InsaneJournal

American Idol Fic: Between Each Spoken Word
TITLE: Between Each Spoken Word
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
DISCLAIMER: None of this is real.
FANDOM: American Idol RPS
PAIRING: Michael Johns/David Cook



It takes Michael nearly six hours to realize that there’s something wrong. He thinks later, much later, when he’s sober again, that this might have been a fucking clue.

He gave Stacey carte blanche to do what she wanted with the money that was rolling in while he was on tour, trusting that she would put enough aside to cover the remaining studio fees that he would have when he got off. It was half apology and half anniversary present, giving her a house that she could decorate in any way that she chose without having to deal with the masculine influence of tennis rackets and dirty gym bags cluttering up her vision. When Michael first enters the house and notes the lack of furniture, he thinks that all that’s wrong is that Stacey has moved the furniture from their old place into the new and has not completed her vision yet. She’s notorious for doing that, not wanting to alter a single detail until the whole thing is perfect and pristine within her mind.

Michael gets back from Tulsa at two in the afternoon. At eight, he realizes that he has not seen hide nor hair of Stacey, not even a phone call for the better part of three days. At nine, he realizes that this is not the way that healthy marriages are generally expected to work. And at ten, he finally does a catalogue of all of the furniture that actually has been left in the space that’s too large for it by any stretch of the imagination and realizes that it’s everything that he brought to the marriage, and nothing that was added by Stacey herself. She’s never been one for drama. She simply took what was rightfully hers, and exited as quietly as she could, skirting the spotlight with a dancer’s grace.

At eleven, Michael discovers that Stacey, preferring the occasional white sangria and nothing stronger, has left the liquor cabinet intact and starts drinking. At midnight on the dot, he calls David.

It takes David four rings to answer, and he sounds exhausted. Michael remembers that the demands on a winner’s and super star in the making’s time is going to be much stricter than those imposed upon the eighth place runner up who might be able to pull an indie career from out of nowhere and might not, and thinks that he should be guilty. Emphasis on should.

“What’s up?” David asks. He makes a valiant effort to scrub the clear fatigue out of his voice. Michael appreciates that. He has no doubt that David is only doing it in the first place because he recognized the phone number.

“She’s gone,” Michael says without preamble and without any need to elaborate. There are only a handful of “shes” in their lives so important that they can be referred to without specific address, and Michael sure as shit ain’t talking about Carly.

“What? Why? Where did she go?” David asks, rapid-fire and without waiting for an answer. There is a rustling sound on the other end of the line; Michael can picture David shaking his head. “Never mind. Do you want to come over...yeah, scratch that.” David is living in a series of hotels until something suitably rockstar could be found for him. “Do you want me to come over?”

“Yeah. No. I’m not sure,” Michael says, and hangs up. He calls David back less than ninety seconds later. “Yeah, come over.”

“I was already on my way,” David answers. Michael can hear wind rustling by the cellular phone to let him know that David is telling the truth.

After David hangs up, Michael sits down in the place where his couch should be and dials another number. “Stace,” he says as soon as he hears her breathing on the other end. “Come on, what’s this about? Isn’t it something we could have talked about?”

“I know, Michael,” Stacey says in a voice that sounds as if she stopped crying hours before. Michael thinks that she’s saying, “I know, we can talk about it,” and is about to ask her what in the hell she means by moving all of their things out of the house, then, when he hears a stifled sound on the other end of the line which means that maybe her crying isn’t quite done, after all, and then Michael gets it. She doesn’t know; she knows. His breath catches in his throat. “Yeah. That. Have a good life, Michael.” The click of her line disconnecting in his ear tells him that calling again would not be a wise idea. Michael leans back and beats his head softly against the plaster.

David is there less than twenty minutes later; Michael does a mental calculation of how many traffic laws David must have broken in order to pull that one off and is impressed in spite of himself. This all happens after he finally manages to decipher what that pounding at his front door is; even after giving Stacey free rein to shell out a down payment on a new, better place in a posh neighborhood with the money that he was rolling in while he was on tour, Michael locked the door behind him out of habit. It was LA, you could never be too careful.

“Don’t fucking scare me like that,” David says when Michael rouses himself from the floor and goes to answer the door.

Michael makes a face; he can’t help himself. “I wasn’t going to hurt myself,” he says, and then realizes that his wife has left him, and altogether everything that he ought to be feeling about this situation is muted and coming to him too slowly. The thought of hurting himself instead of inviting his best mate over and getting steadily, ragingly pissed and then probably crying for so long that neither one of them would actually talk about it in the morning would be ridiculous to a stable person, anyway, but it’s even more ridiculous to Michael than it ought to be.

Maybe he should have seen this coming. Maybe fucking everyone should have seen this coming. Michael and David hadn’t told anyone what they were doing on the tour and during the last days of the show, their hurried, fumbling couplings and the marks that they rushed to cover again, save for Carly and she wouldn’t...no. She had made no secret of her displeasure with the both of them, but she would not have let anything slip. Any one of the three of them could commit an outright murder, and the other two would take it to their graves. With that in mind, Michael realizes that for Stacey to have figured things out, he and David had to have been broadcasting from space.

