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Zach could be in any crowd, anywhere. It’s one of those kinds of nights, generic somehow. How can it possibly be 2016? Feels more like 2002, 2009. He’s pretty sure 2016 isn’t actually a real year. Fuck, he’s old.
He has no idea whose party this is. Someone in the group from dinner--Corey and a bunch of other people--insisted they needed to stop by. Miles is out of town, and Zach had felt a little buzzed and energized after dinner at a buzzy and energetic place in the East Village.
Now he's lost everyone he came with among the surging crowd, densely packed against the cold.
The place is an industrialist loft space with a grungy cement floor and truly deafening acoustics. The party is a mix of people who look New York--a sea of textured, architectural black, shocks of white hair-- and people who look if not LA, specifically, then at least out of place: cardigans and jewelry and golden tans in January.
Given that demographic, he really shouldn't be so surprised when he sees someone familiar in his peripheral vision.
Zach’s squeezing out of the kitchen when he catches sight of him through the cracked door to a bedroom, talking to someone and laughing. Overgrown swoop of burnished hair, requisite cardigan, jeans falling off those narrow hips. Classic white sneakers that Zach also owns, and isn’t that endearing. He’s recognizable anywhere.
Zach decides not to say anything right away. Just circle.
He takes a first swallow of his beer and leans back to watch Chris.
It's been a couple of months since they really talked. It’s an unusually long time for them. He’s been feeling it on a daily basis; Chris’s absence from his life is a constant, regular pang of guilt and apprehension.
That last time, Chris was 3 AM fucked-up, Zach remembers. 3 AM Chris always was touchy as hell. He’d been casually all over Zach in the pulsing darkness of some Dubai VIP section.
Zach hadn't been sober either, and the heaviness of the alcohol had churned with the growing frustration and irritation he felt at Chris for touching him like this. Pushing him.
They’d had a clear understanding that this wasn't going to happen again, now.
So Chris’s hand strumming the back of Zach's neck, combing through the hair at his nape, turning Zach’s hands over in his own like Chris wanted to twine his fingers there--it was dangerous. Stupid.
That realization, that sudden anger at Chris for his recklessness, was what had made Zach snap. He’d grabbed Chris’s hands, viper-fast, balling them into fists and holding them shut inside his palms.
Chris had shut up, mouth dropping open, right in the middle of some story Zach hadn't been able to pay attention to. His eyes had been wide and confused.
Zach had squeezed Chris’s fists. “Can you--I need you to keep your hands to yourself.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.” Chris’s breath had hitched. “I just.”
Zach had waited a beat. “You just what?”
“I don’t know.” Chris had still been looking at him miserably. “I have no idea.”
“You just what? Has something changed?” Zach had tightened his grip on Chris. “Because if not--”
Chris had shaken his head, looked down at their joined hands. “I know. Shit, I’m sorry. Everything’s just so fucked up right now. I wish--”
The unfinished thought had hung in the air between them. Chris hadn't met Zach’s eyes again, but Zach had felt his hands fidgeting. He’d felt Chris’s palpable misery.
Zach’s muscle memory had wanted to gather Chris to him, make it better. But doing that would have been--not a great idea. Which Chris should have known; and yet he couldn't seem to stop putting Zach in this position.
At the thought, Zach’s jaw had tightened. “Don’t you think you've had enough, Christopher?”
“What?” Chris’s head had snapped up. He’d looked shocked.
“I mean, I knew sobriety was never going to be your thing. But--” Zach had glanced at the depleted bottle service at their table.
Chris had yanked his hands away. “Wow. Thanks for the lesson in morality .” His face had started to flush red. “Good thing you’re here to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
Zach remembers feeling like Chris had slammed on a lever, the danger level of their conversation suddenly setting off deafening alarm bells.
He’d felt whiplashed, hearing Chris throw that in his face. Zach was extremely aware of his own track record of failure at many things, monogamy simply being the most significant and recent.
Had he stepped into an alternate universe at some point in the last two minutes? Somewhere where he and Chris were bitter nemeses?
“I am trying to be better,” Zach had gritted out, at a loss.
He’d watched Chris weigh how to respond. 3 AM Chris won out.
“Yeah? That’s not what I heard.” Mouth set, Chris had turned back to the bottle service, doling out two sloppy Patrón shots. They’d reeked. “I heard under all the crystals-and-shamans shit, you’re pretty much exactly the same as you’ve always been. Only difference is he actually believes you’re going to change.”
Zach had been speechless. Chris had shoved one of the shots at Zach, holding his own up in challenge.
“Hey, let’s toast to trying. You know.” Chris had snorted. “Giving it our best shot.”
Zach’s vision had blurred, static roaring in his ears. He’d pulled his hat down further to cover the dumb hair and eyebrows and stood. He'd left the shot untouched.
Normally, he would have ended the night by asking someone to take care of Chris, making Chris promise to text when he got home. Too often, he’d provide a personal escort. But that night, he’d stormed out of the club in a seething silence.
At the time, he’d hoped Chris wouldn’t remember in the morning. Zach certainly wished he didn’t remember, wished he’d taken that shot and several others to Eternal Sunshine the whole thing from his brain. The memory was a raw, open wound, still only barely scabbed over.
Since then, Chris had texted him once: Happy new year. Zach had seen it a few minutes after midnight, in a moment away from revelry. He’d tried to come up with a response other than you too and failed, and in the end he hadn’t even sent that until the next morning.
Zach is still trying to be better, using Chris’s words to fuel his zeal. Definitely not succeeding, but trying. Some mornings, as he leaves another hotel in his own city to head home, he thinks I’m giving it my best shot and laughs at himself.
Tonight, though. Tonight, he and Chris are one-on-one again. They're in this unknown place in an anonymous crowd in a year that might or might not be 2016. The party suddenly feels a lot less generic.
