Work Text:
They’re working. They’re definitely working. They’re definitely…. supposed to be working.
It’s a Friday night and the library is almost empty. Enjolras and Grantaire are basically alone at their customary third floor table, save Courfeyrac, asleep on a pile of books at a window seat, and Jehan, curled up next to him, still working on his final project. Enjolras doesn’t have many regrets about grad school but sometimes, on nights like these, he thinks it would be nice to spend his Fridays with Grantaire in places with less florescent lighting, or at least chairs that weren’t made of plastic.
Grantaire doesn’t seem to mind, though. His dark head is bent over his work across the table from Enjolras and Enjolras can’t stop looking at him. Grantaire bites his lower lip when he concentrates and his hair is a mess of unbrushed curls. They’ve been in here since six, Enjolras methodically working through a pile of student papers he really needs to mark by the end of the night and Grantaire absorbed entirely in his art. From here, upside down, it doesn’t look like anything to Enjolras but then Grantaire always likes to explain what he’s doing if Enjolras asks.
Grantaire must realize he’s being stared at because he lifts his head and smiles. “Having fun?”
Enjolras blushes, caught out. He doesn’t think he’s ever blushed so much in his life as he has since Grantaire had caught his hand and asked him out, weeks ago, just the two of them left sharing the lift down from Courfeyrac’s flat at the end of the night. There’s something about Grantaire that brings this out in him, this tentative embarrassment of happiness. He wears it across his cheekbones for everyone to see like a mark of pride.
Grantaire’s smile shifts into something far more insinuating. “Want me to give you something to look at?”
“Grantaire,” Enjolras says, trying to sound reprimanding. It rings false even to his own ears. “This is a library.”
“So?” Grantaire shrugs. “Looking doesn’t make any noise.”
Enjolras gestures at the few people around them. “There are people here.”
“You’ve never minded before,” Grantaire says. The expression on his face alone looks capable of causing months of society scandal, rippling through the ages to become the dirtiest kind of gossip. Grantaire would have showed his ankles to anyone, Enjolras thinks, and it makes him realize how tired he is.
“I can’t,” he says, ruefully. “I have to finish this.”
“Ah, well,” says Grantaire, clearly not giving up. “If you insist.”
Enjolras drops his eyes back to his work. In his peripheral vision, Grantaire stays still for a moment until, with an amused exhale, he too dips his head to his paper.
The sound of their pens scratching on paper is loud in the library silence.
A minute passes, and then another. It’s long enough for Enjolras to lose himself in marking again, and it’s not until he looks up from a particularly grammatically frustrating sentence that’s testing the limits of his patience for academic language that he focuses back in on Grantaire.
Grantaire, who has the tip of his pen in his mouth.
Enjolras makes a strangled sound before he can stop it and Grantaire’s wicked mouth curves around the pen. Enjolras can see the flash of his tongue.
“Something the matter?” Grantaire asks, innocently, in the voice of a man who knows he’s pushing someone’s buttons. “You’ve stopped working. I thought that was important?”
“It is,” Enjolras grits out. He huffs a laugh. “Fuck, R, you don’t make things easy, do you?”
Grantaire, looking delighted, shakes his head. “You wouldn’t like me if I did.”
That’s not true. Enjolras would like him whatever he did. Enjolras feels hopelessly that he would like Grantaire if Grantaire didn’t like him back, if Grantaire disdained everything he stood for, if Grantaire wanted nothing to do with him. He counts himself lucky that, somehow, Grantaire has sided with him against all odds, possibilities, and methodical disagreements.
Being with Grantaire has made Enjolras feel a way he never expected he could, like the twist of his smile has unlocked something he had previously thought only possible for other people. Grantaire makes Enjolras want to kiss him when he laughs but, more than that, Grantaire makes Enjolras want to make him laugh.
Grantaire pats him on the shoulder as he passes. “I need a reference book,” he says. He grins. “Have fun marking.”
Enjolras waits for the scarcest of moments and then abandons his work to the fate of over-zealous librarians, following Grantaire into the stacks.
Grantaire is waiting for him around the first corner, grinning fit to put a cheshire cat to shame. “Thought I’d got you with the pen thing,” he says. “You’re not normally so easy for that.”
“I am,” Enjolras admits, like the close press of bookshelves is a confessional. “I just hide it better.”
Grantaire’s laugh is an astonished thing, sharp and loud in the quiet library. Enjolras doesn’t shush him. “Why, Apollo,” he says, using the nickname Enjolras can’t seem to shake. “Who would have thought it?”
Enjolras pushes him back against a bookshelf, praying it holds their weight. It does. Grantaire gasps as Enjolras fists his hands in the collars of Grantaire’s creased shirt, opens his mouth eagerly at the first touch of Enjolras’s lips on his. Enjolras presses his advantage, sliding his thigh between Grantaire’s, kisses him until he can hear Grantaire’s breath go ragged.
He leans his forehead against Grantaire’s shoulder when they break apart, catching a glimpse of Grantaire’s wet, red mouth as he ducks his head.
“You would have thought it,” Enjolras finally replies, grumbling it into Grantaire’s skin. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“Of course I did,” Grantaire says. He runs his fingers through Enjolras’s hair, letting them press out the knots of tension in Enjolras’s scalp that Enjolras always forgets are there. He hums a little, off-tune even though Enjolras knows he can sing. He sounds incredibly pleased. “I always do.”