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Matt was sitting on the leather sofa and looking at his second glass of whiskey. The ice had melted, the glass felt warm and sticky in his hand. He wasn’t going to drink this one, а but the unspoken bar etiquette seemed to require a glass in one’s hand. It was Jon‘s birthday, which happened to be right in the middle of some intense filming process, when the big celebrations were out of the question. So all of them ended up in a bar, just a block away from the building they were living in. Right now his co-actors were scattered all over the bar, and Matt occasionally caught glimpses of them in the dimly lit room. There was Jon getting birthday kisses. Isaiah was dancing with the girls. Alberto was taking a photo of Kat’s exotic cocktail. Dom was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant trouble.
“Hey, stranger!” Matt started when, speaking of the devil, Dom dropped onto the sofa next to him.
He looked like a man who was having fun at the price of the last drops of his blood. As soon as he landed, the mask of joy fell off his face as if he finally felt safe enough to show how tired he was.
“Did you get any sleep yesterday?” Dom asked rubbing his eyes. “Or is it today?”
Yesterday they had been filming for 14 hours straight, and today they spent eight hours on set and four hours preparing for a fight scene.
“A couple of hours,” Matt answered with a sigh. “Did you?“
Dom shrugged, “An hour maybe.”
Matt put his glass on the table and turned to get a closer look at him. Dom’s skin was almost as pale as his white T-shit, his mismatched eyes bloodshot and clouded.
“You look like death.”
“And you are charming as ever,” Dom chuckled, his elbow crashing Matt’s ribs.
“Cut it out, Dom,” Matt flinched in pain and immediately punched back, hitting Dom’s shoulder.
They had those little fights all the time, laughing on set or mimicking each other during the interviews. But suddenly Dom got even paler.
“Are you okay?” Matt frowned, the hand, that had just punched, squeezed his shoulder.
“It’s just too hot in here,” Dom muttered, his head leaning helplessly against Matt’s chest. “I can’t breathe.”
“Let’s get you outside,” Matt helped him to get up and they quickly made their way through the crowd and out of the back door.
It was dark outside, and even with the jackets on, the cold sank straight into the bones. Although Dom didn’t seem to care. He laid on the bench, hands behind his head, looking at the stars as if it was a hot summer night. Matt was sitting on the backrest, his feet on the seat, his legs stretched over Dom’s, reading something on his phone.
“Did you know that less than 2% of polar bear hunts were successful?” he finally looked up to check if Dom was still alive.
“That’s fascinating,” he hummed absently.
Matt flexed his cold fingers and kicked Dom’s leg, “How soon do you think we’ll freeze to death here?”
Dom sighed as if all he wanted in his life was to stay on that bench and slowly turn into a piece of ice, “Let’s walk home.”
“Are you sure you can walk?” Matt asked skeptically as he jumped off the backrest.
“I’m from Kent, Matt, we don’t get drunk,” Dom got up and pointed with an accusing finger at his chest, then pressed it harder to accentuate his words. “Alcohol runs in our veins.”
Matt just rolled his eyes and pushed his hand away.
As they were walking down a narrow alley, Matt had to admit that Dom actually wasn’t as drunk as he thought. He kept perfectly steady on his feet and hummed a song along with the quiet sound of their footsteps on the pavement. To his own surprise, Matt found that combination of sounds strangely soothing, almost like a lullaby. Probably, everything would sound like a lullaby with a bit of sleep deprivation.
“Alberto beat me in darts, can you believe that?” Dom chuckled as they were approaching the building where their apartments were located.
Matt pretended to look terrified and whispered dramatically, “The horror.”
“Well, I think he cheated,” Dom said indignantly but a soft smile still touched his lips.
“I bet he did,” Matt agreed as if talking to someone who was clearly insane.
Dom turned around and walked backwards looking at him accusingly, “And you didn’t play with me.”
“I didn’t play with anybody,” Matt shrugged failing to understand what was so important about a silly bar game.
“But it’s always you and me,” Dom said evenly as if he was stating the most simple fact everyone should know.
Matt didn’t answer because his phone suddenly rang too loud for the quiet street.
“Hey, Kat, yeah, I know,” he said as he gestured towards the bar to indicate where the call was coming from. “Dom’s not feeling well, I’m taking him home. No, it’s fine. See you tomorrow.”
“You should have told them we were having that kissing practice,” Dom suggested with a yawn as he turned around to walk normally.
Matt put away his phone and glared at him, obviously not amused, “Yeah, that joke is getting a bit too old.”
“Is it? Or does it get to your head, Matthew?” Dom’s eyes narrowed dangerously. He always used his full name, dragging vowels in a British manner, to be overly dramatic or just to annoy him.
“I’m an actor, Dom. I kiss people all the time,” Matt said a bit more harshly than he meant to.
“Okay,” Dom stopped a few steps away from the entrance to their building and caught Matt by the sleeve of his jacket, making him turn around. “Then kiss me.”