Zach watches Chris bend over--which he can’t say he doesn’t appreciate--and stand back up. The girl he’s talking to inside the room is facing Zach; she looks like she’s barely out of NYU, leather overalls and two nose rings. She bends over too. When she stands, she closes her eyes, tips her head back and wipes her nose. Then she leans up close to Chris, whispers something in his ear, hand on his bicep.
Zach can feel one of his eyebrows arching up into his hairline.
Chris laughs loudly. Zach can picture his eyes crinkling, whole face creasing from his huge white smile. Chris takes something from the girl and hugs her, kissing her on the cheek.
Then Chris backs out of the room, pocketing whatever he just took. When he turns around, he’s directly in Zach’s line of sight, close enough to reach out and touch. His mouth shapes into a cartoonish O.
They stand there for a second while Zach waits to see how Chris is going to play this off.
“Hey,” Chris says, lamely, and Zach can already smell the bourbon on his breath.
“Hey,” he mimicks.
Chris looks both hopeful and wary. More than that, he looks tired, his eyes bloodshot over his half-smile and stubble. He’s not 3 AM Chris yet, but he’s clearly en route.
Zach takes a step forward into Chris’s space. “Let’s go.”
Chris looks like he’s about to protest. And then he folds, nodding once and pushing past Zach toward the door.
--
They go to Chris’s hotel. Because it’s closer, because even though Miles is out of town it feels wrong right now to take Chris home, and because of Zach's morbid schadenfreude.
In the car over, Zach asks, “Who was that?”
“Um, Rachel something? Someone Vail knows. She told me to come.” Chris is messing with his phone, fidgeting.
“Still with the Vanderpump thing, Pine?” The words come out less chiding and more affectionate than Zach intended. But Chris doesn’t look at him, and he says nothing in response.
Weird ongoing Bravolebrity obsession aside, it’s not really like Chris to party in strange cities with friends-of-quasi-friends. But Zach knows it wasn’t social interaction Chris was craving tonight.
They pass one of Zach's favorite restaurants--somewhere he's taken Chris before. It’s crowded and lively, warm candlelight spilling out onto the sidewalk. He thinks about the night they went, how Chris had laughed so hard at one point he’d gone boneless and slid off the banquette and under the table.
“Were you going to tell me you were in town?”
In the silence that follows, he wills Chris toward honesty. He thinks the truth would sound something like Well, I’m kind of in the middle of a downward spiral and didn't want you to notice, so no, of course I wasn’t going to tell you, but instead Chris just holds his closed fist against his mouth and looks out the window.
“Sorry. I didn't really think about it. Figured you'd be busy.”
“Bullshit,” Zach says, too fast. He gets the weird urge to poke Chris, literally jab him with a finger, make him look at Zach, make him react. But he doesn’t, and Chris doesn’t.
They don't say anything else until they get up to Chris’s suite at the Bowery.
It's not a disaster zone, but there's something desolate about it. Chris hasn't really unpacked except for a garment bag in the closet, the bed is rumpled and there’s a depleted fifth of bourbon on the coffee table.
Wordlessly, they both shrug out of their coats. The way Chris takes Zach’s without asking and hangs it up in the closet is sweet and incongruous, and Zach firmly wipes a small, involuntary smile off of his face.
The room is warm and winter-dry. Chris takes off his cardigan too, throws it toward his suitcase. He’s wearing one of his stretched-out white t-shirts. Zach can see the lines of his collarbones through the thin fabric.
Then Chris ducks into the bathroom and comes out with his dopp kit and two glasses. He gives Zach a challenging look as he starts to lay out the kit’s contents on the coffee table in the center of the room. Pipe, lighter, rolling papers.
He pulls what he’d gotten from Rachel--a baggie and a little vial--out of his front pocket and adds those to the pile. He fills one of the glasses with bourbon, then hesitates.
“You want anything?” Chris says. He turns toward Zach awkwardly, as though he’s not sure what to do with his body in relation to Zach’s.
Zach has no idea what he wants. He says, “I'm good.” He tugs off his hat.
Chris sits down on the low sofa, knees splayed wide in his dark jeans, familiar ones. He starts packing a bowl and is quiet for a minute before looking up at Zach. His brow creases. “What’s up?”
Zach lets out the breath he didn’t know he was holding, suddenly aware of how strange it is for him to just stand there staring at Chris. It’s not like they haven’t retreated to a million hotel suites over the past eight, nine years and acted out a version of this blocking. But this time isn’t the same.
He ambles over to the sitting area and takes the chair opposite Chris. He’s still holding his hat, just some old one that he’d grabbed before leaving for dinner. His hair probably looks like shit from being stuffed under it all night. He runs a hand through it self-consciously, although of course Chris’s hair also looks ridiculous. It’s so long now, shadowing Chris’s whole face as he concentrates on the contents of the table.
Chris lights the pipe and sits back. He inhales and exhales without looking at Zach again. “You’re in rehearsals, right?” His voice is a little reedy from the smoke.
“Yeah, it’s going well,” Zach says meaninglessly. He wonders if Chris has thought about even coming to the show. There was a time when he would have assumed, or at least just asked, but now he feels discomfited at the idea of voicing that question.
Chris takes another hit, and this time he meets Zach’s eyes. Zach is struck again by how tired Chris looks, how--not old, exactly, but aged, and worn. He’s mostly clean-shaven, but the light stubble is silvery. His eyes are made bluer by their red rims. He just looks fucking ragged. Zach’s chest tightens.
Silently, Chris raises his eyebrows at the pipe in the universal expression for wanna hit this? Zach does. He wants to share. He takes the pipe and lighter.
The weed is decent, sweet and fiery in his lungs. Zach can feel something unlock a little inside him. It’s whittling away at the resentment and anger he’s been feeling toward Chris for months, reducing it to regret and striking sparks along the baseline desire that’s always there.
Zach meets Chris’s eyes as he returns the pipe, their fingers brushing slightly. He wishes he really were a touch telepath, wishes Chris could understand everything just from that contact.
