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You could say it started when Peter spotted Carter struggling out through the door of the ER with a stack of broken-down boxes under one arm. He watched as Carter somehow managed to completely misjudge both his location relative to the door and the angle of the cardboard, getting himself caught on the door frame and tugging himself free only to almost slip and fall on a patch of ice that the grit and salt had missed.
"You know," Peter said, "with your level of spatial awareness, I can see why you ended up choosing surgery as your specialty."
"Har har," said Carter, trailing after Peter in the direction of the El stop. Peter sighed. Teaching was a requirement of his job. He understood that. It was a thing he put up with on sufferance, knowing that it gave him a paycheque and a position and the opportunity to excel. It wasn't something he'd chosen for its own sake, even before he got saddled with Carter. Peter would say that teaching Carter was like being imprinted on by a baby duckling who perpetually trailed him around on ungainly feet—except that it was also like being imprinted on by a huge-eyed Labrador puppy who perpetually trailed him around on ungainly feet.
Being a grown man who was followed around by a duckling-puppy was a hard thing to reckon with at the end of a twenty hour shift.
"What are you even doing with those?" Peter said as Carter wrestled himself and his dozen boxes through the turnstile and out onto the platform.
"Oh, Jerry gave them to me," Carter said.
"That's a response," Peter said. "That's not an answer to my question."
"They're, uh," Carter said, squinting down the track towards the oncoming train. "I promised Gant's family I'd pack up his stuff, send it back to them. I guess I've been putting it off. So I needed, you know, boxes."
Peter let his head roll back and for a moment he stared up at the wintry sky. He sighed again. He said, regretting it even as he spoke, "You want some help?"
The apartment was roughly what Peter had expected in terms of size and location: the top floor of a three-flat on the edge of a shabby-genteel neighbourhood. Driveway that hadn't been properly shovelled; busted light bulb on the porch. They trudged up the stairs and Carter let them into a living room with mismatched furniture that looked like it had cycled through the Goodwill a couple-three times.
The tidiness levels, though, were a lot better than he'd have predicted. Peter remembered his years as a med student as a period of grease-stained paper plates and laundry piles he never had time for, and that was despite the fact that his mother had still been able to fuss over him then. But this place was spotless, and eerily neat for a place that was lived in by two single guys who were both working a minimum of eighty hours a week.
For a place that had been lived in by two single guys.
"I'm glad today was the day for the cleaning service," Carter said with a careful little chuckle, setting the boxes down just inside the door and unwinding his scarf from around his neck. "Would have been embarrassing otherwise."
"Oh," Peter said dryly, as he took off his own coat. "Sure."
A dim, narrow hallway led from the living room to the back of the house. Peter caught a glimpse of a kitchen at the far end. On either side of this end of the hallway were two closed doors. Carter opened the one on the right and flicked on the overhead light. The bare bulb showed a bedroom with an unmade bed and a bath towel dropped in the middle of the floor.
"I, uh, told the cleaners not to come in here since it, it happened," Carter said. He was looking everywhere but at Peter now. "Let me just get some tape for the boxes."
Carter had been way too generous about the number of boxes he'd need. Gant hadn't lived in Chicago all that long and he hadn't come here with much. Peter wasn't sure what his family could or would do with Gant's stack of medical textbooks and much-thumbed notebooks, but he dutifully stacked them in boxes along with a few battered paperback novels. Carter folded clothes, and Peter made a neat pile of the photos that had been pinned to a cork board, a sheaf of smiling strangers that he stowed away inside an envelope he found in Gant's small desk. Another box held a mix of cassettes and CDs, a small boombox, a desk lamp, some shoes. Carter and Peter worked together to fold the bed's oversized quilt, a patchwork of blues and browns that was clearly the work of someone's hand and that filled one whole box by itself. The rest of the bedding, the towels, the underwear, went into a trash bag that Carter tied off with a decisive knot.
