InsaneJournal

Current mood:

pessimistic

American Idol Fic: I Was Attracted to the Danger (But I Was Never Satisfied)
TITLE: I Was Attracted to the Danger (But I Was Never Satisfied)
RATING: NC-17
AUTHOR: Mari
PAIRING: Carly/Michael/David
DISCLAIMER: None of this is real.
SUMMARY: Once upon a time, Carly Smithson was working at a Georgia bar called Fado at the same time that a musician called Michael Lee was playing there. That’s the kind of coincidence that you just don’t let go.



Carly doesn’t think about music any longer. Carly thinks about her husband. Carly thinks about his plans for a tattoo parlor further out west, though even the red states are starting to embrace the idea of recreational ink so that Carly thinks that this is mostly about getting closer to Hollywood, period, the last place that she wants to be right now, about his plans for a whole house full of kids even thought the very idea makes Carly frankly more than a little queasy, Carly thinks about work and about the bills that she and Todd working together are still barely managing to keep paid. Carly doesn’t think about promises made when she was too young to know that Hollywood lied. Carly doesn’t think that she ought to be a superstar by now. There is a whole list of things that Carly Smithson doesn’t think about, and she’s very good at it.

Carly doesn’t think about the tall and devastatingly hot wannabe rock star on the stage right now, for instance, or the way that he keeps looking her way and winking like that’s supposed to mean something. It’s not like it’s an enormous place, she could probably pitch a bar glass from here and hit him right in the middle of his too-perfect forehead if he got too fresh with her, and there’s still Billy in the corner if she needs him. In the six months that Carly has been bartending here, she’s never actually needed him, but it doesn’t hurt for a woman to be careful when she’s doing this kind of work in a man’s world. And anyway, the fact that Lee is really goddamned hot doesn’t stop him from being really goddamned perverted, if it weren’t for Todd and Carly was willing to accept an offer from a guy that she had never seen anywhere but this stage once, maybe twice a week. He could be a complete freak. You never knew. She’s definitely not thinking about how she could take up that offer, if he made it, if she wasn’t married.

Carly is not thinking about a whole lot of things, and it takes up enough of her time and energy to make her fall into sleep without dreaming every night--or morning--without fail. She’s so busy both not-thinking and getting the foam just right on the beer that she’s drawing--why, she doesn’t know, it just adds up to less of what they came here for, but arguing with drunks is generally about as fruitful as turning around and arguing with the bar glasses--that she hardly even notices when a whole group of guys who are maybe, maybe eighteen come stumbling through the door. When she does notice is when one of them collides with first a chair, then a table when he tries to right himself from that mistake, hard enough to send him flat down to the floor by way of slamming into one of the waitresses on the way down. She squawks and only barely manages to avoid being taken down with him; the drinks go everywhere.

Carly sighs, and over the mess makes eyes with Billy. She can feel her eyebrows going up: you actually let them in? He shrugs back at her. So either they all just look so painfully young that they’re going to be carded at thirty-five, or those fake IDs are damned good and Billy decided to just roll with it and see what happened. Carly herself is barely old enough to be working in here. She guesses that she doesn’t have all that much room to talk, even though there are days when she feels older.

One of the guys, not the one who has just made certain that Alicia has a bad night, is laughing as he leans down to help his buddy back up to his feet. Carly takes a closer look at him under the better light and decides: okay, fine, maybe this is actually legally capable of being in here. That doesn’t say anything about the rest of them, but he can stay off of her shit list for the time being. She watches as he sets the chair upright again, puts his buddy into it before whispering something into his ear that looks like a plea to stay there before he causes any more chaos, and heads over to the bar. Carly does the bartender smile automatically, because it’s not crowded tonight, Lee on the stage or not, and she has no excuse not to. Being in a ragingly bad mood all over doesn’t count as an excuse.

“Um, sorry,” the guy says as he leans his elbows up on the bar. He’s only slightly less drunk than the rest of his friends, Carly can tell at a glance, but he seems aware of that fact and is choosing every one of his gestures with the exaggerated care of the deeply intoxicated. “He doesn’t make a habit of that.”