If Chris hears him, feels him, he doesn’t react. He takes the last hit in the bowl and repacks it.
Then, with casual precision, he picks up the vial of white powder and taps a solid dusting on top of the weed, patting his pinky carefully around the rim to catch the excess.
When he’s done, Chris rubs his little finger between his upper lip and gum in a gesture so absentminded and obscene that Zach has to close his eyes and resist the urge to adjust himself.
"Spare me, please.” Chris doesn't quite roll his eyes at Zach, but when he lifts the pipe to his mouth his look at Zach is enervated.
Zach huffs out a tired laugh and holds up his hands. “Far be it from me. You call the shots, Pine.”
Chris shakes his head. He snaps the lighter open and lets the flame dance across the weed and coke for a second before torching them. The hit he takes is long and deep, deeper than on the first round, and Zach's impressed when he doesn't even cough after. Zach would have. Fuck, Chris.
Chris does make a soft, wet hiccuping sound as he exhales that makes Zach want to--reach out and... something. Something to defuse this unbearable fucking tension, something to make Chris stop the pathetic self-destructive shit he’s doing right now. But he doesn't.
Chris puts down the pipe and picks up his bourbon. He drinks most of it in one go.
When Chris speaks again, there’s a weird brightness in his voice. "So how are things with you? Second person plural?"
The rawness of their last conversation had made Zach afraid Chris might broach this tonight, but it still blindsides him when it actually happens, sends a cold feverish frisson over his skin.
He lets out a breath and rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. Well. Things. They’re… not great.
The apartment has made shit with Miles both harder and also weirdly easier. Harder because their open relationship has, in practice, always been more in Zach's interest. Miles doesn’t exactly reciprocate.
And their cohabitation makes the pretense that Zach isn't with other people multiple times a week something fragile and pointless.
Zach is a regular at every painfully cool hotel south of 14th. He likes to turn on all the lights and have a trick press himself up against the skyline where anyone could theoretically see. He likes to sit across the room, fully dressed, and watch a trick finger himself open.
It still works. The flood of self-loathing afterward hasn’t stopped him yet. And Chris wasn't wrong--all the psychedelic self-discovery experiences he's had haven't managed to fix him.
The Bowery is off-limits, though. This is Chris’s territory, and the backdrop of a hundred memories that Zach wants to protect. And of course, Chris isn’t getting off on the view from this room. He's got the curtains mostly drawn, letting in a single stray beam of moonlight.
The apartment has made things easier for Zach, too. Because he’s been afraid for a long time of what will happen when the glamour fades enough for Miles to see the truth and inevitably leave him. But lately, he’s more and more certain their days are numbered, and that makes things less terrifying somehow. It’s just a matter of time.
And when Miles gives up, Zach will be back to having the life he deserves.
Zach had kind of been hoping, he’s realizing now, that moving in with Miles might be the cure he’d been searching for. But he still finds himself waking up in the same hotel rooms, watching the sunrise alone.
He’s not even close to better than Chris. Definitely worse, in fact, since Chris has been doggedly determined not to drag anyone else into his downward spiral.
Zach wipes his hands down his face, steepling them under his chin. He eyes the shadows and planes of Chris’s' profile. Chris turns his head slightly and the lone beam of moonlight slices across his face in a slim arc, straight through his left iris, turning it an unearthly silvery blue.
Zach realizes he hasn't said anything in a few minutes. The shock has subsided into an urge to be honest with Chris, the only person who'd be hard pressed to judge him.
When Zach finally swallows around the lump in his throat it's painful and audible. He can’t quite get the words out. "I, uh. I don’t know. I think… I think soon he’ll realize that he doesn't want what I want."
Chris's dilated eyes snap onto his; they’re a little anisocoriac right now, as if maybe he rubbed one, and Zach is tractor-beam mesmerized.
Chris doesn't need to say anything. His accusation is palpable . You couldn't stop either.
Zach shakes his head minutely. His disheveled hair flops down across his line of sight.
He feels sick.
And Chris... Chris looks like he wants to break Zach's fucking neck, but there's also something else there. Something vengeful. Like maybe Chris wants to drag someone down with him after all.
He holds Chris’s gaze for a long, fraught beat.
"And what do you want?" Chris says, his voice low, hoarse and barely audible.
Zach presses his fingers into his pursed lips. He tries not to look as defeated and raw as he feels.
In the tense silence, Chris repeats his little ritual, and this time he tips an extra bump out of the vial, fishes a plastic rod out of the dopp kit and sniffs that, too, before he frosts and lights the pipe. He screws his eyes shut as he exhales faint smoke.
Chris is sprawled back in his chair, position belying the thrumming energy Zach's picking up from him, ramping up with each hit.
Chris slowly puts down the pipe. He stands up across the table, looking down at Zach. The look on his face is thunderous.
Chris reaches back and pulls off his threadbare t-shirt and drops it in a crumpled pile on the floor. He’s jacked right now, but still holding himself in his vaguely sheepish way. Like he’s kind of embarrassed about it. Oh, this? It’s for a role.
"Okay." Chris says. "Let's find out."
He picks up the vial.
Then, not breaking eye contact, he stretches out on his back on the unmade bed, just a step away. Zach's forced to turn and watch, helpless.
Propped up on one elbow, Chris tips the vial a few degrees and paints out a thick, snowy line right down his own sternum. His skin is flushed red against the white sheets. Chris’s chest is smooth and filled out in the dim light, and Zach can feel his mouth watering.
Chris’s lips part just a bit, flash of white teeth, but he doesn’t say anything.
Zach’s body seems to stand up and move to the bed of its own volition. His hand drops to the comforter near the jut of Chris’s deep-cut transversus abdominis, almost making contact.
He feels like he’s dropping out of warp, like everything that transpired since the last time they touched--years ago, too rushed, too drunk, too scared, not even close to enough--was just filler, killing time until this moment.