Peter wrote the contents of each box on its exterior with a sharpie, Carter taped them up, and they stacked them against one bedroom wall. The pile wasn't very big. They'd boxed up a whole life, ready for shipping, and Peter couldn't say he knew Dennis Gant any better now than he had an hour ago.
Next to him, Carter let out a deep breath.
"Well, that sucked," he said. "You want something? Shoot, I should have offered you a drink or a... Gamma would have my head if she knew I was inhospitable to a guest."
Carter took off in the direction of the kitchen. Peter followed him in half-hearted protest—he should get going, it was late, he had things to do, and anyway he didn't drink.
"Oh, that doesn't matter," Carter said, opening the fridge. "I've got... Uh, well, I've got..." He scrunched up his nose, closed the fridge, then opened the two cupboards next to it in quick succession and stared into them with a blank look on his face.
"Your cleaning service doesn't buy groceries for you, huh?"
Carter's cheeks flushed a dull red. "I've been busy," he said, which was how Peter somehow found himself sitting on the couch next to Carter with a glass of water and a plate of Mallomars.
"I haven't had one of these since I was a kid," Peter said. He took a tentative, tiny bite. Tasted exactly like he remembered.
Carter ate one in a couple of big mouthfuls. "I always hoarded packets to get me through finals. Couple of these and a Coke, I'd be awake for hours."
"That sounds healthy," Peter said.
"There are worse coping mechanisms," Carter said, and then both of them turned to look silently in the direction of Gant's bedroom, its door now firmly closed, and it was so absolutely awkward that Peter found himself stuffing the rest of the cookie into his mouth all at once. He coughed. He swallowed. He coughed again, and had to take a healthy swig of water to wash the gooey mess down.
"Real smooth," Carter said.
"I've seen you trip on thin air more than once," Peter said. How Carter was capable of being so deft and sure when he was in the OR, but so likely to walk into a wall outside of it, was a minor ongoing mystery. "Not sure I'll take your word for it."
"I can be smooth!" Carter protested.
"Uh huh," Peter said.
"Don't give me that, I can, I'm, I absolutely—"
Peter set his plate and glass down on the rickety coffee table. "It's not a matter of—"
"If you'd just—"
Carter shifted and before Peter understood what was happening, Carter was in his lap. Carter was sitting in his lap, long legs folded up against him, arms braced against the back of the couch either side of Peter's head. His eyes were very bright and unexpectedly close. "See?" Carter said, sounding triumphant.
"Carter." Peter didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to do with his hands. Putting them anywhere at all with this much Carter so warm and so close to him seemed dangerous; he kept them floating in mid air. He was distantly aware of his own breathing coming fast and shallow. "What are you doing?"
The look on Carter's face changed: from triumph through to confusion before settling on low-grade panic. "Just... a demonstration. Of smoothness. Totally... theoretical smoothness. And, uh." His words came out in the staccato rhythm that meant he was speaking at the same time that he was trying to come up with an explanation.
"And what?" Peter still had no idea what to do with his hands.
"You don't—that is—but I—"
"Are you ever going to actually finish a sentence?" Everything else might be bewildering, but at least the low-grade irritation that Peter had associated with Carter almost from the moment he'd met him was a constant.
"Uh..."
"Well, Carter?"
The panic on Carter's face faded away, replaced by a kind of flushed determination. His eyes narrowed, the way Peter knew they did in the OR when he'd figured out a plan of attack on a recalcitrant gallbladder or a stubborn small bowel obstruction.
And then Carter leaned down and kissed Peter.
It was too much of a shock for Peter to make sense of it all at once. He could think about it only in fits and starts: the scratch of Carter's stubble against his own, the warmth of his mouth, the heft of him, the rise and fall of his flanks beneath Peter's hands. Peter couldn't remember touching him, but he was. He was touching Carter; Carter was touching him. Peter dug in with his fingers. Part of him catalogued how that made Carter shudder; another part was aware of how that made his own breath hitch.
