Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Of course, there was always an expectation that eventually Kevin would fall from his false wagon. Andrew had been anticipating it from the first night, cigarette shared, spit shared. This was not going to continue long; hell, it didn't even last through the week, Andrew hadn't asked him to stop for good; just a single night, just the weekend.

And because Andrew never had any expectations of Kevin actually stopping his newly-found alcohol habit as Andrew had dared him to when he was emptying vodka shiny guts onto the alleyway floor, it does not affect him at all when Kevin drinks on Saturday night.

He is not angry; he expected it.

Kevin's hand is pale and lined with scratch marks; they stand out bright pink against his skin, textures like peeled paint. He holds a tumbler, something neat and clear. He rhythmically squeezes his fingers around the carved glass.

Andrew watches him. Long fingers, the even unnatural lines of surgical scarring and the textured tears of self-flagellation. Andrew leans his shoulder against Kevin's arm and feels him flinch; ignores it. Curls his fingers around Kevin's that hold the glass and helps him lift it to his mouth. He feels the flinch at his touch, sees the snarl in the stainless steel bar top, but Kevin doesn't separate them. Andrew wants him to, maybe then the glass might fall.

Kevin glances at him from the corner of his eyes that are wet with tears. Andrew tightens his hold; Kevin had been dropping everything today. Frustration radiates from him; it is abrasive, cloying.

"He has got what he wants," Kevin tells Andrew, his voice ironed of the emotion Andrew had already experienced first hand. Andrew wonders how long it had taken since this morning for Kevin to free his voice of the telling chain of emotion, and he wonders what is better.

Andrew has freed himself from an anchor of expectation; he lets himself float in the water of Kevin's wildly oscillating emotions. There had been part of him this morning that had warmed under Kevin's excitement; cat stretched in a generous patch of sun. It was a rarity; in fact Andrew could barely count the times he had seen Kevin anything less than grave, or panicked, or intense, on barely one hand. Of course it was a distraction — lovely, meandering distraction; smile not hidden in the dark of a strobe lit club, eyes the colour of dew grass sparkling in morning sunlight — from the encroaching reality that removing the cast meant the next part of the story began: recovery, if he was lucky, damnation if not.

Everything looked like damnation, though, to someone fallen.

Andrew had gone with Kevin to get it cut off. Sat beside him; stared at the cast saw and the metal spreaders and scissors laid out on a metal tray. So terribly clinical. Blue and red flashing sirens, bright LED overhead. Dead on scene. Split cut across his face, neck brace. Kevin was wearing a hoodie and he unzipped it, peeled his arm out. The cast was clean of signatures, markings, as though it had just been completed. Blood, a spot on the corner was all that marred it.

Kevin was jittering his thigh against Andrew's, clouds already forming over that mornings happiness and excitement. Reality looming too close.

The question on the end of his tongue that he did not allow himself to ask. Damnation.

Andrew wanted to ask for him. Will he play again.

But he didn't care.

He didn't.

How would the nurse know, anyway? There was a difference between Kevin Day and others; Andrew already knew Kevin would not listen to someone telling him this was the end. There was no point in asking. Kevin would drag himself from the depths and he would be who he was always meant to be. Andrew knew this. Kevin knew it in a way that he was taught to play through, never stop.

When the saw began, Kevin dropped his head against Andrew's shoulder, blocking his ear. Andrew rolled his eyes; wrapped his arm around Kevin's shoulder and cupped his other ear, pressing his finger against Kevin's tragus.

The cast unpeeled.

Soft spools of cotton, pale hidden skin.

The intimate smell of unwashed skin.

Andrew stared at Kevin's unveiled arm; he was seeing something intimate, special. A piece of Kevin held back from him until now.

Kevin creaked his fingers, stretched them, turned his hand and stared, too, at the lines that crossed the back like constellations. Too many, a crowded sky. Neat lines where almost two months ago bone had breached skin, splits formed under the head of a racquet.

Andrew had not seen it. His brain fills in the gaps; blood and gore, Kevin's shaky words as he whispered to Andrew what had been done. Shivering paralellism; Andrew knew what it felt like when blood ran down your hands. He knew the warm terror of it.

The nurse took Kevin's hand and checked the scarring. Said rudimentary things that Andrew noted simply for the fact that Kevin's eyes had become slowly absent as she worked him through stretches that Andrew could forsee becoming tics.

On the drive back, silence, and Andrew had broken it; unbearable. "Share," he said, and gestured absently at the pack between them. It was permission in a way.

Kevin's hand shook as he lit the smoke. Acrid in the car; filter damp as they passed it between them, Andrew's fingers tapping along the steering wheel as the window sucked the grey plumes away.

They got through two before arriving back at Abby's house. Andrew lingered in the driveway, butted the cigarette against his thigh, ash smear.

"Better vices," Andrew commented.

Kevin flipped down the sun visor and shicked the mirror open. He leant forwards and used the corner of his thumb to rub at the bags beneath his eyes; purple, soft. No right to exhaustion when he'd never done so little in his entire life. He blinked and met Andrew's gaze in the reflection; cheap mirror, distorted bend to his features, a curve to a straight nose that Andrew knew had been broken and set twice, at least. The natural slashes between dark eyebrows deepened in Kevin's displeasure, a flicker before flatness. Andrew could not see the edges of the mask to dig his nails beneath and rip it free.

"Better vices," Kevin repeated, in disagreement. He pushed the cigarette packet aside and closed his eyes, a deep sigh pulled his torso taut. His press smile emerged through his expression like flaking plaster beneath water damaged paper. "Eden's."

And Andrew knew then it was lost.

Eden's not because of what they did, but because of what it had been before.

Sure, he could use a drink.

Andrew got out of the car.

"Booor-ring," he called, sing-song.

In Eden's, Kevin slumps into the bar and Andrew squeezes their double grip on the glass.

"I am ruined," Kevin breathes.

"No," Andrew says.

Kevin whips his head around and sneers. He brushes Andrew from his side and tosses his drink back before Andrew can disagree with him anymore.

After that, the night descends.

Andrew stands at the top of the well and waits for the sound of Kevin hitting the bottom.

He is there with winch and pulley to drag him out.

There are a thousand ways that Andrew decides that this is nothing, none more prevalent than the resounding truth of his own nothingness. It is laughable to Andrew to think that the deal was something that would ever hold continuous weight; it was not the same as their original deal that held them together in their entire. And certainly he does not give himself such grandiosity to believe that their — his — want for Kevin would be enough to ensure this did not happen. Similarly to give such importance to the failing of abstinence for one day, one evening, is in itself a failing because it was never, really, an achievement.

