InsaneJournal

Current mood:	buzzed
Entry tags:	ai fic: other pairings

AI Fic: Love You Like an Apology (2/2, Danny/Adam, R)
Continued from Part One



*
It’s a good thing that Danny isn’t going to be playing any instruments on stage that night; his hand is a deeply purple mess of bruises when the alarm goes off the next morning, and hurts to straighten out his fingers. “Oh, fuck me,” Matt says when he sees what Danny has done to himself, levels a finger at Danny’s face when Danny tries to glare at him. “You don’t get to whine after the words that were coming out of your mouth last night, buddy. God, what did you do?”

“Punched a shower wall a few times,” Danny admits. He grits his teeth hard and won’t leave his fingers alone until he manages to straighten them out to their full length, one at a time. “I don’t think that I broke anything.”

“But you, uh. Punched the shower wall,” Matt points out. Danny looks at him. “You’re not catching anything more than the obvious there, okay, fine. Are you going to be able to get dressed with that?” Danny looks at him again, until Matt throws up his hands. “I’ll see you downstairs.”

Getting dressed is a pain--the next time that Danny questions himself right down to the core, he’ll have to remember that tantrums are best carried out with his non-dominant hand--and about eight different producers lose their minds when they see what he’s done to himself. That’s only after they’ve managed to pry the other contestants away from where they’re clustering about him, grabbing at his arm for a better look. They do it gently; it’s the attention itself that’s making Danny want to squirm, for possibly the first time in his entire life. He sees Adam standing back, watching him closely. Have his eyes always been that light, that ethereal, a blue? Danny cannot say and does not want to notice.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he says finally, when producers start to talk about hospital trips and X-rays. “I just flipped out for a few seconds, all right? That’s it.” That, at least, is familiar territory. Danny can see in the faces of the people who work on this show every year that the occasional or not so occasional meltdown is part of the yearly process. They buy it. The people who live with him and know him better than that, he’s not so sure, but he’s not discouraging conversation and they soon stay away.

Even if Danny keeps to himself during the last flurry of fittings, hair and makeup, the dress rehearsal--Faux Randy finds a new part of speech in which to fit “dawg” every week, and finally succeeds in making Megan Joy crack up on stage after he renders it into future-perfect--that doesn’t mean that the little cliques that they’ve carved out for themselves can’t still carry on. He sees Adam hanging out with Lil and with Allison, and stubbornly dragging Kris along with him even though Kris hasn’t done anything yet to distinguish himself as someone who will be there for any good amount of time. Megan, Anoop, Scott, the perpetual comeback kids, all make their own group, and while there’s floating between the two, they haven’t quite bonded into the cohesive happy face yet. Danny watches them, ignores the throbbing in his hand, and wonders what She would thinking about all of this, about his dreams, if she knew. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that at all.

As much as he’s used to people smearing makeup on him at this point, it’s a little weird to have to painted over his hand, and he can’t stop himself from wincing the entire time. The makeup artist is as sympathetic as she can possibly be given that, well, it’s not as if he slipped or fell or something klutzy-yet-endearing like that. As far as they know, he just went slightly nuts for a few moments. The makeup--and there’s a lot of it, and people with important clothes and headsets are already talking about how to spin it if some sharp-eyed viewer happens to notice that he’s got pancake on thicker than Adam’s, and not on his face--is still tacky when Danny goes to watch Adam’s performance from backstage. He wiggles his fingers, which are swollen but at least not as scary-stiff as they had been that morning when he had been wondering if maybe he had not broken something, after all, and watches Adam.

Adam....who desperately needs for someone to pull him aside and make him realize that he is performing on a family show. He really cannot touch himself on stage like and expect people not to think...things, like Danny is thinking right now whether he wants to or not. The quick flash of Adam’s stomach and side before he lets his shirt fall back down has Danny looking down and away as if he’s being allowed a glimpse of something much more intimate, and an invitation to see even more than that. He can feel blood flushing into his face, clenches his bad hand into a fist and hopes that the pain will yank him back from this brink. No such luck; he ought to have known as soon as Adam took the stage that this was going to be the case, if Adam is having this effect on him in the waking hours now, too. Adam moves like he hasn’t got bones; Adam moves like he’s already having sex and the rest of the audience just hasn’t caught on yet. He sings like someone wholly, 100% in his element, past the point where he has to think about obligations or expectations or anything other than what he wants to be, right here and right now. Danny feels his breath catch in his throat. A deer standing in the center of a freeway with nothing but bright in its face has a better idea of where it’s supposed to go from here.

