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Adam was tired down to his bones. He’d woken up at four for his work-study inventory job at the campus bookstore, lain under a truly screwed Rolls-Royce for the better part of his four-hour shift at the mechanic’s near campus, zipped back to his dorm to take a five-minute shower, slogged through a two-hour thermodynamics lab, inhaled a sandwich on the two-minute walk from thermodynamics to aquatic chemistry, sat through another two hours of class, and then done homework for his fluid dynamics class through the four hours of his welcome desk shift. Thursdays grabbed him in their mouths and shook, and usually by the time his desk shift ended at a quarter to eleven, he wanted nothing more to fall face-first into bed and sleep until his alarm went off at six-thirty for his desk shift the next morning.
But between thermodynamics and aquatic chemistry, Adam had checked his phone to find a string of texts from Gansey: May I bring you lunch? Oh, you’re at work, I’m sorry. I’m already at your room. Your door is unlocked! You must have been tired this morning. I locked it for you, don’t worry. Do you mind if I stay a while? I am slightly anxious about my Latin midterm and your room smells like you and it is very soothing.
Adam had texted him yes, of course, and apart from Gansey’s grateful reply, he hadn’t heard anything else from him. Adam had texted him in the last ten minutes of his desk shift asking if he was still there, but the radio silence he’d received made him wonder if maybe - just maybe - Gansey had managed to fall asleep.
Adam didn’t like seeing him stressed, but there was something humanly vulnerable about seeing Gansey, the ultimate comforter, in need of comfort himself. Adam had sat up with him before exams, before family holidays, and if he could calm his jagged breathing, if he could smooth the crease between Gansey’s brows and coax a shaky smile out of him, then there was the rare, proud sort of satisfaction in knowing that he had helped, that he had been what another person needed.
He ducked into the campus convenience store on his way back to his room to spend ten dining points on a ready-made sandwich for himself and a pint of the mint chocolate cookie ice cream Gansey liked, then jounced his keys in his hand as he headed upstairs. Gansey had a habit of eating his feelings, especially the stressful ones. Adam had complicated feelings about that, somewhere between that’s probably unhealthy and I want to feed you until you feel better, but more often, his bias toward Gansey’s happiness won out.
He opened the door to his room slowly, eyes adjusting to the deep blue dark. His room had only one window, and it faced the cement wall of Gansey’s dorm building beside it. He could make out the form of a pizza box jutting off the corner of his desk, and he hushed his keys down beside the box and popped the ice cream into the tiny fridge beside his desk before picking up the box to gauge its contents. It was empty, which was not unusual coming from Gansey.
Fondly, Adam turned on his desk lamp, and watched the light eat away a chunk of the darkness.
Gansey was asleep on his side in Adam’s bed, one of Adam’s flannel shirts pulled snug around his soft sides. He’d kicked off the blankets, which Adam took to mean he hadn’t been sleeping soundly, and he was hugging Adam’s pillow to his chest as if it were a person. Adam’s chest swelled with affection, and he toed off his sneakers and crawled into bed beside Gansey. He arranged himself behind him like the insufferably charming set of sugar spoons he had once seen at Gansey’s parents’ house, and then he pressed gentle kisses to Gansey’s neck and hairline until he stirred.
Gansey made a soft, breathy sound and arched his back, then turned to peer at Adam over his shoulder. His glasses were neatly folded on Adam’s desk, and his hazel eyes were heavy-lidded and puffy with sleep.
“Adam,” he said, and Adam couldn’t tell if there was more pleasure in the word, or relief. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”
“It’s okay,” said Adam, reaching up to stroke Gansey’s hair. “I don’t mind.”
“Still.” Gansey slid on his glasses and rolled onto his back, putting a hand to Adam’s face and kissing the top of his head. He was wearing a snug gray polo beneath Adam’s flannel, a color he usually only chose when it matched his mood. “This is your space, and I know you have a long day on Thursdays. You probably just want to sleep and I’m in your way.”
