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Tim’s house smells like chocolate chip cookies, and Tim smells like lavender and vanilla. The scents wash over Jon as he reaches across Tim for the mixing bowl, a familiar warmth curling in his stomach that brings a small smile to his lips.
“Hey!” Tim holds the bowl just out of his reach. “We still have another batch, remember?”
“One spoonful won’t hurt,” Jon says, stepping a bit further into Tim’s space to extend his reach, but Tim’s got at least a foot on him, so the bowl remains firmly inaccessible. “There’ll be plenty left.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said last time,” Tim says, “and then you ate too much and got sick.” He sets the bowl on top of the fridge, which is just unfair, and then opens the fridge and pulls out a separate container. “Which is why I made some edible cookie dough earlier.”
Jon’s stomach does something a little funny at that. It’s such a small gesture, really not significant at all, but it still makes him go soft inside. “Oh.” He gingerly takes the container from Tim, cracking the lid to see dough that looks almost identical to the kind sitting just out of reach. “I… thank you, Tim.”
Tim’s wide smile goes a little softer at that. The oven timer chimes, and Tim pulls out a steaming rack of cookies and sets them to cool while he prepares the second tray. Jon takes a few tentative bites of the dough; it’s just the right amount of sweet, the chocolate chips breaking under his teeth with that lovely change in texture that baked cookies lack.
Tim had always done this, ever since Jon had joined Research. Jon tended to skip lunch; it wasn’t intentional, just a side effect of becoming so absorbed in his work that minutes turned into hours without warning and the hollow pit in his stomach would chase him home late in the evening. And then one day, a clear plastic container of Pad Thai had appeared on the corner of his desk, placed there at exactly noon by a pair of warm brown hands and accompanied by a smile and a you’re going to waste away if you keep forgetting to eat, Jon. It had been surprising and a little irritating, because it had torn Jon’s attention away from a case and now he would have to search for his rhythm again, but also… nice. So, Jon had eaten it, and Tim had retrieved the container with a grin, and so a routine was born. Once, Jon asked Tim how much he owed him—making lunch for two every day had to be expensive, after all—but Tim deflected the question with a laugh and an assurance that so many recipes were for two, anyway, so it was really more trouble not to cook for Jon as well. Jon’s not sure, exactly, when that transitioned into Jon coming home with Tim for dinner, into Jon insisting that he pay Tim back somehow for the food and getting a cheeky oh, how could you possibly pay me back? in return, into staying too late talking over cooling plates of food and creating a Jon-shaped dip in the couch (and lately, in the bed next to Tim).
Jon doesn’t know what the state of the fridge at his flat is, but he hasn’t been grocery shopping in some time. At least, not by himself. They’ve taken to splitting the grocery bill when they go. It seems more than fair.
So, the cookie dough is just one instance stacked on top of hundreds of others. But as Tim slides the second tray of cookies into the oven, the now-empty bowl sitting in the sink, Jon feels a rush of warm affection that catches him a bit off guard. Perhaps it’s silly to realize just now that he’s quite possibly just a few answered questions away from dating Timothy Stoker, but he’s never been great at putting together the pieces. Nor has he been great at putting emotions into words.
He sets his cookie dough on the counter, steps a bit closer to Tim where he’s setting the oven timer, and wraps a careful hand around Tim’s wrist. Tim jumps slightly under his touch, and Jon almost pulls away before Tim’s hand slips through his loosened grip, his fingers threading through Jon’s with a practiced ease. “I keep telling you that eating raw flour is a great way to get E. coli,” Tim says lightly, even as he rubs the back of Jon’s hand with a thumb. “If you want to eat raw cookie dough, you have to bake the flour beforehand.”
“Yes, I- I know.” Jon stares at a point just over Tim’s shoulder; it’s a rather spectacular view of a blank wall. “That’s, um. That’s not what I…. I just wanted to, uh… to thank you, again. For the, uh. The cookie dough.”
God, he’s a coward.
Jon lets go of Tim’s hand and moves to pick up the dough when Tim’s fingers catch his again. When Tim guides Jon’s hand to his lips to press a soft kiss across his knuckles, Jon provides no resistance.
“You know you don’t have to thank me, right?” Tim says, amused. “I’m not bringing you home out of charity.”
“Thanking someone when they do something nice for you is a perfectly valid response, Tim—”
“I’m not doing it to be nice, though.”
Jon pulls his hand back, face flushed slightly with a hot embarrassment. “I… I see.”
“No, I- ugh, that came out wrong.” Tim takes a step closer, his hand coming up to ghost against Jon’s cheek, and it sends a tingling warmth radiating through him even after the contact is gone. “I meant that… well, I suppose subtlety’s out the window now, isn’t it? Not that it was ever really working in the first place.”
“Tim, what—?”
“You don’t flirt with someone just to be nice, Jon.”
Jon’s suddenly very aware of how close they are. How Tim’s hand has dropped from his face but is brushing against his hand with feather-light touches. How he’s never really noticed that Tim’s eyes grow a lighter brown as iris transitions to pupil. How he can smell sugar and chocolate chips and lavender and vanilla on Tim’s skin, and how warm it makes him feel.
“Oh,” he says quietly, and it feels too small a word, but he thinks that anything bigger might choke him.
“Yeah.” Tim rubs the back of his neck, and is he blushing? That… is Jon making Tim blush? “I was going to wait a little bit longer for you to figure it out, but hey, when the opportunity strikes, yeah?” He lets out a small laugh. “Probably would have taken years of us going on like that before you noticed, honestly.”
“I’m not oblivious, Tim,” Jon says curtly, but he misses the firm tone he’d been aiming for by a mile and a half.
“Yeah, sure,” Tim says with a crooked grin. “We’re basically living together already and nothing. We could have been sampling wedding cakes before you finally thought to ask if we were dating.”
The flush that overtakes Jon’s face this time is of a very different quality. “I- I don’t think that’s quite- I am not completely incompetent, Tim, I would have noticed if we- uh, if we were… together.”
Then, he manages to meet Tim’s eyes again, to see the sparkling disbelief in them, and it clicks.
“Ah. Are… are we already…?”
Tim shrugs with a nonchalance that’s completely betrayed by the nervous, excited smile pushing at the edges of his mouth. “I mean, you’ve already heard my take on the matter. Ball’s in your court now.”
Jon thinks about Pad Thai and shared lunches and split grocery bills and edible cookie dough, sitting half-eaten on the counter. He thinks about waking up curled against soft skin and shifting sheets, face nestled against soft hair that smells like lavender and fabric softener. He thinks about casual touches of fingers to cheeks and hands to backs and pinkies to pinkies, lightly brushing as they walk home from the tube station in blue twilight.
He asks, hesitantly, yet with a resolve that builds within his stomach until the words are pushed out of him like an exhalation after a long-held breath: “Can I… can I kiss you?”
The moment of stunned shock, followed quickly by an I thought you’d never ask, is almost better than the moment their lips touch and Tim’s hand finds its way to Jon’s cheek, stroking soft circles with his thumb that make Jon shiver.
Almost.
They end up burning the cookies beyond recognition or salvation, but that’s really quite all right.