for it, but I need a few more elements to prove it.”
Zach’s tongue feels too big for his mouth. He tries to move it, help him form coherent words, but it just sits there and fills his mouth with silence for a long moment, before he manages to meet Chris’s eyes again. “Tell me your hypothesis.”
“You and me. I think we’re the exception to the general rule of my sexuality. I think—” Chris takes a breath that just barely shudders on the exhale. He drops his gaze, tilts his face toward the mosaic tile floor, and scrubs his hands back and forth on the soft denim of his thighs again. “I think we have been for a long time,” he admits softly.
Chris is not, precisely, a cautious person, but Zach has always considered Chris’s actions as somewhere weighted closer to mindfulness, rather than impulsive enough to just take something like this and damn the consequences. That thought must be the thing that gives Zach the courage to push away from the counter and step into Chris’s space where he’s still sitting on the edge of the opposite countertop.
He tilts his head up and raises a hand to Chris’s jaw, fingers brushing across the bristles of a couple unshaven days, and slides his middle finger beneath Chris’s earlobe, picking up the pulse beneath his palm.
Chris raises his hand and holds onto Zach’s arm, fingers stroking the sensitive skin of Zach’s inner wrist, and Chris breathes deeply through his nostrils, pupils dilating, and Zach can’t believe — he can’t — this had never been something that was going to happen.
“Fuck,” Zach says, because he can’t help it, because this is where they’ve come from. “Your eyes are really blue.”
Chris laughs, for one delighted moment. “We’re not going to talk about Paul Newman this time, man.”
He drops both of his hands to Zach’s hips, tentative yet a little bit more than a maybe.
Zach flashes him an unbearably cautious smile. “So, you kiss me and we see if that proves your hypothesis and that’s it, huh?”
Chris’s smile tilts down a little. “Well, not only— uh, I mean, I’ve been waffling over this for years, and— I mean, if you want it, too— I think I want a little more than just—”
“Years?” Zach spits out, dropping his hand, startled.
“Yeah,” Chris says, “yeah,” voice cracking a little in the attempt to sound like it wouldn’t, eyes dropping to his hands where he’s thumbing under the hem of Zach’s shirt. Zach’s finding it increasingly difficult to focus on anything but that sensation. “By the time I could put a name to how I felt for you, you were — well, you were happy, with Jon, and I couldn’t — who was I to even ask you if it was a possibility?”
“You’ve always been a possibility,” Zach says, still sort of stuck in shock, and Chris looks back up at him, eyes wide, thumbs curling protectively in Zach’s belt loops. That doesn’t sound quite right though; Zach corrects himself. “I never knew you could be a possibility, but the answer would always have been yes.”
“But it wasn’t,” Chris says, eyes locked on Zach’s. “I mean, not after Jon — you’d made it clear you weren’t ready for anyone yet.” His voice softens, adding, “Timing, man. It matters a lot when it’s with someone who matters a lot.”
Zach nods, watching Chris watching him; watching Chris chew on his bottom lip and casually change a truth Zach had thought unchangeable in their lives.
The lights over the kitchen island cast an orange-amber glow over Chris’s body, a contrast to the wide open night outside the glass doors, those carefully chosen windows and fixtures with which Chris built a home for himself up here in the hills overlooking their city.
There is a warmth to the light and design of this house and all it’s held that Zach will remember in his bones when he’s even older than he feels. He doesn’t know if he’ll always know Chris, can’t quite make those sorts of promises to a time forty, fifty years from now, but something in him knows he’ll always remember this moment and its space between them in this room where he’s spent so many mornings waking up to the world with Chris cooking and laughing at his side, or else saying goodbye to these little spaces of time he and Chris have created together, and walking away, always walking away with that something under his skin, unresolved.
He doesn’t want to walk away anymore.
Zach raises both of his hands to Chris’s face. “You said something about proving a hypothesis?” The fingers of one hand graze across Chris’s rough jaw and around to the back of his neck, holding onto him. “How scientific method of you.”
He can feel Chris’s facial muscles beneath his palm struggling against a smile before he sees it spread hesitantly across Chris’s face.
“I do like to be thorough,” Chris says.
Zach laughs, and Chris laughs, and Zach can feel Chris’s exhale against his lips.
“I can’t believe you just set me up for shitty porn dialo—” Zach inhales sharply as Chris slides one of his hands beneath Zach’s shirt and fits it along the curve of Zach’s lower back.
“I can’t believe you didn’t pick up with ‘I’ll show you thorough,’” Chris says, eyes laughing with an edge of nerves, as he wiggles his eyebrows and adds a bow-chicka-wow-wow under his breath. It’s as shaky as his other hand he raises it to Zach’s neck, the new-yet-familiar warmth of it wrapping along the base of his hairline.
“God, I was considering trying to sleep with you tonight if you actually turned out to be into this,” Zach says, an edge of giddiness that matches Chris’s making it really difficult to stop himself from smiling, “but you are not at all helping your ch—”
Chris pulls Zach into him, tilts his head and licks into Zach’s mouth so urgently, it’s like he’s expecting this to be their only chance. He’s a little too tall, up there on the counter, but he slouches and Zach strains a little, and it works. Zach nips at Chris’s lower lip, and kisses back just as urgently, slips his tongue into Chris’s low sound of agreement, tasting how long they’ve wanted this with each drag of tongue and teeth, each slick level of pressure, of push and pull.