“No, no,” said Adam, and it felt true. He had had a long day, and he did want to sleep, but Gansey’s presence had a way of waking him up, reenergizing him when he thought he had no energy left to spend. “I want to be with you for a little while. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Oh, well, then,” said Gansey, and a smile softened across his face. “Did you eat dinner? I would love to get you something if you didn’t. Don’t look at me like that, it’s fair. I did spend most of the day in your bed. How was your day? Was work busy?”
Adam crawled on top of him and kissed him long and soft, combing back his hair from his forehead. “Work was fine,” he said when he’d pulled away, resting his chin on Gansey’s chest. “I worked on a Rolls at the garage, but I didn’t get it all the way fixed. I’ll finish it tomorrow. Class was fine. I got a sandwich on my way back from desk.” He tilted his head toward the sandwich on his desk and fiddled with one of the buttons on Gansey’s appropriated flannel. “What happened with Latin?”
Gansey closed his eyes and made a sound that Adam knew was an indication that he wanted to be over whatever had happened with the Latin exam, but was not. “I just don’t think I did very well,” he said, thumbing at Adam’s cheek. “I think I did the conjugations wrong, but I don’t remember what I did so I can’t check. But I didn’t feel confident about it.”
“You probably did fine,” said Adam, pulling the button through its buttonhole and then out again. “You’re good at Latin. You knew everything when we studied.”
Gansey shrugged. “Maybe.”
He wouldn’t look at Adam, so Adam kissed his chest through his polo and took his hand. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “You have a good average in Latin. Even if you do badly it’ll balance out, but I’m sure you did fine.”
Gansey squeezed his hand, and slid his eyes to meet Adam’s. “Thank you,” he said. He ran his other hand through Adam’s hair, and sighed so deeply that Adam felt the dip of his lungs. “I’d like to talk about something else, if you don’t mind.”
“I brought you something,” said Adam, kissing him again. “A treat. Sit up.”
Adam rolled off of him to head to the fridge. Gansey pulled himself upright, propping the pillow behind his back, and Adam caught an eyeful of the soft mound his stomach formed in his lap, dimpled by the soft, wide indent of his navel.
“I like that flannel on you,” he said, taking one of the spoons Ronan had lifted for him from the dining hall and which Adam now kept in a cup on his desk. Adam thought it had been a surprisingly gracious gesture: Adam had been hesitant to take them himself for fear of losing his RA position or his scholarship had he been caught, but Ronan, with no such woes, had neatly swiped two full sets of utensils at lunch one day and presented them to Adam afterward. Gansey had frowned on it, but Adam had learned that Ronan could get away with most things when it came to Gansey, especially if they were for Adam’s benefit.
Now, Gansey blushed, pulling both sides of the flannel around himself. “It doesn’t really fit.”
“I don’t know,” said Adam, getting back into bed with the ice cream. “I think it’s nice.”
He set the carton beside him and sat on Gansey’s thighs, and diligently did up the buttons of the flannel. Gansey was right - they strained and gaped and would have shown a fair amount of skin if he hadn’t had the polo on underneath, but Adam didn’t think that meant it looked bad. If anything, he liked the way that it called attention to the difference in size between Gansey and himself, the same way that he liked being swallowed by Gansey’s sleep shirts and his fleece jackets and his crew team windbreaker. It made it clear that the item of clothing was the payoff of a transaction of intimacy, and although Adam was still new to that kind of currency, he had found that he was reasonably wealthy in it.
“A little snug,” Gansey observed, looking down at Adam’s handiwork. “Do you still think it looks nice?”
Adam felt his cheeks color. “I do,” he said. He was stupidly gone for Gansey’s extra weight, disarmingly soft for his softness, and Gansey was beginning to realize this, and realize that he could use it to his advantage.
“It’s very comforting,” said Gansey, poking his fingers through one of the gaps between the buttons. “It smells like you.”
“Now it’ll smell like you,” countered Adam, pulling the ice cream closer. “Maybe you should wear my things more often.”
He ran his hands down Gansey’s round sides, scooting farther up his thighs to get close enough to kiss him.