“Floor’s seen worse,” Carly answers with a shrug. “What can I get you?” Lee on the stage stutters on one of the only bad notes that she’s ever heard him produce; Carly looks up and her customer turns to see as one movement. Lee’s shoulders are shaking, though he keeps on singing like nothing had happened at all. Oh, fucking hell, he saw exactly what happened out on the floor, too, and he’s doing his best not to crack up right there on stage over it. The members of his band that Carly kinda-sorta knows have told her that that’s just one of his things, that his humor has one of the most inappropriate senses of timing of anyone that she’ll ever meet.

Her customer looks for just a little bit too long, and Carly starts to get a tingling sense about him, before he turns back. His eyes are dilated, just slightly. They’re a big, gorgeous hazel, and though he didn’t strike Carly as the type to be on anything stronger than alcohol, and lot’s of it, when he walked through the door, she feels a little disappointed now. Unless the dilation is due to something else entirely, in which case she’s not sure what she feels.

“Pitcher of beer and four glasses,” the guy says, finally managing to pull his eyes away from Lee. He flashes her a grin, a little sheepish and very self-aware, and Carly decides to give him this: he’s not immediately devastating in the way that Lee is, but the whole package has something to be said for it. “We’re winding down.”

“I think that would be wise,” Carly says solemnly. Her mouth twitches before she can help herself, and she turns away to do her job.

*
Here’s the thing: somehow, people think that Carly is pretty. She has no idea how this came about, because she has arms that do this weird wiggly thing at the top, about an ass and a half, and was forced to resign herself to hip-checking people unintentionally once she hit seventeen. But it’s a rare night when at least a dozen patrons don’t try to buy her drinks, and Carly can’t always find a way to creatively spit them out without losing her tip. Also, she really likes to drink. It has to be said. So when the bar finally closes down and she gets her shit together, towards dawn, Carly doesn’t think that it’s a good idea to drive. Or walk, maybe. Those fucking hips she has, she swears that the next person who cheerfully tells her that childbirth will be a breeze is going to get a bar glass to the face.

Carly tries Todd one more time, swears when it goes to voicemail, and sits down on the curb outside of the bar. They’re going to fight when she gets home. They’re really good at that. In the meantime, Carly guesses that she’ll watch the sunrise and fret, and maybe in a few hours when she’s able to walk a straight line she’ll be able to act like a human being again. She’s never been good at staying angry, anyway. It always manages to short-circuit back around to worry before she has time to really settle into it and seethe.

“Carly?”

She jerks, looks up. Lee is standing there with Mystery Guy, his guitar slung over his shoulder. The rest of Lee’s band is nowhere in sight. Neither are Mystery Guy’s friends. MG is putting his hand lightly against Lee’s guitar, though, in a way that makes Carly think that he would rather be touching something else, and also that she is more than a little bit of an intruder here. That doesn’t make her look away.

Drinking always makes Carly randy. Todd teases her about it, but Todd is leaving her to sit on a stoop drunk and alone, and so Carly pushes the thought away.

“I didn’t think that you knew my name,” she says stupidly.

Lee blinks, a little slowly. He’s not as steady on his feet as he ought to be, either; his set ended hours before, and he’s been entertaining himself on free drinks ever since then. Free drinks, and Mystery Guy. Carly had been kept busy all night, but she’s not blind, either, so. She hopes that neither of them is actually attached, because she’s going to be witnessing some majorly naughty shit getting started and not doing nearly her part to stop it.

“I’ve been playing here for nine months,” Lee says. His tongue sounds thick. “How could I not know your name?”

That’s...really good logic, actually. Carly thinks that she might have hurt Lee’s feelings. She can’t stand up, she’s pretty sure, so she can’t get up and give him a hug to apologize.

“Are you sure that you’re all right to be out here?” Mystery Guy asks her. He doesn’t look nearly as drunk as Lee himself; when Carly casts her mind back, she doesn’t remember him having more than a beer or two the entire time that he was in the bar, and he was the most sober of his friends even then.