Zach is viscerally afraid that if he lets go of Chris’s face, this might stop as soon as it started. But Chris — It’s like he’s mapping out Zach, acquainting himself with how male Zach is: there, his knuckles brush Zach’s adam’s apple; there, his hand slides down the even planes of Zach’s chest, thumbing a nipple through his t-shirt in passing; there, his other hand tucks up the front of Zach’s shirt, fingers tracing along the hair below his belly button.
That curiosity, that want that Zach feels in every touch, every breath, gives him the reassurance he needs. He drops his hands from Chris’s face, one landing at the base of his neck, thumb tracing the divot between his collarbones, the other landing on Chris’s thigh, sliding up to his hip and slipping under his shirt.
Chris widens his legs and presses closer, kissing him hard, knees bracketing Zach’s hips, one hand dropping to Zach’s waist, the other flat on his chest. “Wait,” he says on an exhale, flexing his hand and bunching Zach’s t-shirt against his chest. He dips his head to rest their foreheads against one another, breathing hard, eyes cast downward.
“What?” Zach says, looking at Chris’s eyelids up close and trying to get his breath back.
Chris’s eyes flit up to his again, bright and unfocused, and he dips down to kiss him again, quickly. “I just— I don’t —”
Zach instinctively takes a step back, feeling cold at the abrupt lack of their shared body warmth. “Experiment: over?” he guesses, thrown and uncertain.
“What?” Chris says, forehead scrunching in confusion. He slides down from the countertop. “No,” he says, getting it. “Just — wait.”
All of a sudden, Zach has an armful of Chris, standing at more or less Zach’s height, and Zach has always known how well they could fit together, but he’d never known it so intimately as this.
Chris raises his hand to fist in Zach’s hair and bring their mouths back together. “I was trying to say—” he says, pausing as Zach keeps kissing him, sucking on his tongue. “I was trying to — uh, say that I don’t know what you want here, but I— I—” His voice shudders as Zach’s hands land on Chris’s thighs and run up around the curve of his ass, pressing them closer together. “I just want you. I just —” Zach starts to suck on the side of Chris’s neck, mouthing at the pulse point and biting just hard enough to make Chris tilt his head to the side and groan. “Fuck, Zach.”
He shifts his hips against Zach’s, feeling how hard they both are already.
“So, your bedroom or right here?” Zach murmurs into Chris’s ear, half serious, half teasing, because as good as he is with words, he’s better at showing what he wants than he is at saying. He tucks his fingers under the waistline of Chris’s jeans, and Chris’s nails bite into his scalp.
“Not right here,” Chris gets out between desperate kisses, fingers dragging through Zach’s hair. “Definitely bedroom,” he adds, dropping both hands to Zach’s hips and starting to aimlessly walk him backwards.
They bump into the doorframe because Chris isn’t actually watching where they’re going — he’s busy tugging Zach’s bottom lip between his teeth, busy licking along Zach’s jaw, teeth scraping across stubble — and Zach finds himself pressed back against one side of the doorframe, Chris’s hands shoved up under his shirt and Chris’s mouth insistent on his own.
“Mmmph, have you redecorated your bedroom?” Zach says, tracing fingertips up Chris’s spine as Chris acquaints his tongue and lips with the soft sensitive area just below Zach’s jawline. “It’s the spitting image of the doorway between the kitchen and the foyer.”
Chris snorts a laugh against Zach’s earlobe. “You get us to the bedroom then, asshole,” he says, smirking and pulling back just enough to meet Zach’s eyes. One of his hands is hot against Zach’s stomach, simply pressed there, a point of contact that stills everything else for a moment.
Zach breathes deeply into that hand and can feel Chris’s breath expand and contract low into his back where Zach’s hands are cupped around his hips, pinkies slid under his waistband. Up close, Zach can see a familiar sort of high glee light up Chris’s eyes. It makes Zach feel bold, powerful, having this sort of effect on Chris.
“I don’t know,” he says, and drags one of his hands across the front of Chris’s jeans, fitting his palm around the hard heat he can feel beneath the fabric and feeling Chris’s sharp inhale everywhere they’re touching. “Maybe—” He lowers his voice, tilting his mouth to Chris’s ear. “Maybe I want to just suck you off against the front door.”
“Anything to —” Chris says, obviously trying to sound playful even as he breaks off into a groan, breathing heavily into Zach’s neck and pressing closer into Zach’s hand. “Anything to prove my hypothesis.”
“I’m pretty sure you getting hard in my hand proves your hypothesis,” Zach says, unable to stop himself from sounding smug.
“I’m pretty sure I guessed that you’d be this self-satisfied about being the dude I do dudes for,” Chris says, not actually rolling his eyes but Zach can tell it’s a tough battle.
“‘Self-satisfied’?” Zach says, raising an eyebrow and delighting in the way it makes Chris give in and roll his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that one of us has a hand on his cock and it’s not—”
He can’t actually bring himself to say anything more, mainly because Chris’s hand starts to rub Zach’s cock through his jeans and Chris cuts him off with another long kiss, their mouths gasping open.
Zach takes his own hand off of Chris to use all his strength to shove him against the front door, as promised.
“Fuck fuck,” Chris groans as Zach presses him flush between the wooden door and Zach’s body.
Zach sucks kisses along the side of Chris’s neck as he reaches between them to undo Chris’s jeans.