“Sleep over,” he said between kisses. “You can borrow some clothes to sleep in. I want you here, I want to see you in more of my clothes.”
Usually he was not this direct. He waited for Gansey to ask to stay, for Gansey to ask him to stay, because doing the asking himself assumed that he was wanted, and Adam wasn’t quite ready to take that for granted yet. But tonight Gansey wanted company and comforting and distraction, and he wanted all of those things from Adam, and Adam was ready and willing to give them.
Gansey’s face lit, then dimmed. “I have my archiving internship tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have to get up early, if I stay.”
Adam shrugged. “I have desk. We can get up together.”
Gansey’s face lit again, and he kissed the corner of Adam’s mouth. “Grand,” he said. “Is that ice cream?”
Adam nodded, peeling off the lid. “Mint cookie. I thought it might help if you weren’t feeling too hot.”
“You’re fantastic,” said Gansey, the corners of his eyes crinkling gratefully. “Although ...” He dropped his gaze to the buttons pulled tight over his belly. “The strain on these buttons suggests that I probably don’t need any more ice cream.”
Adam had no patience for statements like these, because they implied dissatisfaction without action. His thoughts about Gansey’s size were these: Gansey ate like he did not care what size he was, and he did not appear to mind it enough to do anything about it, and he knew that Adam liked it and encouraged that, so Adam felt that any statement to the contrary was automatically moot. If Gansey intended to do something about it, that would be another matter, but his noncommittal expressions of displeasure just made Adam more determined to show Gansey he liked him the way he was.
But Gansey flicked his eyes back up to Adam, and his expression was not displeased or self-pitying. “But what the hell,” he said, an indulgent little smile playing on his lips. “It’s not like the rest of this is going anywhere, anyway.”
Adam’s chest swooped. “Good to know,” he managed, his grip tightening around the spoon. “I think it should stay.”
“I think you’re probably going to be in luck,” said Gansey, leaning in to kiss Adam’s nose. “Do you intend to feed that to me?”
He nodded to the ice cream and the spoon, to Adam’s position in his lap, and Adam flushed. “If you want.”
“Eat your dinner first,” said Gansey, gently. “I’d be just as happy to enjoy this with you snuggled next to me. We could put on the baking show. We still have a whole season, and it always makes me hungry anyway.”
Adam laughed and retrieved his sandwich and stuck the ice cream on the windowsill to wait, and Gansey smiled and kissed him as he unwrapped it.
“Did you have dinner?” Adam asked, leaning his head onto Gansey’s shoulder. He took a bite of his sandwich - a decidedly un-fancy turkey-and-cheese affair, garnished with some lettuce that had not yet lost its crunch - and fished for a blanket within reach to pull over them.
Gansey gave him a wry smile and momentarily dislodged Adam to lean forward for the blankets. “I had two lunches.”
“Oh,” said Adam, remembering the empty pizza box, the lunch he had not been around to receive. “Right.”
Gansey looked apologetic, and Adam was sure he had agonized over that on top of his Latin exam earlier until he’d fallen asleep. Rather than draw out his guilt, Adam shoved the remainder of his sandwich into his mouth and said, “Do you want to change before we put on the show?” And then, because he felt it was important to give Gansey an out, “I mean, unless you want to sleep in your khakis.”
“No, thank you,” said Gansey. “I think I’ll be wearing this outfit to my internship tomorrow as well, to maximize the time I can spend in bed with you tomorrow morning, so I’d prefer not to sleep in it any more than I already have.”
Adam tugged at his flannel. “Do you want to keep this?”
“I think so. But maybe something to put underneath it? I’m showing quite a bit of skin as it is.”
Since gaining his own single room, Adam had lost all of his qualms about sleeping only in his boxers, but that was a preference Gansey did not share. He might strip down to his boxers if it was hot, or if he was with Adam, but he always slept with at least a t-shirt on. Adam didn’t think it was self-consciousness so much as modesty leftover from being raised so conservatively, but he wasn’t complaining. There was a sweet vulnerability to seeing Gansey bundled in soft sleepwear, whether it was an old t-shirt and expensive underwear or sweats and the crewneck college sweatshirt he preferred when it was cold out. It gave Adam the same domestic thrill as seeing Gansey pad around his room making tea in socks or his fluffy old-man moccasin slippers.