“Come on.” Chris gives him a taut, ugly smile. “You wanna do it with a hundred or something?”
Zach’s slowly moving hand freezes.
“See, I know you.” Chris’s smirk deepens. “Even at your nadir.”
Zach raises an eyebrow and his mouth drops open. Chris’s continued eloquence in this situation is twisting something inside of him.
He hears himself speak, deep and disjointed and punched-out, and doesn’t know where it’s coming from.
“Elaborate.”
Chris has the thumb of his free hand in his mouth, again absentmindedly, as though he’s not purposely drawing the pad back and forth across his swollen, pinking lower lip.
“Just pretend. A game,” Chris says. “It could be like I’m one of them.”
Even with all the shit Zach has done, he only tried heroin once, fifteen years ago, and he still remembers the experience in crisp high definition. Specifically, the terrifying euphoria, feeling like the universe of his brain was reversing to the Big Bang, billions of pleasure synapses all firing at once, flooding him with arousal and emptying his lungs of air.
Listening to Chris offer to roleplay as Zach’s trick as casually as if he were suggesting a fucking brunch place might be better than that.
Zach’s amygdala stutters into motion before his prefrontal cortex can reorient its world around this revelation. His hand, once shy, grabs Chris’s hip hard enough to bruise. He leans down like a vampire over Chris’s chest.
No, he does not want to do it with a hundred, fuck you very much, Christopher.
He depresses one nostril and inhales up Chris’s hot, reddened skin, the familiar tang of the powder reverberating through his system. He slides his hands to frame Chris’s ribcage, feels Chris’s heartbeat, too fast, and breath catching erratically under him. He’s watching Zach with a mix of disbelief, fear and unmistakable want.
They hold there for a moment, chests rising and falling rapidly, staring at each other like they’re going to find any answer except how epically fucking fucked they both are.
Zach slides his hand up Chris’s convulsing throat and over his beautiful jawline into his long hair. He gathers it, bronze and clean, makes a fist and pulls, hard. The noise he elicits from Chris is a choked sob.
Chris’s eyes are watering. Zach catalogues that and crushes his face to Chris’s, the excess coke filtering into their kiss, and Chris licks eagerly at Zach despite the tears.
Chris says something when they separate to gasp for air, but Zach can’t hear him at first over the blood rushing in his ears. “Huh?”
Chris noses into Zach’s ear, prickly cheek sticking to Zach’s a little. “I said, how do you want me?”
Zach leans away. “What? Chris--”
“I want to make sure you get your money’s worth.” Chris slides a hand up the front of Zach’s sweater, thumbing the weft.
Zach just stares at him, stricken.
But Chris is on a roll. He insinuates his hands between Zach’s undershirt and his skin, rucking both up, and kneels so they’re eye level again.
“Just pretend. Tell me what you like.”
There’s a drying tear track out of Chris’ dilated right eye. Zach feels a rush of protective affection for this brilliant messy idiot, which makes no sense because he also wants to scream at him and bruise him everywhere. Permanently. Super healthy.
His brain, faced with this conflict, shuts down.
Zach pushes Chris back and gathers Chris’s closed fists inside his own hands.
All the bluster goes out of Chris. His heart is still pounding, rabbit-fast. Zach can feel it in the pulse points on his wrists.
“Don’t touch me until I say you can,” Zach says softly. “And take off the rest of your clothes.” Slowly, he unwraps his hands from around Chris’s.
Chris exhales shakily and gets to work on his button fly. He stands up and shucks the jeans off.
Zach breathes in and out, slowly, deliberately. “Now make me believe that you want it.”
He can see the words hit Chris through the haze, the moment where his eyes widen and his lips part. But whatever Chris might have been about to say, he clearly thinks better of it. His expression morphs into something like resignation.
Chris maintains eye contact as he moves his hands to his tented briefs and slowly, shyly, removes them. He moves to cover, or at least put a hand on himself, and then seems to suddenly remember the role he’s supposed to be playing.
He visibly changes his stance, tilting his hips forward and wrapping a swaggery hand around his hard-- fucking huge-- cock. It’s adorable and Zach’s not sure he’s ever wanted anyone as much as he wants Chris in this surreal moment.
They watch each other for another beat before Zach remembers his role. He wishes he could make Chris stand in this window, pressed up against the cold glass, touching himself, blushing with the risk. Zach has a usual protocol in this situation. But this isn’t the usual situation; this is Chris. His overwhelmed brain is struggling to take the lead.
He tells Chris to get on his knees.
Zach has been hard for a while now. He exhales, cupping himself as he settles at the edge of the bed.
“Take me out,” he tells Chris. At Chris’s expression--apprehensive and hungry--he says, “Come on. You know what you’re doing.”
Chris looks away and bites his lip.
“You can touch. Just for this,” Zach says.
Chris runs one hand up the inside of Zach’s leg, reverent on the fitted denim, and lets out a small, tight breath. His chest is pumping in a shallow rhythm.
He mirrors the movement with his other hand, and they meet at the stretched seam between Zach’s legs. Chris slowly blinks up at Zach, lids heavy, long lashes sweeping his cheeks. He thumbs open the button and pulls at the zipper.
Zach cants his hips up so Chris can tug his jeans down, just barely out of the way. Chris watches Zach’s face as he reaches into his briefs and closes a fist around Zach’s cock. He lifts it out with that same reverence. Zach’s fully hard, pulsing in Chris’s hand.
It’s the first time Chris has really gotten to see Zach like this, and he looks starstruck. His expression is glazed, mouth open, tongue darting out to wet his lips. He looks so gorgeous that Zach has to close his eyes, wanting to preserve this image for the rest of his life.
Suddenly, he doesn’t want Chris to perform. It’s not that Chris is unsure--Zach's pretty certain he does know exactly what to do. But he doesn’t want whatever persona Chris is planning to wear to please him. He just wants Chris, weird and shy and vulnerable and brave.
