Work Text:
The first night in Tommy’s apartment was...strange. I kept waking up every 45 minutes or so, disoriented, standing in the middle of his cluttered living room, trying to make sense of my surroundings.
I peeked in the master bedroom once or twice just to make sure Tommy took his rest in the traditional way. He did. Quiet and still, buried under mounds of blankets. No snoring or tossing and turning. Deep, even breathing, and white noise from a rumbling machine in the corner was all that subsisted in the room besides pitch black.
The final time I stood up from my pallet it was near dawn. I was rounding the corner from the bathroom when I heard Tommy call out for me. Just my name, almost too quiet for me to hear it the first time. So he repeated it. I pushed the door open and part of the bed was vacated, the sheets mashed unevenly against the mattress in a shape resembling a Tommy figure.
He was sitting with his back to his headboard, the muted television casting his face in shades of grey and white. “Lay down with me. Head must be dented from sleeping on those magazines.” Arguably I was hesitant. I still wasn’t sold on his status as a person who didn’t take other people’s youth as they slept. How else was he able to stay fortysomething going on 24?
But I crossed the room anyway, dragging a comforter with me, wrapped around my shoulders. I landed comically on my face and inched up to rest my head on the pillow. I could feel Tommy rearranging blankets around me and instantly he was all I smelled, all I heard as I resettled onto an actual bed. Soon I had the last ties keeping my mind tethered to consciousness let loose.
In that short time before the sun rising and McDonalds stopping serving breakfast I had dreamed in a rather rich fantasy. All Tommy wanted was me. And I him. Instances of him being consumed with me, of wanting to eat me whole. I was being told how much he wanted to lie next to me - maybe not fuck, maybe find himself where my thighs spread - and subsist. Nothing more, nothing less.
I awoke with a start, my face smashed into the mattress, a gasp timing perfectly with the opening of my eyes. The sheets and blankets around me were blazing hot but I was stopped from flinging them off me by Tommy - he laid totally on top of me, arms around my rib cage. I tried my best to work out from under him but to no avail. Soon I was sucking in breath from a slit in one of the blankets and praying to God I didn’t come with the feeling of Tommy slung over me.
“You talk in your sleep,” Tommy mumbles somewhere above my ear. With every word his sleep-warm breath passes over my forehead, further intensifying my shivers. I stayed still and didn’t move a muscle for fear of interrupting him. The way he just spoke said to me that he had more than that to divulge about the first night I shared his bed. He didn’t sound very awake but with each passing moment the very thought of lying next to me roused him further into consciousness.
I finally emerge from the blankets and look him in the eye. Though sleeping like a rock he still looks haggard, darkness around his eyes suggesting he was up earlier tossing and turning without my knowing. “Be very, very still,” I warn him before leaning in, pressing my lips to his without any concept of aligning them appropriately. We end up with the tips of our noses bent together and his breath hot on my face before we finally understand each other’s faces. Like the Dean he loved so much one of his hands cups behind my head, fingers curling around my ear into the hair there.
What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, my brain wants answers immediately. With Tommy I have to stop asking myself that. It’s a question I’ll never get answers I want to. So I decide I’ve got to do this before it drives me insane by not knowing. I open my mouth against his to breathe in as much air as I can. Not a lot, apparently, and I can hear my voice shaking as I gasp out something unintelligible. Tommy groans something back to me and I find the strength to say, “Don’t say anything,” leaning in to take all that Tommy will give me.
It doesn’t go much farther than that. I’m fighting the beginnings of a migraine and Tommy comes on my thigh five minutes after we started going at each other. I let Tommy lounge on my chest like a cat in a ray of sunlight, detangling his hair with my limp fingers. We watch early-morning Law & Order like we’re fortysomething. “If I was suspected of killing nanny I was having affair with, would you rat me out to detectives?” Tommy asks me, voice a mumble, as his cheek is pressed just above my heart.
I consider pensively what I would do if I found out Tommy’s past was occluded with bodies submerged in lime and mob bosses missing from steak restaurants, and reply. “I’d give them the run-around long enough for you to escape to a country that forbade extradition to America if that helps.” Tommy smiles, boyish and drowsily crooked. The dry pad of his right thumb catches on my lower lip. I test him by pressing the tip of my tongue to his finger. “Not without your complementary send-off of wild, tantric, Taco Bell bathroom sex.”
The sound Tommy makes would be a chortle if he had enough strength to display anything other than exhaustion. The fingers of his free hand slide through the ends of his hair to detangle them. “Would you go with me, Greg? Not my planet, we draw too much attention to ourselves. New York. Maybe in winter when people pass by other people on the street without a word. I take you to Macy’s.” Come to think of it, Tommy couldn’t last a day in forced seclusion. One look at his credit card statements and we’d be done for before the fake ID’s could dry.
But I indulge him. I figure if we’re going to run with a scenario we might as well leave the tape at the finish line in shreds. “You would, and I’d get you the coat James had in East of Eden when they’re at the carnival.” Maybe not the exact one but I let Tommy dream as he releases me, lies back on his designated pillow with his hands supporting his head. I watch him go back to sleep and imagine the movement beneath his eyelids as a response to his manifestation of our adventure.