No, Kevin's fleeting weekend sobriety was a flex of his newly found and awkwardly wielded free will; the snatching of Andrew's words from the air — let's not do that here — that Andrew, admittedly, had not entirely intended for him to hear. His busyness being ill; reaction to his own self poisoning should have meant that this eventual disappointment was never on the cards, because the faux, weekend limited, wagon shouldn't have existed in the first place.

What are they, after all, without vice?

Besides, Andrew had his own predilection towards drink and that was one of the reasons they came to Eden's, on a base level. Andrew had been abstaining in his own way too — though glutting himself in a different way, bruising his knees in a pleasing way that he was sure felt good to all those that knelt to pray penitent to god. None of that today and though upon seeing Kevin doing shots and drinking glasses with twinkling ice, Andrew's own mouth watered for that familiar burning numbness, part of him held back.

This was a part of himself he was frequently frustrated with, though equally it was a part of himself that he had promised to Kevin in their doomed, original deal. Their exchange of unequal promises that Andrew was desperate to see realized. Sobriety was intrinsic to his part of the deal; though of course his medication left him questionably grey, the least he could do was lay off on mixing it. Foam on the chin sort of results if he was not careful. Debilitating lack of control.

How could he protect Kevin if he was too far gone? Wrapping them around a tree certainly wasn't part of the deal and how many car crashes could one man survive, anyway? And so water slowly replaces the first few tossed back shots, and he nurses a plastic bottle of water that crunches beneath his hand.

At the point in the night — morning, really — where Andrew could likely light Kevin on fire from fumes alone they stand wobbling and cold in the alleyway outside of the club. Kevin had been towed there; Andrew's hand on the small of his back and forcing him through the crowds because he had lost sight of him until then and Andrew needs a moment to sink his hooks back in so that Kevin might not stray again.

Andrew can deal with the ugliness; isn't it a balm to see people at their lowest and to know that they are still reachable?

Andrew stands with a finger hooked into Kevin's belt loops.

Kevin is talking but Andrew only listens in that there is nothing else to hear but bass. His words blend and slur, a lilting and soft accent appearing and disappearing like light in the corner of Andrew's eyes. That was new; mostly in the sense that on his weekday alcohol binges Kevin was resolute in his own solitude and if Andrew insisted upon being there with him — which he did, frequently — that did not mean that Kevin had to talk to him. Talking when there was a better use for his mouth, bottle top, made little sense to Kevin at his peak haunted.

"Are you over it yet?" Andrew asks, because he cannot help himself. He pulls Kevin from the bottom of his own drunkenness in screeching argument, and douses him in cold water of reminding. All that hard work, all that liquor and Andrew's plucked the chord because — because he is bored? Because he likes Kevin snarling? "Has it worked?"

Kevin slants a look at him. His expression had been animated as he talked but now it is like Andrew has smacked it off him and it smears his features like a mistake on an oil painting.

Andrew taps ash from his cigarette and blows smoke upwards.

"Are you?" Kevin retorts.

"Me?" Andrew asks, looking around. "Oh, Kev, I could hardly care less about you playing exy ever again."

He doesn't say that in Kevin's expression in the nurses office he had resolved himself to changing that very reality, somehow. Enabler to his core.

Kevin snorts, blurs with resentment. "You have been sulking all night," he says, holds his hands up and rings them before his face like a crying clown. "Boo-hoo."

Andrew stares.

"Saw you," Kevin informs him. "Next time, eh?"

Saw him what? Andrew always lingered in Kevin's periphery and his face was ever blank; he was a wall, showed nothing, he knew. But Kevin had a way of staring at him that unbeknownst to Andrew flayed him and Kevin had pins to hold him open so that he could rummage and understand. There is a cold spreading across the back of his neck at the thought.

Andrew laughs because it stops him from sneering. Flicks his cigarette on the ground near Kevin's feet instead of sticking it into the gap between his lips like he wanted.

Kevin walks away.

They don't see each other again until it is time to leave. Time to leave that night happens when Eden's lights turn on and they are expelled from the dance hall like bugs from a hole. Smoked out. In the valet parking lot, Nicky is wrapped around Aaron and Kevin, linked and pleased looking. Successful roll call.

In the passenger seat while Andrew drives them home and his family sleeps in the back, Kevin reaches across the center console and floats in between touching and longing to touch.

Andrew exhales and presses his hand against the back of Kevin's; his left, so Andrew is careful. The spiderweb of white stands stark and fresh against Kevin's cold skin. He presses their joined hands against his own knee. Kevin exhales long and low.

They drive home.

It is over.

-

In the Columbia house a few weeks later, Kevin lingers in the doorway. Last time they were here Andrew had petted sweat damp hair form Kevin's face and they had smelt of vodka for days. He had been waiting to do that, first bottle of water had been him stilling his hands ready for that very thing; for tenderness, if he were honest with himself, which Andrew did not necessarily feel was important. Kevin limp and sodden in his arms and promising he would not do it again all while Andrew knew he would. Trauma and bad decisions, but both those things didn't mean that Andrew wouldn't be there to hand cups of water and tip mouthwash spit down the drain.

Kevin is unmoored, now, after so many weeks of sobriety in Columbia. Around them, the house has morphed and now all Kevin sees is a few weeks ago when he had broken their deal and broken the weekend.

Andrew had expected this; he wanted Kevin to get over it.

But Kevin is hesitant, he wanders the house untethered and strange, ghostly and unsettling. It is like when he first came from the Nest, a lurking presence whom Andrew believed to have already exorcised.

"Why are you not getting ready?" Andrew asks, in the mirrors reflection Kevin is close to disappearing besides the white hoodie he has not removed from practice; the grey sweatpants that Andrew tries to ignore. There is a wave of dark hair that sticks to his forehead; ink swipe, calligraphy.

In the doorway, Kevin presses his lips together. Bitten, to soothe later the pieces of raw skin. To pull; peel apart for Andrew's own investigation.

"Do you want to go?"

"I drove here for fun," Andrew deadpans.

Kevin exhales.

"Say what you want," Andrew advises him. For he sees this for what it is; Kevin putting the ball in his court for the sole fact that he is not used to being allowed an opinion, a choice. Bullies take things better when it is seemingly their own choice, Kevin's a lovely, skilled manipulator but Andrew doesn't want to allow it.

Kevin's jaw works, tenses. He drifts into the room and Andrew leans into his mirror, working at smudging eyeliner he had put on too carefully. Black speckles, egg shell, around amber eyes. He works it into the corners.

"I do not want to go."