“Yeah,” Chris breathes, babbling low and fast, “yeah, touch me, please, I don’t care how you do it, just—” and Zach has to look as he does this. He loves the moment when he pulls down a guy’s pants when he’s already hard, because of this, right here: Zach hooks his thumbs over Chris’s jeans and briefs and tugs them down past his hips, and he watches hungrily as Chris’s cock slaps heavily up against his stomach. He’s so hard he’s dark and leaking, and all Zach wants to do is feel that hot, heavy thickness filling his mouth.
Zach licks his palm and wraps his fingers around Chris’s cock, rubbing his thumb along the slit and pumping his hand to get him wet. “Is this—”
“Don’t stop,” Chris says on a shuddering exhale, raising a hand to the back of Zach’s head, fingers clenching in his hair, as he drops his forehead against Zach’s.
His pulse speeding up, Zach strokes the length of Chris slowly, getting a feel for how tightly Chris likes his hand by the nonsense he breathes over Zach’s lips. Chris tentatively slides his free hand up Zach’s side and presses his fingers along Zach’s ribs, thumbing across his nipple. Zach breathes into that hand and lingers on the smooth friction of Chris’s cock inside his fist and the rough friction of his wrist hair against the hair below Chris’s belly button; the textural contrast somehow thrilling.
“Don’t come yet,” Zach tells him, still stroking because he can’t help it.
“He says as he gives me a stupid good handjob,” Chris says, laughing a little hysterically.
Zach kisses him hard and fast, pressing against more teeth than lips as Chris laughs, and lets go of him, abruptly dropping to his knees to try to finish taking off Chris’s jeans.
“Don’t come yet because I want you to come in my mouth,” he says, glaring up at him.
Chris closes his eyes and thunks his head back against the door, hands fisting at his sides. “Fuck. You talking dirty to me is not going to help me last.”
Zach pauses with his struggle of Chris’s jeans because Chris is not helping him out at all, and tilts his mouth up to suck Chris’s balls into his mouth, just because he can.
“Holy— Zach.” The way Chris says his name, if Zach didn’t know better he’d wonder if anybody had ever touched Chris ever. Chris slides his hands into Zach’s hair to still his head and looks down at him, eyes blown and amazed.
Zach tugs at his pant legs again. “Get the fuck out of these so you don’t hurt yourself when I make you come.”
Chris’s eyes crinkle at the edges. “So thoughtful,” he says, and tries lifting one leg while Zach pulls down the jeans, but somehow this ends up with Chris un-balancing and the next thing Zach knows they’re both on the floor. Well, more precisely, he’s on the floor, on his back, while Chris is sort of haphazardly sprawled on top of him.
“Uh,” Chris says, somewhere above Zach’s head.
Somehow, Zach’s nose is pressed into Chris’s armpit.
“I don’t know how that happened,” Chris says, tensing, sounding so abruptly mortified that Zach can’t help but start laughing into his armpit, snorting against his t-shirt.
“Dude,” Zach says, still laughing. He brings his hands up to hold onto Chris’s ridiculously rounded ass cheeks where they’re peeking out from beneath his t-shirt. “Was it the gravity or the pants?”
Chris’s laughter joins Zach’s as he relaxes against him, the head of his cock wet against Zach’s stomach where his shirt’s riding up. “I actually sort of hate you,” Chris says lightly, planting his forearms above Zach’s head and holding his body above the length of Zach’s. “I forgot how much you delight in schadenfreude.”
“It’s possibly my kryptonite,” Zach says, tilting his head back to catch Chris’s eyes. He slides his hands up Chris’s shirt and holds onto his waist, grinning up at him. Chris grins back. His hair is just long enough to flop forward across the short distance between them and tickle Zach’s forehead.
“Good to know my clumsiness is worth something,” Chris says, and the words and look in his eye are all teasing, but Zach can feel him shiver a little beneath his palms, muscles tensing as Zach holds his hips more firmly.
Shifting to support his upper body on his forearms and Zach’s hands, Chris tries to squirm out of his jeans and briefs. It’s all terribly inelegant. His cock’s bobbing against Zach’s stomach, which just goes to remind Zach of how bafflingly sexy he finds the simultaneous hilarity and vulnerability of a naked man’s body moving in front of him.
Chris presses his hands flat on the floor on either side of Zach’s head and sits up on his knees, reaching behind him to yank irritably at the jeans and briefs still clinging to one ankle and toss them in the general direction of the kitchen. As an afterthought, he pulls off his shirt and throws that aside, too.
He looks down at Zach, settling with his knees on either side of Zach’s thighs.
Zach looks up at Chris, poised above him, naked, straddling Zach’s fully-clothed body.
As if thinking the same thing, Chris bends to pull off Zach’s shirt. Zach lifts his arms to help it over his head, and as soon as he reappears from the swoosh of cotton, there’s Chris: mouth on his, quick like he can’t help it, before he sits back up and reaches for the opening of Zach’s jeans.
Zach props himself up on his elbows and watches Chris fumble with the button, the zipper, but he looks up at Chris’s face as he feels Chris reach into his underwear and pull him out, letting the waistband press back against his balls. Chris’s mouth is hanging open slightly, his face flushed, spreading down across his throat. He licks his lower lip, and Zach can feel himself grow harder in Chris’s hand, then harder still as Chris mutters, “Zach,” like he can’t believe it, and looks up at him, blue eyes going wide with want.
“Get over here,” Zach says, still propped on his elbows.
