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Current mood:	drunk--is that an aspiration?
Entry tags:	ai fic: other pairings

AI Fic: Frail in the Kill
TITLE: Frail in the Kill
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Neal Tiemann/Adam Lambert
SUMMARY: He’s been waiting for a release like this all summer long.
WARNINGS: A little light bondage, some power play. This is the cutest kink that you will ever see in your life, though.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a birthday present for maternabrarum, who is a Lambert-loving, Cook-shoving, security non-noticing, comm-running, picture-taking, fluff-appreciating, snarky piece of wonderful, and who deserves to have the very best of all possible days.
AUTHOR’S NOTE PART DEUX: Title taken from IAMX’s “Mercy.”



It’s the last show. Adam’s pretty sure that they’re supposed to go somewhere with that. The crowd is already on their feet and has been for the past two hours, the air is hard to breathe with all of the energy in it, he and the other contestants are getting drunk off of it like bitter/sweet/dangerous wine until everyone is staggering, falling against each other and laughing for no reason as the lights go down as that’s it, it’s done, that’s that’s all that there is to it until they go on to be see whatever it is that they can make next out of this whole crazy/wonderful year.

And Adam is the reigning American Idol, holy shit, maybe they deliberately keep them all so busy so that they won’t have time to fully dwell on that fact until nearly three months have gone by and it’s had time to sink in bit by bit, in degrees. He’s still more than just a touch shaken up on the....on the rush of it, the adrenaline singing under his skin and making his teeth itch, as they all rush off of the stage and then look around, not entirely sure what they’re supposed to do now that they don’t have a bus and another city to travel towards. Adam’s supposed to be heading back to Los Angeles, for the album, but he’s not going to argue with the chance to take one night and---

And whatever.

The producers have set up a party, as a reward for good behavior, nearly bought out an entire hotel in order to do it. (Adam thinks back to what he watched online last summer, and, all right, the fact that a few giggle fits onstage was the extent of their hijinks, maybe in the producers’ eyes that’s worth a treat for not giving them nearly as many gray hairs as David Cook and Michael Johns did.) Adam’s not sure what city they’re all in, either, but he’s got energy to burn. He’s not going to ask too many questions.

Okay. Maybe he’ll ask a few question. “Um, what?” Adam says as they entered the crowded ballroom in a pack, all of them still jittering and barely managing not to jump on each other like puppies. He knows the newly blond-red figure on the other side of the room, and he knows the bleached blond talking to him. Kind of. The last reigning idol stopped and spoke to all of them after his performance had been taped several months earlier, but his band had boogied out of there with hardly more than a wave to all of them. Adam remembers watching the blond--the not-David blond--playing the God right out of that guitar, though. Remembers the way that his fingers moved across the strings and his entire body turned into one instrument towards one purpose, yeah, Adam remembers that.

There’s a flush against his skin as he turns and plucks away the glass of champagne that Allison had been doing her best to sneak from a passing tray while everyone had been too busy goggling to keep an eye on her. “Seriously?” he asks.

Allison grins at him, her pixie-grin, and shrugs. She’s got a record waiting for her, too, back in California, and a whole big grown-up world of possibilities. She doesn’t look repentant. Adam sighs.

“Am I going to be doing this all night?” he asks.

“Maybe not,” Allison says. “Maybe Danny will do it part of the time. You know, he glares when anyone drinks.” She says it like it’s too scandalous to even believe. Adam has no other choice but to put his hands over his face and laugh, long and loud, and feels eyes watching him from the other side of the room. When he lowers his fingers, he sees Cook giving him this slight, yeah, brother, I’ve been there smile, and the blond with the talented hands just looking. It’s impossible to read that expression: not quite hostile, not quite friendly, but more like he’s assessing Adam one inch at a time in order to figure out what makes him move. Adam’s skin itches all the harder; he can’t stop himself from giving a smile with a purpose back.