Andrew meets Kevin's eyes in the reflection. He puts his pencil down and stretches his hands above his head. He is wearing a shirt he cut himself and it lifts and exposes bare skin; Andrew is aware of Kevin's gaze wavering.

"And what instead?"

Kevin shrugs.

Andrew has some ideas, of course, but he believes it's more fun to get Kevin to say what he wants so he nods in affirmation instead of leaving Kevin's original statement ignored. They'll stay home; this is fine, already Andrew's mind is working overtime.

"Think of something while I drive the other two."

Which he does, far too early for them to be particularly happy about it, and with the sole excuse that Kevin's migraines have returned. The fact that Kevin had seemed perfectly fine — his typical bad attitude aside — on the drive up was ignorable for the fact that Nicky had already convinced himself he knew the reason for Kevin's absence, which Andrew would neither confirm nor deny, and that Aaron did not particularly care, so long as they still stopped by at Sweeties.

Which they did; lingering there enough time that they weren't arriving at the beginning of Eden's door opening. Something unfashionable about being so early to a club that the lights are hardly darkened, the floor still clean and empty. Nicky taps his shoulder as he and Aaron go to the door. Andrew flicks him away.

"You'll collect us?" he asks, and Andrew nods, hadn't thought otherwise and barely thinks about waking up at three am to the sound of a phone call. Family is a good reason for suffering; new found as it all is.

The drive back is faster than it should be; a few times he consciously lifts his foot off the gas and allows himself to slow naturally, but by the time he's pulling away from traffic lights again he's slipping into the sixties within moments and he's thinking, thinking, about Kevin who is home alone and how rare that must be for him. He wonders if the panic that is always within Kevin has risen to the surface with no one there to distract him, absorb it. Really, Andrew should have brought him, but Kevin had made himself scarce when the other two were galloping down the stairs and complaining about changed plans and pointless journeys.

He tells himself the pit in his gut is just worry; a peach he'd eaten when he'd first met Kevin Day. Sweet, certainly at the time, for Andrew was unfortunately a sucker for a pretty face, and, apparently, green eyes glazed with tears. But now a lingering pit he could not tire of and had to build his life around. Of course such a thing cannot just be one thing, but to think of it as want and desire forms a sort of bile in his mouth that he has to spit on the tarmac of the house's drive.

Perhaps Andrew imagines the curtain twitch in the window at his arrival; it feels achingly domestic that someone might be in his house and waiting for him to come home.

Andrew hurries in.

Andrew does not think he will ever quite tire of having a place to call his own.

"Kev?" he calls when he walks in, locking the door without noticing he was doing so. He takes off his sneakers.

There is a sound from the living room, the source of the curtain twitch, and Andrew follows it. Feels the moment they reattach; the return to orbit.

Kevin is reading a book on the sofa. Andrew was not aware they had any books, and he had not seen this one in the backpack they shared for their weekend things. Kevin discards it upon Andrew's entrance, laying one half of the book on the table so the other, heavier side, balances it out and it hangs off the edge.

He is more solid now, settled.

Andrew lingers, stands between Kevin and the coffee table.

Kevin's hand brushes against Andrew's thigh where he had left it hanging after discarding his book. Andrew looks down at him. Safe. The pit is still there. Andrew would smoke if he could muster the will to go back outside and away.

"Did you catch wind of tonight's theme?" Andrew asks when there is nothing between them but Kevin's fingers on his leg and Andrew's inaction to remove them.

Kevin quirks an eyebrow.

"At Eden's."

Kevin shakes his head. When he speaks his voice is quiet, like the hour of Andrew's absence had given him time for his throat to get raspy, his voice unused. "I just did not want to go."

"I'd gotten you a little outfit," Andrew says. "You'd have fit right in."

"To what?" Kevin asks, hand sinking downwards. His nails touch Andrew's knee, his shin. It makes him jolt, just slightly, though the casual way of their touches has now permeated the walls he had built so suddenly and effectively, and the jolt does not make him want to run.

"I'm sure we'll find use for it," Andrew continues, ignoring Kevin whom he doesn't want to give answers to, no matter how small. "Fishnets are common clothes now, aren't they?"

Kevin narrows his eyes in playful confusion.

Andrew drops his own hand and their fingertips touch. Creation of Adam.

"Eden's isn't the trigger you know," Andrew says, low. Says this because they have not spoken anymore on what had actually caused it, the fall, and he likes digging a knife along the sealed edge of the unsaid, and peeling it open

Kevin sits up. He folds his hands on his on top of his knees, drawn to his chest. "No," he says. "It enables."

"You don't need a club to drink," Andrew reminds him.

Kevin narrows his eyes, Andrew relents.

It feels good to relent.

He touches Kevin's cheek, he cannot help himself. He makes it brief. The movement of assistance, brushing away an eyelash, not tenderness, never. Kevin exhales, drops his head back against the arm of the sofa.

"So I have thought of what I want to do." Kevin extends the offer of moving on like Andrew is deserving of it, and Andrew snatches it. Bait on hook.

It occurs to him that Kevin is natural at quick resolution; perhaps it grows from the same stem as quick to bow his head, quick to give in.

"I saw," Andrew says, nods to the book.

Kevin cuts a dismissive hand through the air, eyeing the book with distaste that amuses Andrew. He likes disgust on Kevin's face as equally as he likes anything else. Still, he should like to smear it away with his hand, too.

"The only book in the entire house," and he says this with a narrow look at Andrew that is accusatory enough that Andrew responds to it with a shrug. "And it's erotica."

Andrew looks at the cover; a rakish oil of a shirtless man and a knight of ambiguous gender.

"Well, if the deal is still on—"

"The deal is not a prerequisite to fucking," Andrew reminds him. He had a hunch. Though this too is flaying and open admission of Andrew wanting him before the deal. The second deal. How many more deals before his desperation is too obvious, before it is tattooed on his very skin?

Kevin rolls his eyes. "It is, but okay," he says, which is true. But okay. "Entirely separate from my weekend sobriety and your feelings about it—"

"If this is going where I think it is going, I have a few notes on your manner of flirting and proposition," Andrew says.

"I have a few notes about yours," Kevin snips. He cuts another hand through the air, brushes away their words which on his brow have formed an apostrophe of irritation that Andrew wants to line with his teeth. Kevin says, quickly exhaling the words so they cannot bring his usual embarrassment or telltale flushed cheeks, "I want to ride you."

