Work Text:
At nine twenty four a.m., there is a jolt in the pit of Jon’s stomach, and for one wild moment he thinks he’s being punched or he’s falling in love.
He is pressed through darkness;
then he is sitting at the same table and listening to the same argument his writers are having over fledgling Sarah Palin material, yet he feels like he’s traveled miles. From the untethering, a tightness in his chest lingers.
It’s not like Jon has a lot of time to navel-gaze these days. So he goes on.
*
At nine twenty four p.m., his driver takes him straight home without him having to ask.
“This isn’t my apartment,” Jon says when, outside an expensive building that definitely isn’t his apartment, the car stops.
“I’ve brought you back here every evening you tape since you moved in, sir,” frowns his driver.
Are you fucking kidding me? Jon is about to say to him – it’s very late – until he reaches into his pocket and finds the jagged shape of an unfamiliar keyblade. Incongruous, like the strange dark pressure of many hours ago.
The driver is looking at him as if he is unwell; in the rear view mirror, Jon catches the deep edge to his own tired eyes.
He doesn’t want any rumors of him losing it to surface (‘DAILY SHOW HOST JON STEWART’S DELUSIONAL RANT – and this time it’s OFF-SCREEN’, some hack could write all too easily), so Jon thanks his driver and gets out of the car.
The doorman recognizes him. He takes the elevator to the top floor, because that’s what he usually does. And the key fits.
There’s no-one in. Has he moved? Is Tracey out with the children, this late in the day?
Or, here, does he live alone?
Across the polished expanse of Columbian oak he walks, and then sits down on the stylish couch. It’s very clean, this stranger’s loft that he has the key to. What the hell is going on?
Cutting through the silence, he hears the sound of someone coming in and he turns towards the movement, only able to see the edge of a dark-colored coat before he feels himself drift away again
and he is back in his own home, one of Maggie’s dolls sharing his sofa now, and Jon finds himself facing a firmly closed door.
*
Hypochondriac that he is, he searches the internet for symptoms of stress, tiredness, mental deterioration. He reaches the conclusion that he moved house for one day only and nobody informed him of it.
A couple of days later, he’s making finishing touches to the script
when it happens again, but still nothing seems to immediately change, an identical script in identical hands.
*
This time, he lets himself into the apartment as if he lives there, and sits on the couch as if he lives there, and opens a bottle of beer as if he lives there. (He finds plenty of it filling up an integrated wine cooler in the kitchen. There’s no wine.)
This time, he’s still around after the door closes.
“Stephen!” Jon says, standing up in awkward surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh, you are adorable,” Stephen says, sarcastic perkiness adulterated by the rasp in his voice from the requisite long day. Next he speaks too clearly, eyes widening as if desperate to communicate to someone who regularly misunderstands. “The memory medicine is on the bathroom counter.”
Stephen hangs up his coat, then goes into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Jon waits.
“Hey,” Stephen says, flopping down exhausted on the couch Jon was sitting on already, the sort of couch that Jon didn’t think any version of himself would buy. (Not that he’s bought furniture for a very long time now; Tracey had sorted out the loft, got the rooms re-done every few years–)
“Hey,” Stephen says again, “look at me,” and Stephen’s staring at him in admiration like Jon has just made him laugh even though Jon hasn’t said anything for a good five minutes now, and that’s when Stephen leans in a little further just as Jon finds himself pushed back through darkness
and back in his own bed, Tracey already asleep.
*
Turns out there really are two Americas.
*
(Maybe there are hundreds of Americas. Maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and in one of them he’s shacked up with Denis.)
*
It’s not as if he’s never thought about Stephen like that, of course (glasses off, smiling devilishly, hair a mess, and, once or twice when Jon’s been very drunk, on his knees). They are great friends, and there have always been those jokes about them. But it’s not ever been something that’s been possible, so the thoughts took low priority in Jon’s mind, far behind everything else he has to deal with.
When he next sees Stephen – at their weekly production meeting, mind should have been entirely on work – Jon can think of little else but Stephen close to him, on that sofa, on the edge of something more and in a shared apartment. Different Stephen, but same Stephen, even up that close. Same lines around the eyes.
It happens again, later in the evening this time, and when Jon finds himself yet again in
the body of another version of himself, this alternative universe or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, he finds himself above all curious to know exactly what their situation is.
I’ll be late, Stephen texts him when Jon gets back to their home. Taping ran over. So, out of habit, he sticks on CNN until he arrives.
(He finds a room off the living room with a bigger TV. It’s lined with shelves of Lord Of The Rings figurines.)
(For the first time, as he watches the unchanged news, he wonders about the location of their bedroom.)
“Why are you in here?” Stephen says, frowning, apparently having made it in at last. “When you’ve got a perfectly good study down the hall. And you hate this room!”
“I do?”
“Last Christmas, you said you could feel their eyes follow you around the room.”
“Oh,” Jon says. “Oh yeah.”
Stephen smiles at him, and Jon still doesn’t understand why. Why him? Why did this Stephen pick him?
“What’s happening?” Stephen asks. On-screen, a reporter is interviewing a mother irate over how sexy pop stars are these days.
“Not much.”
“Then there’s no need to watch.”