Danny doesn’t intend for all of the people eyeing him surreptitiously to know that he’s still slightly nuts, so he goes out and sings instead. Sings like he’s about to lose his mind, because that might happen before it’s over, sings to Her, wishes like hell that She could be listening, can’t....can’t quite bring himself to cross the line and think that she still is. Do angels get to move on, too? It hardly seems fair that Danny can’t.

He almost throws up on the stage when that thought slams into his head. Danny even feels a little bad when none of the judges call him on the muffed note, though maybe he recovered from it so quickly that they didn’t have time to notice. He’s good at smiling, anyway, and if he’s a little bit pale, then no one in front of the stage or behind it says anything. He’s still wobbly on his feet when he gets back, finds a quiet place to lean against the wall and close his eyes for a few moments. It’s been so hard to sleep lately that it’s easy to forget where dreams start and reality ends. Adam has lost the golden jacket by the time that he finds Danny, a line between his eyes as if he’s wondering if Danny isn’t going to maybe lose the part where he’s everybody’s best friend and just start pulling heads off.

“Oh, my God, you’re an actual man in black,” Danny blurts out before he can stop himself. Everyone always looks so surprised when he swears, it would be funny if the rest of his life currently wasn’t so...not funny.

“Yeah.” Adam picks at the side of his shirt for a moment. Given that his earlier move is still making Danny think, very hard, about Adam shucking that shirt over his head in preparation towards climbing into a bed, that’s not fair. That’s not fair at all. “Danny, you’re starting to scare people--”

“I’m scaring me,” Danny says bluntly before he pushes himself up from the wall against which he’s leaning before he can think better of himself. His mouth is on Adam’s before Adam knows what he’s doing and he’s kissing him hard, not bothering with technique, just wanting to touch as much of Adam’s skin as possible before Adam pushes him away, because surely one of them has to remain sane, here. Any moment now, Adam will be the level headed one to call this to a stop, any moment now, Adam will remove the hands that he suddenly has wrapped in the front of Danny’s shirt, hauling him forward and more firmly onto Adam’s mouth, any moment now. Danny has a hickey bitten and suckled into the side of his neck and his hand halfway down the front of Adam’s pants before it catches up to him that any moment now ought to have been several moments before. He wonders if he maybe he ought to have thought this threw a little bit more. That thought gets slammed right out of his head again by Adam using his leverage against him, twisting him around and hurling him up against the wall. Danny is stunned that a producer does not hear the sound and come running to see who among them has gone temporarily insane now. Adam makes a pleased sound when he pushes his hands up beneath Danny’s shirt and takes hold of his waist. He seems amused by the slight love handles that Danny can’t get rid of, though not in a mean way; he strokes the skin so softly that Danny would hardly be sure that Adam’s hands were there at all if not for the fact that he suddenly cannot stop shivering all over. He parts his mouth to allow Adam even greater access, Adam seems glad to take it, and Danny can’t actually believe that he waited this long to crack, if the reward at the end is going to be so great--

Until Adam pulls his mouth away from Danny’s so abruptly that Danny cannot swallow back his noise of protest and surges forward. Adam turns his face away, though, even if his hands don’t extricate themselves from underneath Danny’s shirt, and he rests his forehead back against Danny’s only when it doesn’t seem likely that Danny is going to maul him again. Danny can feel Adam’s breath tickling against his cheek, his ear; Adam’s eyes are very close and, in the florescent lights from above, the lightest and brightest blue that Danny has ever seen.

“What are you trying to accomplish here?” Adam asks Danny. He sounds almost tired. Danny can feel himself frowning. From where he’s standing, he’s the one who’s supposed to be confused enough to take it out on someone else, even if the gravity of the situation is maybe lessened somewhat by the delicate way in which Adam is removing Danny’s hand from down the front of Adam’s own pants.

“What are you talking about?” Danny asks. Adam is still leaning up against him, one long length of heat even if he doesn’t seem particularly aroused any longer--Danny wants to congratulate him on that, because he thinks that he’s going to have to find his way into yet another cold shower--and it has been way too long since he has known what it was like to have another person’s warmth pressed body to body up against him. It’s hard to even remember that this is a different gender than the one he’s comfortable with being attracted to, he’s craving touch so much.