Andrew sits down. It is unrelated to the sudden wobble in his knees; he simply bored of standing. He stares at Kevin and Kevin has always been good at holding his gaze, and does now. It is magnetic how Andrew is drawn to him, to pinch his cleft chin in thumb and forefinger so he can only look more deeply in his eyes and search in them any hint of something that could suggest otherwise. Because Andrew's been thinking about it since he got Kevin in his mouth. Eden's lends a hand to imagining what it might be like; for Kevin is a languid dancer, it has not yet lost its gleam for the sort of freedom it implies, and his loose dancing often involves his hips moving against Andrew.

He has thought about it in the sort of underwater way of nighttime, biting his pillow to assuage the sounds; to feel his own grinding teeth to drag him out of it. And after all that overly prepared flagellation, Kevin offers it to him now as though it is nothing. As though it is not so despicable of a want; that Kevin wants it, too.

Kevin has two moles under his right eye like an unfinished ellipses. Flecks from a paintbrush. Andrew drops his chin and cups his cheek. He bites his tongue and swallows it whole to remove his own damned tenderness. To solidify his own silence.

"I know we—" Kevin begins, and cuts himself off. Andrew cannot talk so the silence lapses and Kevin fills it again. "I know we have not done more than —" he gestures, which should encapsulate everything that they have and have not done. He shrugs, it implies a way out that Andrew desperately does not want.

"I want a smoke," Andrew says, suddenly, regurgitating the chewed pieces of his tongue to form this non sentence that is not a yes or a no but a wait.

And Kevin nods.

He turns his head and kisses Andrew's palm.

Andrew flinches away like he has been burnt.

Kevin stands up. He unfolds; he is all long limbs and soft in sweatpants and socks tucked over the cuffs. He pulls his hood over his dark wavy hair and gestures towards the French doors, a come on, and Andrew leads them out.

The duration of the cigarette is long enough to think of a million reasons why this should not happen and why he does not deserve it, but none of those reasons can stand up to the fact that simply, he wants it. He wants it so bad he can hardly finish his cigarette, hand shaking and flames settling within his lungs; heat he cannot do anything with but transfer into desire and greed and guilt.

He will have Kevin; Kevin is giving himself to Andrew and Andrew is going to ruin him.

Andrew pushes his cigarette into the wall and goes inside.

His shadow follows.

There is unfortunately not a perfect way to go about this. They are both deeply flawed. This has not stopped them before, and Andrew suffocates his want for perfection with the truth that this is potentially going to go wrong; that no matter how plainly and strongly he wants this and wants Kevin, desire alone is not always enough to break through long existing walls. He is also aware that thinking in this manner sets him on the wrong path, and he blots the thoughts away like soaking up blood on a tissue, and in its wake tries, warily, to release the thoughts he had bolted away. Thoughts of Kevin; his long pale throat, his black hair under Andrew's hand, the distracting notion of Kevin on top of him. Exy stats put he and Kevin in a similar weight range, though Kevin's is height and muscle where as Andrew is bulk and fat. He has experienced Kevin's pliability with his own hands; he has seen the tapering off of the bite and the snark and seen how, with a carefully placed hand on the back of the neck, Kevin's eyes can soften and he can submit in a way that is sort of terrifying as it is comforting. The brief glimpse of giving in is proof of a deliberate choice to do so. Rag doll pliability, heavy lidded eyes. Kevin on top of him; his slim tapered waist beneath Andrew's hands. Andrew inside of him. Andrew inside of him.

"We could always watch a movie," Andrew says at the same time as he is opening his bedroom door and walking into the dark, fumbling with the lamp and turning it on when finally he finds the click on the lamp's neck. He does not mean it. If Kevin agreed, Andrew might run downstairs and cut the fuse box before they could even try.

Kevin pulls his top off. His torso stretched, taut, bowstring. "Sure."

Andrew closes the gap between them. Kevin grunts as Andrew closes his hands around his bare waist and drags him close, firm against Andrew's body. He traps Kevin between the door frame and the wall. Andrew can feel Kevin's stomach rising and falling with each breath. They are in sync; Andrew has to close his mouth, clench his teeth to stop his own panting, though Kevin does no such thing. He lets Andrew feel him, the vulnerability of his quickened breaths like an exhausted prey animal, having given up. Andrew's teeth in the back of his neck. His.

Andrew drags his palms up Kevin's sides, the divots of his ribs like rungs in a fence.

He wants to know if Kevin has ever done this before. He thinks of Kevin's cum on his face; sudden, gasping, and decides he probably has not. Where would he have gotten the chance? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, after all. Andrew's hands xylophone back down and into the thick waistband of Kevin's sweats, fingers dipping beneath the Klein elastic of his briefs.

The room is buttery in the glow of the lamplight; Kevin's skin golden and blemished, soft and overheated beneath Andrew's hands. Andrew tugs Kevin's hips; the discrepancy in their height means Kevin's pelvis arches into Andrew's stomach. Andrew wants to unhinge his jaw and swallow Kevin whole, from the uneven press of his toes, the smooth arches of his feet all the way to his skull. They would press together, skeleton to imperfect skeleton like lovers in a grave.

Kevin is looking at him. His eyes appear almost hazel in the buttercup light; it is almost like looking at himself. Andrew looks away; he busies himself pressing his lips to Kevin's sternum, scraping his teeth — for softness must always be followed by sharpness, what are they without one another? — along the rounded curve of Kevin's pec.

"What about here?" Andrew asks, his voice taking the same tone as Kevin's soft and unused voice upon Andrew's return from Eden's. He clears his throat, banishes the softness. Drags old conversations to the fore because everything for Andrew is present, now; his memory at the tip of his tongue.

"Yes."

Kevin knows, remembers. Andrew silences the grunt of pleasure he emits at Kevin's understanding, forcibly loosens his fingers so not to bruise but it is hard, so difficult to not take outside of his bounds.

The marks he leaves on Kevin's chest are expansive; he looks up between each one, his lower lip still pressed into Kevin's damp skin, checking furtively for signs of displeasure, but to his own delectation finding in Kevin's gaze a pushing desire that asks of him why he has stopped himself in the first place; to which Andrew replies in kind, purpling a mark beside Kevin's nipple, then turning his head to take that in his mouth, instead.

In such a simple thing, Kevin is responsive in a way that Andrew has come to expect, and had become used to hearing only over the hubbub of the club below them; and to hear such sounds in a house empty besides them fans the flames in his chest to almost imperceptible heights forming only into fireworks and sparklers that skitter, hot, down his spine. In the silent house he can hear every hitch of breath and stuttering exhale, of which there seems to be endless and which Andrew wants to find out if they are; can he chase the sounds of Kevin's breathlessness until the breathlessness merges into something deeper? For he could busy himself like this, to his own greedy pleasure, endlessly. The feel of Kevin's skin beneath his teeth and sucked into his mouth for him to smooth and lave his tongue over; the firmness of Kevin's body arcing into his, so pliable under Andrew's hands that curve Kevin's spine into his own torso.

