Work Text:
They hadn’t been doing anything they shouldn’t have when Jim’s phone rang. Not that they ever did anything the rest of the time either – technically there was nothing to feel guilty about. They were standing in Jim’s kitchen, throwing away the boxes of the take-away food Adam had shown up with earlier, in comfortable silence as they stepped around each other in the small space. Just a late post-work dinner between coworkers – unusual maybe when Jim didn’t really socialise much with his other subordinates, but hardly inappropriate. They hadn’t touched. They hadn’t kissed. They hadn’t even been looking at each other.
And yet Jim flinched at the sudden ringing, not so much because the sound startled him as because there was really just one person calling him at this time of night when there were no open urgent cases – unless there had been a terror attack or something similar, and it probably said everything about his current situation that Jim almost hoped that’d be the case. Work. Messy and stressful and a fucking pain in the ass, but straightforward in its own way. A place where Adam could follow him without anyone wondering about it. A place where Jim didn’t need to lie.
Instead it was, of course, Neil. For a moment Jim met Adam’s eyes, saw that same guilty expression in them that he had no doubt stood in his own, and then he picked up. Adam slipped out of the kitchen without a sound and disappeared into the bathroom – an illusion of privacy when Jim knew that his augmented hearing could pick up every single word spoken in the entire flat, and in all likelihood even Neil’s part of the conversation on the other end of the line.
They didn’t talk for long. The kids were already in bed, Neil had an endless day full of dull meetings behind him and wasn’t in the mood to talk much. It was normal, mundane. The kind of brief phone call they’d used to do almost every night when they were apart, just to check in with each other, hear each other’s voice. They’d started doing that again after London – after deciding to make a last effort to save what was left of their marriage. In the early years of their relationship Jim had loved those little calls, now he was tense down to the bones as if he expected to hear suspicion in Neil’s voice, questions, accusations. As if anything had happened that Jim should have felt guilty about. As if Neil would have had any way of knowing if it had, and wasn’t that a dangerous line of thought. Jim never even told Neil when Adam was there, even though they’d briefly met at the hospital after London. It wasn’t a secret, not as such, and yet Jim had been treating it as one almost from the start, as if he’d known right away that everything about this was a bad idea.
A few minutes later, after a half-hearted “take care” and “good night” where they’d used to say “I love you”, Jim leant back against the kitchen counter and stared at the two half-empty wine glasses – Adam wasn’t really a wine drinker in his own time, but he’d been happy to let Jim introduce him to a few of his favourites. It felt like a transgression somehow, knowing Adam’s opinion on wine at all. Knowing what kind of sushi he liked and which sports he was interested in and how the skin around his eyes crinkled when he thought of a fond memory. They’d been doing this too often. Their harmless, acceptable dinners they didn’t need to feel guilty about.
Another two minutes passed until Adam came out of the bathroom, quietly pretending that he hadn’t listened, that he didn’t know exactly why Jim didn’t meet his eyes. Better that way. A dangerous thing, eye contact with a man who refused to show his eyes to just about anyone, and Jim couldn’t blame him when those eyes were so painfully open and easy to read. Looking into Adam’s eyes – that felt like a transgression, too.
Adam leant against the kitchen isle across from Jim, arms crossed in front of his chest. The black turtleneck he was wearing looked so very soft, and Jim idly wondered if Adam even felt that – on his augmented arms, on a torso that was reinforced with dermal plating. If Adam would feel the callouses on Jim’s fingertips, how cool his hands were after washing them, if he’d feel them tremble.
“I should go,” Adam said once the silence had stretched out for too long – something tense and uncomfortable, nothing like their earlier quiet. As if he felt just as caught as Jim had, interrupted out of this strange little routine they’d let themselves slip into like they had any right to it.
