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"Do you know much about stars?" Charles asks. It's an abrupt question, especially considering he's gotta break away from Arthur sucking at the hollow of his throat to ask it.
"Uhh. Not much. Why, they suddenly more interesting than me?"
Charles chuckles lightly. "Maybe. A little."
"I've always thought the most interesting things were the things I could actually get my hands on," Arthur says, not wanting to get sucked into a discussion about astronomy when they were just getting to the good part.
Charles bats said hands away from the buttons on his jeans, still craning his head up to look at the night sky. Arthur stills in front of him, finally glancing up.
It is something, he thinks, just to see the huge expanse of sky, dotted, littered, veritably swarming with stars. "Sure is pretty," he says.
Nodding, Charles heaves a huge sigh.
"What?" Arthur asks, knowing he's done something, said something wrong. Just when he thinks he's in the clear, he messes it up.
"Nothing, don't get defensive. The sky just always makes me feel…"
Charles is silent for a long time, looking up. Arthur's quiet too, looking at the sky, the scrubland around them, and the stars reflecting in Charles' eyes. He feels something again, a little flicker of something deep in his gut. Charles looks good in the starlight, but it's more than that.
"Feel what?" he finally asks.
"I don't know," Charles admits, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Small, maybe. Insignificant. But not badly."
"Insignificant, but not badly." Arthur repeats the words, kind of trying to make heads or tails of them.
"Just a feeling. I didn't say it made sense."
"Sure it does," Arthur says immediately. He often feels a bit guilty for not understanding the philosophical things Charles comes out with and knows he probably sounds a fool when he replies, but they both know they're not spending time together for the sparkling conversation.
Charles laughs again, not unkind, and finally looks away from the stars to meet Arthur's eyes. "Sorry," he says. "I got distracted, didn't I?"
Arthur fakes a grumble, barely hiding a smile, and reaches for Charles to pull him back into the interrupted kiss.
They end up on the ground, when being vertical turns out to be too much to manage. Sometime between up and down, while they're distracted by other things, the view of the stars increases exponentially. Charles rests his head on Arthur's shoulder and watches the cloudless sky. It's close in a way Arthur wasn't used to. He… doesn't hate it.
Uninterrupted, alone out in the wilderness and tuckered out by the evening's activities, his guard is down. Charles leans over him and for a second Arthur's thinking he'll have to come up with a creative excuse for why he can't go a third time, but instead Charles kisses him different.
It's slow, methodical, like he wants to know what it's really like instead of just kissing first so they can move on. Arthur tenses, tries to open his mouth to say something, anything, but Charles slips his tongue in and Arthur has to stop a groan.
Charles pulls back instead of taking it a step further, which gives Arthur a mixture of feelings, but it's like a dam broke somewhere. It's suddenly so easy to twine his fingers in Charles' hair, to feel their legs knocking together, to allow the easy touches Arthur's always avoided.
"It seems like they go on forever. How many stars do you think there are?"
"Still got your head in the stars?" Arthur asks as Charles resettles on his shoulder, pulls his blanket over both of them. The fire is burning low; someone will have to get up and fetch another log, but Arthur's not in a hurry and Charles' voice is heavy with sleep.
"Yeah, I guess," he says.
"Probably... a lot," Arthur guesses. It ain't much of a guess, he can see about a million from where he's lying. He opens his mouth to speculate further, but Charles is sleeping, still comfortable at Arthur's side.
He stays awake a bit longer, just watching the stars.