And Jon’s known for a while that, at some point, this moment is going to come, and he’s not going to break them up. So he goes along with it.
You’ve kissed before, a voice in his head reminds him.
Only for a joke.
A quick peck on the lips; it comes and goes quickly, and Jon manages not to flinch.
(He’s leapt away for a while now, whenever Stephen tries, just in case it’s not just a joke, and because they can’t and because he doesn’t want Stephen or anyone else to see, see him, see the way his eyes might close.)
Then Stephen puts CNN on mute, shoves his hands through Jon’s hair and dives in again.
How would Jon kiss? he wonders, before remembering he’s Jon too.
Wrong Stephen, he still makes sure he reminds himself. Wrong Stephen. Even as he kisses him for longer, tongues turning filthier and heart rate pulsing faster, even as Jon feels the beat of Stephen’s eyelashes fluttering open and closed...
This isn’t something he’s allowed to do. It’s fucking absurd and Jon can’t help it anymore; to stop feeling like this, he has to laugh.
“What? What’s so funny?”
If you're laughing, I defy you to be afraid, Jon remembers suddenly, but he can’t think where those words first came from.
“Noth-nothing! Just you and me, we we’re just-” and he dissolves into giggles again.
“Stewart, are you breaking? Because we’re not on set right now, and it doesn’t do wonders for my ego.”
“No!” he grins, then ensures his expression turns contrite. “Sorry,”
“Come on. Turn the TV off and come to bed.”
And Jon raises his eyebrows at that, forgetting it’s not innuendo anymore.
“Come to bed and get some sleep, you dirty old man,” Stephen laughs, a honeyed sound close to Jon’s chest. “Don’t worry, I can sense the exhaustion from here. Yours, not to mention mine.”
Stephen kisses him once more (weird weird good good weird) and pads away.
Wearing pajama pants, Stephen joins Jon in the bathroom once Jon starts brushing his teeth. It makes him feel very self conscious to be brushing his teeth, to be doing something so unattractive and intimate, in front of his good friend Stephen, but here they live together, they’ve been together a while; he’s got to act as if they share this part of the day all the time.
The bathroom’s large, luxurious yet generic, like the rest of the place. He wonders for the second time that evening where’s their bedroom? What’s it like?, but he’ll have to wait for another time – will there be another time? He shouldn’t assume there’ll be another time, a chance for him to get his head around this new universe-shifting deal a little better, a chance for him to once again transgress – because before he can turn off the bathroom light and open the door
there comes that familiar push and he is back in his own world, dozing in front of CNN on his own TV.
*
‘Free for a quick lunch on Monday?’ Stephen texts the next day, and Jon isn’t but he vows to find a way to clear his schedule because, really, he doesn’t see enough of Stephen these days.
*
The next time
is late one Saturday evening. He finds himself on Jon and Stephen’s beautiful roof terrace, message-filled smartphone in hand half-forgotten as he takes in the empty yellowed sky for a few moments longer.
It appears Stephen is not here, and as soon as Jon discerns this for certain he feels the unmistakable drag of disappointment in his chest. He shouldn’t feel like that; disappointment over an opportunity lost, but the opportunity shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Disconcerted by how quiet it is (the city shouts, of course, and the streetlights muddy that plain sky, but he is high above the sidewalk here), Jon goes inside to locate his laptop and, although feeling guilty for his lack of self-control over not prying, not changing things (surely he’s just passing through for a little while; some strange unscientific quirk, huh, or maybe it’s all a dream), employs some judicious internet searching.
Mr. and Mr. Satire
By Alana Jones
Hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert grant a uniquely candid interview about their relationship and life in late-night.
It is rare for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to discuss the specifics of their relationship. They claim they don’t want such knowledge to interfere with people’s perception of their comedic interaction, although they’re likely to above all wish to maintain their right to a private life off-camera. Not that their shows, The Colbert Report immediately following The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central Mondays through Thursdays, are free from innuendo and implication. Just last week, a photograph of in-character Colbert’s family showed his wife as Stewart in a long blonde wig. It elicited delighted laughter and cheers from the studio audience. “As long as it’s funny, we’ll do it,” Stewart explains. “You’ve got to be able to relinquish your dignity for the sake of a joke. Not that I’ve got much dignity left to speak of.”
“We’re always thinking about making each other laugh, first and foremost,” Colbert adds. “We’ll worry about everyone else later.”
At their request, I meet Stewart and Colbert not at home, where they live together with their three dogs – beyond their spacious Tribeca loft, their portfolio reportedly extends to properties in upstate New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Los Angeles – but in The Daily Show green room. “We don’t do interviews together that often,” Stewart says as he shakes my hand. “I’m going to have to be nice about him for a change.”
I want to know how they met. “The year is 1999,” Colbert begins. “We’re both chillaxing in a Chelsea hotspot. Our eyes meet across the crowded room. It was love at first sight. In 1999, of course, Jon was young and handsome... ” Throughout this riff, Stewart doesn’t stop giggling. Consummate comedians, they regularly lapse back into trying to make the other laugh; you can’t help but notice.
“We actually started dating not long after I started on The Daily Show. I’d not long broken up with my ex-girlfriend, so Steve, Steve Carrell, he was pretty instrumental in setting us up,” Stewart admits after further questioning, but reveals no more about those early days.