Kevin's hands linger at his sides, though Andrew knows he has the same inclination to grab and to pull and simply suppresses it from their earlier conversation. He is glad of it, because he does not want to break away from the soft skin of chest almost dipping into underarm, the smell of sweat and deteriorating deodorant, to chastise a touch that earlier he had allowed; Kevin's fingers on his thigh, that sort of thing.

After a while, where indeed the breathlessness does begin to peak into frustrated little sounds that Andrew likes just as equally, Kevin's hands do raise but they don't seek to close any invisible gap between them, instead they push into Andrew's chest and form a great yawning expanse between them that feels cold after the Velcro-like connection of their bodies.

There is a sheen across Kevin's chest like sweat, but that is Andrew's spit and is separated only by a staggering amount of purpling, speckled blooms that seem innumerable, now, looking at them from a distance.

Guilt hardly has a chance to surface before Kevin distracts him, pulls him back from the edge before a chance has even arisen to step over the rails. Kevin grabs himself through the fabric of his sweats, which draws Andrew's attention down from his own self indulgent, vampiric attack of Kevin's chest, the almost girlish fullness of it, and to the tent in Kevin's sweatpants that calls to him just the same.

And like they have been at it for hours, time diminishing in a way that sometimes hours disappear, Kevin asks if they are going to get further than this.

Which Andrew answers by gesturing towards the bed, because it is imperative then that he should see Kevin sprawled on his bed, his long limbs sheet tangled this time for pleasure and not the aftermath of a racking sort of hot and cold feverishness that could only be cleared by the ejection of vodka from his stomach.

"You should take those off," Andrew says.

"I'll be naked and you're almost still in shoes and a coat," Kevin comments, though not with a specific disapproval, because he lifts his hips and does as Andrew asks. Andrew has the dizzying realisation that he could ask for anything.

Andrew stands at the end of the bed and helps discard Kevin's clothes, putting them aside and on a chair to give Kevin a semblance of privacy to arrange himself on the bed and second guess, if he had to.

Kevin is right that there is a disparity between them and their states of vulnerability in these ventures; Kevin had touched Andrew once, through his pants and Andrew had almost bitten through his cheeks at the force of feeling that he could not decipher and which funneled into one he could; shame, disgust, though this was all self directed, and he had pushed him away to later jerk himself off to the memory.

He turns back to Kevin who is all long golden limbs and pretty enough that Andrew wants to squash him beneath his thumb.

He touches a hand to the arch of Kevin's foot. One of his middle toes is purple, bent from a stomp in practice that had made him laugh and knock his racquet against his perpetrator in acknowledgement of an underhandedness that was, really, his own language. Andrew would map him like this if it wasn't entirely revealing, and instead he lets go and evens the space between them.

When he removes his pants it is only because this requires it, and even then he is aware of Kevin's gaze on his thighs and is glad that he had never breached into new territory with his self infliction.

"You planned this," Andrew accuses, placing himself at the head of the bed and drawing Kevin's head to his lap to breathe and stroke his silky black hair. "So what do you want?"

So that Andrew can give it to him, exactly. He is obsessed with asking what Kevin wants, with making him form his desires into words.

Kevin's exhaling breath on his thigh; it is an acclimation for Andrew, too, and he finds he does not even flinch, and that in fact he likes it and likes, even when Kevin touches his fingers to Andrew's knees and their grape toned bruises. "You have already got it," Kevin says lowly, and tilts his head up to look at Andrew from his lap, through the thick fan of his dark eyelashes. "You sat against the headboard and me — in your lap."

Kevin turns his head and in this position it looks as though he could sleep like this, Andrew with his fingers in his hair; but Andrew drags his fingers out and makes an impatient noise, though of course he could stay like this too.

"Come on then," he invites. "Have you been helpful, at least?"

Kevin blinks, he moves with a diluted sort of eagerness, and places himself hovering over Andrew's lap. "Helpful?"

Andrew snorts, drags his hands once more up Kevin's ribs and lingers on the outside of his pecs, pushing them together and leaning in to lick the resulting cleavage, dip his tongue in and flick at the top. "Are you ready?" Andrew asks, affecting boredom as he pulls back and drops his hands very obviously back down and to Kevin's ass. He uses his hold to pull Kevin into him, where his shining cock brushes a smear against Andrew's clothed chest. "Did you finger yourself," he states, because he likes the way it suddenly makes Kevin blush and he likes to be blunt with him because in a way it keeps the power firmly in his side, the lewdness of it all. "Or do you want me to do everything."

Of course, Andrew wants to do everything, but already he has indulged too readily in his own tidal wave of want and desires; and he cannot trust himself not to linger on preparation when apparently Kevin has formed ideas of the entire act. He has wanted enough for tonight that wanting something as self indulgent as a careful preparation, too much lubricant and too many looks up and down, assessment of Kevin's expression's like he needed an excuse to analyse him anymore, is too much and out of reach, and Kevin nods. He nods jerkily and it is not immediately obvious what he is agreeing to until he wraps his fingers around Andrew's wrist and pushes it, with some embarassment, between his cheeks where Andrew finds him slick and wet and slightly open.

"So the book was a cover," Andrew comments, voice low, pleased at this, and then at the overwhelming image of it.

Where had Kevin done it? How had he done it? Had he done it before? Andrew would be submerged if he allowed himself to linger on that thought for long, and even the idle wonderings that come immediately to the surface threaten his grip on reality and not cumming, embarassingly, in his underwear. The thought of Kevin on this bed — had it been rumpled before Kevin had placed himself there, Andrew could not remember, it hadn't seemed important — and touching himself with, what, the bottle of lubricant that Andrew shamefully kept stashed in his bedside table for the times where wanting became unbearable to ignore?

Kevin shrugs, it straightens his spine and pushes Andrew's finger down lower, forcing him to move it back up so he can touch as he wants to. Which he does, circling his pointer finger around Kevin's rim in a lazy touch reminiscent of circling his finger around the rim of a bottle before taking a sip.

"So the book was a cover," Andrew repeats lowly, dropping his head back against the cushion of the headboard, "and you rushed downstairs, lube still dripping down your thigh, when you saw the Mas in the driveway, is that right, baby?"

That pet name again, adorning his sentences without his permission. Kevin shivered in his lap; not so much a reaction to Andrew's words—that was the flush of red that blended into his skin, hot—but to Andrew's finger which at the same time pushed into the heat of him, because as much as Kevin claimed to be prepared that didn't mean Andrew would be remiss to check and that he could really, even, possibly resist touching him like this before he filled him in a different way.