“I’m pretty happy right here actually,” Chris says, his face lighting up with a smirk as he smears his palm wet with Zach’s pre-come and pumps his hand in slow, even strokes, then wraps his other hand around his own cock and matches the same rhythm.
Zach inhales and squeezes his eyes shut, quietly willing himself not to come yet.
Wouldn’t you rather come down Chris’s throat after you’ve blown him first? he thinks.
That is not helping at all, his cock thinks back at him.
This is not a normal conversation, he thinks, eyes still closed, and grinds out, “Well, I’ll be even happier with your cock in my mouth.” He feels Chris’s hand-stroke stutter. He opens his eyes and meets Chris’s. “You can do whatever you want to me later. Right now, I want you to fuck my mouth.”
Chris lets go of both of them.
“Well, when you put it that way,” he says, voice strained, and awkwardly knee-walks so he’s straddling Zach’s chest.
He looks down uncertainly when he gets there, so Zach lifts one hand and wraps it around the back of one thigh, urging him closer.
Zach noses at the base of Chris’s cock, slowing down for a moment to inhale his scent, opening his mouth and pressing his tongue flat and wide against Chris’s balls, licking them into his mouth and sucking just gently enough to make Chris squirm closer to him. He wonders how the rough texture of Zach’s face feels against Chris’s smooth skin; remembers the times he’s teased Chris for getting waxed down there and not once thinking they’d ever be in this position.
Chris fists his hands in Zach’s hair as Zach lets him go, a wet suctioning noise in his wake.
Zach traces his fingers up the indent between Chris’s left thigh and pelvis. “Do you know the name for this part of a man’s body?” he teases, smirking at Chris’s frustrated groan in response. “It’s called the iliac furrow,” Zach tells him, wrist brushing across Chris’s cock as he moves his hand to trace the indent on the other side.
Chris bites his lip and inhales sharply through his nose. His thighs are trembling a little when he says, almost out of breath, “I should’ve known that sex with you would be excruciatingly educational.”
“Hmm,” Zach hums, wrapping his hand around the base of Chris’s cock and feeding the tip between his lips. He moves his hand to hold onto Chris’s ass, one cheek filling his palm, and this — this — is what he’d wanted: Chris, breathing Zach’s name heavily above him; Chris, making him feel full and deliriously turned on; Chris, pumping his cock in and out of Zach’s mouth. Zach breathes through his nose, swallowing down his gag reflex each time Chris’s cock bumps a little farther into his throat, and the longer they do this, the more his lips tingle from the friction of it all.
The only problem is he can’t ignore the strain of his neck at this angle anymore, and his elbow’s starting to hurt from the hardwood floor, so — Zach abruptly pulls his mouth off Chris and lowers himself onto his back, his mouth feeling empty as he gulps in ragged breaths.
“Jesus Christ, I’m so close, why did you—” Chris hovers off-balance for a second before tipping backward, his ass landing on Zach’s stomach.
Zach can’t help but laugh, throwing an arm over his eyes and just laughing a deep belly laugh.
“Why are you laaaughing at me, asshole,” Chris says. It sounds more like his familiar, slightly nasally Californian teasing tone than the less familiar, out-of-breath Chris who Zach had just been acquainting himself with. It’s reassuring, how unremarkably easy this is between them; the two of them still themselves together.
Dropping his arm away from his eyes, Zach looks back up at Chris. He’s flushed all the way from his face down beneath his chest hair, and he’s still breathing pretty hard, but he’s smiling small and puzzled down at Zach and casually sliding one of his hands through the hair on Zach’s chest.
“I’m not laughing at you,” Zach says, smiling back at him.
“Well, that’s a first,” Chris says.
Zach smiles even wider. “My neck just hurt.”
“Your neck hurt,” Chris repeats, pulling a straight face.
“My neck hurt,” Zach repeats, mimicking his facial expression.
Chris raises a hand to his mouth and bursts out laughing into it, nose and eyes crinkling in amusement.
“Hey!” Zach smacks his ass.
It just makes Chris laugh harder. Maybe not so much a turn-on then. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s just that one minute you were all fuck my mouth, Chris, oh baby oh baby and then the next minute you can’t even finish blowing me because you didn’t realize we were at a shitty angle.”
“There is no universe where I would ever say to you Oh baby oh baby,” Zach says, trying to glare at Chris, but it’s really difficult when Chris is bending onto his elbows and knees so he can crawl forward and kiss Zach, messily, still laughing a little.
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris says, then kisses him again, deeply, lingering. “I bet I could get you to say anything with the right encouragement,” he murmurs against Zach’s lips, after.
“I seriously bet you couldn’t,” Zach declares, but without much conviction.
Chris tucks his face into the side of Zach’s neck and kisses along the muscles there, as if in apology for the strain, and Zach’s chest aches a little at such an unexpectedly tender gesture.
He feels full and wanted in a completely different way than he had just minutes ago. Nosing at Chris’s hair above his ear, Zach raises both of his hands to rest on Chris’s ass, then slides them up to hold onto his hips.
“Hey,” Zach murmurs. “C’mere.”
Chris makes a questioning noise and raises his head to kiss Zach’s swollen lips, gently, then nipping on his way back to Zach’s neck.
“You know what I can do, without even any encouragement from you,” Zach says, gripping Chris’s hips more firmly and bending his knees to plant his feet on the floor.
He can feel Chris’s smile against his throat. “What’s that?”