He slid off the bed and dragged open the top drawer of the little college-issued storage unit tucked underneath it, and rummaged through until he found a t-shirt soft enough to bestow upon Gansey. It was a heathered charcoal gray, and the fabric clung in a way that Adam didn’t particularly enjoy for himself, but was very eager to see on Gansey.
He handed the shirt to Gansey, picked another to change into himself, and stepped out of his jeans and tossed them toward the laundry pile before crawling back into bed. He lay propped on an elbow and watched as Gansey stood to wriggle out of his khakis. The movement made his thighs jiggle, and Adam was overcome with the urge to kiss them, mouth at them and feel their yielding softness beneath his touch.
Then Gansey pulled on the shirt Adam had chosen, and Adam went breathless as they realized at the same time that it was not big enough to cover all of Gansey’s stomach. Its lower curve, soft and supple and tantalizing, tumbled out over the waistband of his boxers, and Adam wanted to mouth at that too, grab as many handfuls as it took to feel all of it. He let out an unconscious little whine and was horrified when Gansey reacted, unaware he’d made the sound aloud.
Gansey raised an eyebrow, cradling the bare part of his belly in both hands. “Yes?”
“Can we hit pause on the baking show?” Adam asked, feeling his face heat. “I - want.”
Gansey was still now, his hazel eyes intent on Adam behind his glasses. “What do you want, Adam?”
Adam’s heart beat you, you, you.
Because it wasn’t just that sag of belly welling out. It was the crease at his hips on display, where his love handles crept over his boxers and flowed into the roll of his stomach. It was the wrinkle of fabric between his soft chest and the slope of his gut. It was the stretch marks at his biceps, soft and pink as the sunrise when Adam’s earliest alarms went off. It was the bulk of his thick arms brushing the bulk of his plump sides. It was the saddlebag curves of his thighs, a term Adam had learned from Gansey’s sister Helen and which he did not think he’d been meant to overhear. It was how snugly his boxers hugged those thighs, that if they’d been any tighter they might have left a mark. And it was the marks already visible on Gansey’s flabby underbelly, pressed into his skin by the too-small waistband of his khakis. Adam wanted to stroke them until they evened out, until they were soft, contented peach instead of angry red.
“I want you,” said Adam, each word kicking like the recoil of a gun. “Get over here.”
Gansey got over there.
“Do you want me to take this off?” he asked between kisses, plucking at the t-shirt, and Adam shook his head no. He didn’t know how to say that was part of the appeal, that he’d seen Gansey without clothes on so many times he had every inch of his body memorized, but he’d never seen him wearing Adam’s clothes, he’d never seen quite like this how much bigger he was than Adam, and that was what was driving him wild.
Adam eased Gansey back on the bed, then slithered down between his legs so that his mouth was level with the swell of Gansey’s underbelly. He sank kiss after kiss into it, sucked bruises into the soft skin, traced the length of each stretch mark with his tongue. He mouthed over the bulges of his love handles, then pushed the sides of Gansey’s belly together to watch it pile up, soft and pliant, then dove back in to kiss it more thoroughly. He explored the insides of Gansey’s thighs, inching up just past the hems of his boxers, where his skin was pale and silky. Adam left bruises there too, kissed the wobbly pudge until Gansey laughed and squirmed and arched his thick hips, and finally hauled himself up to kiss Gansey’s face.
“So I do get a turn!” teased Gansey, and Adam, breathless in his lap, cocked his head.
“I thought you were going to make out with my stomach all night,” said Gansey, a sly smile playing on his lips. God, Adam wanted to touch his lips. “I was going to be very jealous if that was the case.”