What do they say to those who’d like to see them more involved with the gay rights movement? “The LGBT rights movement is an extremely important one,” Colbert answers. “We publicize and satirize it, or more often what it is fighting against, and we support it, as we do many other important causes. On our shows, and personally. But we don’t have to be these great fighters for the cause. To me, this is just my relationship. It’s not a political statement. It’s not a stunt for the liberal media’s gay agenda, you know? And we never want to become the story.”
“That’s why we kept quiet for years,” says Stewart. “Because we thought that was the best way to not steal focus from what the The Daily Show was there to be. That was absolutely our decision to keep quiet, by the way. No-one else’s. It would have probably been hypocritical for us to outright lie about being in a relationship. But no-one ever asked! We made quite a few jokes about it on the show early on, thinking the show wouldn’t last and before anyone had even thought to ask, and nobody noticed! Nobody cared. I mean what were the viewing figures back then? Like, twenty people? The rumors started circulating, of course. When we were asked about it directly, we confirmed we were in a relationship, and suddenly a lot more people knew about us and we had to deal with that. And I think we dealt with it as best as we could without disrupting the shows or our lives too much.”
“It’s not quite how I imagined my life would turn out,” Colbert admits. “But that’s certainly not to say it’s disappointing. I couldn’t have foreseen this level of success, either. It is difficult sometimes, we’ve both got very hectic schedules, jobs we love – and when we see each other at work, it’s usually to talk about work. There are things you lose out on for that. My daughter Madeline and my son Peter, they live with their mom in New Jersey; I see them most weekends.”
Colbert’s fictional pundit persona on the Report is married with kids, though has alluded many times to repressed homosexual tenancies. As a divorced Catholic, could this have been inspired by the real Stephen? “I’ve said this before,” says Colbert, ever so slightly tersely. “I believe you can question the church and still be part of it. I am very happy with my life, and with my faith. The character is ostensibly heterosexual with repressed homosexual thoughts because that is funny, that is satirical; the number of Republicans who abhor homosexuality and then are later revealed to have been soliciting in an airport bathroom or paying for rent boys... You don’t need me to tell you about that.”
By coming out, were they ever worried about losing viewers? “No,” Stewart snorts, a little too defensively. “Have you seen our demographic?”
“Ideally, it shouldn’t be seen as a risk at all,” says Colbert, a little more pragmatically. “But, in our case, we’re lucky to work in an environment where we feel we can answer a question about ourselves honestly and it won’t harm our careers too much. It’s not like we were ever going to be GOP favorites...”
Were things ever awkward when Colbert was a correspondent on The Daily Show? “Well,” Stewart answers, “Sam [Bee] and Jason [Jones; two Daily Show correspondents who married in 2001] work together great and no-one finds that awkward. We were the same.” But this was different: Stewart was Colbert’s boss. “Nobody has ever come to me with any complaints about working for the The Daily Show at that time.” Did either of you ever think about quitting to make things easier? “No, we like working together.” Did the relationship play any part in the birth of The Colbert Report? “No,” Stewart sighs. “Other people agreed Stephen would be great, Stephen had kind of outgrown the show... I didn’t compromise anyone, I went on talent. I never let our relationship interfere with the creative decisions of the show, I assure you.” Stewart continues, frowning and drumming his fingers against the coffee table, so I decide to move on.
Talk turns to the duo’s planned ‘Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ taking place in Washington DC on October 30th, to which a crowd of some twenty five thousand people is expected to attend. “These days, we try not to work with each other too much,” says Stewart. “He’d get sick the sight of me, otherwise.” (At this charge, Colbert over-acts wounded.) “But we’re very excited about the rally. It’s been a lot of hard work putting it together, but I think it’s going to be...”
Jon stops reading for a moment and sits back in the desk chair. The relationship is long-term, their happiness apparently similarly assured. But he’s hardly begun to take it all in before
he’s pushed back to his own kitchen. “Do you want white or red?” his wife is asking him, and it reminds him that, however much hard work he demands of himself, nobody actually expects him to be in two places at once.
*
On Monday, Jon and Stephen are having lunch in Stephen’s office and, despite recent events, Jon is above all simply pleased to have Stephen’s company.
“Preparing for this week’s guests,” Stephen is saying. “Wednesday’s – I’m concerned that she’ll get all amorous like last time.”
“Kissing you.”
“Kissing me, yeah.”
“Kiss me, Stephen!” Jon imitates in a high-pitched voice, swooning dramatically, steadying himself against the back of the chair.
Stephen smirks. “One of these days I will kiss you, Jon.”
Jon, still laughing, rights himself. “We’ve kissed,” he says. (Both worlds, but don’t think about that mindfuck now.) “You’re the most handsy guy I know. With everyone.”
“I mean I’ll kiss you properly,” Stephen replies, his slow smile making something curl dangerously warm inside Jon’s chest.
Jon looks down at his lo mein. “I look forward to it,” he says, and Stephen says “what?”, though that might only be because Jon is speaking so quietly, and–
An intern rushes in with more coffee, and the moment – if it could be called a moment at all, all things considered – passes without further comment.