The blond colors, looks away. Cook laughs and elbows him before he waves to Adam and comes over with drink in hand. “Congratulations are in order,” Cook says. “Don’t think that I had a chance to do that during the finale.”

Adam barely remembers the finale outside of a rush of color, noise, and damn, is this real; he doesn’t think that he would remember if Cook had thrown him up against a wall and kissed him senseless. He rubs his hands over his face and grins instead, shaking his head. “Thank you. Thank...thank you.” Another laugh.

Cook looks him up and down. “All right, I’ve been where you are now, I ought to know the drill, but I don’t think that I lost the powers of speech quite that hard.”

“Sorry.” Adam shakes his head. “I’ve been giving interviews all summer, this ought to be nothing, but--”

Cook claps him on the shoulder. “You’ll get better at it,” he says with the voice of certainty. “Don’t expect to get any sleep for at least another year, but--” And now it’s Cook’s turn to look up towards the ceiling and let out a low-throated laugh like he cannot believe his own ridiculousness. “God.”

“But it’s worth it,” Adam feels in, ‘cause it’s true, he’s wondering if his jittering and prickling and need to--to just do, something or someone, isn’t a part of sleep deprivation, but he wouldn’t trade any of it for the world.

“Yes. That.” Cook gestures the blond one other. “We’ve only got a night off, and kismet just happened to put us in the same city, but I don’t think you got to meet the rest of the guys last time.”

Cook and his band had been packed off so fast that Adam is kind of amazed he even had time to meet the lead singer. “Less so.”

“Right. This is Neal.” Neal takes the hand that Adam offers; Adam barely stops himself from shivering. Neal can’t stop himself at all. So maybe he knows where all of that extra energy is going to go, he can’t stop himself from thinking on a sudden burst of lust, and it’s going to be up to Kris to keep Allison out of trouble for the rest of the night. “And over there are Joey, Kyle, Andy. You didn’t get a chance to meet them, but Art was cut off our beer money, they’re not going to get their faces out of the free booze for a while.” And with a strange, sideways look at Neal, the kind of look that ought to be private between friends if not for the fact that Neal is giving Adam look belonging to a different kind of privacy. They haven’t even spoken two words to each other yet.

“...right,” Cook finally says slowly. “You guys play nicely with each other, then.” As he wanders off, Adam thinks that he hears his predecessor mutter something along the lines of, “At least it’s not a fucking groupie, this time,” but he can’t be sure.

“I’m Adam,” he says, and grins a little wider when he realizes that Neal still hasn’t let go of his hand.

Damn, but he loves a fair-skinned man, you can see every single thought that’s going through their heads based upon how high their flush is. “Neal,” the guitarist says, never mind that his buddy already said that, and Adam doesn’t think that Neal has ever done anything like this before in his life. He rubs his thumb across the back of Neal’s hand before he releases him and thinks, This is going to be fun.

*
Adam had prided himself on having a fairly fool-proof sense of gaydar by the time that he graduated high school; survival instinct if nothing else. Looking Neal up and down hours before, he would have pegged him as someone who was bisexual but didn’t know it, one of the ones who wouldn’t have done anything cruel to Adam just because he could, but also would have been more than just a tiny bit freaked out by any flirtation that Adam decided to throw his way all the same. Hours before, he would have thought that he would have been doing most of the prodding to get them anywhere.

Hours before, Adam realizes, he would not have had any idea how much different, how much better, it could be like this instead. He’s a little drunk, his head buzzing on the producers’ reward for their tour-long good behavior--he really hopes that someone kept on eye on Allison while he was otherwise occupied in seducing this supposedly secretly bi man who, as it turned out, didn’t need seducing so much as he just needed a fucking open invitation--and Neal is stone-sober. That should have surprised Adam; he thought that he was going to be the one with the upper hand here, and that Neal was not going to go along until he got a fair dose of liquid encouragement to wash away his supposed heterosexuality. The way that Neal has him pressed up against the wall of the hotel hallway says something else, though. It says something better. ‘Cause Neal has his tongue in Adam’s mouth and his hands held up over his head and pushed hard against the wallpaper, where it’s easy to look past their intertwined fingers. Adam shivers, just a little, reminding himself that he’s been wanting to do all night long and longer than that, having this thrumming under his skin for weeks now, and all that he needed was someone willing. Guess there’s that.