When the kiss finally ended, Carter didn't pull very far back. Peter found himself staring at Carter's reddened mouth and said, "You kissed me."
"In my defence," Carter said, wide-eyed, "I didn't know what I was doing."
"So how's that different from every other day?"
"That's not fair!"
"Isn't it?" Peter's hands were still clutching Carter's waist, and he didn't know why. This was Carter. It was Carter and he was a man and Peter was a man and they worked together. "You kissed me."
"Yeah, but you're..."
"What?"
Carter's hands flexed against the back of the sofa. "You know, I decided to go pre-med because of my brother. I don't do well on tests, but I thought screw it, the MCAT's nothing compared to having to go through chemo. And then I stuck with it, all the way through med school, because I could tell my grandparents didn't want me to do it—I could tell my grandfather didn't think I could do it."
"And?"
"And I never wanted their attention or their approval half as much as I want yours."
"Carter—"
A car alarm wailed in the distance, and Carter blinked. He shook himself, like he was a sleepwalker waking up and finding himself far away from his own bed. His eyes got even wider, and he tried to heave himself up off Peter's lap. "Shit, this was a mistake, I shouldn't—"
"Carter." Peter tightened his grip on Carter's waist. Part of Peter's brain—the good part, the serious part, the part that got him out of North Lawndale and into med school—was firmly insisting that he should let Carter go. That would be smart. Stop touching Carter—Carter, who was a man—stand up, make his excuses, go home. Go to bed, sleep in tomorrow, spend his day off catching up on laundry and going for a run and very pointedly not thinking about what had just happened. See Carter again at work on Friday. Never mention any of this at all, ever again.
If Peter was smart, that was what he'd do.
But part of Peter's brain—the part that was too damn curious for its own good—wanted to know what would happen if he stayed. It wanted to know what would happen if he undid Carter's ugly tie and unbuttoned his shirt. If he didn't do the most pragmatic thing. If they kissed again.
"Well," Peter said. "You wanted my attention, you got it. You want to know how you get my approval?"
Carter nodded mutely.
"Okay then." Peter peeled one of Carter's hands away from the back of the sofa, and placed his palm flat against Peter's chest. "Give me your differential diagnosis."
"Are you ki—"
Peter raised both eyebrows.
"Okay, fine. Uh." Carter splayed out his fingers. "Signs of mild tachycardia. Pupil dilation. Subject is alert and verbally responsive, some would say too responsive—"
Peter slapped Carter lightly on the thigh. "Professionalism, please."
Peter was capable of admitting to himself that a flushed, irritated Carter was an attractive Carter. He moved his hands lower on Carter's side and started to tug at where his shirt was tucked into his pants. That shifted Carter a little further into Peter's lap, made his hips cant forward so that he had to lean back a little to compensate. Peter grinned.
"Professionalism," Carter said through gritted teeth. "Right. Well. A wide range of candidate conditions means that a physical examination is required to exclude some possibilities." Now he was unbuttoning Peter's shirt with deft fingers, pulling it open, rucking up his undershirt, running those big warm hands over Peter's stomach. Peter could feel his nipples tighten in response.
"No sign of abdominal tenderness, but..." Carter scratched blunt fingernails against the trail of hair that started just below Peter's navel. Peter hissed. "Some interesting reflex responses. Might merit a closer look."
"Is this a diagnostic pathway with actual exclusionary potential?" Peter could feel his cock stir; was increasingly aware of the heft of Carter in his lap and of how small a shift would be needed for Carter to be able to grind down against him.
"Are you asking if I'm teasing you, Dr Benton?"
"I'm implying that maybe you're not as smooth as you think you are, Dr Carter," and the look on Carter's face at that left Peter helpless to do anything other than kiss him.