“But anyway,” Stephen says once the intern’s left. “I wanted to know if you think, on the Report, whether we should–”
Stephen has Jon up against his office door, Jon’s cock fucking Stephen’s tight grasp as Stephen’s murmuring so hot when you- in his ear, and Jon can taste Stephen’s release in the back of his throat, and he’s about to come, and
“Sounds good to me,” Jon says, thrown, heart beating too fast and holding back from saying the don’t fucking stop on the tip of his tongue as he watches a buttoned-up Stephen adjust his glasses with a whole desk between them, as it should be.
And he manages to hold himself together all the way until he’s back at his own desk and he locks the door, hand over his mouth as the other wraps around his dick and, oh, he thinks just after he shuts his eyes and plays the snapshot-scene in his head on loop until he comes over his own fingers, am I in all kinds of trouble now.
*
Tracey... Tracey has underwear that made Jon’s dick show interest just thinking about her in it, still.
Stephen is–
Stephen is Stephen.
*
He’s not cheating on her, he tells himself on a regular basis. He has to behave like the other Jon when he’s over there. It’s not like he can start ranting about parallel universes. He’d get committed. (Then who would do the show? Sam’s been a correspondent for longest, or maybe they could get Steve back somehow, but he would hardly have time to run as well as present it, or the correspondents could take turns, in pairs...)
Still, he often forgets he carries nothing physical over from one world to the other. He thinks she must be able to smell Stephen on him, must be able to tell somehow. But nothing happens, no recrimination, and he feels guilty and relieved all at once.
*
The next time Jon shifts to the other world isn’t until July twenty-sixth,
and he looks down to see an unfamiliar silver-colored band on his left ring finger.
He turns immediately to his search bar, and returns an avalanche of hits: both horror and congratulations, sometimes in the same piece, and articles about what this means for Comedy Central, for Fox News, for comedy, for society, for their relationship. In a corner of the internet that Jon has been told a little about but he does not wish to investigate much further, he finds photos of them edited into collages and saturated to an unnatural brightness, people tapping multiple exclamation-marked messages to each other speculating on the celebration and the honeymoon afterwards, absurdly happy that these people they have never met are finally getting and able to get married.
He finds a blog post from a socialite that sees the occasion as a contrived opportunity to plug her five favorite NYC-based premier kosher catering companies. He reads another article which takes the opportunity to cry nepotism: is their relationship why Colbert got his own show? (No, that was because he’s fucking hilarious, Jon thinks furiously, and vows to follow no more links.) He opens an email from PR at Busboy saying their address has so far been sent nineteen congratulatory bouquets of flowers, eight congratulatory baskets of muffins and one giant heart-shaped cookie from Starbucks and was he interested in taking any of these items home?
He doesn’t reply to it, or any of its kin, and opens up colbertnation.com instead. I’m not getting married to anybody, I don’t know what you’ve heard! the character insists. My marriage to my wife is on solid ground. Solid, unyielding ground. And, well, it looks like she’s never going to forgive me for those emails from my boss she found on my computer, so if I was marrying someone else right now I would of course be feeling incredibly happy and thankful for everyone’s support...” The audience cheers forever and the character disappears as Stephen brightens, both thriving on the applause.
Jon closes his laptop, and stops.
Jon has wondered about this ever since the Act had passed, he has to admit to himself. Now, he sits at his work desk grinning, his head tilted down to hide his smile even in an empty room, feeling elated for Jon and Stephen taking New York up on her offer. Feeling proud.
*
His cell beeps with the sound of a new message. That particular tone, he has come to associate here, means the message is from Stephen.
No problem, put our prodn meeting forward 15 mins. Don’t forget to bring your Shtar Tenaim.
*
They get through the meeting agenda pretty quickly. Stephen hangs back as everyone else is leaving the room, and Jon catches several of the others rolling their eyes.
“Looking forward to tonight?”
“Er, sure. What’s–”
“Good. Because I’d much rather fuck you right now,” Stephen murmurs, and Jon has to bite back the sound he wants to make at Stephen saying that. “You can’t expect to walk around being you all day without eliciting a reaction.”
“Stephen-”
“And by reaction, I mean erection.”
Jon remembers, flushing, that brief moment on the brink of orgasm in Stephen’s office. “I wish we could, but I’m, uh, very busy at the moment.”
“And I’m busy,” Stephen sighs. “We’re always busy. We always said, if we don’t make time for it, it’ll never happen. Hence tonight, but there’s now... I mean, if you’re not in the mood...”
Jon wishes he could say otherwise. “Tonight. Or tomorrow morning.”
“I miss the early days,” Stephen grins suddenly. “When we worked in the same building. When we had some time.”
“Unknowable universe, right?”
“Yeah. But do you remember?”
This Jon, of course, does not remember. “Tell me.”
“You know how it goe- Oh,” Stephen smirks, understanding and misunderstanding him at the same time. "You used to love getting me to come round to your office at lunch time. We didn’t normally eat much lunch. God, yeah, it was just... you’d have me up against the desk, or you’d blow me...”
“I want to suck you off,” Jon says quietly. “I want to, right now.”
