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There’s no sound or movement that Adam can blame for waking him up, but he knows before he even opens his eyes that Jamie is awake, too, lying silently beside him. They’re somewhere in the long weekend they’ve been given to catch up on sleep after testing sleep deprivation myths. Till now Adam’s been floating in and out of consciousness irregularly, blissfully unaware of the day or the time. Judging by the light filtering through the curtains it’s sometime in the afternoon, and for the first time he actually feels awake.
“Whatcha thinkin?” Adam asks, rolling to his side to face Jamie.
Jamie mumbles, sighs, stretches. “I feel awake, but I know in about an hour I’m going to crash again. I don’t think it’s worth getting out of bed.”
“Want to play truth or dare?” Adam asks with a grin.
“Are you ten? Besides, it’s only a tool for my humiliation. I’ve sworn off.” Jamie retorts. They’d used Jamie as the unwitting guinea pig for the myth the sleep deprivation would make a person do things they normally wouldn’t. After already being awake for 24 hours, with 18 more to go, they’d had a sleepless sleep-over with the build team and tried to involve Jamie into various unlikely activities. The image of Jamie dressed in a party hat and doing the Macarena was one Adam would (happily) never forget. There’d also been a particularly informative game of truth or dare, which was (wisely) limited to just ‘truths’ at the insistence of the producer. Even Adam had been shocked when Jamie answered Kari’s question to the group at large (What’s your number?”) without batting an eye. He didn’t even need to have it explained to him. Just said “five” and wouldn’t say a word more.
“I think it’s sexy that you’ve only slept with five people.” Adam says, hand wandering under the covers to find Jamie’s chest.
“You don’t think I’m a prude, Mr. I- Can’t-Count-That-High?” Jamie asks, and Adam can tell he’s trying not to smile.
“Jamie, you are anything but a prude. And if we omit that one night, my number’s only like 15 or 20.”
Jamie makes a happy, quiet noise and rolls to face Adam. “Fine. I dare you to eat some of the pudding your boys made the last time they were here; it’s still in the fridge.”
Adam makes a horrified face. “Okay, A: I think I’d die. And B: We’ve been sleeping, and not sleeping, in the shop for a week with Jess and cameras watching us. I want to play sexy truth or dare.”
Jamie makes the face that means he’s deciding if it’s worth it to play along with Adam’s game of the moment. Adam makes his best puppy-dog eyes. “Alright, I dare you to be quiet for the next ten minutes,” Jamie says. Adam starts to make indignant sounds about how that doesn’t sound sexy to him, but Jamie clamps one hand over his mouth and cocks his eyebrow. “Giving up so soon?” Adam narrows his eyes and shuts his mouth.
“So, you think my number’s sexy. You want to hear more about it?” Jamie sounds like he’s talking to himself. He also sounds like he’s enjoying it a lot. He trails one hand up to Adam’s head and starts stroking through Adam’s hair. He thinks it makes him look a lot older since he let it grow out, but it is nice to play with.
“The first was a woman. More of a girl, actually. But I was 14 and she was 17 so she seemed grown up to me. I had run away from life on the farm after my parents threatened to send me to reform school and I made my way to San Francisco. I’d already been there for a few months and I knew when restaurants put the good food out in their dumpsters. I was waiting out back of this place for them to bring out the trash from the buffet when Cam showed up. She was there for the same reason I was and I was afraid at first that she was going to beat me up. She was muscular and beautiful and tough-looking, and here I was this scrawny kid, barely out of the nest by her standards. She didn’t, though. She invited me back to her place, and at that point any roof was a good one, so we gathered up enough food to feed a small army and I followed her back.” Jamie pauses and looks at Adam’s face. He’s completely still, and more focused than Jamie has seen him outside of working on one of his pet projects. Jamie leans over to kiss him, briefly, smiles and continues.