“Yeah,” Jim agreed, and wasn’t the least bit surprised when Adam didn’t move. He only looked up, and even out of the corner of his eyes Jim could barely take it. He couldn’t remember when that had happened – when he’d gone from a general awareness that Agent Jensen was objectively a handsome man to feeling like he was doing something wrong every time he looked in his direction, at least outside of the office. At the office, it was easier. At the office, they were still Agent Jensen and Director Miller and Jim was too busy kicking Adam’s ass for all the bullshit he pulled to think about anything else. Most of the time.
“I shouldn’t come around tomorrow,” Adam added in that same tone – even, careful, almost resigned. Adam had never asked him for anything. He’d asked about Neil once, in those first few weeks after London. Things getting better at home?, still in the tone of a friend enquiring after his marriage troubles out of nothing but casual sympathy. Yeah, Jim had said because he’d still wanted to believe it then, and neither of them had ever brought it up again. He didn’t complain to Adam about Neil – about all the things that still drove him up the wall, about the fact that half the time he felt like he was playing an elaborate charade, some sad little amateur theatre play about two people pretending to be married. It didn’t feel fair, not to Neil and not to Adam.
“Probably not,” Jim agreed again. He didn’t want to know what Adam might see in his expression when he finally met his eyes, only hoped it didn’t look as pained as what he saw on Adam’s face. He shouldn’t put it on Adam, the responsibility of ending their … whatever this was. This nothing at all that felt like far more than they were allowed to have. Adam wasn’t the one who was married, the one who had responsibilities elsewhere. Adam kept coming by, but he’d never tried anything. If anything, he seemed to have already accepted that they couldn’t have more than this, and somehow that made Jim furious – that Adam didn’t even complain about this shitty situation neither of them had ever wanted to end up in.
They stood there for another moment, far too long, like neither of them managed to look away once they’d made the mistake of looking in the first place. And then Adam finally turned away, had already made two steps towards the door when Jim did something he knew he shouldn’t be doing. Another thing. One more in a long line of bad decisions.
“Adam, wait,” he said, and something in his chest tightened when Adam obeyed immediately, stopped and looked back at him. Didn’t move when Jim stepped closer again – too close, right into his personal space. He didn’t touch him, but his hand hovered over Adam’s hip like he was just one last bad decision away from touching it. He didn’t know what Adam would feel like against him – had only ever felt those augmented hands on his feverish skin when he’d been dying, and he barely remembered any details of that. Nothing but Adam’s eyes and the way his voice had cracked when he’d said Jim’s name. His first name, for the first time Jim could remember.
“What the hell are we doing?” It was an unfair question, Jim knew. He didn’t know what kind of an answer he was looking for – maybe they needed to say it out loud to remind themselves of the impossibility of it, of just how much this couldn’t happen. It wasn’t who Jim was. At least it wasn’t who he wanted to be.
“Technically? Dinner.” Adam said dryly. Jim wasn’t sure if he wanted to smack him or laugh. Then Adam looked down, soft eyelids covering those far too human eyes, and Jim tried to ignore the urge to kiss them. To kiss his sharp cheekbones and that ridiculous beard that somehow looked good on him and then finally his lips, like he’d wanted to for so long he could barely remember what his brain had been busy with all day before he’d started obsessing over his fucking subordinate. Even if he and Neil had gone through with the damn divorce – and Jim was starting to think that they should have – he still couldn’t have had Adam. Been his friend, maybe, but not this.
“Whatever it is we are doing, it’s not helping,” Jim just said. He didn’t think he’d ever admitted that there was anything either of them needed help with.
“I know how things are, Jim. You don’t need to justify yourself for me,” Adam said more seriously than before, and once again he sounded so resigned that Jim wanted to punch something. Adam deserved better than this – he deserved someone who could be with him, who could be there for him, who was actually by his side in this world in which all the odds were stacked against him. He deserved so many things Jim couldn’t give him, and yet he was here – still not leaving, and Jim had a feeling he wasn’t really going to stay away tomorrow night either, or any night after that. Not if Jim didn’t insist. He should have. Nothing had ever felt more difficult.
“I’m not,” Jim said and sighed deeply. “I’m all out of excuses and good reasons.”