“Don’t fucking do this to me, man,” Stephen says. “Or I’ll cancel the bit I should be pre-recording right now and keep you here instead... oh God, I really have to go,” Stephen says, checking his watch and moving back from Jon. “I’ll see you later.”
Jon imitates a clichéd seventies porn soundtrack as Stephen walks out the door. Out of duty, Stephen laughs.
*
“Hi,” Jon says, pleased to see Stephen again, in desperate need of coffee despite having already had his usual two cups that afternoon, and he gives Stephen a quick open-mouthed kiss.
“Hey, since when did you ditch the haphephobia, flinchy?” Stephen says. “We haven’t done that before.”
Wrong Stephen. Ah. He laughs it up, bringing his right hand up to touch his left. No ring once more, as if he needed any further confirmation he was in the wrong place. “No point without an appreciative audience, right?”
(Because too often, between the flirting and the easy company and how much they make each other laugh, far too often, both universes feel exactly the same.)
“Well, not exactly. But there usually is an audience present. I don’t know how appreciative they are.”
Jon makes sure he laughs. “Well, naturally I can’t promise for certain I won’t forget myself in the face of your distracting handsomeness and lunge again, but... ”
Something changes behind Stephen’s eyes, behind Stephen’s glasses. “Seriously, Jon. What do you mean to say?”
It makes Jon want to be truthful, and it’s not like anyone else will hear them.
“I guess I’m saying that, uh, next time you try and kiss me, I won’t pull away.”
Stephen’s laugh, usually so full-hearted, sounds this time utterly mirthless. “So, we’re talking about this now? Now I know you want me to... now I know, I don’t think I can ignore this anymore. I never thought I’d get a chance to have you.”
The humor’s turned so fast to honesty, it’s tripping Jon up. His heart’s in his mouth. Don’t take me away from this, Jon appeals to he-doesn’t-know-what-power when Stephen, very slowly, starts to walk towards him, and it’s strange to see him so hesitant when he is usually the one who always acts so sure.
They are staring at each other as if daring the other one to make the decision on their behalf.
“It’s just once,” Jon says, knowing better. “If we just have one-”
The guilt, Jon thinks as their lips at last meet in their world, is going to do you in.
*
Jon remembers getting the subway back in the days when he both had to get the subway and was able to get the subway, listening to the other passengers on his way to work.
“Daddy, do we get off here?” a young girl had asked once, holding onto her father’s hand on the otherwise-silent subway car.
“Two more stops, honey,” he promises her. “Two more stops and we’ll be there.”
She squirms. “Then why are the doors opening at this one?”
*
Selfish, selfish, selfish. Kids are allowed to be selfish, because they don’t know any better. He’s forty-eight and he’ll never know it all but he knows enough to know that this is wrong.
*
It’s just a kiss, but like an insult said in the heat of an argument they can’t take it back, and it hangs between them to be thought about over and over.
*
Vacation soon, Jon reminds himself when in a rehearsal that’s flagging and sending out for yet more Starbucks. Nearly time for the kids, and the fucking in-laws. And sleep. Loads of sleep.
That night he goes home to his family, but at dawn he feels that dark rush,
and he wakes up with Stephen.
He finds Stephen moves around in his sleep a lot. All pep even when in deep REM he thinks with a wry-happy smile all dawn, putting up a half-hearted fight for his half of the bedcovers.
“I know we weren’t going to,” Stephen says when he wakes up too, “but let’s go away for a couple of days – yeah! – just upstate, and then we come back and do the stupid things we have to do.”
“Cut that romantic bullcrap,” Jon says, looking up at the ceiling, smiling. “You’re delusional.”
“Remember that time I jerked off over you?” Stephen murmurs in his ear. Over you, over your gorgeous mouth,” and Jon aches with imagining and with wanting to remember it. “Unromantic enough for you?”
“Maybe the work can wait,” Jon sighs, overwrought, and he hopes he isn’t screwing over other-Jon’s career commitments. There really was a lot to get done. “New York. Or Charleston, or wherever. I don’t mind.”
“And maybe leave the dogs here this time. Upstate’s good at this time of year,” Stephen says. Then, he looks momentarily awkward. “And I’m really sorry about last night. I know you’re never going to come with me and spend your Sunday mornings... It was a stupid thing to argue about.”
“I’m sorry too,” Jon says, acting yet meaning the words. “Don’t worry, I’ve already forgotten about it.”
They kiss, mouths lazy against each other, Stephen’s hair rumpled against the pillow, and God but Jon wants him.
“Let’s get dressed,” Jon says, rubbing his eyes. “And grab some food, and get going.”
*
And there it is, a well-kept house that must be theirs: New England clapboard in the wilds of New York, brightly built beside a spreading sugar maple, and around them is utter silence.
Here, fall has already begun. They tread through a thick carpet of red leaves to get to the front door.
Some of them get stuck in the wheels of Jon’s suitcase. “City boy,” Stephen tuts good-naturedly as soon as they’re inside and Jon’s trying to toe off the forest floor mush with his shoe, though he soon gets distracted by Stephen spending seconds staring at his lips.
“I want you,” Stephen is saying. “I still want you, all the time. I don’t know how you-”
“You know I’m the same about you,” Jon says, the words spinning from his mouth before he can think about them, and he is unsurprised to find they are true. “I... I’m going to push you against the door right now.”