Adam laughed and kissed him square on that smile. “I do occasionally like making out with your actual mouth,” he said, thumbing at Gansey’s pretty, aristocratic lips. “It’s pretty nice.”
Gansey wrapped his arms around him and pulled him closer, then pushed off an elbow and rolled over into Adam. “Not crushing you, am I?”
Adam could feel every pound Gansey carried that he, Adam, did not. At least thirty, he thought, maybe forty after midterms. “Honestly?” he said. “Crush me.”
Gansey laughed and ground a hard kiss against Adam’s mouth, a kiss that meant business, and Adam fell into it like he’d tripped down a rabbit hole. Gansey handled him tenderly but firmly, as if he knew that Adam was not delicate but believed that he deserved to be treated as such. His sure hands and gentle teeth and soft voice lulled Adam to contentment, even as he sparked with electricity as Gansey rocked his chunky hips against his own slim ones, even as he was driven out of his mind by the lapping of Gansey’s plump belly against his own flat one.
By the time they were finished, Adam was clinging to him, Gansey buoyed against him, each keeping the other afloat. Adam had finally caught his breath; Gansey was still working on catching his. He’d fallen out of shape since quitting crew, and although Adam felt weird about liking it, he did like it. He liked Gansey’s leftover crew muscles, liked that he could pick Adam up or throw him over his shoulder with almost no effort, and he also liked that sometimes Gansey had to catch his breath after too many stairs. Was that weird? He thought it might be a little weird. Maybe he’d ask Blue. She seemed to know a lot about weird things. He thought probably she and Henry weren’t into whatever this was, but she might have a tidbit of enlightenment for him.
No, no, he thought sleepily. He should ask Ronan. Noah was soft, and Ronan was always all over Noah. He probably knew something about it.
Then he spent an excruciating five seconds imagining trying to ask Ronan about this, and vetoed it immediately. Blue was a better resource, he thought. Definitely Blue. If not, maybe Google.
Beside him, Gansey made an amused little sound. “What?” said Adam, propping his chin on Gansey’s soft chest.
Gansey tipped his head toward Adam’s windowsill. “That is almost definitely some very melted ice cream over there.”
“Oh, goddamn it,” Adam groaned, and Gansey burst out laughing.
“I could drink it,” he said, and Adam made a little sound of that will kill me before he realized Gansey was serious.
“You, uh. Could,” he agreed. “I’m - we could put the baking show on. I’m not sleepy yet.”
Gansey quirked an eyebrow. “Will you feed me if it’s not melted?”
Adam thought that would definitely kill him, or else he wouldn’t sleep at all thinking about it after, and then he’d kill himself doing something stupid tomorrow because he hadn’t gotten any sleep. “Maybe next time,” he said cautiously, in case Gansey said no, but Gansey just reached for the carton, his t-shirt pulling up to showcase the way his stomach rolled into his lap. Adam closed his eyes and slid his hand to Gansey’s warm skin, jiggled it around.
“There will be a next time,” Gansey agreed. “I probably should stop eating pints of ice cream at midnight, but between you and me, I don’t think that will happen.”
Adam laughed and whined in the same joyful sound, and sat up to kiss Gansey before he got distracted by the baking show or began pouring ice cream into his beautiful mouth, whichever came first.
Adam’s laptop was slower and clunkier and had worse resolution than Gansey’s, so he allowed Gansey to set up his sleek silver one, balancing it on his chunky thighs and angling the screen so Adam could see next to him.
“Which episode are we on?” Adam asked, leaning his head against Gansey’s shoulder, and Gansey pulled up Netflix, kicked out a laugh.
“This one is just called Sweet Dough. They should have you on. You appear to be something of an expert.”
Adam buried his face in Gansey’s neck, pinching a bit of his arm chub so gently that it barely counted as a pinch. “I’ve had an excellent study partner,” he said, mouthing at the softness along Gansey’s jawline.
Gansey popped the top off the pint of ice cream and eyed it. “Looks like a milkshake to me,” he said, and brought the carton to his lips and tipped it back.
Adam got comfortable, drank him in. He could do this all night.