Adam would have to choose that moment to put his hands back against Danny’s waist, over his clothing where Danny can just feel the heat. There are voices coming down the hall, but Adam doesn’t move. Danny can’t stop himself from flinching back, though, and seeing Adam’s eyes cloud from where they’re still so shockingly, distractingly close. Adam’s smile isn’t a happy one. It also doesn’t look as if it’s the first time that he’s worn it.

“I’m talking about being your safe place to panic while you realize that you’re not as straight as you thought you were,” Adam says, stepping away and pulling his clothing back into place. Within seconds, he looks as if he wasn’t well on his way to kissing Danny senseless in the first place. Danny, meanwhile, is still leaning back against the wall and his pretty certain that he looks as if he’s just starred in a porno even though not a single article of clothing was actually removed. He runs his thumb across his lower lip and feels how swollen it is. He wants to protest, but Adam is already turning away. He doesn’t look angry, but he doesn’t look as if he’s in the mood to argue, either.

The hallway is full of people a second later. Danny thinks about how close they came to being caught, and his throat closes up.

*
“That’s impressive.”

They get a break on Wednesdays, of sorts. There’s still the rehearsals and the press and the makeup chair, but somehow they also seem to find at least a couple of hours apiece to live in their own heads and fret. Even though he knows that it’s going to be several weeks, at least, before he actually has anything to worry about, Danny still kind of hates that. He’s not good at introspection; he prefers to do, and then let everything else happen as it may.

That’s worked out so well for him, too. Danny keeps his butt pinned to the couch in the red room and tells himself that this is behavioral therapy. It keeps him from screwing things up. He’s not going to allow himself up from the couch until he decides what, exactly, “screwing up” would entail.

It’s easier when they just stay in their groups, when they just stay what they’re meant to be, Danny tells himself. It doesn’t get complicated until someone starts to get rebellious. So he closes his eyes for several seconds, takes deep breaths through his nose, and waits until he’s absolutely certain that Alexis is not going to go away before he opens his eyes and looks at her again. “What is?” he asks, already knowing the answer.

Alexis has been drifting around all day, nervous and unsettled, even though she ought to be right up there with Danny, Adam, and Lil among the people who aren’t going anywhere for a good, long while. Danny had overheard Lil earlier asking her why she was doing that, she was making everyone dizzy, and Alexis saying that she didn’t know, Lil could call it simply nerves or she could call it the way that cats and dogs could tell when an earthquake was coming, she didn’t know.

“You made Adam avoid someone,” Alexis says. She stays standing, keeps her arms folded over her chest. Danny is alone on the couch; now that he thinks about it, he’s really been alone all day. Their little groups can be broken up, but not put together in new formation again. “I didn’t think that anything could make Adam stop being a people person short of being punched in the eye.” And Alexis frowns at him, as if she means to make him pay if that turns out to be what happened, literally or otherwise. Danny would laugh--Alexis might weight ninety pounds, and then only if she’s wearing shoes that mean business--but his head hurts, and he was enjoying the silence.

“I didn’t do anything, Alexis,” Danny says wearily. He thinks that he can be forgiven for the lie, if for not other reason than because Adam has been so close-lipped publicly about what everyone already knows, anyway, that Danny can’t imagine him being thrilled about the small detail of them making out in the hallway the night before. Danny still thinks that his lower lip looks slightly swollen and, paranoid, has been making up potential stories in his head all day about running into various things in order to convince anyone curious enough to ask.

That’s the only reason that he’s keeping silent, Danny tells himself, and knows immediately that it’s such bullshit that anyone who heard him out loud would not be able to hold back a smile. He didn’t dream last night; he wishes that he had. Anything to convince him that what he did, what he’s contemplating doing again, aren’t completely insane and that he really is still the same person.

When Alexis only continues staring, line drawn down between her brows like she’s tempted to call him a liar but thinks that God might send a bolt down from heaven if she does, Danny sighs again, and looks Adam’s way. He’s with Allison and Kris, one person who might have a chance and another who’s hanging on by his fingernails if Danny has ever seen it. He won’t be surprised if Kris goes home tonight, or maybe Michael. He holds Adam’s gaze when Adam flicks it up to meet him. When Danny can still feel the heat in that stare from all the way across the room, he shifts and looks away, still feels Adam’s eyes on him even afterwards. The heat has to be coming from inside of his head.

“All right,” Alexis allows finally. She’s stopped looking irritated and started looking worried; Danny guesses that the guy who nearly broke his hand putting it into a wall can inspire that. “Will you two kiss and make up, already, whatever it is that has you pissed at each other? It’s making everyone think that there’s bad juju hanging over their heads.”