Carly starts to tell him that she’s fine, until she stops and realizes that she’s a woman sitting by herself on a curb in the most dangerous hours before dawn, and that even Billy has gone home. She’s drunk, but she’s not stupid. “Not even a little bit,” she says.

Mystery Guy looks at Lee, even though Carly can tell from where she’s sitting that Lee’s ability to make any decision more complicated than untying his shoes is at least six hours away from returning. Lee looks back. Carly winds up in the backseat of a car that Mystery Guy is just barely sober enough to drive.

She watches the sun come up and rolls down Mystery Guy’s window in time to throw up without destroying his upholstery. Carly thinks that he appreciates it.

“My name is David,” he tells her, watching her through his rearview window.

*
David is staying in the kind of rundown motel that you only tolerate if you’re broke, and even then only by telling yourself that you’ll have a hell of a story from it later. He glances at his shoulder at them apologetically as he pulls into the lot and cuts the engine. “Road trip,” he says in a tone that sounds like apology. “The less money spent on where we sleep, the more there is for beer and gas.”

When he says it like that, Carly kind of expects to see his three buddies already piled onto a single bed when they enter the room, but there’s no one. What there is, however, in addition to the bed is a low and ratty couch that might have seen Eisenhower. Carly doesn’t care; it’s the only part of the room that’s willing to stay still for her at the moment. She rolls onto it and closes her eyes.

*
Carly doesn’t know how many hours have passed by the time that she wakes, but it’s been long enough to process a big share of the alcohol through her system already, because her head aches, her mouth tastes horrible, and she has to take a pee. She scrambles up from the couch and raises towards the bathroom on shaky legs. Her bladder has to stand in line for her stomach as she falls to her knees hard and hardly makes it. Feeling better immediately, Carly takes care of the other business and rises back to her feet so that she can wash her hands and rinse out her mouth. The woman who stares back at her in the dented mirror has pale skin and smudged makeup, and she looks like there’s something that she ought to be remembering. There are probably several different messages on her cell phone from her husband by now, each more panicky than the last, and Carly has calmed down enough to consider answering them. She’s not good at being angry, she remembers, but that’s not the thing that is eluding her. She went to a strange motel with the singer that she had spoken a half-dozen words to before tonight and a tourist who didn’t even bother to tell her his name until they were in the parking lot, and in terms of incredibly stupid things that will be put in the next edition of The Gift of Fear she’s probably going to make the Top Ten, she’s alive, sober, and unmolested now, so that’s not it, either. Carly purses her lips at herself and orders her brain to think.

The sound that comes from the room proper is unmistakeable. Suddenly, the skin that was so pale a few moments earlier is flushed with embarrassed color. Oh, now Carly remembers what that thing was. It was that, with the way that Lee and David were looking at each other, Carly had thought that she would be amazed if they even waited for her to pass out before they got down to the business that they had been clearly headed towards before they had paused to rescue her. She hadn’t looked towards the bed as she had hurried towards the bathroom to take care of her aching bladder and roiling stomach. She must have caught them in a moment of rest. Carly hangs her head down between her shoulder blades and has to bite her lip hard so that she won’t erupt into a peal of laughter.

She keeps her eyes averted as she creeps back into the main room and starts trying to locate her things by touch around the couch. She’s a big girl who works in bars for a living, it’s not like sex shocks her, and she’s sober now. Perfectly capable of finding her way home and explaining to Todd that she was too busy getting ragingly pissed and finding her safe haven for the night--day--with two men who very well could have raped her and left her body in a ditch for all that she knows them than to contact him.

Because you wouldn’t bloody well let yourself be contacted. Maybe even she can still find room to be angry about that one.