Maybe it would have been easier if he and Neil had argued again, if he’d been angry at him. Not that Neil would have deserved it then, but maybe Jim would have felt a little bit less like a piece of shit then. Probably not. It wasn’t really about Neil, as much as about who Jim thought he was – and the fact that Neil’s feelings mattered so little in all this was probably another good sign they should have gone for that divorce, instead of letting Jim’s near-death experience make them believe they still wanted to be together. As if almost dying somehow repaired a long ruined relationship.
But that little phone conversation had been so normal and friendly and downright comfortable, and yet it didn’t change a thing about how happy Jim was that he was right here, with Adam, and not at home with his actual husband.
Something shifted in the way Adam was looking at him, like he knew what Jim was thinking, what he was considering – seriously for once, instead of an idle, guilty thought he tried to crush immediately. Maybe Adam did know. Jim was never entirely sure just how his CASIE worked, just how much Adam could read in his expressions and the tone of his voice and his fucking pulse. It was uncomfortable if he thought about it for too long, but in a way it also made this so much easier. Because Adam knew, and so he had plenty of time to make up his mind and step away and be sensible about this.
He didn’t. He didn’t move a muscle when Jim’s fingers finally came to rest on his hip, didn’t resist when Jim pulled him a bit closer. Only cocked his head to the side a little bit when Jim leant in until their noses brushed and they breathed the same air.
One last stupid mistake away from something he couldn’t turn back from anymore. It felt like watching a train come right at him and failing to jump out of the way. And because Adam was apparently a far more decent person than he was, he still hesitated – put his hand on Jim’s where it rested on his hip (and that was what those augmented fingers felt like, cool and smooth and yet eerily human).
“Jim, we –”
“I know. You think I don’t fucking know?” Jim interrupted him because he didn’t need to hear all the reasons why they shouldn’t, couldn’t. He’d reminded himself of them every single evening he and Adam had spent together like this, trying their best to pretend it was just friendly and nothing more. He’d kept reminding himself of them tonight and somehow they all paled when he met Adam’s eyes and that quiet, sad look in them. Because Adam’s feelings apparently mattered, dammit, and because Jim wanted him so badly that denying them both took more strength than he had.
“I know,” he said again, more quietly this time, and felt Adam shift against him, his fingers curling around Jim’s, his other hand coming to rest on Jim’s shoulder when their chests brushed. They’d never been this close, not even in London, not even afterwards at the hospital, when Adam had come to visit him and had looked at him almost the way he did now. Jim just hadn’t realised it at the time.
There were so many things he hadn’t been meant to know about Adam. How his laughter sounded when he actually drank enough to feel the alcohol, how his fingers twitched for a cigarette after a few hours in Jim’s strictly no smoking flat even though the Sentinel kept him from actually getting addicted to anything. How he could go on about baseball for ages or old-fashioned mechanical watches or a dog he’d seen on the way to Jim’s. Jim hadn’t been meant to know these things – but even less was he meant to know what Adam’s lips felt like when they finally touched his. That Adam was such a tender, gentle kisser, at least until Jim shoved him back against the kitchen counter and held on to him like a dam had finally broken and he couldn’t hold back anymore, and then Adam was kissing him back with so much raw longing it almost made Jim feel dizzy. He bit Jim’s lips and did it again when Jim moaned into the kiss, licked into his mouth and slipped his hands underneath Jim’s shirt like they’d done that a million times before.
Maybe he could have still tried to stop, but he knew he wouldn’t as soon as he felt Adam smile against his lips, as soon as he glanced up and saw that almost blissed out expression in his eyes. Like he couldn’t believe his fucking luck.
Jim wasn’t going to send him away tonight, and he wasn’t going to tell him to stay away tomorrow either. He might tell himself it didn’t really matter anymore once they’d crossed this last line they’d been so careful to stay away from, but he knew better than that. It mattered, and Neil didn’t deserve this, and Jim had wanted so very badly to think he was a better man than this.
But he wasn’t, and Adam simply mattered more.