Work Text:
LA is a dreamy kind of summer hot, and Katya is in love.
“I’m not scared, I don’t think,” Trixie is saying. “Nervous, but not scared. Do you know what I mean?”
Trixie’s eyes are honey brown, glinting with the sun as he walks backwards down the pavement, tourists in a rush veering out of his way like he’s some kind of historical monument, or a statue in a museum – look but don’t touch. Trixie smiles at Katya, oblivious, and Katya feels that same mantra pound in his head like a hangover – look but don’t touch.
It's a daily mantra for him. Mostly. Sometimes yes, sometimes not. Sometimes it takes a little break, when the tides are right (wrong) and Venus is in Leo (Virgo) and the ghosts that tap at Katya’s walls are – well, still tapping, but in encouragement. You-go-girl tapping.
It’s a metaphor. Keep up, Diane.
“Like, shit. If I go home first and I lose all my credibility and my career ends in shambles, I can go live in a cave in Montana for a couple years. That’s a vacation, bitch.”
“Girl,” Katya says, heart so full it could punch out of his chest any moment, “not Montana, girl.”
Trixie stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk; the crowd parts around him like a rock in the crashing sea. His mouth twitches. “I dunno. It’s sunny out there too, right? I could work on my Mon-TAN-a.”
Katya stares at him, then hacks a mock hairball, mouth working and nose scrunched. “That is awful,” he declares as he draws even, grabbing Trixie’s arm and turning him the right way around. “You might as well stay home. Jesus.”
Trixie’s shoulder bumps his. “You don’t mean that.”
Of course he doesn’t. “Of course I do.” He looks over and up, and Trixie is looking back at him, smirking with disbelief. “Do I lie? Have you ever known me to lie? This is an insult and a scandal and I hope you’re ready to duel over it – to the death if need be – “
“You lie down a lot,” says Trixie. “I keep telling you to get orthopedics, but do you listen to me? No –“
“Fuck the whole entire fuck off,” Katya says, laughing. Trixie’s skin slips sweaty under his palm, so he has to squeeze tighter to keep hold. “I’ll lie you down, you bitch –“
Trixie breaks at that, throwing his head back and laughing, the line of his neck lit golden in the sun. God, that fucking tan. The sun does such good things to Trixie’s skin, the set of his shoulders, the shift of muscle under thin fabric. “What does that even mean,” he says, voice all cracked and high. When he gets his breath back, he looks right at Katya, face open and happy, and Katya – it’s in moments like this, this right here, that Katya can believe it’s not just him that feels it.
Katya wipes sweat away from his forehead with his free hand and grins. “It means whatever you want it to,” he says, over-the-top sexual, and that sets Trixie off again, brings back that golden line down his throat.
*
They’re not out with any purpose today. Trixie’s first night back in LA he’d shown up at Katya’s door; you almost won this shit, he’d said, and I’m younger, more beautiful, and less fucked up in the lungs and head than you are. I’ve got this. Right? And that last question, he’d meant it; and so Katya had brought him in, past his roommate on the couch, into his bedroom, and he’d gotten Trixie a beer and cuddled into his shoulder against the headboard and told him how fucking great he was. The next day they’d gone shopping. Today, though – a show in Lobster Bumfuck, Canada and a few other gigs later – they were out without purpose. I’m not gonna see the sun for a month, Trixie said, curled like a question mark in Katya’s bed. Let’s go outside. Let’s do something.
It isn’t a date. Katya is firmly reminding himself that it isn’t a date.
“This isn’t a date,” he says out loud, then freezes.
Trixie stops beside him, and twists fully – not dislodging Katya’s hand on his arm, though – to look him in the face. They stare at each other for a moment. It’s high noon; the sun, directly overhead, catches on the side of Trixie’s face under his hat, the corner of his eye, the corner of his mouth.
“What is it, then?” Trixie says.