Alexis’s choice of words makes Danny look up sharply, and she just almost gets it, he can tell, before settling down into the old irritation. “I’ll plant the best kiss on him that I have,” he says, “right in front of the cameras. Lil will applaud, all of our stock will plummet, and you’ll take it all.”

The smile that he was hoping for doesn’t come. Alexis just wags her finger at him and says, “Be nice,” before she goes to join Lil again. The two of them appear to be giving each other manicures; nervous energy, when the show would be willing to give them all that they wanted in order to keep them looking their best when film was rolling. Danny throws his head back against the couch and blows a stream of air up at the ceiling. Now that he thinks about it, he’s not certain that he even has that one person in the house that everyone else has been able to find, rather than just sort of blending into whichever pack happens to have been formed at the moment. It’s a competition, he’s not here to make friends that he can carry off for the rest of his life, but he didn’t until now plan for it to be lonely.

On the other hand, the friends that he has outside of the competition are so good that they might actually be telepathic. Danny jumps hard when his cellular phone starts to buzz in his jeans pocket, and then feels himself actually swear in relief when he sees Jamar’s number. He doesn’t remember to lower his voice in time, and heads turn towards him from all over the room. Danny thinks that he’s sworn more in the past week than he has in any amount of time since...since he discovered what obscenities were, probably. And if people keep staring at him, he tells himself as he jumps up from the couch and leaves the room to take the call, they’re probably going to hear him doing it a lot more.

“You are the greatest human being on the face of the planet,” Danny blurts out to Jamar by way of greeting once he’s managed to get out into a hallway that’s not...not clear, but also not containing an Adam, and thus is far less likely to make Danny do or say something that he’ll regret just as soon as Adam stops looking at him. And the show staff is already starting to think he’s crazy, anyway, they give him a wide berth so that all he has to do is keep his voice down so that he has some semblance of privacy.

“That’s what I do,” Jamar answers easily, as if Danny isn’t audibly coming to pieces right over the phone. “Look, bro, you have to carpe diem already, all right? Maybe you fooled Middle America with that nonsense last night, but I know you better than that, and uh-uh.”

“It was her favorite song,” Danny answers back simply, because that’s all that he can or intends to say on the matter.

“I know it was.” Jamar’s voice is gentle. “And look, I loved her, too, but I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about every single time that a camera has been pointed at you for the past two days, that’s what I’m talking about.” Danny is silent. “Yeah. I’m saying. So carpe diem that shit already, you’re freaking people out.”

It’s so close to what Alexis and Adam themselves have said to him that Danny can’t help but put his hand over his mouth to hold back a snicker, not caring that he’s probably proving Danny’s point for him. “The PAs won’t come near me any longer,” he says, and before Jamar can answer, “What makes you think that I haven’t?” And had it come disastrously, enough so to make Danny think that permanent widower celibacy might just be the wave of the future. He’s been thinking about having sex with Adam so much in his dreams that doing it the waking world now only makes him want to turn around and beat his head softly against the plaster wall a little bit.

Jamar makes an impressed noise and then says, “Wait a minute. Isn’t every woman there with you married, a mommy, or both? You’re not hitting on the jailbait, are you?” Danny can’t help it, has to turn around and put his forehead against the wall that he was thinking of assaulting so that he can give in to silent laughter.

“Why does it have to be someone in front of the cameras?” Danny manages when he can speak again. “Maybe now you know why the PAs won’t come near me.”

Jamar laughs and then says, his voice growing somber again, “You know that none of us are going to push you to rejoin the human race before you’re ready, but it might not suck if you start thinking about it.”

Danny turns around, leans his shoulders against the wall, stares sullenly out at the people going about the business of getting everything ready for that night. “Are you telling me to stop being such a neurotic ass?”

“The neurotic part is new,” Jamar answers. “The ass part, not so much. Actually saying it, though, that’s kinda different.”

“I have a foul mouth lately.” Danny closes his eyes, thinks of his wife, thinks of Adam, thinks of the long parade of men that he’s known and managed to have nothing near an attraction to before, and wants to beat his head back against the wall. At least everyone already thinks that he’s just a few steps away from nuts, so he won’t be surprising them. “I’ll call you later, all right?”

“Yeah, sure, man.” Jamar does not sound sure. He does sound as if he’s going to do his very best to fake it for so long as Danny’s willing to do the same, though. “Take care of yourself.”