They kiss, entangled, and Jon feels warmer with every tug of Stephen’s teeth on his bottom lip. He answers in kind, licks into Stephen’s mouth, sucks lightly on Stephen’s tongue. Only the sounds they make (breath; moan; scrape of a hand through his hair) and their heartbeats punctuate the outside’s silence. There’s not even wind through the trees. It is nothing like the city.
“Come upstairs,” Jon says, and Stephen looks to him with distractingly glassy dark eyes and nods.
The bedroom that awaits is large and inviting, getting ever darker as the light starts to fade outside. Designer wallpaper on one wall and a rustic unlit fire like they were in some Vermont honeymoon suite, but the immaculate bedsheets are soon creased by Jon pulling Stephen onto the bed by the hem of his sweater.
Stephen flicks a switch, and they are bathed in low lamplight.
For all their remembered making out and that office encounter that repeatedly sears through Jon’s brain at inappropriate moments, this is the first time they’ve been horizontal and Jon’s been on top of Stephen and taking off his clothes, and in no way wanting them to stop.
Stephen is there, on the bed, as they kiss, each time lingering for longer, and then Stephen is kissing his neck, collar bone, chest as more clothes are discarded.
“So, do you want to fuck me?” Stephen asks, looking up at him from underneath his eyelashes, and Jon’s first thought is yes, of course I do. And then he realizes what Stephen means, and that he has no idea what he’s doing, and that this Jon is supposed to.
“I want you to, uh, fuck me. Actually.” I guess. It’s a quick think, and he is reminded by it that this still isn’t real. This isn’t Stephen, and Jon isn’t risking anything by doing this. And when Jon gets back, Stephen won’t know he’s ever done this.
The way Stephen slowly smiles at Jon’s words, entirely naked now, makes heat rise further in Jon’s belly.
“Then what were you doing up there?” he asks, smoothly switching their positions.
My wife really likes missionary, is Jon’s first thought, and it’s true, but it doesn’t seem appropriate to say.
“Then we’re going to need some of this,” Stephen says, producing a small clear bottle. And his fingers push inside of Jon and, OK, it’s a little weird, but then it feels good.
No condom is produced from the bedside cabinet, and realization comes to him in a dull throb, slowed by his arousal.
“You must really trust me.” (He doesn’t mean to say it out loud.)
“I trust you, if you’re fucking someone else on the side, to tell me how the hell you’ve found the time.”
Jon laughs, and finds what would I do without you thunder involuntarily through his mind. The thought is not a new one, it merely exists now in a different, less platonic context than Jon could have ever anticipated. He almost laughs out loud at that realization too, because it scares him. Away from here, he has a wife and kids and a public reputation (don’t hide behind the comedy now, don’t joke-parry-joke, it is more than a reputation to be funny that you have built up) and back in the real world he cannot fall in love again. He cannot.
He’s too married. He’s too busy. He’s too tired. He’s too old.
“Do you want me to call time out on this and fish out the STD test certificates, Stewart?” Stephen is asking him, those dark eyes disconcertingly searching and close to his (are his pupils really that blown, or is that just a trick of the light?). “Or do you trust me too?”
“I trust you,” Jon says, those words oddly familiar on his tongue he now notices, from all those different contexts, and Stephen says “good, because I’m about to fuck your brains out” and somehow gets away with it and all of Jon’s words disappear once Stephen thrusts inside.
Soon the silence seems much further away: Jon censors his self-censorship and allows himself to gasp embarrassingly as Stephen finds the spot that makes his whole body thrum with shaky pleasure. Stephen comes first, deep and hard and wonderful inside him, grunting as his hand grips tighter on Jon’s shoulder, the feeling of Stephen’s release inside him making Jon feel taken. Near-perfunctory, Stephen withdraws and gets Jon off with his hand, for it doesn’t take much to make Jon come, not with Stephen putting just the right amount of pressure on his cock and looking at Jon like that.
Afterwards, Jon closes his eyes and now all he can hear is the sound of Stephen’s now-gentle breathing, and like this he can believe they could be anywhere.
*
It is nightfall proper when they are awoken from their doze by the noise of something flying into their window.
“Should probably... see what it...” Jon says sleepily, reluctantly, because to stay here is to stay warm and stay with Stephen, but they get up and go outside together.
Beneath the window lies an owl in a fluffy rumpled heap. They don’t get too close.
“It’s moving,” Stephen says. “It’s fine. It’ll come to in a few minutes. Poor thing. We’ll just wait...”
Sometimes being here feels curiously similar, like a slightly extended friendship, because Stephen’s still Stephen and they get along the same, but then Jon looks up at the countryside-darkness and sees for the first time unrecognized constellations, so many crowded clusters of stars. He has not noticed until now that in this world he is under a different sky. And then Stephen places his hand in Jon’s hand.
“Wow,” Jon says, thrown by the unexpected difference, and the fact that he can see any stars at all. “Beautiful.”
“Getting sentimental in your old age,” Stephen says, but he seems taken with Jon’s words.
Underfoot are fallen leaves, and above them all of this.