This second kiss was a shock of a different kind: deep and pushy and drugging, the thrust of Carter's tongue against his enough to have Peter all the way to hard fast enough that he moaned with it. Careful, and with none of the clumsiness that Carter had a knack of showing at the worst of times. Christ, Peter actually wanted him—and a couple of hours ago, all he'd wanted to do was to go home to a quiet apartment.
"I'm being professional," Carter said when the kiss ended, his voice rasping in a manner that was a nice stroke to Peter's ego. "Thorough."
"You haven't—"
Peter bit off his words, because Carter was moving his hand lower down, cupping Peter's cock through his pants. "Oh, well I think this is a pathognomonic sign right here," Carter went on, and stroked him, and Peter shook all over. "But just to be sure—"
"Oh, c'mon," Peter said, batting Carter's hands out of the way so that he could unzip first his pants and then Carter's own. Carter's cock pushed out against his boxers, fabric already darkening over the tip, and Peter felt his own breath come faster. It was a race then to see who could push their underwear down and out of the way first—a race complicated by the fact that they both kept getting distracted by kissing—but once they were done it was Carter who rocked forward against Peter, Carter who licked his palm and then took them both in hand.
And that felt better than Peter could ever have imagined, his cock sliding hot and slick against another man's, his whole body pushing up into it and Carter meeting him measure for measure. It felt good, it felt great, but he wanted more. Peter wrapped his arms around Carter and then twisted, flipping them so that Carter was lying on his back on the couch and Peter was on top of him.
Carter didn't protest, just gave a shuddering groan that Peter knew he was going to be thinking about for a good long while, let his right foot fall to the floor and his hips roll up. With his hard cock poking up out of those expensive pants of his and his tie half undone around his neck, he should have looked ridiculous. He looked beautiful. Peter wanted him.
"You don't need my, uh, my full diagnosis?"
"Shut up, Carter," Peter snapped. Play was one thing but this was something else: the warm press of Carter against him, the living challenge of him, the way he made Peter want things he objectively shouldn't. He lined them up, indulged in one slow leisurely thrust that had his cock rubbing against Carter's and the plane of his pale belly.
"I'm just, just trying—" Carter's voice was wobbly but still far too coherent for Peter's liking. He bowed his head, nipped at Carter's nipple through his undershirt, smirked at the way that Carter hissed and then said, "Oh, please", like he'd been startled by the discovery of some great, unexpected pleasure.
And Peter liked that, wanted more of it—wanted to feel Carter come beneath him. He had a feeling it would be like the best endorphin rush after a surgery, the ones when he was handed a case that would make any other resident panic but where he saw the surgical pathway just lighting up for him, clear as day.
"Please, please," Carter said, head lolling back against the faded couch cushion and his hands scrabbling at Peter's back and pushing up beneath his shirt, nails scraping at sweaty skin. Peter thrust against him again and Carter pushed back, a rhythm building between them that had Carter gasping and Peter sweating. "Oh fuck, fuck, make me," Carter said, and Peter bowed his head and bit again at Carter, teasing his nipple to a stiff peak before sucking wet and gentle at it through the fabric.
Carter's foot thumped once, twice, against the floor and he let out a loud sob before he came. Beautiful. Peter felt a surge of triumph so profound that his own orgasm felt like a leisurely crest in comparison.
The aftermath of sex was never something that Peter had been particularly good at. He knew what to do with his hands; less so his words. But Carter didn't seem to mind the quiet. When Peter slumped to one side, in between Carter and the back of the sofa, Carter just rolled with him, flinging an arm around Peter's waist and nuzzling idly at the hollow of his throat. The couch was too small for the two of them together, but if Carter didn't mind the quiet, Peter didn't mind the couch. He ran a hand up and down Carter's back.
"I should go," Peter said eventually.
"You should stay," Carter said, muffled.
Peter checked his watch. "I need to eat."
"I've got food!" Carter protested.
"You've got Mallomars," Peter said.
"They're like food," Carter said.
"Shut up, Carter," Peter said, but he didn't say it like he meant it.