Danny hangs up the phone, goes back inside, tries his best not to act like a crazy person until the makeup artists herd them all towards the chairs. Shortly before that, he even finds himself with Matt taking up a seat next to him on the couch. “You’re not kicking me off,” Matt tells him in a tone that allows no room for argument, and Danny even finds it within him to laugh.

*
They all fall into their clusters during the commercials that night, the same as they did the week before, whispering to each other, waving at the crowd, pointing out out some of the more amusing signs. Danny looks at the space where his wedding band isn’t and hasn’t been for a few months now; the ring of smooth white flesh is even starting to tan to match the rest of him. Danny likes to think that this would still all be happening way too fast if it were Lil or Megan that he couldn’t stop dreaming of at night, but he’s not that much of a fool. He watches Adam from beneath his lashes as they wait for the next person to be told that it’s over, they’re done, and more than once he catches Adam looking back at him. Adam’s gaze is steady; he doesn’t flinch away and dares Danny to do the same. Except for the fact that Adam actually contemplating sex is different from Adam pretending to contemplate sex while he sings--though Danny swears that he’s throwing pheromones off like heat, still, and wonders that the crowd is not dizzy on them--Danny would wonder how the two of them are managing not to broadcast from space. Maybe he knows a little bit about why Adam keeps finding things on the internet during their rare moments of downtime that make him throw back his head and laugh.

Danny cuts his eyes away as soon as the cameras start rolling again, telling himself that he’s being an idiot. He waits for the predictable choice to go home; when Alexis is the one left singing for her fate, he nearly falls from the couch. And when she goes home, he flails his hand out for anyone who will grab onto him, not even caring that it’s the injured one, caring even less that he’s being stared at again. He doesn’t look around to see who grabs him back, feather-light and being mindful of the bruises, but somehow he just knows.

*
It’s three-thirty in the morning, and Danny wakes up to realize that he has not dreamed. This is not the comfort that it ought to be; he stares up at the ceiling and wonders what he’s going to do, when there is nothing left to anchor him. It doesn’t catch up to him that he’s getting out of bed until his feet touch the floor.

Kris is the one who answers the door, his shirt rumpled and his hair sticking out in about ten different directions. He blinks at Danny several times and seems to be struggling at first to take in the fact that Danny is there, and secondly to wonder why. Danny can see Adam on the other bed beyond, just starting to sit up. He doesn’t think that he’s ever seen Adam without makeup before. He thinks that he’s doomed, and that everyone involved would be better off if he just turned around and headed back to his room now, and made up some kind of excuse about sleepwalking in the morning.

Instead, Danny jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. “Out,” he says.

Kris blinks several more times before he finally seems to realize that, yes, Danny really is there and, yes, he really is being a prick. “This is my room,” he says evenly; Danny doesn’t think that his voice actually has any other tones.

Adam is watching him very carefully from the bed, his face wiped clean of expression in a way that has to be the theater training at work. Danny just jerks his thumb back again. “Go bitch about it with Matt,” he says. If Kris doesn’t actually leave, Danny swears, he might bodily lift him up and set him out in the hall. They both know that he could do it.

Kris sighs and steps out into the hallway. “I thought Matt was out of his fucking mind when he told me about this,” Danny hears him mutter. Danny doesn’t actually pause for anything else that might follow before he shuts the door and leans against it.

“You know, if you keep doing that you’re going to get a reputation for being a real asshole,” Adam says to him. He doesn’t seem inclined to leave the bed any more than Danny feels as though he can step away from the door, though he does draw his legs up and into an Indian position, setting his hands on top of them and looking at Danny with his head tilted slightly to the side.

“I’ve been straight my whole life,” Danny blurts out. As far as conversational gambits go, he admits that it’s not exactly the most suave that he could have been, and Adam’s head tilts in the other direction.

“No, you haven’t been,” Adam corrects him in a voice that’s still not unkind, but doesn’t leave any room for argument. “Or else you--” A finger leveled at Adam’s chest. “Would not have made out with me.” Turning it back towards himself. And had gone about halfway towards trying to give Adam an inexperienced but enthusiastic handjob, Danny remembers now, and feels his cheeks color. Adam sees all of it. “Yeah, that. You’re not a bad kisser, and there’s--” Another rapid gesture between the two of them, not quite as controlled. Danny is perversely glad that he’s not the only one being thrown for a loop. “Whatever, but I’m not in the place or the mood to be your safe zone while you’re making muppet arms over your own sexuality.” Adam looks tired for a moment, and Danny realizes that this might not be the first time that Adam has had a man who had otherwise believed himself to be straight flailing all over him, either. With that charisma, it’s not exactly a crazy thought. “You should probably let Kris back in the room, he needs the sleep.”