“Have you come apart in my mouth in under five minutes,” he says, and rolls them over so he’s on top of Chris, so he’s pushing apart Chris’s legs and kneeling between them, so he’s spreading his hands under Chris’s ass cheeks and bending to tongue at Chris’s asshole.
All the breath goes out of Chris at once.
When he gets it back, he’s back to groaning Zach’s name and combing his fingers into Zach’s hair, wriggling himself closer to Zach’s mouth. Zach wraps his hand around Chris’s cock and comes up for air, just a second, before he’s sinking his mouth back down onto Chris, sucking him deep in one go.
The sound Chris makes above him pulls straight from the gut, goes straight to Zach’s cock. Chris tightens his hold on Zach’s hair, then immediately loosens it, as if hesitant to take too much control; as if he hadn’t been straddling Zach and fucking his mouth just minutes ago.
Looking up Chris’s body, Zach pulls his mouth up off his cock. “I’m pretty sure I told you before,” he says, voice low. Chris raises his head and meets his eyes as Zach repeats, “I want you to fuck my mouth.”
Zach keeps eye contact and reaches up to press one of his own hands against Chris’s, increasing the pressure against the back of his head.
Chris’s eyes widen, his hands tightening in Zach’s hair, and Zach lets his jaw go slack around Chris’s cock as Chris tentatively thrusts his hips up, then carefully back down on a shuddering exhale. Zach breathes deeply through his nose as Chris does it again, cock sliding further into Zach’s throat. He watches as Chris licks his lips and drops his head back to the floor, his breath growing even more ragged as his hips pick up a rhythm.
Zach slides his hand up Chris’s thigh to cradle his balls, his other hand lingering on Chris’s thigh, gripping and releasing with each thrust of Chris’s cock in his mouth. Chris reaches one of his hands down to his thigh and blindly twists his fingers with Zach’s. Making a satisfied noise low in his throat, he squeezes hard as Zach swallows around the head of his cock, and that’s all the warning Zach gets before Chris’s cock twitches and he’s coming in Zach’s mouth. Thick spurts hit the back of his throat and pool hot against his tongue as he holds the head in his mouth, pumping his hand until Chris finishes.
Zach pulls off, swallowing, and Chris groans and threads his fingers through Zach’s hair, his own head tilted back against the floor, throat exposed, breathing beginning to even out. Zach can’t help it: he dips back in and licks Chris clean, lingering on the taste and texture of him against his tongue.
Untangling their fingers, Chris flutters both of his hands ineffectually at Zach’s shoulders, lifting his head again and gasping out, “Oh fuck, I’m too sensitive, that’s so—” and Zach holds Chris’s softening cock in his mouth a second more — because he wants to feel the way Chris’s nails dig into his shoulders and hold on, because he didn’t get to see Chris’s eyes as he came but he gets to see them now, needy and desperate and not blinking away from Zach’s — before letting go.
“Zach, god, you are so—” Chris presses his lips together and shakes his head, hands relaxing on Zach’s shoulders, smoothing down his biceps and cupping his elbows as Zach rises forward to kiss him.
“Uh-huh,” Zach murmurs, “you, too,” and loses himself in the way Chris’s tongue slides into his mouth, tasting himself inside of Zach, and kissing him harder.
Zach rubs his cock against any inch of skin beneath him, while Chris’s hands slip down below the waistband of Zach’s underwear and squeeze his ass. “Off, off,” he breathes, hot and wet against Zach’s chin. “Get up— can I suck you off now? I’m going to do that.”
Groaning and huffing a frustrated laugh into Chris’s neck, Zach stills his hips and pushes up off of Chris. He stands and leans back against the door to remove his pants and underwear as quickly as possible and kick his clothes aside, watching Chris’s face as he sits up: his eyes darting up and down Zach’s body, as if he’s not sure where to settle, or he’s cataloguing it all, or maybe he’s just a little nervous. Zach wraps a hand around the base of his cock and breathes deeply through his nose, biting his lip at the way it makes Chris focus all of his intensity onto that hand.
“Well?” Zach says, trying to sound demanding or sassy or — anything but how he actually turns out to sound: expectant. Breathy. Equal parts thrilled and nervous about whatever’s going to come next.
Chris licks his lips and swallows, holding Zach’s gaze as he rises to kneel in front of him; to rest his hands on the sides of Zach’s thighs and smooth them up and down slowly, almost casually, like he’s just saying hi. He licks his lips again, then turns his attention to Zach’s cock, to Zach’s hand on his cock, and exhales a hot breath against the shaft. Zach runs his fingers through Chris’s hair — soft, just long enough to get a good handful of it — and presses both of his hands to the back of his head.
“Yeah,” Chris breathes, and tilts his chin up to offer an experimental lick, his tongue warm and wide against the base of Zach’s cock where his hand had just been. He raises one hand to cup Zach’s balls and his middle finger brushes across Zach’s asshole, just barely but enough for the sensitive nerve endings to make Zach’s breath catch and fingers clench in Chris’s hair.
Chris hmms, looking up at Zach again, and — yeah, okay, Zach is going to pay for how much time he’d just spent teasing Chris and withholding orgasm, Zach can just see it. Chris lets go of him and sucks two fingers between his truly indecent lips, making sure Zach sees them slide out, then lowers his hand back to cup Zach’s balls, and shifts his hand farther forward to rub his fingers wet and rough against Zach’s hole, pressing just barely inside.
Zach breathes out a shuddering moan, his knees giving just a little before he stabilizes again.