He doesn’t know how to tell Chris that. Instead, he runs a hand through Chris’s hair again, fingers pressing hard on his scalp, and strokes back around to tilt Chris’s chin up. “Hands off now. Okay?”
Chris’s forehead creases, but he pulls his hands back. He actually presses them in between his knees like a little kid. He doesn’t touch himself either, even though Zach notices that he’s rock hard too, leaking onto his abs, precome mixing with the light sheen of sweat. If Zach hadn’t already been painfully aroused, that sight alone would have done it.
Chris hasn’t taken his wide, anxious eyes off Zach’s cock.
Zach fists himself like a warning, trying to preventatively flood his mind with the will to not come as soon as Chris’s lips close around him. This is only going to happen once, he thinks. It shouldn’t even be happening now. He wants to make it last and he knows he’s barely holding it together.
With the hand resting on Chris’s chin, he coaxes him forward, tugging slightly on his jaw. Open wide. He hears and feels Chris let out a shuddery sigh.
When he pushes inside, he rubs the head of his cock up against the roof of Chris’s mouth, spongy and hot. Chris makes an aborted noise, a whimper, that vibrates against Zach and almost does him in right there.
He wants to ask You okay? but doesn’t. Instead, he wraps his hand around the back of Chris’s head, tangled in his long hair, and pulls him forward onto his dick. He feels himself slide back into Chris’s open throat.
“Yeah, yes. You really--jesus--”
Chris’s eyes slowly close. He has to breathe more deeply now. Zach can see him focusing on not gagging, trying so hard, and without realizing it finds himself stroking Chris’s cheek, feeling the shape of his cock distorting it. He sees Chris’s eyes starting to water again.
Zach probably has a minute at best until he loses his tenuous control and comes all over Chris’s pained, earnest face. He leans one hand back, bracing himself on the bed, and sets up a rough cadence, urging Chris forward again and again, hitting his tonsils harder and harder.
He’s fucking Chris’s face . The room swims in front of him. Chris is making more of those small, wet noises in time with Zach’s movement. They're really not helping Zach hold back.
Precome and spit coat his cock and Chris’s face, more splashing out with each thrust, and Chris’s eyes are watering too, tears leaking onto his cheeks. He’s giving it his all, breathing heavily through his nose, only gagging on the hardest thrusts. It’s a gold-star performance, but it’s also totally authentic, nothing pretend about it.
It’s exactly what Zach wanted. He’d been resigned to never seeing this, never seeing anything close to this, and he’s got no idea how this is happening right now, or why, and he’s right there on the edge, trying desperately to hold on so it doesn’t have to end. “Fuck yes,” he says. “Shit, so good, so pliant for me, the way you take it. I’ve never--”
With the slight awareness he has left, he sees Chris reach up to palm his own dick, and he nudges him with his foot, still in its boot. “Not yet,” he manages, and Chris shoves his hand back between his knees. He honest-to-god blushes, ashamed, squeezing his eyes shut around more tears, and that’s what does it for Zach.
His body curves down over Chris’s, both hands in Chris’s hair and on his face, and he fucks up into Chris’s perfect mouth in a final, sustained thrust. He can’t remember ever coming this hard, feels like everything inside and out, all the anger and regret and desire and loss between them is pumping in thick, powerful spurts down Chris’s throat. Pretty fucking therapeutic.
Zach hears himself groan deep in his chest. It’s a helpless, desperate sound; not part of the protocol.
When the spasms slow, he pulls back, panting, dragging his softening cock over Chris’s cheek and chin. Chris looks completely debauched. His lips are pornographically puffy and his face is pink and shiny with fluid. His hands have come out from between his thighs and are gripping his knees, digging in enough to whiten the skin.
He’s so hard it looks like it hurts, and he’s somehow even bigger than before, swollen and dark with blood. Zach kind of can’t believe how much Chris has dripped on himself. It’s pooling on his stomach and soaking into the hair at his groin.
He forces his breathing to slow, trying to find his assertiveness, step into his character. It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle to even think.
“Unh,” Chris says, high-pitched and incoherent, coming back to himself. He wipes a hand over the mess on his face. His eyes flutter up to Zach’s.
“Zach. Can I--”
“No,” Zach says, because he doesn’t trust Chris not to come in seconds, not with how close he is right now. And if Chris comes, he thinks, that might be the end of this.
Chris looks crestfallen. He makes his hands into fists again, nails biting into his palms, trying to take the edge off.
It helps, to watch Chris like that, because it turns Zach’s longing into resentment of the fact that he only gets this once: when Chris is spiraling and he’s taking advantage.
Zach strips off his damp shirt and sweater and stands up, toeing off his boots, shoving off his briefs and jeans. He sits back against the headboard, halfway propped up against the pillows, and notes the starved look on Chris’s face as he stares at Zach’s body.
“I want you to come up here,” he says. “But you need to control yourself.”
Poor word choice, Zach thinks as the words linger between them.
Chris nods. “Okay.” He clambers up, hands and knees next to Zach, looking down at him with anxiety and a puppyish hope. Gravity makes the precome on his stomach drool down onto his balls and toward the sheets. Chris doesn’t seem to notice. Zach can feel his spent dick twitch in response.
He has a sudden clarity about what he wants to do next, and feels a shiver of adrenaline run through him at the thought. Something he’s thought about in fantasy probably a hundred times. They’ve always been too rushed.
“Turn around,” Zach says. As Chris does, he reaches out, pulling one of Chris’s thighs over to the opposite side of Zach’s chest. So Chris is straddling him, and his ass is in Zach’s face.
Zach draws the hand on Chris’s thigh upward and over the hot skin. Then he slaps him, hard enough to form a white handprint.
He’s envisioned that more times than he can count, and impossibly, he feels himself getting hard again already.
Chris looks back at him hesitantly. His thighs are shaking under Zach’s hands with strain and arousal. Zach maintains eye contact as he uses his hand to urge Chris back toward him.
