Work Text:
Angus’s hands are wrapped around a lit cigarette, the pre-dawn summer light casting shadows on his forearms in Adam’s bedroom. He’s covered in so many freckles that Adam is tempted to do something ridiculous like count them.
Instead, Adam settles for watching Angus exhale the smoke steadily, one unoccupied hand searching for the glasses his lover had folded so meticulously on top of a copy of a well-thumbed crime novel. Reading it technically counts as doing research for the programme he’s supposed to work on in early autumn.
Angus is a precise man, but the part of him that Adam appreciates treads beyond public school politeness and into something far filthier. The part of him that had sidled up to Adam at a bar in a private theatre club in Soho and whispered an invitation in his ear six months ago.
Angus unfolds the beetle-browed frames and pushes them onto his face. His shirt remains, the buttons unfastened halfway. When he’d dropped by Adam’s flat with a bottle of gin last night, there hadn’t been much consideration made towards the careful removal of clothing.
This is the part Adam likes best: the slow dance between becoming and undoing. They both know it intimately: after all, politics and acting are two sides of the same counterfeit coin that keeps England afloat. Adam likes to think that’s what drew them together more than the sex, or the fact that Adam looks damned good in evening wear. All of his past lovers had made mention of it, but none had ever paid for the dry-cleaning bills that inevitably came from ruining good suits by dropping to his knees.
Angus had paid for his dry cleaning after their first night. Adam wanted to hate him for that. He should’ve known better than to like the proud set of Angus’ shoulders or the way he tilts his head in approval whenever Adam does something that pleases him.
Angus was curiously courteous in that sense. He tolerated Adam’s drunkenness in public, but when they were alone there was an obliqueness to him that spoke of a lifetime of operating under discretion. Still, there are some obvious tells that Adam has learned to pick up on. The one that makes him laugh the most are Angus’s hands: tapered and so elegant that Adam wonders that they haven’t given his true nature away yet.
The two of them make a handsome pair. Angus is the press liaison to the BBC who’s made it far enough above everyone’s heads that they don’t say anything about his domestic life. Adam is the up-and-coming actor whose quirks are mostly forgivable, except for the fact that Adam has ambition and Angus, clever chap that he is, has a solution.
“Have you given it any more thought?” Angus’s voice is thick with smoke and still a little drowsy from the gin. “My proposal?”
How typical and bureaucratic it is, that slow return to business. Adam got what he wanted tonight—Angus beneath him; hard, blush bright, and willing to surrender. Now, of course, he is expected to reciprocate with the bloody Elms case.
“Oh, I don’t know Angus.” He moves across the sheets to drape himself over Angus’s freckled spine like a moth-eaten fur coat. Angus stiffens beneath his touch but doesn’t push him away. “It’s too early to think about such things.”
Angus sighs like an aging grand dame; not for the first time does Adam think his lover is wasted behind a desk. “The whole business is obscene. The girl should’ve known better before going and getting herself knocked up.”
Adam thinks Ruth is perfectly ordinary. She laughs when Adam tells bad jokes at parties, but then again she only knows him as a queer actor type who drinks too much. Marriage would be convenient for both of them, but Adam doesn’t want to consider the lovelessness that goes into such things. He feels a sense of kinship towards her. After all, being jerked along on a thread by a man one really shouldn’t be associating with isn’t a terrible way to establish common ground.
“She isn’t so bad.” He reaches over and traces one hand over the ginger thatch of hair on Angus’s chest. “I like her well enough.”
“Enough to resolve my problem?”
“Depends. What’s in it for me?” He already knows the answer, but he wants to tease Angus. Fame, security, a large country estate for his later years: it’s everything he could dream of, sans the one man he has grown recklessly fond of.
Angus pulls away, finally tired of Adam’s wandering fingers. He begins adjusting the buttons on his shirt. “You’ll do it,” he says, with all the conviction of a man who has never been uncertain of his place in life.
Adam knows how this will end, so he pitches his voice to an insouciant drawl. “Will I?” He also knows how to get what he wants.
Angus has a surprising physical grace that shouldn’t stun Adam so much now he’s had him in his bed for several months. Still, Adam lets out a gust of air as Angus pins him supine by his wrists.
“You don’t have much of a choice, do you?” Angus’s grip is firm but not uncomfortable. “You could get out of this the old-fashioned way—blackmail, and so on. The problem is you want this too much.”
The liquor makes Adam petulant and he screws up his face into a pout. “How do you know what I want?”
Angus lets out a low laugh. A car passing by the window of the flat illuminates his hair for a moment before falling back into shadow. “Looking at you is like looking at a reflection of my every desire, were I a less disciplined man.
“Discipline has nothing to do with it, darling.”
“Is that so?”
Adam surges up to kiss Angus, his stubble scratching against the other man’s mustache. “It’s all about technique.” It’s easy for Adam to pretend like this that he’s the one in control.
Angus pushes off the bed and goes to the bathroom. “Bad form.” He flips the switch and stands in the door frame, splashing water onto his cheeks from the sink.
“Fine.” Adam’s too tired to try anything else at this point, so he might as well concede defeat. “I’ll do it.”
“Come again?” Adam knows Angus can hear him, but the bastard’s going to make him repeat it as if once wasn’t humiliating enough.
“I’ll marry the girl: drive down this very afternoon to propose if I have to.”
Angus looks up, hair in disarray across his forehead. This man really should repulse him, but all Adam seems to muster up is tender-hearted affection. It feels a lot like a knife in the back. He’s glad he’s playing a gangster in his next role; it’ll be a change from the unwitting mark he’s been reduced to in his personal life.
“Excellent.” Under the sodium light, Adam can just make out the other man’s grin. “I’ll telephone Lord and Lady Elms to expect you.”
“You said this would fix everything.” A draft whisks its way through the room, and Adam pulls the blankets tight around his shoulders. The action isn’t cowardly, but it feels like capitulation all the same.
“It will.”
“I hope to God you’re right, or I’d say this is a rather piss-poor way of throwing me over.”
Angus tilts his head slightly, glasses catching the yellow glow and obscuring his eyes. He nods, uncharacteristically quiet: all his earlier bravado in bed is gone out of him.
Adam looks over at the clock on the night table: 5 a.m. In a few hours, they’ll both have to step back into the roles they’ve learned to inhabit so well: paper pusher, actor, censor, and above all, liar.
“Come back to bed, McCain. It’s my last night as an unattached man, and you owe me.”
Angus’s mouth presses into a hard line. “I owe you nothing, Le Ray,” but he slips under the blankets anyway.