“Chris, Chris, give me your mouth,” he babbles, “please— I need—” fluttering one of his hands down the side of Chris’s neck, resting his thumb along his collarbone.
Leaving his fingers where they are, Chris takes Zach’s cock in his other hand and licks at the tip, just a quick dip of his tongue along the slit. Zach would have mistaken it for hesitancy, for the lack of experience with dudes, if it weren’t for what he does next.
Chris looks up at him through his eyelashes, blue eyes wide, and rubs his full lips thoughtfully back and forth across the head of Zach’s cock. “Give you my what?” he teases, then pokes out his tongue to lick back and forth while he smirks up at Zach.
Zach looks down at Chris’s grossly unjust mouth on his cock, playful and limitless, and he opens his own mouth to say something scathing about Chris being a cocktease, or just plain tease back at him. But all that comes out is a stuttering breath, muscles clenching low in his stomach, as Chris bows his head to suck Zach’s cock deep into his mouth without warning. Chris closes his eyes and stills his hands as if putting all his focus into the feel of Zach as he moves his mouth over him, but after a moment he looks back up at Zach, eyes lighting up, as if to say check this out and tries to take Zach a little bit deeper.
He comes up coughing a second later.
Cupping his palm to Chris’s cheek, Zach says, “That—” was really fucking hot, how are you so hot “—takes practice.”
Chris leans a little into his hand but when he meets Zach’s eyes, he doesn’t look discouraged at all.
“I like this,” Chris says, breathlessly, eyes still bright, and Zach’s not sure which of them looks more amazed right now, but he doesn’t really have a second to wonder about that because Chris starts to slowly drag his tongue up Zach’s cock and slide both his hands to grab Zach’s ass.
His mouth goes slack when he reaches the head again, tongue loose and licking his bottom lip, like he’s about to make out with Zach’s cock instead of suck it. He dives back in, hollowing his cheeks on a pull and slurping sloppily at the end. He just sort of hangs out there for a little while, giving the head of Zach’s cock way more attention than anywhere else, mouthing at it like it’s his new favorite thing.
Zach lets his head rest back against the door and closes his eyes at the sensation, Chris keeping him just on the edge. He breathes deeply and relaxes his hands in Chris’s hair. This is the most relaxed he’s been in a long time, standing here with Chris’s mouth warm and wet on his cock. He could probably just stay this way for awhile long—
Chris slurps his lips off his cock again, then lowers his mouth back down just as suddenly — cool air to hot mouth — and tries to take Zach deeper again. He comes back up pretty quickly, but isn’t coughing this time, just laughing on a deep exhale-inhale, and when Zach curses and looks down at him, Chris looks wrecked and flushed, trying to get his breath back.
“You know,” Zach says, both of his hands dropping to Chris’s shoulders, “a lesser man might be uncomfortable with a guy laughing at his cock.”
“Oh yeah,” Chris says, rolling his eyes, “your cock is hilarious.” He grins wickedly and licks right below the head, eyes not leaving Zach’s. “Funny is what this is, right, not blindingly hot.”
Zach grips his shoulders so hard at that — thumbs pushing into his collarbones, nails digging into his back — Chris moans and his mouth drops back to Zach’s cock like a fucking gravitational pull, full lips stretching thin around the head, tongue flattening against the underside, sliding wet and smooth and hot against him, and Zach can almost taste the eager way Chris holds him in his mouth and sucks, his hands on Zach’s ass holding him closer to his face.
“Chris,” Zach breathes, lifting one hand to Chris’s hair and the other to his jaw. Chris meets Zach’s eyes as he moves his mouth up and down his cock. “Chris,” Zach repeats, and he can’t stop because — seven years of friendship and feelings he’s never been able to share or categorize properly and — here they are.
Chris takes one hand off Zach’s ass to stroke Zach’s cock at the base. He lifts his mouth, breathing hard. “Come on,” he says, voice low, his lips pink and raw, his eyes locked on Zach’s. “Come for me, Zach.”
Licking messily at the head, Chris opens his lips around Zach, shallowly, while he pumps his hand tight and fast, and —
“Chris.” Zach lets go and fuzzes out, holding onto the back of Chris’s head, tugging his hair between his knuckles as he comes. He feels Chris’s lips close around him, catching it all, and thunks his head back against the door, breath caught in his chest as he finishes.
It comes back to him in one big gulp, and when he looks back down, breathing deeply, Chris is still watching him, slipping his mouth off of Zach’s cock. He sits back onto his heels, and Zach’s hands fall away from his head, dangling limply back to his sides because fuck if Zach can do anything but stay standing right now.
Chris catches one hand in his own, thumb pressing against his wrist, stares right back up at Zach, and fucking swallows. Zach would not have expected that from Chris giving his first blowjob, but when Chris’s tongue pokes out to chase the taste on his lips, his face brightens into what might be the most gleeful, smug expression Zach’s ever seen on him.
“Always a competition, isn’t it,” Zach says, fondly, curling his fingers around Chris’s.
“Hey, I do what I like,” Chris says, with a slow shrug as he hoists himself to his feet.
“I guess you do, don’t you,” Zach murmurs as Chris’s grinning face tilts toward Zach’s. He dips his tongue between Zach’s lips, and Zach lifts his palm to Chris’s rough jaw, pushing more deeply into the kiss.
Chris squeezes his hand and pulls his mouth away to mumble, “I might actually pass out now.”