Chris lets out a rattly, short breath. “Are you sure?”
“What was it you said earlier? Tell me what you like? ” Zach says. “I’m telling you. Now do your job.”
Chris shudders, but he relaxes into Zach’s grip, letting his head hang down between his shoulders.
Zach takes a solid ten seconds to calm down. He tries to ignore the coke-fueled impulse to freak the fuck out because he’s about to make Chris Pine ride his face.
When he leans in, sinks his teeth into the inside curve of Chris’s left cheek and starts to suck at the skin, Chris lets out a loud, shocked gasp and falls to his elbows. One hand flies to the root of his dick. Zach can see him squeezing there, trying to hold off. As Zach works on the hickey, he sets up a demulcent pattern with his hands on Chris’s ass, soothing in contrast to the bite, dipping his thumbs closer and closer together on each pass.
He pulls off and looks at the darkening bruise, punctuated with his teeth marks. He could probably be happy just covering Chris’s body in these all night. But there’s something else he’s planning, something he’s wanted for a long time.
He applies pressure with his thumbs, spreads Chris further as he feels the tension in Chris’s body spike.
Zach’s done this a thousand times before, but he's never wanted to be good at it like he wants to be good for Chris now.
And he can't get enough of it: the way Chris’s muscle slowly relaxes and opens under his mouth, the sheer heat of his body here, the sweet, embarrassed, pathetic noises Chris makes in response to what he's doing.
Every time Chris whimpers and pushes back toward his face, Zach licks in harder, trying to soak Chris and stretch him. The dark rough taste is killing him, and he's forgotten his normal pattern-- he's just trying to get deeper into Chris’s hole and push him further. Chris is mumbling something into the bed between Zach’s legs, a litany of oh my god please, his whole body undulating, synchronized with Zach’s tongue.
Zach pulls back to catch his breath and rests his forehead on Chris’s tailbone, panting, losing his mind.
”Holy shit.” Zach mouths the words straight into Chris’s ass, punctuates them by grabbing Chris’s hips and moving them in time. “You love this. Riding me like a fucking pro, you want it so bad--”
Chris starts to move his hand on his cock in an erratic rhythm, and this time Zach doesn't bother to tell him to stop.
Using his hold on Chris’s hips, he forcibly flips him. He wants to watch him come.
Chris is so goddamn beautiful as he strokes himself desperately, his face tight with frustration. He’s chewing on his own lip and his hair is dark with sweat. He’s not looking at Zach--his gaze is cast downward, watching himself and the picture their bodies make together as Zach kneels over him.
“Look at me,” Zach says, running his hand over his dick. He really might be getting hard again. Unbelievable.
Chris does, raising his lashes with a deliberate slowness. His eyes are a vicious neon blue in the low light. “Zach,” he says. His hips stutter, arched halfway off the bed. “I have to, you--it’s too much,” and he’s gone, glassy precome turning thick and white as he sprays himself.
Chris doesn’t stop looking at Zach the whole time, his dazed eyes locked as he pumps the last drops out of his twitching cock
Zach reaches down and trails his hand through the come on Chris’s stomach, over Chris’s hand on himself. He weaves their fingers together, mirrors that with their other hands, brings them up to frame Chris’s face as he kisses him. It’s gentle, under the dirtiness of kissing Chris with the same mouth that just rimmed him. Gentle and honest.
Chris breaks away after a second, gasps heavily, trying to catch his breath. “What--Zach. You don’t. You don’t have to.”
Zach closes his eyes. Fuck, the game.
He frees his left hand and returns it to Chris’s hip, pressing him down into the bed from where he’d arched up. He can see Chris’s breath wracking his body. With his right hand, he jacks himself to full hardness. He's there so fast his head spins.
Zach fixates on Chris’s throat. He glides his left hand up, rubs his thumb over Chris’s Adam’s apple as he strips his own cock. He's already on the edge, barely hanging on from watching Chris try so hard not to fall apart. He gets closer, watching the tremors that run through Chris as Zach presses into his larynx.
He stares into Chris’s unfocused eyes, his vision increasingly spotty as the raw pleasure ebbs in his body, and allows himself the memory of a thousand old dreams of actually being inside Chris. Stretching him, slowly, meaningfully, in another universe, where any of this could be real.
Zach reaches between Chris’s shivering thighs with his free hand and pets Chris with his thumb, letting it slip inside, pushing gently. The wrinkled skin is still slick from his mouth.
“Fuck, fuck, oh my god,” Chris says brokenly, and bears down on him with the little strength he has left, taking him deeper. WIth that, Zach is done. He’s shattering apart again, anchored to Chris.
There's less come, since it's his second time tonight, but he feels shaken at his core, vision browning in and out and his strokes becoming painful as he loses muscle coordination. He opens his eyes to see that he's striped Chris’s groin and thighs with white. It’s nasty and beautiful.
Chris is shocky, still trembling all over, and Zach finally gives in to the urge to hold him. He’s thankful the only light on in the room is close to the bed. He flails at it with one hand, plunging them into darkness. The rightness of the fit of their bodies together is too much to process.
A knot of guilt, regret, anger and that familiar, melancholy desire is forming in Zach’s chest. But he’s so fucked out, so tired. He tries to ignore it, wraps his arms more tightly around Chris.
Chris is right on the edge of sleep, Zach can tell. But Chris still closes a hand around Zach’s forearm and holds on.
--
Zach blinks awake a few hours later. The room is still dark. He’s been holding Chris against him so tightly he can’t believe Chris hasn’t woken up, tried to break free.
His first instinct is a powerful rush of arousal (and then concern and disbelief about his impossible refractory period). Chris’s body is smooth and overheated in his arms. Half-asleep still, Zach lets a hand stray to Chris’s soft cock and then across his hip and back, between their bodies.
He can feel himself dried across Chris’s hips and thighs where he shot earlier.