Jon wasn’t a very good act. He isn’t a very good actor. He’s said so hundreds of times, so it must be true, yet he’s never been kicked off a movie set. So, act.
“I love you,” says Stephen.
They’ve had this exchange before. Pretend you’re just friends. Pretend it’s just a joke.
“I love you too.”
He isn’t lying, that’s the thing. He doesn’t have to dredge up those acting skills after all.
The owl stands; it takes flight for only a few meters into the dark before, still dazed, it hits the ground again, and has to struggle up once more.
“Poor thing,” Stephen says again, but they go back inside. And Jon’s thinking, like every other time, this might be the last time this anomaly happens, this switch. This might be the last time.
When Jon wakes up, he is in Manhattan; he had been so deep asleep he did not even notice the moment he was wrenched back.
His real vacation passes busily, despite how often he has to pull his mind away from where it is not supposed to go.
*
“We’ve got to stop this,” Jon tells Stephen before it’s barely begun (just that kiss in his office, and, worse, he can feel their quotidian touches start to mean something), and Stephen agrees with one eye on his iPhone he’s sliding to unlock, lock, unlock, his three children the appearing, disappearing, appearing wallpaper.
Out of the Adirondack silence, I love you rings in Jon’s ears for a long while afterwards.
*
Never again does Jon get to go to the universe with too many stars in the sky.
He sees Stephen at least twice a week, and they talk about work and smile tightly. He has to remind himself every time that here Stephen isn’t his and never has been. That as far as Stephen is concerned, he has never seen Jon come undone and swear hard in his good ear, never had every inch of skin under his hands, never held him against the wall of the house they share. And it won’t happen again. Jon can’t stop thinking that. Never again.
*
A year passes.
Hopelessly, he still remembers clear as day, a year on. Six transgressions that changed his life.
*
That year passing has allowed him and Stephen to return to all but normal, and the same jokes have crept back. They no longer try to not touch each other, and some days Jon thinks that Stephen must have forgotten.
One year on, and Jon can’t get that damn owl out of his mind.
The return to old habits happens as quickly as it did the first time.
“It’s your birthday soon,” Stephen points out, ostensibly over at Jon’s office to sign some papers. “Fifty years old. Well past it, Jon, in the world of entertainment. Far too old to be fellating powerful TV execs...”
“Are you suggesting... Anyway, I can still get down on my knees! I assure you.”
“You’re scared of fifty,” Stephen says in a sing-song voice. “Go on. I dare you.”
Jon grabs the back of Stephen’s neck and kisses him in his office.
“Uh, yes please,” Stephen says. And it’ll be worth the likely joint pain (the joke’s true, the truth hurts; more’s the pity) just for more of the choke in his voice and the look on his face. Jon kisses Stephen again, harder, before momentarily breaking away to go and lock the door.
And they shouldn’t, he should say right now all the reasons why they shouldn’t. There should be someone to come in right now and say don’t do it! and Jon’s forty nine and he’ll never know it all but he knows enough to know that no-one is going to come in through that locked door.
“Yeah. Yeah, OK-”
Jon pushes Stephen into his desk chair and spreads his legs apart. He’s hard already, Stephen looking up at him flushed and tight-lipped and his own mouth already slick from kissing.
Jon sinks to his knees, between Stephen’s legs.
He pulls Stephen’s pants to his ankles and mouths Stephen’s tenting erection through his underwear, enjoying the way it makes Stephen’s fingers twitch against the arms of the chair, enjoying the feel of him for the first time in so long. Jon wants to think about nothing outside of giving Stephen an incredible orgasm, but, he can’t help thinking, this can’t be the last time now, they’ve got to do this again so he can see Stephen naked, have Stephen inside him again.
Jon has a strangely intoxicating upper hand in this, he realizes, stupidly late, when he touches Stephen in a way that he has grown to find other-Stephen (same Stephen, looks the same, sounds the same, smells the same; was always all too easy to forget) likes and it gives him a rush of confidence and power.
“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Stephen grins, expression warm and wanting. “Sure you’ve never been with a guy before?”
Jon pauses before replying, so Stephen can tell it’s not a joke and because he wonders for a moment whether it counts. “Only one.”
He frowns. “You never said.”
“Not the kind of thing that comes up at writers’ meetings.”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing that comes up in writers’ meetings. On a slow news day, in any case. What the hell else are we going to talk about?”
But Jon’s never done this, this specific act, before.
He pulls down Stephen’s boxers and Stephen’s cock bobs free, and Jon wants to do this, he really wants to, that’s the thing. Spit-slick, he takes as much of Stephen as he can, and hope no-one but him hears the noises Stephen makes. It’s not too bad, he could get the knack for it, although he’ll have to watch the neckache. Next time, he’ll get a cushion.
He’s taking most of Stephen in his mouth with each movement of his head now, one hand on the soft hair-scratchy skin of Stephen’s inner thigh, and it’s wonderful for them both to be giving in, to make Stephen feel like this, to have Stephen again after all this time; this is what they’d been missing, when Jon had called him friend for all that time but always felt they could have had just a little more.
“Jon-” Stephen says, words part-lost. “I’m-”
Most of it he manages to swallow, but a little more smears against his lips. They end up looking at each other, both breathing heavily, Jon carefully getting to his feet and licking his fingers clean, Stephen watching.