"No," Kevin was of course obstinate. Andrew bites at his nipple. "I did it on the sofa."

Because this was Andrew's bedroom and there were boundaries that Kevin did not cross for — what? Fear of reprimand? Or was it respect, this unsaid between them that to speak it would be too revealing, too blindingly open?

In the back of his animal mind Andrew appreciates Kevin's hesitance and waiting for Andrew to return to break the barrier of intimacy in Andrew's room. The sofa was, after all, Kevin's place; the sad blanket over the back often his cover after long nights, for Andrew couldn't always bear the long tangled mess of him in his bed, unless he were a poor, wet, sick little creature; whom for his own vulnerability allowed Andrew a sort of comfort and distance.

Andrew coos. How one would speak to a little creature, palm-sized, small. His intention was, in a way that he could not separate from himself, to wound and to patronize. Always baiting in a way that he could not help, though also, underneath, a warmth of pleasure. He liked the idea of that, too.

Kevin's teeth sink into his lower lip, drawing it up from the way it hung sullen and weighted in a pout that felt perfected just to itch at Andrew's insides.

"Presumptious," Andrew says as he pushes in a second finger with pleasingly little resistance, and to a keening sound from Kevin's throat that Andrew has to put his mouth to, instantaneously, to ravage the sensation of the vibration against his skin.

Kevin shrugs.

He moves his fingers, wraps his arm around Kevin's waist to absorb the way his body jolts, holding him close against Andrew's abdomen so he can feel every pulse of reaction. This too is greed, but greed he cannot stop until Kevin asks him to. He likes how the movement raises Kevin, just slightly, on his knees and Andrew can feel Kevin's cock dragging up his abdomen , the enticing wet trail of it. Certainly Kevin was right in his being ready, Andrew's fingers stretch and scissor inside of him to an ease that makes him wonder if Kevin has actually done this, or something in the realms of this preparation, before. He lingers a third finger at the edge of his rim, though Kevin, he knew, could take this too.

"I'm taking note," Andrew hums.

He drags his teeth along the pleasing swallow of Kevin's Adam's apple.

Kevin raises an eyebrow, Andrew wants to run his thumb nail along the sharp arch of it.

"Partner tiring of Eden's hookups: makes elaborate plans for use of bed," Andrew drones like he is reading a news article. He ignores his own slip; his admission of their attachment and its likening to Raven traditions. Partners is not accurate, moreso shadow, moreso extension.

Kevin snorts. He adjusts his hips. It brings Andrew back down to himself, and what a place to be; an entirely overwhelming position that if he thinks too hard would feel like a trap, a cage, if it were anyone but Kevin who, as a previously caged creature, would never put another in such a predicament as the one from which he had taken flight.

"That, and," Kevin stipulates, hesitating before winding his arms around Andrew's neck and shifting his centre of gravity. He slips back and, "well, I have been thinking about this."

"This is not a hickey," Andrew murmurs, their old conversation, first night; had Kevin thought about this as he had thought about Andrew's potential mark, claim, on his throat? Apparently. Andrew drags a hand up Kevin's ribs; Kevin's spine arches in synchronicity.

"No," Kevin agrees, breathless but still conversational because it keeps the distance, in a way.

He gently pulls free from Kevin.

Andrew wraps his hand around Kevin. He bites away his own groan. Kevin does not. He has sucked Kevin off enough to know he gets wet like a girl; drippy and shiny and pretty, slick and giving. He lifts his hand in a circling twist.

He should stop while they are still ahead; truthfully he can hardly believe himself to be in this position without wanting to pry Kevin away. It is a betrayal to begin thinking in these terms at all, and he barricades that road before he can step foot on it and destroy this sanctuary of their own making.

Kevin slumps back, suddenly, onto his heels. Andrew's arm loosens around his waist to allow it, though his hand remains at the small of Kevin's back, the inset line of his spine.

"Can we—?"

"Can you finish a sentence?" Andrew asks, focusing his attention on rubbing his thumb over the tip of Kevin's cock.

Kevin rolls his eyes and Andrew finds himself grinning, this savage sort of thing that if he saw it in the reflections of Kevin's eyes, he might flinch; but he cannot, he is caught on the way Kevin narrows his eyes at him and tilts his chin, as though balancing something upon the end of it, in the split divot of it.

"Can we. Hurry. Up."

Which is of course music to Andrew's ears, this demand, finished at his request, and he curls his hand upwards before removing it from Kevin's cock to move this along as he was demanded.

Upon pulling himself from his underwear Andrew has wrapped himself in his fist and squeezed because it is overwhelming, terrible, that Kevin might see him, and for the fact that he is so used to ignoring his own arousal, that it comes as a surprise to himself — and for the fact he usually does not do this, touch himself like this — just how aroused he really is.

He has to squeeze it away, try and get past the fact that already there is something building, hot, in his stomach, and get through to what he wants. What they both want. He snatches lubricant from the bedside, Kevin tilting in his lap as he leans.

Kevin seems to sense it and before Andrew is at the edge, both figuratively and literally, pushing against him and the sweet opening between his legs—due to the power of Kevin simply sat on top of him, the weight of him and the build-up, surely the build-up was all part of it, the weeks of wanting and the waiting waiting waiting that was all now, to shreds— looks up to the ceiling and takes great swallowing breaths that inflate his bruised and claimed chest and distracts Andrew almost entirely until he is past the rim of him, and then all attention is to that, that overpowering drug of all encompassing oneness.

For as much as Kevin might have prepared himself, he is tight and hot and engulfing and it is unfair, unjust, to submit to that sort of pleasure after having, for so long, none, and for a while they both have to sit with it. Kevin taking his time, yes, as he sinks on Andrew's cock, these jittery sort of pauses where his muscles shake like after a long, intense run and his breaths like morse code, falling from his lips in hot little gasps and staccatos that Andrew uses as a broken metronome for his fingers, tapping gently, present, against Kevin's hips.

On his face, in the darkly arched brows and the sullen mouth, is a twist that sits on the precipice between pleasure and pain; the scales balancing more often on the side that Andrew could deal with, and when they went the other way, he tries to distract, to gentle in a way that he would never admit; he would later claim uncharacteristic in a lie, because there was nothing more characteristic of him than wanting to hold Kevin's hand and help him avoid his hurts, ease him through it, protect him.

"Yes or no," he mumbles, and doesn't really know what he means, doesn't like the sound of his own voice suddenly breaking what had been almost a quiet that one only found in places of religion, only to be ruined, usually, by the beginning of song, or sermon.