They’ve reached a break in the crowd -- moved one block past the shit tourists care about, or something. There’s no one else to hear the quiet vulnerability in Trixie’s voice, to see the way his fingers twitch at his side and his mouth thins, like there’s more he’s holding in.
Katya searches his face, but – god, sometimes it fucking hurts to look at him. Katya feels a lot of things all the time, but none of that, in his thirty-some years of existence, could have prepared him for how much he feels when he looks at Trixie sometimes. He looks down now instead, which is how he sees those twitching fingers; index and middle finger tapping against the curled-in thumb, tucked half out of sight behind the baggy leg of Trixie’s grey coveralls.
Look but don’t touch. It’s a mantra with a whole list of appendices. Katya’s not a liar or a rule-breaker; he’s just a very creative equivocatrice.
He reaches out and curls his hand around Trixie’s wrist. Present but not shackling. Trixie’s fingers still, and then Katya watches in fascination as they curl and uncurl, just minutely, beckoning without words.
Katya adjusts his hold accordingly, sliding down to thread his fingers with Trixie’s, palm to palm, thumbs crossing.
“Who knows what you’re getting out of this,” he says. “I’m just here to watch you soak up the sun.”
Trixie’s mouth twitches and – incredibly – his cheeks pinken, just a little.
*
“I can’t believe you go outside in overalls,” Katya says as they cross the park. “I’m – listen, there is not a lot on earth that I can judge anyone about.”
“I’ll say.”
“Shut up, you are just proving my point. I can’t judge anyone for shit but – girl. Overalls? What would possess you?”
“Listen,” Trixie says, half a sigh, face weary but mouth twitching -- “I… got pantsed a lot as a kid.”
Katya bursts out laughing.
“It’s physics, bitch!” Trixie crows, his face dappled by the shadows of the trees overhead. “You can’t argue with science, Katya!”
“Imperialistic western hocus pocus – watch me, Tracy,” Katya says, then starts laughing again.
“What? No, okay, it’s – the fucking straps, they hold it up – shut up you dumb-ass. Oh my god.”
Katya is fully stopped by this point and more or less on the ground, laughing up at Trixie’s exasperated face.
Trixie rolls his eyes. “Listen, no one in this park is a scientist –“
“You don’t know that,” says Katya, looking around.
“No one in these five square feet is a scientist. Mary mother of fuck. I’ll prove it, okay?”
“How?” says Katya. He leers and rasps, “Are you looking for a pantsing, Mother? I have nimble fingers, you know.”
“Eat me,” Trixie says, flipping him the bird. He looks around thoughtfully, then pauses and eyes the tree beside them, assessing. “Okay. So if you tried to climb this tree in those skinny jeans, what would happen?”
“Well, first I’d get an erection.”
Trixie rolls his eyes again but nods. “That seems likely, okay.”
“And then my jeans would get caught on the bark and slip down, baring my whole ass to the world at large and rendering everyone in this park snow-blind.”
“Also likely. Fine. Okay.” Trixie drops his backpack to the ground and steps up to the tree, looking up the length of the trunk, tracking his path like a mountaineer at the foot of Everest, not an idiot about to disturb some public property. He rubs his hands together and cracks his knuckles. “Watch and learn, motherfucker.”
He gets his first handholds, then looks back to make sure Katya is watching. Katya pretends to spit into his palms, left then right, and grins back up at him like a shithead.
“Okay, Brokeback,” Trixie says, dry. “Real climbers use chalk and real cowboys use lube.” Then, as Katya falls backwards laughing, he hoists himself up, getting about a foot off the ground before his feet find purchase on the rough bark.
And that – Katya sits up again at that, because. Damn. The muscle tank under Trixie’s ugly-ass overalls is doing great things to the muscles of his arms, his lats spread like wings peeking past the fabric, shifting as he pulls himself up another foot.
Katya might be getting a boner over this americana boyhood fantasy. He’d like to say that’s a new level of weird for him, but it’s not, of course.