“I thought that I was going to be doing more work than this,” Adam manages when he has to breathe; when he can even take a deep enough for speech, which is harder than he would have thought if Neal hadn’t been shoving his knee up and between Adam’s thighs, brushing northward and then dipping down low again, driving Adam mad and knowing with every fucking second exactly what it is that he’s doing.

“Yeah?” Neal bites the edge of Adam’s jaw, very lightly, and has a grin that’s downright fucking wicked when Adam can’t help but jump. “I’m thinking that you don’t know a fuck of a lot about me.”

And there’s that, Adam has to concede, because he had thought that Neal would be the Quiet American type, and certainly not that he’d be funny and relaxed and more than once touching at Adam’s arm or shoulder in those accidental touches that never really were. “Hmm,” he hums from the back of his throat, thinking that this is true, thinking that Neal doesn’t know him that well, either, thinking that a one-night stand will do nicely before heading back to Los Angeles to get started on the album. Neal’s hands against his wrists are sending thrills up and down Adam’s back and straight into his groin; he doesn’t know which side of that power balance that he wants to be on, just yet, but they have a little time to decide that.

“You staying in this hotel?” he whispers to Neal. Neal’s eyes light up, and Adam grins. “You have me pinned up against a wall and were making out with me a few seconds ago, I think that you’ve gotten your invitation.”

The whuffing laugh against Adam’s neck feels...feels goddamn good, in a way that’s not just physical, and Neal disorients him less than a second later by drawing a lazy swipe beneath Adam’s ear with his tongue, okay, now they’re back. Adam’s breath shudders on the exhale. “Still could have misread a signal there or back,” Neal says before he finally lets go of Adam’s wrists, grabs for his belt loops instead to lead him down the hall. And now Adam’s thinking that he’s learning a few things about one Neal Tiemann before their boots ever come off that will prove to be very useful once they do start shedding clothes. Adam’s pants are tighter than they were a few moments before, and he can’t stop slowing to catch a glimpse or two of Neal’s ass as they go down the hallway. He can go either way, with a little prodding; he doesn’t mind at all going the way that Neal’s hinting right now.

Neal notices that Adam is lingering back and glances back over his shoulder. His expression changes from concerned to nearly leering once he sees what Adam is doing. “I thought that maybe you were changing your mind,” he says.

Adam can’t stop his eyebrow from going up. “I think that maybe you should walk a little fucking faster,” he answers, and is gratified to see that Neal’s hand shakes, just slightly, as he pulls his keycard from his jeans and slides it into the door. He doesn’t have to be overtly in control to be calling the shots. Sometimes it’s more fun that way.

This thought scarcely has time to enter Adam’s mind, let alone leave again, before Neal is dragging him into the room, kicking the door shut (fuck me, that’s hot, Adam realizes), slams Adam back up against it just a second later. And that’s fucking hotter. Neal doesn’t control the kiss, not this time. Adam gets his hands fisted through the front of Neal’s shirt before Neal has the chance and drags him down hard onto Adam’s mouth. It’s his tongue that pushes into Neal’s mouth, not the other way around, it’s his hands that take the side of Neal’s face and make damned good and sure that he’s not going to pull away; he feels Neal’s lashes fluttering against his brows as his eyes close. They’re roughly the same size and height, and Adam could shove Neal away if he wanted to, but it would be a struggle. The thought sends an extra shiver down Adam’s belly and into his groin. It’s going to be one of those nights? Yeah, he thinks that it is. He shudders again when Neal pulls his hands away from the sides of Neal’s face and doesn’t let go, but laughs when Neal’s grip is still light, uncertain, like he doesn’t quite know what he wants to do from here.