But Carly’s gaze strays on her, and she catches a glimpse of someone’s smooth, flexing back when she glances up without meaning to. Carly’s breath freezes in her throat. She thinks it’s David; he’s shorter than Lee but broader. He has a line of moles clustered low on his spine, and he’s so pale that he glows in the room’s scant light. Carly makes note of all of these things in order to distract herself from the fact that it’s pretty obvious that he’s fucking Lee, and that it’s making her wet between her thighs. She’s a horny drunk. It’s a fact.

Carly turns away, curses beneath her breath, and tells herself that maybe Todd will be getting his forgiveness faster than she anticipated. Lust makes her fingers clumsy and numb; she drops her bag with a heavy thump that sends her cell phone and cosmetics rolling everywhere. Carly curses again as the activities from the bed come to a sudden and clearly mortified halt.

“Sorry,” she calls over her shoulder, determinedly not looking again. “Sorry, sorry. I’m going to get out of here, since I’m not in danger of being gang-raped on the sidewalk any longer. Uh, carry on.” Of course her favorite lipstick would have rolled right under the couch, and far enough back so that the only way that Carly can reach it is to lie flat on her stomach and stretch. She’s blushing so hard that she’s giving serious consideration to just leaving it there and buying another one already, never mind that it was department store and dear and she’s fairly certain the color has been discontinued. Lipstick-procuring strategies are much, much safer than any other direction that her mind could be turning at the moment.

“Carls,” Lee calls to her. His voice sounds ragged. Carly wonders what else she managed to sleep through. She also wonders what makes him get off (stop that), thinking that he can call her by a nickname when they’ve managed to exchange maybe two dozen words in the entire time that he’s been playing at Fado. She also wonders if she’s going to make it home, because his voice is doing things to her that...his voice is doing things to her. Carly sinks her teeth into her lower lip hard and rises to her feet.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says over her shoulder. “I didn’t see anything.” That’s a patent lie. Carly has a husband and a reasonable amount of pornography at home. She’ll deal with it.

“You’re blushing.” Lee sounds amused. Carly thinks, and not for the first time, that maybe he’s a bit of a shit.

She turns around, finally, and gives them both a long look. They’ve...um, they’ve disentangled from one another and are now both beneath the covers of the bed, watching her. Lee looks amused. David is watching him like he’s not entirely sure what Lee is going to do next. The blankets cover his lap. Carly can’t stop herself before she wonders if he’s still hard.

She’s a bad person. She’s a bad, bad person.

“Because you were fucking,” Carly answers Lee crisply. His response is a slow grin. Oh, she’s a very bad person. There’s a challenge in that smile, and what the hell. Carly’s never had all that much of a competitive spirit; she just wanted to sing, and maybe that lack of bite was part of...everything, but now he’s making her mad. So she walks over to the bed and stares down at them both, but Lee especially, one of her eyebrows slightly raised.

“Mike--” David starts in a low voice. He sounds just a little nervous. Carly is just a little nervous, too, not quite sure of where she sees this ending, and she feels closer to David already.

She kisses Lee, and hard, just to shock that look off of his face. The sound that he makes against her mouth says that maybe she has succeeded. Carly didn’t really put a whole lot of strategy into her action beyond that, so she doesn’t really know what to do with herself as she deepens the kiss rather than pulling away and strutting out with her point made, as she puts her hands against Lee’s shoulders to keep herself steady. It’s already turning into a boudoir kiss, a horizontal kiss, and accordingly Carly is finding it difficult to keep herself upright. Lee obliges her just fine by taking her about the waist (Big hands, oh, this is a one-way ticket straight to hell that I am writing for myself right now) and lowering her down to the bed and across both of their laps. Something pokes her in the shoulder as she sprawls across David. Carly’s a big girl. She knows exactly what that is.

“Lee,” Carly starts in a tone so eerily reminiscent of David’s from a few moments before that the two of them probably ought to be bonding over it. If there’s any time at all to stop this, it’s right now. If there were any time at all to be sure that she wanted to stop this, that would probably be right now, too. Carly takes a deep breath.

A line appears between Lee’s eyes. “Don’t call me that,” he says.

“Your name?”

“It’s my last name. I don’t like it. Call me Michael.”

