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The Bowery’s catwalks are unsteady - rusted and swaying to a degree that makes Dave’s stomach lurch. Jack never seems as bothered - he’s got the advantage of familiarity, Dave figures, but he still can’t quite understand how the whole thing can creak and shake underneath his feet without Jack ever even opening his eyes.
He’s laid out, now, on the metal grate suspended above the Bowery, head pillowed on his palms, and the swaying of the catwalk interrupts the falling of moonlight over his features, swinging back and forth over him like a pendulum. Dave’s not entirely certain he’s awake even - Jack could sleep through an earthquake, he’s pretty sure - but he drops down to sit at Jack’s side regardless, close enough to run his fingers over strong features, thumbing lightly at a faded scar at the corner of his jaw.
The corner of his mouth twitches up, eyes still closed. “Miss me, Davey?” he asks, and Dave smiles.
He has. Missed him, that is. Missed him like this, at the least. Missed him relaxed and at ease - between trying to make sure the littles at the lodging house have got clothes warm enough for the oncoming winter, and trying to keep up with the demands of this new factory job he’d gotten, Jack’s been tightened, lately. Drawn in close and snappish, temper running off at the slightest provocation.
Not the way he is now, the Bowery hanging over him, like he doesn’t have a care in the world. It seems, sometimes, that the Bowery is the only place Jack is truly himself.
“I thought you were asleep,” Dave says, instead of relenting easily (so, so easily) to admittance of having missed him. Not that Jack really needs the admittance, to know how thoroughly gone on him Dave is.
Jack laughs, face alight in amusement, and opens his eyes, only squinting a bit against the light of the Bowery. “So you decided to come over here and wake me up?”
Dave smiles down at him, feels caught on the points of Jack’s sharpest edges, even as they’re sanded down to nearly nothing, in the light of the theatre, and runs the crest of his knuckles lightly along Jack’s jaw, along the barest hint of stubble that’s come in since the morning. He shrugs.
“Maybe I did miss you.”
Jack’s smile goes softer, fonder, more like himself to his core. “Yeah?”
Fishing. Jack does that, sometimes; wants so badly to be wanted that he has to start digging for something precious in a goldmine - forgets, in his need to be loved, how thoroughly he is.
“Yeah,” Dave says, and is rewarded with Jack beaming, reaching out a hand to tug idly at a stray thread that’s started to unravel from Dave’s only good coat.
It’s going to bunch up the fabric, and need mending come morning proper. He doesn’t dissuade him.
“You’s a real charmer, Davey,” Jack says, the loose thread spooled carelessly around his fingers. “You ain’t careful, ya gonna give a guy the wrong idea.”
Dave hums, watches the way the moonlight deepens the hue of his eyes abyssally, catches lightly along the valleys of faded scars in his flesh, shadows the hill of a once-broken nose that hadn’t healed quite right. “Am I?” he asks, and traces a part in the neat lines of Jack’s cornrows, only just starting to frizz. “What’s the wrong idea?”
The air hums around them, warm despite the steadily dropping temperatures outside, and Jack’s fingers unspool thread from around themselves lazily, unhurried. “Like you ain’t doin’ it on purpose?” Jack asks, and Dave smiles down at him, lovesick. He tsks lightly, teasing. “You been hangin’ around some bad influence, ain’t ya, Jacobs?”
And Jack’s - rough, undeniably. A die-cast part that hasn’t been sanded down, so that he still catches on everything that gets near enough, drawing blood and ripping fabric. But a bad influence?
What influence Jack’s had on Dave’s life has been immeasurable, and immeasurably bright.
“No,” Dave says, softly, and the night closes around them, cradles the softness of Jack’s answering smile. “I haven’t.”
The Bowery, technically, is too open - too exposed - for Dave to kiss him, but it’s the Bowery. The Bowery, which affords a sense of immortality to the moment. It’s the one place Jack truly settles into himself, soft and warm and open, and Dave thinks it’s the one place that he would kiss Jack in the middle of a crowd of cops.
He readjusts, muscles in his back straining, a bit, as he bends over to press his lips to the flesh of Jack’s throat, warm and soft beneath him, and Jack’s hand slips from that stray thread to just underneath the hem of Dave’s shirt, fingers brushing over skin like oil paints on canvas.
“Davey,” Jack breathes, as Dave’s fingers begin, of their own volition, to toy with the buttons of Jack’s shirt, opening beneath him to reveal further swaths of skin to the light.
Jack gets the idea easily, eagerly, and sits up to undo the rest of the buttons, shrugging out of his own clothes, and then eyes him up and down. “What’a you doin’, Sweetheart?” he asks, impatience sharpening the edges of his voice, and reaches out to begin working the buttons on Dave’s coat. “Got too many clothes on.”
Dave catches Jack’s hands in his own, slowing him, and brushes his lips against Jack’s own, soft and fond, as the catwalk continues to sway gently underneath them.
A few feet away, something in the metal of the scaffolding cracks loudly, and they both pull back, Dave’s heart racing wildly against his ribcage. The moment twists in the air, heavy, for just a minute before Jack starts laughing, lit up from the inside out, and Dave could no more deny the pull of his gravity than he could stop breathing, leans back in to kiss him in between the slow warmth of his amusement.
“We oughtta get a place,” Jack says, his lips brushing against Dave’s as he does, and Dave’s struck all at once with how thoroughly he’s in love with Jack Kelly.
For a while there, he hadn’t known that was possible. He’d known, with an abstract and quiet fascination since he’d been a small child, that men sometimes fucked other men, but in a very hushed sort of a way. It happened, despite the laws of morality, in dark alleyways and shadows. No one ever talked about the love. He loves Jack Kelly, in much the way a woman loves a man.
Dave hums, pulls back just enough to turn his chest into an aching pit of wanting, and asks, “You think we could afford it?”
Jack shrugs, and Dave reaches out idly to start tracing the line of a scar along the swell of his bad shoulder. “Sure. Just a little studio or somethin’, nothin’ fancy.”
Jack grins, then, and leans back in to run his teeth along the tenderest spots of Dave’s throat. “Get to defile you proper-like,” he says, sending a thrill down Dave’s spine. “Don’t gotta worry about no one seein’.”
Dave doesn’t know if Jack grasps how much he’s oversimplifying things, as though two men sharing a studio won’t invite questions they can’t answer, but he decides, consciously, to ignore it for the time being, just hums in response. “You don’t defile me, Jackie,” he says, because to be defiled implies debasement, implies that he’s being made less than by Jack’s hands on him, when, really, the opposite is true - Jack does artistry down to his bones, would not understand how to break something when creating is so close to his fingertips.
Jack’s smile twists along Dave’s flesh. “What’d’ya wanna call it, Dave?” he asks. “Making love?”
And Jack’s poking fun, teasing lightly, but Dave’s so overcome with fondness that it becomes a tangible thing in his chest, threatening to break every last rib in its need to be expressed. He rests his hands on either side of Jack’s neck, at the base of his jaw, and pulls him gently back, far enough for Dave to look him in the eyes.
“Yes.”
He says it softly, like a tightly held secret, like fucking a man isn’t a crime, but to refer to it so tenderly might be, and Jack softens entirely, leans back in, lays Dave down along the grate of the Bowery’s catwalk.
“Alright, doll,” he says, reattaching his mouth to the column of Dave’s throat, “I’ll make love to ya.”
And Dave laughs lightly, pinpoints his focus to the sensation of Jack’s mouth along the planes of his flesh, and allows himself the daydream of taking Jack home.