Kevin rushes out a laugh, his ribs beneath Andrew's palms moving in the sort of way of a bird's heartbeat, quick and instantly fragile, delicate. "What does that even mean," he pants.

They're both so still. It is good and overwhelming at the same time; the intensity of Kevin wrapped around him and the weight of him on top, Andrew waiting for Kevin to move, to do something but breathe through it.

"Are you okay," he makes himself ask, because that is what it is and deep in his chest if he does not know it will, later, make him want to dig into his scars and work out new ones. He knows this. He makes himself say it again, "are you okay?"

"Yes," Kevin replies immediately, "yes, yes, Andrew."

Andrew nods. His jaw firms.

"Yes, it is just —" and Kevin shrugs, blinks up at the ceiling as though it might give him absolution. Tears gather on his lashes in beads. "So much. Fuck."

It makes him chew his own insides even harder to hear Kevin speak like that; to see the morning dew of his tears and the petal smear of red against his skin.

"You wanted it," Andrew teases.

"Yes," Kevin agrees again, a rush. "I do."

I do meaning none of the desire had gone away; perhaps it had even multiplied, which is of course what Andrew's had done; and he finds that his hands are shaking in the sort of way that he cannot stop. This trembling of his fingers he digs into Kevin's hips, and Kevin covers one of them with his own and absorbs the shaking into racking shivers that make Andrew, for a moment, worry he is cold. He skims his hand up Kevin's ribs in a simulation of warming him up. He would cup Kevin in his palms and blow into the hole between his thumbs to warm him, if he could.

The shivering turns into movement. It is initially jagged movement, slumping and amateur; for a moment just circling on Andrew's lap and adjusting, Andrew knows, to the feel of it and his own control over the matter that is both imperative to his enjoyment of it almost in a way that is at odds with Andrew's own. This does not feel like control, Kevin learning himself, learning this; but he does not hate it, does not analyse any deeper than the flashes of intense feeling that make their way, like lightning, down his spine as Kevin slowly lifts himself and then lowers himself, manufacturing a thrust from Andrew's still hips.

There is the instant want, though, to push into Kevin and use the weight of his own body to topple him and take him but Andrew similarly hates the idea, the taking. He wants the way Kevin wants this, is hot all over from it and the almost crushing patience and penitence of the act; is it punishment if he is enjoying it? If he is enjoying his own torturous sort of edging when usually it is quick, done and washed, white and swirling down the drain before he can comprehend his own disgusting nature?

It is torturously long, Kevin's rolling hips, the grinding, slow and deep. Andrew had known how Kevin moved, like plants tangled in tide, a fluidity and abandon of self consciousness when he danced, so Andrew would be lying if he said that, when at Eden's and holding Kevin's hips and snarling like the dog he was at any prospectors, he had not imagined those hips, like this, on him.

"Miss Eden's?" he remarks to make sure he hasn't bitten off his own tongue.

Kevin looks at him under a wave of black hair, he shimmers with sweat. "No," he says. Pants, "it feels good."

He drops his right hand back on the bed, bracketing Andrew's knee. He forms a trapezoid; his torso angular and perfectly straight to the mattress, which changes the angle and heightens every nerve in Andrew's entire body; and, embarassingly, plucks from his chest a groan he cannot, quick enough, bite back and capture behind his teeth. He shivers, his mouth left open after his postulation. Kevin raises an eyebrow, mouth open, same, and drool daubing the corners.

Kevin's hips arch and circle and his cock bobs between them, slick trailing to his stomach.

In a world where Andrew is not who he is, not formed of mud and bones, he would ask Kevin to put his fingers in his mouth. It would silence him, so perhaps the him that could ask such a thing was no different after all.

Kevin stays like this a while; Andrew appreciates how his muscles work, the angle of it, his bicep as pivot, the muscle rounded and firm in a way that makes Andrew, inexplicably, want to sink his teeth in.

Kevin drops his arm and sits up again. He asks in a voice roughened by his own pleasure, "Can I?"

And Andrew hates how quickly he nods. Doesn't even know what it is he is so eagerly nodding along to. He reaches up and holds Kevin's chin, holding his jaw open, waiting for the rest of the sentence he has already, feverishly, agreed to. His thumb is damp with Kevin's spit; his heavy bottom lip victim to Andrew's grip, pulling it down, bearing straight teeth, pink gums. Kevin lets him, and isn't that why he does all of these presumptive things in the first place? In hopes that Kevin will let him, or worse, in hopes that he won't, so that later, Andrew can hate himself as he should, for breaking Kevin's trust, for daring to want this at all.

Without further warning, Kevin's eyes close and telling of nothing; Kevin decides to snap Andrew to pieces. He licks the very marrow and lust from Andrew's bones. Gone, then, the slow circles and smooth circling hips, and instead a hurried and harried pace where he lifts to almost to vacating, then drops down again. Andrew's shocked sound of pleasure could only be rivaled by Kevin's, a sound pulled from deep within him; a groan that is jagged and guttural and paired with the sudden furrowing of his eyebrows, the mouth pursed, the jaw tense so that if he could hear beyond the rushing of his own blood, he might hear the squeaking of teeth grinding.

"Where did you learn that?" Andrew asks to grapple himself to reality.

"I have not," Kevin tells him through his teeth.

"By all means," Andrew says, losing, losing his grip after all, and dropping his head back on the headboard to stare at anything but Kevin's face. "Keep practicing. I'll be here all night."

And Kevin does, and inevitably he draws Andrew's gaze back to him through sheer voracity and because the feeling in his gut has returned with a fervor that makes him grip onto Kevin's hip in encouragement and satiation. He is entirely without control, but it is Kevin's taking of it that it feels almost as though he has entrusted it to him and Kevin is, then, the better one to have it, is doing better things with it than Andrew could; though he innately knows he could take it if he wanted. Andrew is panting aloud and wanting, quite desperately, as Kevin moves without tiring and end on him up and down, the movement of his body so sensuous and smooth that it seems almost unnatural.

"God," Kevin breathes, his voice deep and masculine, in a way that Andrew has to lean up and capture it from the air, kissing him firmly and pulling back, blinking, only when he tastes salt upon his tongue, and realises in horror and fascination that Kevin has begun, truly, to cry. A redness glistening and alighting in his eyes that contrasts with the green and brightens the tone; his cheeks aflame and his mouth hanging wet and abandoned from their kiss, wetness pooling in the lip and too at the corner of his mouth. "God. God."

"That's it, baby," Andrew says. "Are you close?"

Kevin nods, hiccuping. "Yeah."