“Need suggestions?” Adam murmurs, whispering it directly into Neal’s ear. He bites at the lobe, feels Neal’s stubble against the side of his face and the hot gasp on the side of his neck before Neal can stop himself. His bulk is suddenly against Adam more firmly than it ever has been before, pinning him against the door with enough solidity that it would be a struggle, a real test, if Adam decides that he wants to call quits to all of this. He ignores for the moment that nothing is stopping him from yelling, screaming if it comes down to it--he hasn’t given a particular shit since the age of sixteen who knows that he’s queer--and if he thought that he was really coming up here with someone who would refuse to let him go, then he would not have come at all. But it’s the game, the little voice which says that maybe Neal wouldn’t, and maybe no one would come at all, and what would Adam do then? Neal’s knee brushes up and between Adam’s thighs again. Adam parts his legs further in encouragement.

Neal lets out that breathless, whuffing laugh again; Adam has to lean his head back entirely against the door in order to make eye contact with him, they’re so close. Neal’s pupils are dilated until the blue is the slimmest of aqua rings around the outside, glimmering when Neal leans in even closer. Adam thinks that Neal is going to kiss him, hears himself making a disappointed whine when Neal whispers instead, “I tend to stay a little more vanilla than this on my one-night stands, but I get the feeling that that’s not what you have in mind, is it?”

Adam flexes his wrists against Neal’s, just to see. Neal tightens his grip automatically. Adam grins and takes Neal’s mouth hard, biting at the lower lip and hearing Neal gasp when Adam then refuses to lick the tiny hurt away. The invitation created of his parted thighs is finally taken by Neal’s leg, pushing up, rubbing against Adam’s cock through his pants and teasing him into full erection so fast and hard that it makes his head spin, makes it impossible to draw a steady breath and all but impossible not to arch himself down and against Neal’s thigh right here, before they ever get to the bed. That he could ride himself to orgasm against Neal’s leg without ever being touched or losing an article of clothing wasn’t a part of his plan, Adam thinks.

Head swimming, he wonders if he cares as Neal yanks them both away from the door, so suddenly that Adam stumbles and sees a smirk that he did not expect curving the corners of Neal’s mouth. They’re a tangle of limbs that doesn’t even try to become two distinct people again on the way to the bed, and Neal all but throws Adam down onto it before he follows with his own body, pinning Adam to the mattress with his weight. Some of the air is driven from Adam’s lungs by the force, but Neal is still hesitating, touching the side of Adam’s face lightly as if asking whether that was too much, whether he hurt him. Adam bites the side of Neal’s neck.

“Okay, then,” Neal manages after he’s ground his hips down hard against Adam’s in his shock and Adam has gotten control of his shudder. He shoves his hands up beneath Adam’s shirt, exploring the skin there, while Adam hooks his leg around the back of Neal’s thighs and presses their pelvises together so that each can feel the other’s erect cock through their clothes, encouragement to stay close. “Okay,” Neal repeats, voice gone ragged, a growl on the final syllable that makes every hair on Adam’s body stand up and renders it impossible not to squirm.

Adam’s not entirely certain when he loses his shirt, the next thing that he’s aware of is that Neal is sitting up, still straddling Adam’s hips, and that he’s pulling his belt free. He’s not throwing it to the side, either. Adam sits up himself, puts his hand over Neal’s. “Hmm-hmm, not that far,” he says. He’s interested in losing control, tonight, but not in pain.

Neal’s response is only to grip Adam’s wrist with the one hand and then use his weight to push him back until Adam is lying flat again. His voice when he speaks hitches just slightly, like he’s still not entirely sure what he’s doing; never a good quality to have in a dominant partner, and Adam starts to shift in protest again. “Shh, shh,” Neal whispers to him, before he takes Adam’s hand and guides it up to the rails of the wrought-iron headboard. Adam gets it, and wonders for a moment what Neal would have done if this particular hotel had been furnished with the solid wood of most. He pictures himself with his hands bound behind his back and knows that Neal can feel his cock jump between them. “Do you trust me?”