Or Mike, Carly thinks, a little giddily, remembering how David has already managed to ascend to such an informal mode of address after a matter of hours. Michael keeps looking at her, and David has started to stroke her hair, and Carly imagines a snapping noise as any hope of her leaving his bed officially exits the room. She lifts herself up onto her elbow, careful of where she places it, and pulls David’s head down to hers so that she can kiss him. Carly thinks that it’s mostly surprise that draws him down to her without more of a fight; he doesn’t carry himself like a man who thinks that he’s attractive. He’s wrong, Carly feels like telling him, if she weren’t already so busy showing him. He’s got those eyes, for one thing, and that cute little curling smile, and his shoulders, back, and arms are all broad and strong. It’s clear within moments where his insecurities about himself lie, as he immediately puts his hand over her own and moves it when she tries to stroke his belly. Carly pushes north instead, caressing his chest and thumbing one of his nipples until it’s a hard and eager point against her hand, and keeps kissing him. David takes over at some point and sweeps his tongue through her mouth; they have become soft and pliant against one another.

Carly hears Michael make a soft sound, and then he starts pulling her pants from her body. She can feel his fingers trembling against her waist. It makes her feel sexier than she can remember feeling in a long time. She probably hinders his progress somewhat, with her sudden need to press her thighs against one another hard, but Carly is really past the point at which she cares. She lets Michael pull her clothing from her until she’s nude from the waist down and keeps kissing David, until she feels Michael pushing her thighs apart again and then blowing softly at the entrance of her sex. Even that lightest of touches makes shivers run up and down the length of Carly’s body. She can’t stop herself from jumping and squealing when Michael presses his mouth to her, finally, and starts flicking at her clitoris with his tongue. His laugh is a rumble against the deepest and most sensitive part of her.

“He’s kind of a pain in the ass, yeah?” Carly whispers to her David. Her voice has already started to go thready with the sex-whine. She watches David’s eyes growing darker as he registers it.

“I’m starting to get that feeling,” David whispers back to her. Carly’s reclining back with her head almost directly side by side with his erection beneath the blankets, and she can see his eyes growing darker with that knowledge, too. “Do you want to--”

Carly doesn’t even let him finish the request. She turns her head, pulls the covers down, takes him into her mouth. He’s bigger than she expected; Carly thinks that maybe if she had not acted so strongly on impulse, she might have been able to take that into consideration a little strongly. She can take him down all the way and gags a little when she tries, so she draws back far enough to pay attention to the sensitive head alone instead and uses her hand to pump slowly up and down the base. What she’s doing is clearly good enough, as David’s hand is on the back of her neck almost immediately to encourage her rhythm and he’s saying her name in a soft voice that’s just almost awed, but...not quite. Not with that growl that he has in it. Carly feels herself getting even hotter when she thought that she had already hit a plateau from which she could go no higher.

Michael rubs his hand across her ass as he keeps licking at her, sending heat spiraling through her entire body with every stroke of his tongue. Her ass is like David’s stomach; Carly would wish him to stop if she was anywhere near her right mind. She pushes her thighs as far apart as she can instead, hears a whining noise start low in her throat as Michael hits her right there, right there, please keep doing that right there. It rumbles all the way through her throat and is felt on David’s cock; the hand at the back of her neck spasms hard. Carly has always liked giving blowjobs, provided that it was readily understood that some reciprocity was going to be thrown on the table. She has always loved the feeling of seeing a man come completely undone above her and knowing that that was her work, she was the one who was doing that. Carly glances up as much as she’s able and sees that David has his head thrown back, his eyes tightly shut. She can count the stubble on his throat. She can see his Adam’s apple working up and down. He’s clearly close.

Carly lets David’s cock slip from her mouth until the only thing that she’s still maintaining contact with is the slit at the tip. She flicks her tongue against the bitter taste of precome there at the same time that her index finger finds his perineum running just beneath the skin behind his testicles and strokes down on it hard. David comes so hard that Carly barely manages to swallow it and chokes a little before she’s able to pull away.