“She was living in an abandoned hotel with some guys. I think there were four of them, but honestly, it’s a little fuzzy. The were living the dream life, compared to the one I had left on the farm and the one I had been scraping out with my wits on the street. She introduced me to harder alcohol and drugs, and in more copious amounts, than I’d been able to get my hands on before. I told her about the farm and my parents, about why I ran away.” Jamie pauses but doesn’t look up at Adam, just strokes his hand through his hair again. “I do remember the first time. We fucked on a bare mattress next to a trash fire in a stripped out hotel room with a broken window that overlooked the city. I felt so alive. We spent days - I don’t know how many, but I don’t think it was more than a week - getting drunk and high and sleeping and fucking and doing it all over again. I woke up one day with a killer headache, sober for the first time in days, and hungry as hell, and they were gone. Everything was gone except the mattress I’d been lying on. Within an hour the cops showed up and took me to jouvee; called my parents. I think she told them where to find me. I think she did it because I had a family, and she didn’t, and she wanted me to go back home.
“Number two wasn’t until I was in college. His name was Kitt and he was a grad student when I was in undergrad. He was writing his thesis on the frequency of depressive words in poetry. There was this bell curve effect the showed up everywhere and he wanted to see if it would extend to haiku. He thought that if we all wrote haiku for half an hour every day there would be no war. He believed that making love was an art. We talked about music and art and philosophy and spent lazy, naked Sundays going through his poetry books. He was so passionate about his research, he could make a bell curve sound like the single more erotic concept in the universe; and he would make you believe it, too.” Jamie trails off.
“How did it end with him?” Adam asks, and Jamie’s so caught up he forgets to even admonish him for speaking.
“Oh, we grew up, we grew apart. You know how it goes. Mostly he graduated, and I think he got a little bored with me. I went down to the ocean after that. There were a lot of tanned, shirtless, hot young things running around down there - and I was one of them, if you can believe it. Number three, Paul, was one of the best looking guys there. He was a deckhand on a sailing ship that docked next to me at night. We were both living on our boats, but he had to share his with six other guys. He slept around with everyone on the dock, I think partially so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the crowded boat. We weren’t exclusive - or at least he wasn’t - but we made up for it in passion. We fucked our ways through the romantic movie clichés: on a beach, under the moon; in a cove with dolphins; at a secret spring; under a waterfall; in dirty beach bar bathrooms; on deck, making our own waves.... He was from the Texas coast and he always wore this ridiculous cowboy hat. I’d started wearing the beret by then - it came along during my artistic phase, with Kitt - so we made quite a pair. We made a lot of mutual fun of each other for the hats. We never really broke it off. We saw each other less and less often until I finally moved to San Francisco and never saw him again.
“Number four was the first woman since Cam and once again it was in San Francisco. She was sharp-witted and fun and it didn’t bother her in the least that all my real relationships had been with men. In fact, I think she liked it. We met on a commercial set. She was dating one of the actors and I had built a robot for the shoot. We got to chatting while he filmed take after bad take and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to steal her away a little bit. Anyway, it worked. It was a more grown-up romance than my frolics with Kitt or Paul. That’s not to say we didn’t have our share of frantic bathroom sex, but we went to the movies and the opera and the park. It felt more like real dating. She liked to talk about art and music in a way that reminded me of Kitt and she had Paul’s energy and wildness. It was the perfect combination; it felt so right. And it was perfect, for a long time, but, well, you know how that ended.”
Adam’s hand finds Jamie’s and he squeezes gently. He means, It’s not your fault, and It’s okay and I’m sorry, but by now he said them all so many times before that he doesn’t have to say it again.
“And number five,” Jamie says and graces Adam with the same grin he normally reserve for high explosives, “was this guy I hired to help out in the shop. He was brilliant, but he broke everything and I ended up firing him. It wasn’t over, of course. I got my most unlikely job yet, and he came back to be my co host and my best friend.” Adam’s smiling at him, mouth slightly open, and Jamie can’t resist kissing him quickly. “He reminds of all the lovers I’ve grown away from. Of Cam, who looked out for me, and Kitt who was beautifully passionate, and Paul’s wild abandon and the quick-wit of the one that hasn’t quite healed yet.” Adam’s still just staring at him with a half smile and a slightly stunned look on his face. “You can talk now, you know.” Jamie reminds him.
Adam rolls onto Jamie’s chest and kisses him intensely. “You know I’m a sucker for a love story,” he breathes against Jamie’s mouth.