David gives Michael a long, hard look and says, “Don’t say that like it ought to be obvious until you’ve seen your face.” He shoves past Michael and into the house.

“With my luck, she fucking took the bathroom mirrors, too,” Michael mutters as he turns to follow David deeper into the shadows. He hasn’t bothered with lights. From the hitch in David’s step, he notices, but he does not say anything. Michael sees that his hands are empty.

The thing about David and himself, one of many things that even the press had been starting to remark upon (Goddamn, Michael thinks to himself, how did we get away with it for as we did?) is that they don’t need to actually say anything to each other in order to have a conversation. “And I didn’t bring any fucking booze, either,” David throws over his shoulder.

“Fucking bastard.” Michael sighs and sinks against the wall, watching from the corner of his eye as David does the same a few feet away. “I’d offer you a chair, but Stacey up and took all of them, so.”

David laughs. It’s a hushed, guilty sound; even now, Michael loves the way that David laughs. “I went to your place before you moved, man,” he says. “There were three pieces in that place that you actually picked out, don’t act like she robbed you blind.”

“You see any of those three pieces here?” Michael fires back. The urge to thump his head back against the wall again is becoming overwhelmingly. Michael really, really wishes that David had brought booze with him. “Guess she thought that it was payment.”

David is silent. Michael can almost hear what he’s thinking. One chair, a futon, and a bookcase that had traveled all the way from Georgia and looked it, against months of adultery? Stacey hadn’t been nearly as vindictive as she could have been.

“Yeah,” Michael whispers. The way that they can talk to each other, not a word needing to be said. “Yeah, I know.”

And David reaches across the distance between them, rests his hand against Michael’s knee and rubs a circle that Michael can feel even through his jeans. “I’m sorry, Michael,” he says.

“You’re a fucking liar, Dave,” Michael answers, because David’s words are saying one thing but his hand on Michael’s leg is saying something else, and Michael wants equally to respond to both of them. He reaches out and pulls David’s head over to him; okay, he can answer one of those messages more loudly than the other right now, and much more easily. He knows the way that David kisses and that David likes to be kissed. After the past eight months, he knows it as well as he knows what his own wife likes.

Stacey likes her mouth to be made bruised and swollen, likes to be made to look like she’s been kissed. She touches her neck and laughs, low and a little guilty, like she’s embarrassed by her own lust, when Michael leaves burn marks from his stubble on her neck and on and between her breasts. When he had left his marks on her. He needs to start being mindful of tense.

David likes it best when Michael starts slow. He likes the journey; he fucking loves it when Michael puts his hands into his hair, on the back of his neck, maybe under his shirt. The sounds that he makes when Michael is doing everything right reminded him of the sounds that Stacey made right when he was on the verge of getting her off, and in the beginning it had given him pause. Only in the beginning, though, and never enough to make him stop. It occurs to Michael now that he doesn’t know if David likes to be marked, though. They always had to be so careful, so fucking careful, not to leave more of a mark on each other than they absolutely had to, that each kiss had to be placed with precision and care. He’s never seen David driven absolutely wild. Michael draws a ragged breath, because he doesn’t want to be thinking about that, he doesn’t want to be the one who has to take care of anyone tonight, and yet--

And yet his wife has left him, clear result of him thinking that she could take care of herself and being so very, very wrong, and Michael can’t drive these thoughts out of his mind.

David feels Michael stiffen. “Hey, hey,” he whispers against Michael’s ear. His breath is a warm tickle; his beard is soft, but still makes a rasping sound against Michael’s neck when he moves his head. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll handle everything.”

Michael isn’t even sure how he’s supposed to classify the sound that he makes. “You should have just brought the booze,” he mutters.

David strokes the back of Michael’s neck in the same way that he seems to love when Michael does it to him, and Michael realizes that it feels pretty goddamned good, too. He bows his head without particularly caring that this makes him very similar to a pet begging to be caressed. David dips his head so that he can kiss Michael under the line of his jaw, so light that Michael could almost convince himself that he’s imagining it, until David fastens his teeth to the skin tightly enough to border upon pain and sucks. Michael jumps and then realizes that David has been waiting for months for the chance to leave his mark openly on Michael.

“They have me set up somewhere pretty swank until I buy a new house,” David whispers to Michael. “It’s got a bed, room service.” When Michael is silent, David adds, “That room service probably includes booze. I’m just saying.”

Michael snorts out that sound that he can’t even begin to fit into a category again and shakes his head. “Nice try,” he says, and then sighs. “I don’t want to go anywhere just yet. This was her place. I want to be in it for a little while.”