It is so not what Zach would’ve expected, he bursts out laughing, dropping his forehead onto Chris’s shoulder.
“Dude, I’ve been awake since like 5am!” Chris protests, but he’s laughing, too, letting go of Zach’s hand to wrap both arms around his lower back and pull him closer.
“So can we finally get to your bed now?” Zach says, lifting his head to roll his eyes and lean in to kiss him again.
“Pushy,” Chris murmurs, sucking on Zach’s lower lip, but he reaches for Zach’s hand again, slips his fingers between Zach’s, and leads them toward his bedroom.
Chris lifts his head and noses at Zach’s jaw, murmuring, “You awake?”
“Well, now—” Chris cuts him off as soon as Zach turns his head. The kiss is warm, sloppy, heavy with the last lingering traces of a dream Zach had just woken up from, and all he can do is roll onto his side and press closer.
Still half-asleep and struck by an old fantasy, he rolls Chris onto his back and holds down his wrists above him on the pillow, pressing their hips and torsos flush together, knees straddling Chris’s thighs.
Chris groans into Zach’s mouth and rolls his hips up to meet Zach’s, half-heartedly straining his wrists in Zach’s grip.
“Yeah,” Zach breathes against his lips, and thrusts against him again. “You like feeling my cock hard against yours?” he whispers, dipping his mouth down to Chris’s ear, then mouthing at his shoulder.
“Zach,” Chris gasps, and Zach can feel them both get lost in the sensation: their cocks leaking enough between them to make the friction just right, muscles straining against each other, all that warm skin. “Zach,” Chris breathes again, and Zach raises his head to kiss him.
“You want to hold me down and fuck me, don’t you,” Chris whispers against his lips, voice rough and unexpected, making Zach want him impossibly more.
“I—” But Chris cants his hips just right against Zach’s, and — body moving frantically, burying his face in Chris’s neck, Zach is coming between them.
“Oh,” Chris says, which Zach distantly finds hilarious, but then Chris pitches up against him, rubbing himself off and it isn’t really hilarious at all when he comes: Zach can feel every muscle in Chris’s body tense as he spurts hot against them both, his cock twitching against Zach’s stomach.
As they both slowly relax against each other, breaths evening out, Zach realizes that somewhere along the way, instead of continuing to pin down Chris’s wrists, they’d ended up twining their fingers together into tight fists. Zach tries to release them, rolling off of Chris and onto his back, but Chris grabs ahold of one hand and tugs those adjoining hands down to rest on his chest.
Swiping his thumb back and forth across Zach’s knuckles, Chris turns his head to look at him, smirking. “I was actually just going to wake you up to ask what you think we should make for breakfast in the morning, but that was good, too.”
Zach is pretty happy with how quickly he can swipe away the pillow from under Chris’s head and thwack him with it.
He passes out shortly afterward, with Chris still laughing at his side, their hands loosely linked between them.
To be more precise, Chris is drooling on Zach’s arm. There’s a pretty steady pool of it, actually, spreading onto the pillow and smearing against Zach’s wrist where his arm is bent between them. Chris is breathing through his mouth, nose wheezing faintly, like maybe he’s getting a cold or something.
Zach decides to wake him up by nudging him in the face.
“What the—” Chris snorts awake, head bolting off the pillow then back onto it face-first. He swats blindly at Zach’s arm as Zach, laughing, continues to try to smush his wrist alongside Chris’s nose.
Chris grabs ahold of Zach’s wrist and presses it down into the pillow between them. Zach lets him, watching as Chris turns his face away from the pillow and blinks blearily over at him, licking at the drool encrusting the corner crease of his lips.
“Zach?” He sounds confused, but only for a second, before his face relaxes into a sleepy smile. “Zach,” he repeats, sounding equal parts amazed and relieved. He lets go of Zach’s wrist and lightly brushes his fingers down his forearm, letting his hand come to a rest at Zach’s elbow.
“Hey,” Zach says, voice gravelly with morning, and probably a little bit from how deeply he’d sucked Chris’s cock down his throat last night.
“Hey.” Chris’s grin widens, and Zach wonders if he’s remembering everything, too; dozens of details flooding back to them as they look at each other now: the first kiss, their mouths on each other’s cocks, the way their bodies had moved against each other in the middle of the night as if making up for lost time.
“So,” Zach says.
“So,” Chris repeats, accompanied by an eyeroll.
Zach nudges Chris’s hand with his elbow and tries to keep his tone light, not sure how to begin. “Last night was fun.”
Chris’s grin dims just a little bit. “Yeah, it was.” He licks his lip in his old nervous tic. “Fun.”
Looking at Chris’s bed-rumpled hair and sleepy eyes suddenly dawning uncertainty, Zach realizes he has no idea how he could even begin to parse through what he hopes last night meant to them both. Their future feels like it might be the beginning of their past twisted into a new shape: replacing their morning run with sex, bickering over the phone while they each get stuck in traffic, cooking together and letting the eggs burn because making out against the refrigerator seemed a whole lot more pressing. But then will come the long-distance that always rides on the back of their careers, miles and miles without touch. Zach’s going to have to miss Chris in an entirely new way from now on; pixels and phone lines can’t make him feel like this. He has so much more to appreciate now and the same old inadequate allotments of time in which he can appreciate it.