In denial about his mental state, Zach lifts two fingers to his own lips and starts to suck, quietly, letting his mouth flood with saliva. His heart’s still slamming against his ribs, partially from the coke, partially for a different reason.
He reaches down and starts to finger Chris open, ratcheting up his movements until his first finger presses through into Chris’s warm heat. “Shit,” Zach blurts, and feels Chris move under him. He buries his face in Chris’s neck.
“Did you keep yourself wet for me, Christopher?” The words are muffled. What is he even talking about? Zach feels crazy. Chris is actually driving him to the edge of sanity.
Chris grunts, sub-verbal, and tenses around Zach's finger.
“Shh, it’s okay,” Zach whispers. “Just let me.”
He nudges a second finger against him. He can feel Chris trying to relax, but it's not enough.
Zach slides out, already missing the smooth clench. He pads to the coffee table, where he feels around for the dopp kit and finds the supplies he'd seen earlier. Chris’s little bag of vices. Zach wonders how long he's had this stuff in here.
With lube, it's easier to coax Chris further open, dilating him. Chris starts to breathe more heavily, in time with Zach’s thrusts.
Zach deliberately angles his hand so that his knuckles rub against the bite mark from earlier, where the skin is still slightly hotter and he can feel the indents from his teeth.
He grinds in until Chris grunts and pushes back against him, flush against his body.
Zach digs his thumbnail into the bruise for leverage and compensates by latching his mouth under Chris’s jaw and sucking down onto his jugular. He uses his teeth there, too, but more delicately.
Chris turns, trying to look at Zach. Zach lets up, draws back. Chris’s eyes are bleary. “Hey,” he says quietly. “Are we okay?”
The words wrench at him. Zach covers Chris’s mouth with his hand and exhales deeply.
Then he pushes Chris back into the pillow, meeting his eyes, leaning half over his body. Zach replaces his hand with his mouth and kisses him, artlessly: deep, sincere like nothing between them in a long time.
Chris reacts, letting out a sound of relief that Zach feels more than hears, and moves his free arm, the right one, up to touch Zach's face, with a tenderness that feels both impossible and immense.
Zach knows what he wants to say, but can’t. They agreed.
Faces pressed together, Zach twists his fingers and feels Chris’s whole body convulse under him, moving them both. As Zach corkscrews deeper, Chris drops his hand and gasps, arching his neck back so Zach's mouth is on his throat instead.
“What do you want?” Zach asks into Chris’s sweaty skin, feeling the precipice of the question stretching out before him.
Chris makes a strangled noise. He looks up, eyes wild and fixed on Zach. When Zach stops, waiting, Chris brings his hand up again, resting it on Zach’s cheek. “You know.”
“What?” Zach says. “Has something changed?”
Chris shuts his eyes and strokes his fingers over Zach’s face. “ No. I don’t know.” He opens his eyes again a little, like he’s just waking up, and they rove over Zach as he traces the lines of Zach’s profile with his hand.
“Can we… I don’t want to pretend anymore.” Chris’s thumb rubs across Zach’s brow and drops to his lower lip. “It’s okay if you want to stop.”
The words do stop Zach cold, and then just as quickly spur him into motion. All at once, he’s ripping open the condom and rolling it on as he lifts Chris’s leg up and wraps it around his hip, and then he’s already pressing against Chris in the hot shadows under the sheets. “No,” he manages, mouthing across Chris’s throat and cheeks and ears. “No, god, of course I don’t want to stop.”
Chris doesn’t say anything, but for the first time all night the expression on his face looks like a genuine smile. He leans up and kisses Zach, urging him forward and grabbing his hand. Chris interlaces their fingers as Zach pushes into him.
Even now, Chris is still so tight that Zach has to go so, so slowly just to keep it together. There’s so much to say, but he doesn’t want to break the tense, spellbound silence. He rests their foreheads together and stares into Chris in the darkness, trying to communicate everything this way, everything he’s not sure he even understands himself.
When Zach is fully seated, he pulls back slightly, watching the way Chris’s face is screwed up with the effort of taking him. Chris says something under his breath. He’s asking Zach to move, please move, please Zach.
Zach doesn’t, yet, but he gathers Chris up in his arms, running a hand between them down to his lower stomach and palpating the skin there hard enough to earn a whine from Chris. He thumbs Chris’s leaking head and Chris seizes up in an involuntary full-body shudder. He strokes the head and slides his hand down around Chris, the thick length of him, his heavy balls.
Chris is panting into Zach’s collarbone. “Say something,” Chris whispers against the skin. “Give me something.”
Zach does. “Okay, Christopher. I think you’ve earned it. ” He keeps grinding the heel of his hand into Chris’s groin, trying to find the shape of himself. “So good for me, taking it all again .”
“Now tell me how it feels,” Zach murmurs into Chris’s shoulder as he starts to litter it with bites.
“Feels like… ah. Too much. It’s so much,” Chris hisses. “Please move. Fuck.”
Finally, Zach does move.
When Zach withdraws and thrusts back in, the sensation is so intense that it immediately sobers him for a long moment. What the fuck is he doing? Pretend, a game? He's fucking Chris and he both has absolutely no excuse and absolutely no way to stop.
It’s just… the slide, the heat, the smell and feel of Chris under his mouth and hands, the watchful, hopeful look in his eyes. They’re instantly addictive. He’s so lost.
Zach leans in and grips Chris’s chin, forcing his head to the side so he can mouth ragged words into his ear, hips moving in time. “Who did that for you? Hmm? Who's filling you up, stretching you out?” He slides his hand down, thumbing Chris’s larynx again. “Since you don't want to pretend anymore.”
“You!” Chris gasps against Zach's hand. “You, it’s you, fuck, Zach--”
“Yes," Zach says, feels Chris shiver from the sibilant hum. “And is it good?”
“Shut up,” Chris snaps suddenly, pulling away from Zach's mouth, though he continues to rock his hips into the rhythm Zach’s playing. “You know it's good. Asshole.”