“All right, that last of round tequila was too much,” Matt tried to break free but Dom’s fingers clutched at his sleeve in a deadly grip.
“I said I’m not drunk. I can do a hand stand!” the tone of his voice left no doubt that he would do it right away.
“Please, don’t,” Matt winced feeling a faint wave of a headache.
“Then kiss me,” Dom repeated stubbornly as he released his arm and took a step closer, which forced Matt to take a step back. “I’m an actor, remember? It should be easy.”
“We’re outside,” Matt kept moving backwards, trying to appeal to the voice of reason.
“I know,” a smug grin, another step forward, another step back.
All of a sudden, Matt found himself standing in the dark, where the deep shadows of two nearest buildings crossed. Dom stopped right at the border, staying in the streetlight that reflected in his bright eyes. He didn’t smile anymore, he just stood there, watching. Matt knew he was a loose cannon, he knew about all those crazy challenges when Dom dived head first and started thinking afterwards. He knew there was no reason for his heart to skip a beat but somehow it did.
“It’s freezing,” he said quietly, and it seemed like the temperature dropped a few degrees since they had left the bar, the wind howling in the bare trees above.
“So?” Dom was standing so close that Matt felt his warm breath grazing against his lips.
He suddenly got angry because he couldn’t even understand why he was standing here, in the freezing wind, in the middle of the night, letting Dom play him like a schoolboy.
“Listen…”
I’m here to work, not to fool around. I’m not going to be a part of a stupid teenage game of truth or dare. You may be from Kent, where they have alcohol in their veins, but you’re drunk as fuck, deal with it.
There was a lot Matt was going to say but it took him a second to take a breath, and that second was enough for Dom to step into the shadows and crash their lips together.
The brick wall hit his back, and Matt couldn’t breathe because of the the pain in his shoulder-blades, because of Dom’s weight on top of him, because of his mouth claimed so unexpectedly. It wasn’t even a kiss, just cold lips pressed together for a short yet endless moment.
“I knew you wouldn’t do it,” Dom grinned victoriously when he pulled away. “Because you always think too much, you think you know exactly what will happen, you…”
He didn’t finish because in one swift motion Matt turned around, shoved him into the wall and kissed him back, making sure that this time it was the kiss Dom was asking for. That smug British jerk was not the only one who could play dirty. The only flaw of that perfect plan was that Matt didn’t catch the exact moment when it stopped being a payback, when he got lost in the sensation himself.
“What are we doing?” Matt pulled away with a sharp breath when Dom wrapped his cold hand around his neck. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a challenge anymore. It felt real and forbidden and good.
A blink of an eye, and they almost jumped away from each other, hands raised slightly, as if to avoid touching, as if they were held at gunpoint. They stood there, lips flushed, chests heaving, as they struggled to control their breathing, to control anything. The wind was blowing in ice-cold gusts, ruffling hair, burning skin. And then they met each other halfway, not knowing who was the one to make the first move. That was a kiss of pure despair, a scream for help that had gone wrong, a helpless hand of a lethal wound.
“Stop, wait, stop,” Dom gasped but it looked like he wasn’t sure if he was talking to Matt or himself.
He pushed Matt away only to grab the collar of his jacket and pull him back into another kiss at the same very moment. They rolled along the wall, as if in a peculiar head-spinning dance of touching, dominating and surrendering. Matt’s hands rested against the rough bricks, encaging Dom in his arms, and the next moment it was Dom whose fingers were pressing Matt’s wrists to the wall. Rough lips, a scratch of light stubble, a caress of steel and cold - it was alien and strange, yet unstoppable. When they crashed into the metal drainpipe, both groaned in pain and froze, staring and blinking, their faces only a breath apart. Slowly, they let go of each other and leaned against the wall, barely feeling the cold bricks behind them.
“Wanna talk about it?” Dom asked finally still trying to regain his breath.
“Not really,” Matt looked at the ground in front of him, at the clear line between streetlight and shadows.
Dom followed his gaze and glanced up at the same stars he had been watching on the bench behind the bar, “Me neither.”
Later, when Matt’s head finally touched the pillow and his eyes closed, he still could hear Dom’s voice in his head. “You think you know exactly what will happen.” He did think so because he had it all under control. And he had to put everything in order, to tame that chaotic train of thoughts in his head, so that he could keep his sanity. So, they would sleep through the night, dreamless and dead to the world, because they were both too exhausted to think about it tonight. It would be the next day when something would shift between them or maybe that would be the poles of the earth switching places. Something would still linger on their lips, still clench inside their throats, something they would have to put extra effort to breathe through. There would be distance and silence, eyes wouldn’t meet and hands wouldn’t touch. But somehow everything would be back to normal, they would be back to normal. They would just need some time for the lips to stop burning and for the sound of November wind in their ears to go quiet. They would just need some time to find their way back to earth.