But here’s the thing: He knows how to miss Chris. There is a different sort of longing between missing a friend and missing a whatever-they-are-now — but the core of it is a familiar thing, a thing he’s spent the past seven years learning. It’s an ache that sits just beneath the rest of his life, tempering it instead of overwhelming it — usually; usually not overwhelming it.
When we’re not living in the same city, sometimes I miss you so much that simple skills of mine fall away, like chopping vegetables or affecting an English accent, because the thought of you and not the presence of you puts me so out of focus it takes all my concentration to bring myself back, Zach wants to say, to just lay it all out there and see where it takes them.
What he actually says is: “You’re a pretty unattractive sleeper.”
Chris huffs a laugh and, even though his eyes still look a little uncertain, he reaches out to curl his hand around Zach’s bare hip under the sheets. “You sure got your pillow talk down pat, man.”
Zach grins and presses his hand to Chris’s chest, casually mapping it out with his fingertips, taking his time while he’s got it. “Your mouth hangs open,” he says, “and when you’re just waking up, your tongue, like, tries to lick the drool that’s encrusted the edges of your lips, and it makes you look sort of like a dumb sleepy dog. It’s comforting.”
Chris laughs again, hand squeezing Zach’s hip as Zach’s thumbnail brushes across his nipple. “It’s comforting?”
“Yeah.” Zach drapes his arm around Chris, fingertips massaging circles into the small of his back, skin still warm from sleep. “I hate being with guys who look too perfect all the time. It’s comforting that there’s at least one part of the day when you look less than hot.”
“Mm, well,” Chris mumbles, sliding his hand up the side of Zach’s body and resting it along his jaw. “You look ridiculous when you shave.”
Zach snorts a laugh. “When have you ever seen me shave?”
“Plenty of times,” Chris says, thumb rubbing along Zach’s stubble. “It’s hilarious. Your eyebrows have a field day. Like, every time you angle your head with the razor, your eyebrows go through this range of surprise and rage and concentration that match nothing else going on with the rest of your face.”
Zach laughs low in his belly, rubs the ball of his foot against the smooth inside of Chris’s ankle.
“Okay, full disclosure—” Chris grins. “I actually still find you disgustingly attractive even when your eyebrows are plotting to kill your reflection.”
Zach inches closer on the pillow. “I still want to kiss you even though five minutes ago you were slobbering on my arm.”
Chris laughs, eyes bright, and any signs of uncertainty Zach had seen there a minute ago are gone now. He inches closer to Zach, too. “I sort of always want to kiss you, so hey — seven years and still finding new things we have in common, huh?”
“Not really all that new,” Zach murmurs, feeling like he’s going all in. Their faces are close enough now that he can feel Chris’s breath against his lips.
“No,” Chris says softly, eyes crinkling, “it’s not, is it,” and what else is Zach supposed to do besides kiss him?
The kiss is lush and lingering, with none of the urgency of last night but all of the passion. It feels like things Zach wants to say aloud, eventually; things he’d thought that he’d never get the chance to say — had never thought Chris would want to hear them. It’s more than enough now, to know that in whatever ecstatic future they’ll have together, there is time to have that chance, and in the meantime, they can keep on showing what they are to each other in every other way they know how.
“Mm, okay,” Chris murmurs, and pulls out of the kiss to prop himself up on his elbow and look down at Zach. He looks pretty damn content. “Actually, now full disclosure: I’ve really wanted to kiss you right —” Chris strokes a finger over the outer edge of one of Zach’s eyebrows. “—here.” He bows his head and gingerly presses his lips against the edge of the opposite eyebrow, right over Zach’s long-unused piercings.
Zach’s skin tingles with the sense memory of both those spots being smooth skin for months at a time, compounded with the idea of Chris kissing that bare skin, but he groans. “Oh god, please don’t tell me you have a Spock eyebrow fetish. Do not ruin this. That might be a dealbreaker for me.”
“Nooo, no, no, no.” Chris laughs. “Not a Spock fetish.” He combs his fingers into the hair at Zach’s temples and rests his thumb on the side of one full eyebrow. “Well, not precisely a Spock fetish.”
Zach narrows his eyes. “Until we get called back for a third film, I refuse to shave these again. Ever. I’ll do a lot of things in bed, but that. Is not. One of them.”
Chris laughs even harder. “No, no— Zach— I’d never ask that of you,” he says, voice going softer, the laughter receding, a sparkle in his eyes. “It’s a stupid sentimental thing, I promise you, not a fetish.”
Zach softens his glare. “What could possibly make you sentimental about my Vulcan eyebrows?”
“I just —” Chris’s face curves into a private half-smile, his eyes locked just above Zach’s eyes. “You had Vulcan eyebrows when I first caught myself wanting to shove you up against the nearest surface and lose some time together. I mean — dude. While we were shooting the second film, I used to think about kissing you pretty much everywhere.”
It’s more of a revelation than Zach had expected, even after everything.
“But,” Chris goes on, “there was something about the idea of pressing my lips against the smooth skin there. Maybe because you were so adamant about covering them in our off-hours, I’d figured maybe nobody had ever kissed you there, then. It just . . .” His eyes flit back to Zach’s, and he combs his fingers farther back through Zach’s hair, his smile a little wistful as he gazes down at him.
“Chris,” Zach pleads, voice low and rough. He slides his hand up Chris’s back, palm coming to rest on the smooth curve of his shoulder. “Kiss me,” Zach says, softer.
Chris’s smile widens. “That’s what I’ve been saying,” he murmurs, and ducks down to meet Zach’s lips.
*