Zach shoots him a deliberate, dark smirk and grabs his ass, hikes it up, sealing them together as he slams in at a new angle. “Yeah, I know.”
Chris goes beyond words then, makes a low, choked moan and gives himself over to Zach, limp in his arms as Zach drills him into the mattress. Zach swears he sees the whites of Chris’s eyes.
Chris is leaking again, less than before but enough to make his stomach glisten where the muscles are clenching. Clenching on Zach's cock.
Zach takes pity, reaches down and gathers the precome and uses it to lube his hand, palming the head of Chris’s erection and starting to stroke him in time. Chris gasps, eyes unseeing, and barely makes it ten seconds before he shoots all over himself, his whole body shuddering under and around Zach.
This feels safer, more familiar, but underneath it is still the weirdness of each time he realizes again: Chris, this is Chris. So fucked up. Can’t stop.
The feedback loop is dizzying and it spins Zach somewhere else entirely, kind of an out-of-body experience, where he has no control over his own actions, just watches himself fuck Chris into a sweaty, come-soaked mess.
Soon Zach’s laying into him close up, whole bodies pressed together, his face buried in Chris’s neck, and he's lost all filter. “Shit, shit, shit,” he huffs out mindlessly, gasping with each thrust into Chris’s loosened, slick hole. “What are we doing, Jesus, when did it all get so fucked?”
Chris just lies there riding out his aftershocks and takes it. The only sounds he’s making are these small, wheezing whimpers as Zach continues to hammer him, belly shoving his softening cock through the wetness between them.
It hurts when Zach finally comes. He's wrung out and exhausted and his head is pounding and it still feels so right that he wants to die. “Did you feel that?” he hears himself slur into Chris’s hot skin.
In response, Chris turns his head, slow, like it’s a huge effort, and noses the side of Zach’s face until their mouths meet. The kiss is simple, chaste. It reaches into Zach with a quiet kindness. He feels tears prick behind his eyes.
When Zach comes out of the bathroom after, Chris is lying on his back, tucked up under the covers, gazing in his direction. He watches wordlessly as Zach cleans him up, as Zach climbs back into bed. When he’s settled, Chris nudges himself into the crook of Zach’s arm, tentative.
“I’m sorry,” Chris says into the thick predawn silence. “For what I said about you. Before. I didn’t mean it. And for all this…” he trails off. “Why? Why did I...why do I do this?”
Zach turns this over mentally for a few minutes, his mind fuzzy with the aftermath of the night, slow to shift into existential-philosophy mode.
“Hmm. Good question. I’ve been asking myself the same one.” He runs a hand down Chris’s arm, pulls him in across his chest. “And I think it’s more important to ask the questions than to know the answers. In all things.”
“That’s very wise, Zachary,” Chris mumbles. “But what if I need the answer? So I can fix it?”
“Yeah.” Zach takes a deep breath. He watches Chris’s head rise and fall. “I get it. I try to be patient with myself. But it’s hard.” He sweeps a hand up and down Chris’s back, where the heat is finally receding. “There’s still time, I think. Maybe we can both find some answers.”
Chris nods, stubble rubbing against the hair on Zach’s chest. Zach can feel Chris’s heartbeat slowing against his own.
He presses his mouth into Chris’s hair and says softly, “Well, I know you will. I don’t know about myself, but I believe in you.”
Chris shifts slightly on Zach’s chest and looks up. His heavy-lidded eyes shine in the darkness. “God. So enlightened, and still such an idiot,” he says. Zach can just make out his smile. “I do know about you, all about you. There’s so much to believe in.”
--
Curtain shoved open, it’s true that Chris doesn’t have much of a view, but it’s still a movie-star suite even if it looks out on Brooklyn.
There’s a hazy winter sunrise blooming over the brick towers in the distance, pinks and blues and soft oranges striated over each other like a burning geode and scored by liminal white-gold contrails. The whole city is shadowed in dusky lavender.
Zach’s heart is still hammering in his chest and he can feel the deep pillow creases in his stubble. He needs water, a shower, a cigarette.
When Chris stumbles out onto the balcony, Zach is smoking his second. Chris is wearing one of the hotel robes and he looks terrible. His face is ashen and his eyes are red and swollen, hair a crazed mess and the hickeys on his neck purpling.
Zach has to cover his mouth to hide his smirk. Chris deftly plucks the carton out of Zach’s hand and the lighter out of Zach’s left pocket. He leans up against the railing beside Zach, facing the brightening light that’s dancing over his exhausted, still-beautiful face. Zach’s smirk falls away.
And then after a few moments of almost-sacramental silence, he feels Chris’s fingers nudging his.
He loosens his grip on the iron railing and lets Chris curl his hand in under, making a little fist under the blanket of Zach's palm.
After a beat, Zach curls his hand around Chris’s. Neither of them do anything but breathe, foggy in the cold morning. Slowly, Chris angles himself inward and lets his forehead drop onto Zach's shoulder.
Chris smells like sex and sweat, pot and cigarette smoke and something alkaline underneath. The moment winds on as the sun opens fully onto the skyline. They don’t move, but the tension’s gone. It’s okay, somehow.
Out of nowhere, Zach has to stifle an involuntary giggle. “Pine,” he mutters into Chris’s hair, “if you start singing Umbrella right now, I swear to god I'll throw you off this balcony.”
And Chris cracks up too, snorting, bracing himself on Zach as he totally loses it. They slide down against the cold bars, piling into each other and shaking with laughter.
Zach tips his head back, dragging out smoke. Shared, his nadir really doesn’t seem that bad anymore.
“So,” Chris says. “I’ve been thinking about new year’s resolutions.”
Zach raises an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
Chris flicks out his cigarette and brings his other hand to cover Zach’s on his. He grins, and it doesn’t quite reach all the way to his eyes, but it’s getting there. “Wanna make some?”