“I wasn’t expecting you to actually do it,” Stephen says, his smile pleased but odd. His eyes are heavy lidded from the insouciance of orgasm as he looks at Jon, slightly flushed in the cheeks. “I was just making a joke.”
“But you weren’t, were you,” Jon replies.
*
Swapping between universes: could have it all, for a while. And now this isn’t quite the same, it’s an affair, no two ways about it. Couldn’t have it all forever here, either, not with this Stephen, his Stephen. Something would have to give.
But it might just be worth it, whatever happens, this tentative start of something new. A relationship he’ll remember the beginning, middle and end of, however it pans out. His life, his decision, not borrowing someone else’s.
It’s far from ideal.
*
What relationship that lasts begins in winter? Time of snow on the ground and dead plants everywhere, and desperate holiday hook-ups to take you through to the Times Square kiss.
It’s not death and desperation, Stephen would say. It’s holidays and happiness.
They fall into a routine troublingly easily. Every so often – not too often, wouldn’t do to take anything for granted, now, and they have busy lives anyways – they book a hotel room under a false name. Occasionally it’s more frenzied, a proper office getting off, but it’s risky to do that unless it’s in the middle of the night, and maybe even then.
Their first time in a hotel, when they finally get to it, is the first time they fuck each other and it’s mesmerizing, and makes Jon think of the house in the woods except he can hear Manhattan traffic and there is much less familiarity and they use a condom, as if he needs reminding that after this they need to leave hurriedly.
Jon fucks Stephen hard once he’s sure Stephen's all right with it, blinds closed even on the thirty-ninth floor and Stephen’s fingers in Jon’s mouth to stop him making too much noise. Hard, wanting to feel Stephen, wanting Stephen to feel him. Wanting to connect and reconnect and wanting to come–
“Cunt,” Jon swears under his breath, unable to stop watching the way Stephen’s mouth opens to grunt at his every thrust. “Motherfucker.”
He withdraws as soon as he’s finished, condom coming off his softening cock, and pulls Stephen up to meet his mouth as he pushes Stephen firmly against the headboard. “Love,” he manages to say between kisses, Stephen’s cock still hard against Jon’s stomach, and Stephen says “yes”.
*
Afterwards, there is silence. No jokes – neither familiar friendship or distancing humor – or regret. And this silence does not have the warmth of Jon and Stephen’s sugar maple silence, because it has consequence.
*
“I wonder, sometimes,” Stephen says when they’re lying naked together afterwards, “whether people... you know, people whose lives that are too good, end up self-destructing. Because they’re guilty.”
“Or people just want each other,” Jon quietly replies. “If this is just a fuck to you,” he continues, not caring if his voice sounds rough, “then of course it isn’t worth it. If this is just a fuck, then go and don’t come back and we can forget about it."
“I’m not going anywhere,” Stephen says, looking sad and tired but looking right at him, and they both feel the weight of his words in the small room. “And we can’t forget about it. We already tried that.”
*
“But you have to go somewhere,” Jon says, checking the screen on his cell. “We have to leave here in ten minutes.”
“I wish I wasn’t going anywhere, then,” Stephen amends, but Jon knows it’s far more complicated than that, anyway.
*
“I sort of skipped into another universe,” Jon would say.
“‘Skipped’? Like a child?” And then Jon would laugh at the thought of himself skipping.
“Like a record. And it was the same, except we were already together there. Had been for years. And... and I saw, when we went to this place we had upstate, and I looked up. There were different stars in the sky.”
Then there would be an awkward pause, and then Stephen would laugh. Strike, parry.
Because telling him this would be an impossible thing, but now Jon has lived through an impossible thing he might try to tell him, after all. One day.
*
At twelve twenty four p.m., Jon and Stephen are having lunch.
“So, I mean, where does this go?” Jon says. “Our life? Where do we end up?”
“I don’t know. I mean, we’re famous and successful millionaires. I think this is pretty much it.”
“This is it?” Jon says thickly through his latest mouthful. “This is the zenith? What, me sitting at your desk, eating a Subway Melt? That’s not very climactic.”
“This isn’t the end. It’s just another moment. It’s going to be the same job for a while. The same stuff. But it’s goddamn good stuff.”
Jon’s happy to no longer be living in two worlds: it’s disorientating, and confusing, and not even fucking believable, and he still wonders sometimes whether he’d gone mad and he’s made the whole thing up.
He is still in two worlds, in a new sense: there is his family, and there is Stephen.
Can’t entertain the debate too long, got to have an opinion, got to come down on one side. (News moves so fast now.) One day (one day, not yet; God, I’m a coward) he will have to stop, pick a winner, extricate himself from being in between. He hasn’t got a chance.
“Do we have time now?” Stephen asks, a glint in his eyes that rightfully belongs on a man twenty years younger, Jon thinks.
“Right now?” Jon says, feeling a twist in his gut from the bad and the good (and for one wild moment he thinks he’s returning to the impossible universe after a wait of so many years). The door is still locked (he checks) and Stephen can still make his heart beat faster through the mere power of suggestion. Across his lips stretches a well-worn well-practiced smile. “Yeah. I think I could find some time.”