“Holy shit,” David says when he catches his voice again a few seconds later. He sounds like he might even apologize for catching her off guard if she lets him; Carly shakes her head and waves her hand at him. One, not off guard, and two, she’s a little distracted right now. Michael is both a shit and a competitive shit, it would seem. He has renewed his efforts upon her, he’s kneading at her thigh now, Carly thinks that she’s going to lose her mind if her orgasm takes any fucking longer in getting here, already. She’ll bite herself bloody if she tries to hold any of this back and so doesn’t try, tilting her head back, letting out a full-bodied shriek when Michael gets her right there so close to the edge that if he doesn’t get across the precipice soon Carly swears that she’s not going to be responsible for her actions.

Carly can feel Michael smile. She swears that she can. She wails hard enough to make their neighbor next door pound the wall irritably as he gets her there, and gets her there hard enough to make the entire world go gray around the edges as orgasm comes over her. Carly’s breathing in ragged gasps as she comes down; it only takes a glance to let her know that her entire body is flushed. Fucking china-pale Irish skin.

Michael doesn’t seem to mind. He’s staring at her like she’s a work of art (A Ruben, maybe, Carly can’t stop herself from thinking), and the way that his tongue touches lightly at his lower lip is...not any expression that Carly has ever seen in a museum, he does have that going for him. “Holy shit,” he says, looking up and down her body with one of the most naked expressions of lust that Carly has ever seen. His cock is fully erect in front of him. There’s already pre-come leaking from the tip.

“Come here,” David says to him. He’s still got that sex-growl in his voice that makes Carly shiver. Michael flows into the sound of that voice like water. He lets David lay him back, watches with darkened eyes as David lies partly on top of him and takes Michael’s cock into his hand. It’s a big bed, but not porno-big, so Carly has to scoot to the side to give them room. She watches as David jerks Michael off in a slow, leisurely fashion that, if the way that Michael eventually starts cursing at him is anything to go by, is a lot slower and more leisurely than Michael would have cared for. David gets that curling smile again and doesn’t change his rhythm. It might be driving Michael wild, but it’s all that Carly can do not to applaud. The way that he’s making Michael surge his hips up and into David’s hand, the way that he’s making Michael clutch at the sheets and start breathing in desperate little gasps; the orgasm-tingle has barely begun to fade from her body and Carly can already feel herself getting ready for a second round. She presses her thighs together hard and watches with wide eyes as Michael comes into David’s fist, his entire body strung up and into a long line of tension that doesn’t dissolve until he collapses back to the bed in satiation.

“Holy shit,” Carly says herself, mimicking Michael’s tone. She rocks back on her heels and waits for things to get awkward, as none of them strictly know each other and yet they’ve just done something together that could have been filmed for money. I don’t want to go home, Carly thinks, and doesn’t care that her interior voice sounds a little petulant even to herself.

David and Michael can’t break eye contact with one another immediately, even when Carly speaks. Finally, David rolls away, rubs his hand off absently on the sheet, and grins slightly. “Um, you might have guessed that this place doesn’t do room service,” he says, and Carly grins back at him. “But the bonus is that I’m saving enough to spring for pizza. If you guys want to stay a while.” And maybe do that again, hovers unspoken through the room.

Carly gives her answer by crawling back up the length of the bed and wiggling her way down into the blankets between the two of them, feeling each man drop an absent arm around her waist. They can still touch each other that way. It’s going to get awkward now, Carly thinks, and is still waiting for that moment when they reach David’s unspoken point of maybe doing that again.

*
Carly doesn’t know how she managed to miss him in during the auditions, but somehow she did. She doesn’t realize that Michael is in this with her until she hits the Hollywood auditions, and she doesn’t seem him until about thirty seconds before she sees David, too. Carly puts her hands over her mouth to hold back a peal of laughter, Michael doesn’t even try, and David grins and shrugs as he looks at the both of them.

“What do you know,” he says. “I guess we’re just going to have to chalk this one up to fate.”

End