That’s about as fucked-up a place as Michael can possibly think of for a tryst, before they even take into account the hardwood floors that are exquisite to look at but are already hurting his ass. But they talk without words, and David gets it without Michael needing to explain any further. This was Stacey’s place, that she chose without Michael’s influence and then chose to leave the same way. If Michael wants to kneel beside the grave for a little while without trying to chase down the corpse, then David can at least offer him comfort there while he lays down his flowers and says his final words. It means that Michael’s admitting that it’s over.

Michael gets the feeling that to David, he’s many times over more eloquent than he actually is in reality, but right now that’s okay. David caresses the back of Michael’s neck again so that Michael can decide once more that the place where skull joins spine is a vastly under-appreciated erogenous zone, and kisses Michael’s neck, and then kisses his mouth. Michael opens his mouth to allow David all of the access that he wants while David nudges him backwards, a few inches at a time, until Michael is lying flat on that stylish but still vastly uncomfortable floor. David goes slowly, almost hesitantly; he’s giving Michael plenty of time to decide that this is not what he wants.

This is most definitely what Michael wants. He fists one of his hands through the front of David’s shirt and hears David make a startled sound as he’s yanked more fully down upon Michael’s body. Michael hitches and gasps as David draws his shirt up far enough to place a series of soft kisses down Michael’s stomach, the trail of dark and slightly coarse hair that leads down beneath his jeans. He can’t stop the way that his stomach quivers; David’s beard feels even better there than it did against Michael’s neck and the side of his face. Michael draws in his breath again and feel his cock swell as the fingers that he had watched, fascinated, for nights on end as they traced out music first on a guitar and then against Michael’s own body draw down the zipper on his jeans and free him. His entire body is humming with the need to release something; he is amazed that he is able to keep his hips pinned down to the floor even this far.

Michael is expecting David’s hand on his cock. When the warm heat of David’s mouth encloses him instead, he jumps so hard that he swears he hears David gag a little. As far as porn-worthy performances go, maybe they shouldn’t expect tonight to make it into the top ten, but Michael still can’t stop himself from feeling a little embarrassed. David releases him long enough to place a kiss against Michael’s navel.

“Relax,” he whispers. As ridiculous as his request ought to be, the rumble of his vocie against Michael’s skin for a few seconds makes it actually possible. Michael exhales. David does not need to hear an answer before he takes Michael into his mouth again.

David had been stunned, when Michael had cracked and made the first move in February, to discover that Michael had never been with a man before David himself. He had even been a little flattered, when they had had any room left around the screaming guilt (how had that managed to become so unimportant, Michael wondered now, how had they let it) and certainty that they were going to be caught at any second. David was a wannabe rock star who had played most of his gigs in venues where alcohol was flowing like water from the tap, he had explained laughingly to Michael when Michael had asked. Anyone who claimed to be totally gay or totally straight under those circumstances was a fucking liar, he would lay down his last dollar to prove it. And he had given Michael a blowjob that had proven then and there that it was not his first.

It is that same kind of blowjob that he’s giving Michael now, the kind that can be filed under epic in the grand category of Michael’s sexual experiences; even if David is a whole new branch of uncharted territory for him, he knows what he looks like, and he’s never lacked for companionship when he wants it. But this. But this. This is an intensity the likes of which Michael has only felt a handful of other times in his life. Many of those times centered around someone that Michael is trying very hard not to think about right now, and he shoves the thought away before it can take hard root. It’s David that he wants to think about right. It’s David who is making himself very easy to be the only thing on Michael’s mind right now, and Michael is grateful to him for it. David wraps his lips around Michael’s cock and takes him into his mouth all the way down to his base, fucking Christ, before he draws back up until only the head remains and flicks his tongue around the sensitive head that makes Michael feel as if his entire world is centered right here in this room and this deeply uncomfortable floor and the skilled attentions that David is plying to him right now. He closes his eyes when all that he can see is flashes of color and then swears beneath his breath when they follow him across the insides of his eyelids, feels David knead at his inner thigh and make a muffled sound in response. It all feels so incredibly good, and it’s so exactly what Michael needs, that Michael can feel himself riding on the border of orgasm within moments. He doesn’t fight it; he wants to forget this place and everything in it.

David swallows him down and then crawls up the length of Michael’s body so that he can kiss him hard. Michael tastes himself there; it reminds himself of the times that he’s given David blowjobs and listened to David whispering endearments and words of encouragement from above him, telling him in words and very soft guides of his hand what he likes. Michael kisses David back until he feels himself stealing David’s breath away, licks the inside of David’s mouth for every trace of himself. Stacey’s presence has no choice but to retreat, at least for a moment or two. Not for long. Michael guesses that he has that coming, with what he and David willfully started amongst themselves months ago, but he has never been one to think of consequences if he can at all help it, and sometimes he wishes that he was the asshole that the media had early on gleefully declared him to be.

David saves him; it’s amazing how often David saves him. “Come on,” he whispers. “You have to see this hotel room to believe it, and at least you don’t have to sleep on a floor.”

And Michael lets David pull him up, and to his feet, and leaves Stacey behind.

End