Adam’s tone is a dismissal if Danny has ever heard one. He takes a deep breath, even puts his hand back against the door knob to do just that. The dreams that he’s been having over the past week or so have been the first ones not tinged with longing in months, though, and Alexis going home even after they’ve been told for weeks that she’s one of the frontrunners means that there’s not much else that Danny can count on, so maybe he ought to...maybe he ought to just live this, and stop worrying so much about whether he’s betraying someone who, he knows, would have given him a good flick between the eyes for trying to throw so much of the rest of his life away, and definitely stop worrying about neat little categories and how he fits into them. Danny can’t say that he’s ever been the person to think himself in circles rather than just do.

So he goes to the bed instead, and sits down on the edge of it, and puts his hand against the back of Adam’s neck when Adam starts to stiffen and lean away. It still doesn’t take much more than the lightest of nudges before Adam’s eyelashes flutter down, the loudest signal that Danny expects he’s going to get, so Danny decides to kiss him. It’s the chastest kiss that he’s shared with anyone in a very long time; though Adam’s lips part just slightly after a long moment, he doesn’t encourage Danny to go any farther than that. Danny lets his hand fall from the Adam’s neck and against the small of his back. He has to stay close in order to maintain the contact, and Adam has to be deaf if he cannot hear how loudly Danny’s heart is thundering, because Danny swears that it’s going to start making the walls shake if he gets any more agitated.

“I’ve been with the same person for more than a decade,” Danny says, doesn’t realize until Adam blinks at him that he referred to Her in the present tense. Maybe it’s time to retire the capitalization, too, maybe it’s time to let her rest. “And she was a woman. So I’m not going to promise not to occasionally run in circles and make an ass out of myself.”

Adam starts to speak, puts his hand against the side of Danny’s neck, and frowns when he feels how fast Danny’s heart is beating. “Jesus, calm down,” he says. “I let you kiss me, I didn’t agree to marriage.” Danny swears that his pulse manages to rocket even faster, it almost hurts at this point. Adam even smiles a little. “Okay, that’s kind of funny. Look, I’m out, I have no interest in...in not being out, and if you’re just looking for someone to steer you around the curves--” Danny answers in the form of kissing him again. Adam parts his lips further this time, because Danny’s being more aggressive, and Danny is also discovering the the light brush of stubble and the difference in the shape of the jaw don’t make that much of a difference. More to the point, the few differences that they do make are ones that he thinks he likes.

Adam makes a soft sound and lets Danny continue for a few more moments before he gently pushes him back. “You can’t kiss me every time that I say something you don’t like,” he protests.

“Why not?” Danny asks. “I think I’m getting good at it.” And since this thing...this thing that he’s only now realizing how much he wants would have to move at a nearly glacial pace, even if he does get Adam to agree, he figures that he had better be the best kisser that Adam has ever met in his life.

Adam is still leaning back, giving Danny that speculative look, before he finally shakes his head, laughs a little, and then twines his fingers through the front of Danny’s shirt so that he can drag him forward and firmly onto Adam’s mouth. And that is a kiss, Danny decides, and also maybe he shouldn’t get so cocky about his prowess just yet, as Adam deftly sucks every bit of free will from his body and leaves Danny gasping, thinking about his dreams and wondering just how much they’ll be able to do while still falling under the category of taking it slow.

“We don’t have to go that slow,” he says. Adam’s grin is a flash of teeth against the side of his face before he’s released. He feels something fluttering about him, or swears that he does, and then it’s gone again and Danny is nothing but nerves all over again. They don’t dissipate when Adam brushes his lips very lightly against Danny’s own, sweet and skin-tingling. Adam then shoves him away so hard that Danny nearly falls off the bed and makes a protesting noise. If he’s going to have a...okay, once he’s willing to settle down and admit it to himself, if he’s going to have a boyfriend (and if this is what it takes to say it to himself, he can’t imagine what it’s going to be like to say it to others), then it would basically suck if Adam turns out to be an abusive one.

“Go,” Adam tells him, “before Kris convinces your roommate to make you sleep in the hallway.” And before Danny can get more than a few steps, Adam’s grin is slow and promising, and makes Danny want to drift close again. “We’ll finish laying out the terms tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Danny answers back, and leaves so that Kris can reclaim his half of the room. When he sees a pillow and blanket spread out neatly in the hallway, he can’t do anything other than throw his head back and laugh.

End