He’s known Neal for about four hours now, or thereabouts. Neal pulls back so that Adam can see his face clearly, in the lights that they have not yet turned off. He still has his hand upon one of Adam’s wrists, but the other is free, and Neal obviously isn’t going to go any farther until Adam gives him explicit leave to do so. And it would be so fucking hard for Neal to slide down Adam’s body and put his mouth against all of the places where Adam wants him to put it if he has to be pinning Adam’s hands up and over his head the entire time.

Adam’s next breath shudders on the inhale. He nods, and then twists free of Neal’s grasp only so that he can grip the railing himself, both hands. “Dude, that was almost porn,” Neal says before he binds Adam’s hands to the headboard with his belt. Adam tests at the bonds and discovers that he could probably get loose on his own, but not unless he pulled pretty fucking hard and was prepared to lose some skin in the process, at the same time that he’s not restrained so tightly that he’s going to lose circulation if he jerks. Adam is on the verge of asking Neal if he hasn’t done this before when Neal is sitting up again--Adam is startled by how much he misses that weight on him, and shifts before he can stop himself--the uncertainty coming back into his eyes and voice as he asks, “Do we, uh, need a safe word or something?”

Adam gives the belt around his wrists a few more experimental tugs. Every time that it holds fast, he feels more blood flowing into his cock, and he knows that his eyes are already heavy-lidded and sex-dazed. He licks at his lower lip; Neal’s eyes follow the gesture. “No pain,” he repeats from earlier. “You want to...” Fuck, if he can’t discuss the limits without shifting up and against Neal’s groin, they might be in some trouble. And frankly, given the way that Neal jerks out a strangled curse and then palms Adam’s erection through the front of his pants, hard, this is probably something that they should have gotten out of the way before Adam let himself be bound to the bed, because he’s not exactly in a position to be talking terms right now. Or to want to. “Tease me if you want--” Adam really, really wanted him to. “But don’t hit me.”

Neal’s laugh is equal parts lustful and shaky. “I get the feeling you know things that I can’t even imagine,” he says, and Adam grins at him in a way suggesting that he could show him more than a few of those things if given the opportunity, forgetting for a second that this is supposed to be a one-night stand and the night is only so long.

“Since we’re not going anywhere extreme, just assume that no still means no, and yes...” Neal is sliding off of Adam’s body so that he can remove his shirt, then his pants. “Yes means ‘what the fuck are you waiting for?’” Neal is pale; he still glows silver-white even though the light of the bedside lamp is buttery yellow. Adam shivers as Neal, still kneeling over him, but without that barrier of clothing, reaches over to turn it off. “Don’t--” Adam starts, and moves to sit up without thinking. The leather about his wrists goes taut.

“Shhh,” Neal says again. The uncertainty is gone; Adam is listening to a curl of humor that goes straight to his dick, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He pushes up against his restraints again before he can think and feels himself coloring. He wonders if Neal can tell in the dark, by the way that his skin grows warmer. “I’ll stay within the rules.” Adam is thinking that he didn’t make the rules nearly specific enough; Neal’s tongue against the soft hollow where Adam’s collarbones come together make Adam jump hard, and then curse when the belt about his wrists brings him up short. Neal’s face comes into focus slowly as Adam’s eyes adjust to the shadow, broken only by the intermittent city lights outside, and he sees that Neal is smiling.

“Okay,” Adam says when he gets his voice back. “Okay, you’re kind of a son of a bitch. I think I like that.”

“You want me to stop?” Neal asks him. When he kisses the hollow of Adam’s throat again as he speaks, Adam swears that he can hear Neal’s voice rumbling down his entire body.

No still means no, and yes still means yes. Adam’s legs are free, so he hooks one of them around the backs of Neal’s thighs and brings him down hard onto Adam’s body with an oofing noise, presses their pelvises together. He’s not giving up total control here, not by a long shot.