Soon Trixie is more than half his own height off the ground. He’s eyeing the branch near him, which is an offshoot thick enough to be a trunk itself, and Katya has taken up heckling.
“Climber’s got a rubber wrist,” he calls, and Trixie calls back, “Better than a rubber dick, you godforsaken drain on society.”
Katya cackles. “Sometimes when I’m fucking a guy I pretend I’m a dyke with a strap-on,” he says, and Trixie laughs so hard he almost falls.
Then Trixie’s eyeing that branch again, and apparently he decides to go for it, because he shifts for a moment, and then clenches his thighs around the trunk, and Katya’s so fucking distracted by the shift of muscle under the denim that he almost misses Trixie taking one hand all the way off the trunk and stretching up and back to grab hold of the branch.
Trixie pauses for a moment, adjusting, then calls back, “I hope you appreciate that I nearly just died for your education.”
Katya jolts out of his dumb haze of arousal. “Give me stupidity or give me death, zogwarg queen.”
Trixie tests his weight a few more times, then swings his other hand up as well, so he’s stretched half between the branch and the trunk, back arched. He shifts, unwraps a leg, swears, wraps it again. Pauses. Moves again, more carefully now, shifting one foot to brace against the wood, knee bent into his chest, before bringing the other leg around to curl his knee over the branch.
He gets the first leg up as well then shouts, “Ha! Eat that, you wooden piece of shit!”
Katya pauses in his enthusiastic clapping to call out reproachfully, “Trees are the lungs of the earth, Trixie. You should show them a little more respect.”
“I was talking about you, you wooden piece of shit,” Trixie calls back, and Katya folds over his crossed legs laughing. He can hear Trixie laughing too; then Trixie adds, “As if you’ve ever respected a pair of lungs a day in your sad life, you cancerous motherfucker.”
“Stop, stop,” Katya wheezes. “I’m old, leave me alone.”
“Elderly cancerous wooden garbage-eating bitch,” Trixie says, voice scathing. “Look at me, cunt. Look at what my overalls can do.”
Katya drags himself upright with difficulty, then starts laughing all over again. Trixie is hanging from the branch like a sloth, arms extended and legs hooked, hat teetering on the brink of abandoning ship. He shifts – bracing his leg against the trunk again -- then glances at Katya, and huffs a breath of quiet laughter, looking back up at the branch with his eyes all squinty and smiling.
The late afternoon sun is a warm touch on his face, his arms, the spread of bare skin where the tank gapes open across his ribs and shoulder. Katya’s not even thinking about it when he raises his phone, flicks over to the camera, and aims with an artist’s eye.
He lowers his phone a moment later to inspect the picture in the shadow of his own body. When he looks up, Trixie is swinging his legs down, hanging by his arms, and then letting go, falling the four feet or so to the ground easily. He brushes his hands on knees, then looks up, grinning, and Katya carefully schools his face.
Trixie, he thinks sometimes, knows a little too well what it is he does to Katya.
The problem is – Katya likes that.
Trixie is still grinning, waiting, and Katya is still cross-legged on the ground, his MassArt t-shirt doing a shit job of covering his semi.
Fuck it. In for a penny, in for a pounding – Katya plants his hands behind him and leans back, grinning back with the power of a thousand watts.
“Gross,” Trixie says, but not like he means it. He’s not subtle about the way he looks. Then he grimaces, eyeing his palms. “Ugh. Sap.”
“I thought you were from the country,” says Katya, dragging himself up.
“You don’t get to call me on shit-all right now,” Trixie says. “I just climbed a fucking tree. And what have we learned today, Katya?”
“Well,” Katya says, deadly serious. “If you can do that, you can definitely win All Stars.”
Trixie screams a laugh, and smacks at his arm, only instead of pulling back he gets ahold of him and doesn’t let go, sliding his palm down the full length of Katya’s arm to his hand, drawing goosebumps in his wake all the way.