And it is high time Andrew do something, and that control that passes back and forth between them so, too, easily, is back then in his hands and instead of continuing to simply be a pedestal for which Kevin could take as he pleased, he in turn gives back.

"Do you want to come like this?" Andrew asks as his hips pump upwards, pushing deeper and emitting louder, wetter sounds between them. He feels Kevin's cock pulsing and hot against his torso as Kevin tightens their embrace, tilting onto his knees and pressing into Andrew's abdomen.

Kevin lets out a whimper. Tears brim his lashes like coins on a slot machine and upon blinking three streams loose down his cheeks and collect on his jaw. Another wet blink. "Yes, yes — Andrew, god."

Andrew grits his teeth and nods, makes it his task to wring as much pleasure from Kevin as he can; so that after this he might be soft and languid, so that he might lay beside him and stroke the sweat damp hair that sticks, now, to his neck and curls like rose vine around his jaw, jutted and pronounced as it is. He moves his hands from their spot on Kevin's hips—expectant of the red marks of hand prints, but nonetheless shocked by them, unsettled by them in a way that he had not quite been from the marks he had made across Kevin's chest. Not bruising but temporary bright signs of Andrew's weakness, his badness, though he knows Kevin is too lost in it—now gently rocking and bouncing in Andrew's lap without, seeming, awareness of exactly what he was doing—to think anything of it, to be disgusted or horrified by it as he should be.

Still, despite the self hatred that simmers as a constant in the back of his skull, the sight of such a possessive sign is only inspiration and ignition for the way he then takes Kevin. He places his freed hands upon Kevin's ankles and up his bent, napkin fold knees, tucking his hands in the crooks of them and taking away Kevin's footing. So while he is in Andrews lap, he can't jump and control as he had and instead he is folded and held by Andrew's strength alone.

Andrew thrusts his hips, lets himself pull out to the very edge.

He looks at Kevin then.

Kevin who whines piteously enough that there is a flash where Andrew thinks of pulling out entirely and holding everything back until they're both sensible again, until this hysteria has passed.

"Stop looking," Kevin snaps, his embarrassment something that Andrew can understand, that he knows intimately. He blinks at Andrew, wets him with tears.

Though he's hardly making a point, looking like this, for who could possibly resist? Stronger men than Andrew, though the thought of anyone besides him ever having Kevin like this makes his teeth ache. Who could do anything but stare at this man that somehow, for whatever fucking reason, has chosen to give himself to Andrew? He is enraptured, for lack of a better word, and even the slight jaggedness of his top front tooth is enamoring and maddening, for he has captured his lip by his teeth and is blinking at the ceiling as though it might give him answers, but all it does is cause tears to stream freely down his cheeks and drip onto Andrew. He wants to take his throat in his mouth. He would lick the salt away until he was parched.

"You love when I look at you."

Who was Kevin Day without some form of audience?

And Andrew suddenly pushes up and he watches the lip fall from Kevin's mouth as he gasps, loud. It ricochets through his chest, this big intake of breath like the breath of life. Adrenaline shot. He watches as Kevin loses the last of his balance and falls back on Andrew's legs, elbows holding pivoting on the bed, holding him in place. He is arched, precarious, his cock perfectly in front of Andrew now as he fucks into Kevin with a frenzy that in himself he will not address, not ever, and he doesn't look at how the angry red of Kevin's leaking cock matches the marks his hands have left on his hip bones, nor does he look at the worried marks across Kevin's pectorals as they bounce in times with Andrew's faltering rhythm.

If he looked at any of that the tide would drown him and he would succumb to the deep.

"Come on."

And Kevin's muscles tense, his abs flexing and the muscles in his arms like bow strings, the tendons raised, sweat shining from him and gathering at each perfect point where their skin meets.

"Come on, baby."

Andrew would not allow himself to think that it was that utterance that tipped Kevin over the edge, that drew from him this pained sound, teeth clenched, eyebrows drawn, as his hips spasm and his cock jerks, covering his chest in his own come.

What a sight, something he could only have imagined in their Eden hook ups; never thought he could have so much, never thought he'd be trusted. Andrew squashes every feeling that raises to the fore at the sight, the pulsing of his own wanting orgasm, squashed until it is only in his toes, in shivers in his spine.

Later, later, later.

He slips out of Kevin, tucks himself back into his underwear with the sort of squeeze that hurt, that waited and flagged. Not important, and besides the stars and fuzz in his eyes is debilitating, distracting. He takes his own gulp of air and exhales it through his nose.

He recalibrates.

"Good boy, good boy," he says.

He draws him back, precious, into his lap and into his arms where he engulfs him in a pressing hug, and kisses the shaking breadth of his shoulders.

Kevin's face wet against his neck, his hair damp between Andrew's fingers. The discomfort of his chest against Andrew's rucked shirt. The feeling of trappedness warring with the indisputable need to hold him close, even for a moment, and attempt a true merging of their skin and their bones; a joining of their very blood.

"So good," Andrew murmurs, shell of Kevin's ear, the soft pulse behind, the velvet fuzz of the lobe.

Kevin shivers, stretches the fingers of his left hand behind Andrew's neck. Rocks.

"What about you?" he asks, glancing down.

Andrew ignores him. "Was it what you'd thought about?"

Kevin leans back in the circle of Andrew's arms and purses his lips; this sunset like flush still adorning his cheeks in a spectrum of colour. He shrugs.

"It was fine," Kevin says.

Andrew rolls his eyes. Kevin smiles at him, a shyness making his expression vulnerable and terribly young.

"I did most of the work," Kevin comments. "So I cannot give a proper review."

"Better than Eden's," Andrew states, parameters low.

Kevin leans back in his lap, which Andrew doesn't particularly appreciate. He shrugs, this arrogant sort of expression curling the corner of his spit damp mouth. "Well, they're hardly comparable," Kevin says. "Besides, you said this wasn't a reward for pausing my drinking."

Andrew rolls his eyes, scoff; his eyes narrowing in a way that makes the pleased expression only deepen on Kevin's face.

"It isn't," Andrew asserts pointlessly. "I've got a handle of vodka right here."

Which of course he doesn't, not since their inadvertent deal.

Kevin ignores him.

"It's a better vice," Kevin says, eventually.

Andrew snorts.

Kevin lifts his hand from Andrew's shoulder and stretches it, visibily, before Andrew; who cannot look at him like this for long, who has to take the fingers in his sweating hands and work his thumb over the knuckles, the curl of his fingers a workbench.

This is distraction enough that he doesn't have anything left to say, and their sudden fabricated illusion of normalcy and put upon torpor for one another sloughs off, they are, once more, simply together.

Andrew exhales.