Neal laughs. “I remember what yes means,” he says before he untangles himself from Adam’s body, runs his hands down Adam’s legs so slowly that Adam could fucking kill him, he swears. Neal pauses when he gets down to Adam’s feet. “You and Dave and these fucking boots, I don’t even know,” he says before he pulls them off, one by one. He’s a shadow crouching at the end of the bed; Adam can’t even see his expression, any longer, and his breath hitches at the back of his throat as he wonders what is going to happen next. Neal’s hands are the faintest of ghosts as they brush back up the lengths of Adam’s thighs, making it impossible for him not to squirm and push up against them. Neal pushes him back down to the bed, holds him there first with his hands and then his full weight as he straddles Adam again. Adam has no idea how Neal is managing to stay so calm while Adam’s hands are flexing and unflexing and he can feel the leather keeping him pinned down becoming slick with sweat. He tugs upwards again. Neal makes a soft noise when Adam arches and their cocks, Adam’s still damnably clothed and Neal’s notably not, brush and make friction. Adam makes a low whining noise before he can stop himself.

“Come on,” he growls out. Neal laughs again, low and soft, puts his hands against Adam’s zipper. The sound it makes coming down is the loudest in the entire room; Adam wasn’t certain, at first, about Neal’s decision to turn the lights off, but his blood is running fast now, and being unable to see anything other than the faintest of glimmers even with Neal’s face hovering mere inches from his own is making it hard to breathe.

“What makes you think that you’re in control, here?” Neal says to him before he pulls Adam’s pants down his legs and throws them off somewhere to be taken by the darkness of the room. Either he is the fastest learner that Adam has ever encountered in his life, or--

“You’ve done this before,” he says.

“I saw you watching me all fucking night,” is Neal’s answer, nearly disembodied. Adam is not certain what he’s going to do until he feels Neal’s tongue flick against his navel, moving suggestively south before he just as abruptly straightens and presses the full length of his body against Adam’s. “Bet you thought that I was straight, didn’t you?” And Adam can’t help but laugh, a little bit, even if it does have a nervous edge that he likes. “That you would be the one making all of the moves, taking me around the curves?” Neal’s fingers stroke patterns against the inside of Adam’s thigh without ever quite going where Adam needs them to go, no matter how much Adam shifts and makes small, aborted noises from the back of his throat, telling himself that he is not going to beg. It’s getting harder and harder to remember why, however.

Just a part of the game; the one on the bottom is always the one whose really in control, because he’s the one who decides when it stops. But still. But still. Adam makes himself wonder what it be like if he wasn’t, and he shivers. Neal puts his hand against Adam’s abdomen, not quite pushing him down, monitoring the reaction without giving him what he wants. And he won’t, Adam knows, not yet...

“Please, come on, please,” Adam whispers into the dark. Something in Neal’s body uncoils, Adam doesn’t need sight to know it, and might be a good thing that he’s tied down, in the end. Neal takes Adam’s entire cock into his mouth at once, making Adam jump and curse, and keeps his lips wrapped around the length as he so goddamned slowly raises his head up again until the only part of Adam’s member he remains in contact with is the ultra-sensitive head. When Neal hums, Adam can’t control the upward surge of his hips, any more than he can control the keening sound that he makes when Neal puts his hand against Adam’s thigh and pushes him back down. His wrists are going to ache in the morning, if he keeps pushing them up against the belt. It’s not exactly stopping him; Adam doesn’t think that anything at this point could stop him.

Neal...has definitely done this before, and maybe Adam should have listened harder to the inner voice telling him that there could be some truth to the rumor about rock musicians and bisexuality. Neal spends most of his time on the head of Adam’s cock, wrapping his hand around the base that his hand cannot reach and pumping slowly, making Adam’s eyes roll back in his head. It’s not going to be long at all before he can’t speak. “Come on,” he hears himself whispering. “Come on, come on, you fucker, I know that you can do better than that.”