*
They go to Trixie’s favourite bar for dinner and drinks, and Trixie sips his beer with a contented smile, nodding along to Linda Ronstadt over the speakers. Linda Ronstadt is someone Katya had heard growing up any time his mom had control of the radio, but not someone he could have named until he met Trixie. He doesn’t love music that involves people singing – it grates on him in a weird way – but this is pretty good. Trixie likes it.
Trixie hums along under his breath, and his thigh is warm against Katya’s in the booth. Katya eats his fries and suffers in silence.
Eventually it’s too much, eventually it’s always too much. He excuses himself for a smoke and steps out into the dim alleyway, across from the BLADES sign he loves so much. Flaming Saddles isn’t his usual joint – if he’s not performing, bars aren’t, really, so he’s only ever in one if his friends are – but he’s come with Trixie a few times, and he was there for Trixie’s album release party, of course. Speaking of too much. He can still remember the thrum of guitars through the walls as he sucked desperately on a cigarette, trying to forget the way that Trixie kept seeking him out in the crowd from the stage.
That was… three months ago. And here he is again. Jesus shitting Christ.
He lights up and stares out into the street, watching a streetlight flicker. It’s pushing nine and getting dark; summer is reaching slowly towards its end, and he’s going to spend the last month of it alone. He inhales deeply and blows grey smoke into the purpling night. It’s not worth thinking about. He should be happy for Trixie. He is happy. He’s just also –
“Hey,” Trixie says from behind him.
Katya turns to see Trixie shutting the door carefully behind him, mindful of the wedge under the doorjamb to let them back in. He’s lost his hat somewhere. He turns around and looks at Katya, glancing briefly at the cigarette in his fingers and then back to his face.
Whatever. Katya’s down to just a few a day. Suck that, cancer. Suck on the entire blackened surface of his lungs and the sweet taste of minimal progress.
“You okay?" says Trixie. "You left kind of abruptly.”
Katya does a double-take. “What? Yes. No I didn’t.”
“I was halfway through a sentence, Katya.”
“See how it feels, huh,” Katya says. He takes a deep drag on his cigarette, blows it out towards the street. When he looks back, Trixie’s stepped closer, into the dim glare of the streetlight outside the alleyway. He’s faintly pink in the cheeks from their day, and his gaze darts across Katya’s face, brows drawn together with quiet concern.
“I’m serious. You okay?”
“Yeah,” Katya says. He drops the cigarette and crosses his arms over his chest, feeling a chill that isn’t there. “Just, you know. Tired.”
Trixie’s mouth purses and he presses a hand to Katya’s arm, fingers ghosting along his tricep. “Yeah? We can go, if you want.”
“No!” says Katya, too fast and he knows it. Trixie catches it too, if the slight narrowing of his eyes is any indication. “No, I mean. It’s fine. Let’s stay out a while longer.”
Trixie shifts on his heels but nods. He looks unsure. Katya hates that, and loves that he’s one of the few that gets to see it, and hates that he loves it. Trixie is so sure all the time. He’s about to turn twenty-eight and he’s so sure.
Katya luxuriates in uncertainty. He’s made an art out of it, out of ambiguity. That doesn’t mean it’s better; it certainly doesn’t make this any easier.
“I’m gonna miss you,” he says, finally, instead of lighting the second cigarette he badly wants. He only wants it to stall on saying anything, and his therapist – well, his witch sort-of-friend, it’s a long story – says he hides behind his self-destructive tendencies to avoid saying anything of value and risk. In his emotional life, at least.
“I’m gonna miss you too,” says Trixie, like it's easy. “So much, Katya. Holy shit. I’m gonna lie awake at night. I can’t sleep if I haven’t subjected you to at least one bad pun over the day, you know?”
