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David exits the men's room and enters the main room of the pub to whoops and laughs. He checks downward where he's been wiping his hands dry on his trousers, then looks up again -- the laughs weren't directed at him, he realizes, but at Brydon, holding court.
"So no, Lee," Rob finishes, sweeping a hand at the man giggling near-hysterically into his pint. "Under no circumstances, including one in which you had transformed magically into a seven-breasted virgin dancer girl," and David has to laugh at that one, coming up behind the table to slide into the seat between Tara Palmer-Tompkinson (why, he thinks, fucking Mack is the one who invited her, desperate to get her to take off her shirt, the cock) and Rob Brydon, "would I ever contemplate the idea of taking you to bed."
"Fer chrissakes," Lee chokes out, dragging the back of his hand across his face in a vain attempt to stifle his laughter. "I just wanted to know if you'd lay me down for a nap, Brydon."
"Oh, certainly." Rob flutters his eyelashes at Lee, who snorts out another giggle. "Now, David here --"
Rob's arm lands around David's shoulders, and David jerks back in surprise, then hides the flinch in a move backwards to look at Rob. "What about me?"
"You, Davey-boy, oh, you." Rob ruffles his hair and grins at him, slightly feral, mostly drunk. "I'd take you in a heartbeat."
David blinks at him. He knows where this is going, but Rob's drunken sincerity is off-putting. "T-take me where?"
"To bed, you arse," Tara shouts. David winces, and moves away from her dangerously sloshing drink. Which moves him closer to Rob. Of course.
Rob, who crooks his elbow around David's neck and pulls him in even further. "Indeed," he purrs against David's ear, his stage-whisper loud enough for the whole table to hear clearly. "But I'd never do that to Webb."
"You wouldn't sleep with Webb?" Lee frowns at him. "Christ, I would."
"No," Rob says, and rubs his nose against David's hairline. David wishes desperately for a full pint, and for his blush to go the fuck away. "I wouldn't make Davey-boy cheat on Robert."
David leans back slowly to look at Rob. The sincerity is drunken, but still sincere. "Wait." He blinks at Rob. "Why would it be cheating?"
Rob blinks back. "Cheating is, is -- David." He licks his lips, then glances over at Lee, who's sniggering behind his hand. "David," Rob says again, slowly, "when a man and a man love each other very much, sometimes they start a sketch comedy show together."
"And fuck!" Tara shrieks.
David's jaw drops. He feels like he's walking underwater. Did someone spike his pint? Is that a paranoid thought, or something Lee would think a hilarious joke? "Robert and I aren't fucking," he manages weakly.
Rob breaks into a delighted smile. "Really?"
David nods, and feels like he's just doomed himself to something.
"Then I get to do this after all." Rob leans in and presses his mouth to David's, tongue already swiping over David's lower lip before he's even gotten his hand into David's hair.
When he pulls back, David is panting, and painfully hard. Rob looks at him with a glimmer in his eye that David knows has nothing to do with alcohol.
"Thanks, mate," Rob says softly, and David nods, and the table whoops and laughs.
He leaves the pub not long after -- not long after another pint, anyway, and not long after allowing Rob to pass a hand over the front of his trousers by the dart-board.
He's drunk, he reasons to himself, and it's a solid mile's walk to his house. So it makes sense to head to Robert's. No, really, it does.
The door's unlocked when he gets there -- he has a key, but Robert always unlocks it for him when David texts ahead. "Hello," he says to Robert, who's sitting at the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer and the newspaper. "Bit late for that, isn't it? I mean, it's literally yesterday's news, at this point."
Robert shrugs and pushes the paper away. "Wanted to make sure you got in all right."
David squints at him, then sheds his coat with a shrug and drops it onto the coat hook -- above all of Robert's coats, which lie in a heap at its base. "Thanks? You didn't have to."
"I know. Want a beer?" Robert pushes one over to him without waiting for an answer.
"Thanks." David cracks it open, and takes a long drink. He looks back at Robert, who seems to be waiting for something. "Rob Brydon thinks we're sleeping together," he says.
"I'm trying to imagine how that came up in conversation," Robert says.
David plants his elbows on the counter and stares at him. "You seem remarkably unsurprised."
"Should I not be? Hang on." Robert presses the hand holding his beer bottle to his forehead, and the other against his chest: a fainting damsel in distress. "Oh, heavens! Martha, fetch my smelling salts, we've become the subject of pornographic rumours!"
"Shut up." David slaps Robert's arm gently, and he lets it fall to his side. "I didn't say they were pornographic."
"Rumours about who's sleeping with who --"
"Who's sleeping with whom," David says automatically, and Robert makes a face at him over the rim of his bottle.
"Who's sleeping with who -- ha, yes, shut up -- are always pornographic." Robert sits back in his chair and shrugs. "It's all about who they'd like to imagine naked together."
"No one wants to imagine me naked," David says, resting his chin on his hand. He feels pleasantly numb, and pleasantly buzzed, and pleasantly uncomfortable. If there is such a thing. It's a frequent feeling around Robert, like he's being kept on edge for just long enough. What edge, he's not sure. But he likes it. "I don't want to meet the person who does."
Robert glances at his bare wrist, miming checking his watch. Oh, the time, David thinks, and takes out his mobile to look at it. "I'd best leave, then. Too bad it's my own fucking kitchen."
David looks around. "Yeah, it is. Wait -- what?"
"David." Robert sets his bottle down and leans over the counter, hands clasped together like a schoolmaster about to explain a lesson that really isn't hard but his student is having a massively difficult time understanding. "I don't have a problem with the rumours that you and I are fucking. I'd like to see you naked, so I don't have to imagine it, and so that the rumours will actually be about something. Is that all right?"
"Yes," David breathes. "Hang on, bollocks, my hands are full --" He drops his mobile and the bottle on the counter, and turns to walk around it only to find Robert standing in his way.
"Can't believe Brydon got to do this first," Robert mutters, and pulls David to him, hard and fast and solid, and kisses him.
"Hang on," David says into Robert's mouth, when he remembers how his brain works. "Hang on," he says again, holding Robert back by his shoulders even though Robert is being a complete arse and making begging eyes at him and David's knees feel kind of weak, like they just want to collapse and give him license to press his face against Robert's crotch. Stupid knees. "I didn't tell you Brydon kissed me," David says. "I just told you he thought we were sleeping together."
"Didn't you?" Robert looks up at the ceiling and scratches the back of his head. "I could've sworn you mentioned a good, solid snogging --"
"I didn't," David says flatly, but leans into Robert anyway, curling his hand into Robert's hair in an echo of what Brydon had done to him earlier. "I don't want to know, do I?"
"Just so I can be smug about it only costing twenty quid," Robert says, and kisses David's smile again.