Neal takes his mouth off of Adam long enough to laugh, and Adam swears that if his hands were free Neal might have gotten punched in the mouth. “I cannot believe that you didn’t let fly with something like that onstage,” he says.

“Thought about it more than once,” Adam grits. Neal is not going back to what he was doing, and his keeping his hand upon the juncture where Adam’s hip meets his body, preventing him from arching up and offering some encouragement of his own. “Don’t you dare stop there, come on.” No movement. Adam’s lips form the words before he can stop himself. “Please. Please.”

Neal shudders, hard enough for Adam to feel it all the way into the mattress. “Fuck me,” he mutters. Adam bites the inside of his cheek, hard, to keep himself from making an ill-timed suggestion. Neal’s mouth takes his cock again, warm and wet and lips wrapped expertly around the head, and Adam has always preferred to watch when this is being done to him--he has a thing about eye contact--but the darkness keeping him from knowing what Neal is going to do next is its own aphrodisiac. Adam tilts his head back against the pillow and lets his eyes fall closed, imagining what Neal must look like instead, if his lips are swollen by now or his cheeks bright. He can hardly stop his hands from clenching into fists, and the loudest sound in the room is that of his own increasingly ragged breathing until he comes with a low, strangled cry. The darkness explodes into color that doesn’t stop until Adam comes down, breathing hard. He startles when he feels Neal’s hands at the belt, releasing him.

“Sorry,” Neal says. “Fuck, did it actually hurt you? I’ve never--”

Then he’s one of the better actors that Adam has met in his life. Adam flexes his wrists a few times, decides that he still has enough feeling in them, and lunges for Neal as soon as he has the leverage for it. Neal swears when Adam hits him with the full weight of his body, pushing them down to the mattress with Adam on top this time, and swears again when Adam takes the length of him in hand. Neal’s fully erect and leaking from the tip; Adam’s kind of amazed that he was able to suck Adam off like that without giving voice to how wanting he himself was. Admirable control; when Adam bites Neal on the side of his neck and feels Neal’s pulse skip, he thinks that it’s a lucky thing that he can enjoy both roles.

“Lay back and enjoy it,” Adam murmurs to Neal as he starts stroking him off, and Neal jerks into Adam’s hand the same way that Adam was trying to do moments before. “Or I’ll tie you to the bed and make you.” Neal’s laugh gets caught somewhere in his throat. Adam concentrates on what he’s doing rather than on further conversation, the rigidity of Neal covered in the softest and most velveteen skin that Adam has been able to find on the human body, the way the softest of touches in the right place can make a large man fall into pieces. He wants to see Neal’s face; the shadowy imprints he’s allowed in the dark, broken up by occasional flickers of headlights from below, isn’t enough. Adam makes do by holding his face close to Neal’s and feeling Neal’s breath against his cheek as he runs his thumb over Neal’s slit and hears Neal start to plead with him, the same way that he made Adam plead. Neal swears when he comes, and his entire body shudders into Adam’s hand. Adam stays where he is until their breathing has nearly started to fall into sync with one another, then swings his legs over the side of the bed, intending to get a washcloth from the bathroom to clean them up. Neal’s hand on his wrist stops him. Adam thinks of the belt about his wrists, the way that it had warmed to his skin until it had nearly been a part of his body, and flows back before he can stop himself.

“Deal with it in the morning,” Neal whispers to him, his voice already sounding thick. His one-night stand--there is a crackle where skin touches skin, Adam wonders if he’s not being a bit of a fool here--is a dozer.

“That’s gross,” Adam says, laughing a little, but not resisting the hand that pulls him further into the blankets. Hotel rooms are always chilly; it’s good to curl up against another warm body. It’s better when he feels Neal’s breath against his ear, just seconds before Neal takes it into his mouth and bites down lightly.

“So we’ll have to shower. What could go wrong there?”

End