“Meanwhile my sleep schedule has suffered,” Katya jokes, but it’s half-hearted. He’s looking at Trixie, at the pink in his cheeks, all sun-kissed. He’ll be golden-brown for All Stars, maybe a little adorably burnt on the first days. The camera loves Trixie.
Katya pushes down a weird feeling of jealousy. It’s a camera. He needs to acquire some fucking chill, here.
Trixie smiles at him, soft, then looks away into the street. The light finds all the little faults and cracks of his face: the laughter lines around his mouth, the arch of his cheekbones, the faint shadows under his eyes. He looks better rested than he has in ages. Katya can’t help but remember the two nights they’ve had together this past week, Trixie in his bed, warm and pliant, his thigh pressed to Katya’s in sleep, his hand against Katya’s stomach with his arm over Katya’s waist in the early hours of the morning. And then, turning over, the small, private smile Katya would find waiting for him, and the soft huff of sleepy breath.
Trixie looks back at him abruptly, and something flickers across his face – he sees something, looking at Katya, Katya sees him register it, whatever it is. Who knows what Katya’s face is doing. Who the fuck knows what it’s ever doing when he’s looking at Trixie – he finds out weeks, months later, when it turns up online. But now, with the way Trixie’s brows draw together, and the way his mouth opens on a soft exhale… Katya can guess.
“Katya,” Trixie says, “Katya –“
Then he’s stepping forwards, and his hands are bracketing Katya’s face, warm palms on either side of his jaw and his fingers tickling the short hair near his ears. Trixie looks at Katya for a long moment, that same, aching look on his face, and then he leans in, and he kisses him.
Trixie’s lips are so soft, and sweet like the honeyed chapstick he uses as a boy. He kisses Katya; pauses, exhales, hot breath against Katya’s lips; then kisses him again. He licks, just a little, at the seam of Katya’s mouth.
Katya’s own hands find the bare skin at Trixie’s ribs, and he sighs into the kiss, opening up to it, asking Trixie in – not like a guest. Like someone coming home.
He’s the one to break it, when it’s time to break it, drawing away with a shaking breath. When he looks up, Trixie’s eyes are still closed. They open slowly, that honey-brown gone dark in the low light, and Katya rubs his thumb against the naked warmth of Trixie’s skin and tries to fix this moment, this day, all of it, in his memory.
“I feel like you’re shipping out to war,” he says, his voice barely a whisper, “and I’m your virginal sweetheart left to pine away in our small coastal town, until I get a real job at a factory and realize that men are unnecessary, both to capitalism and my life in general.”
Trixie’s mouth twitches. “Are you undercutting my big moment?”
“Moments are fleeting,” Katya says, an echoing grin pulling at his lips. “Forever is forever.”
“Moments are especially fleeting if I’m in the navy,” says Trixie. Then, “Get it? Fleet-ing?”
Katya smacks at the inside of his arm. “Now who’s undercutting the moment,” he says. And then he blurts, “Come home with me. I know you’ll have to be up so early to get all your stuff from your place but, Trixie, I –“
“Of course,” Trixie says. “What did you think, dumbass, I was going to kiss you and then run off into the night? You know who you’re dealing with here, right?”
Katya looks at him and smiles, drumming his fingers against Trixie’s ribs. “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea, yeah,” he says.
And later, they’ll curl up in his bed; later, he’ll put his hands all over that sun-warm skin. They won’t fuck, he’s pretty sure. Trixie’s not that kind of girl, and he’s okay with that. But they’ll lie down together, and Katya will draw weird patterns on Trixie’s chest and tell him they’re runes for success if he asks; and Trixie will fall asleep first, like he always does, and Katya will watch his eyelashes flutter shut like the skyline going dark and he’ll pin that to his memory too, to carry him through the next month.
LA is hot at night, full of dreams, and Katya – Katya’s in love. It both is and isn’t the end of the world. Katya looks at Trixie’s face in the lamplight; Trixie looks back, open and happy, and Katya knows – Katya knows.