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Darren wakes slowly to the strains of “Filthy/Gorgeous” growing increasingly louder.
It’s Chris’s ringtone, so, his hand goes immediately to the phone before he’s actually even awake.
And then, flashes of what he thought happened last night raced through his mind.
“Come on, Dare,” Chris whispered, pulling him forward by his belt loops. “Kiss me again.”
“No no no,” Darren had replied, kissing him on the forehead. “I need to go home.”
“But why?” Chris practically whined, kissed forehead falling to rest at Darren’s temple. “I have clothes or a washing machine and food and you should just stay here.”
“Chris, we should,” Darren paused, “I don’t know, take things slow.” That sounded lame and stupid even to him.
Chris scoffed. “If you wanted to take things slow, you shouldn’t’ve declared your undying affection for me and then let me choose my own adventure.”
Darren chuckled. “To be fair, I only let you choose the arduous quest of our first planned kiss, not the entire course of the evening.”
Chris pulled away from Darren and gave him a skeptical look bordering on judgmental. “Oh really? You had vast plans for the way this evening would go?”
Darren paused a moment too long.
“That’s what I thought.”
And with that, Chris captured his lips in a kiss again, fingers curling around Darren’s shoulders. Darren stopped struggling for a moment of weakness, whimpering softly into Chris’s less than angelic mouth as their tongues met again.
“No no no,” Darren said again as he pulled away, and God, why did he keep doing that? “I should go home. We should, I don’t know, think for a while or something.”
Chris reluctantly relinquished his hold on Darren’s shoulders, eyes slowly lowering to the floor. “Okay. Right. I’ll see you later this week, then?”
Darren smiled warmly at him, lifting his chin with the side of his curled forefinger. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He left Chris’s house with his co-star’s smile tingling on his back, closing the door behind him, and regretting his choice almost as soon as he stepped onto Chris’s stoop. He seriously considered whether it would be romantic or just sad if he said he couldn’t bear to leave Chris’s home.
Determining it was probably the latter, he got into his car and mournfully drove to his own home twenty minutes away. He felt like taffy, being stretched from Chris’s side to his own couch, where he sat studying the grain of his wood flooring instead of doing something that involved not thinking about Chris.
The knock on his door came ten minutes after he sat down.
Darren wonders how much of it is memory or if any of it is memory at all.
Because he might be wacky, but he doesn’t really fancy himself the blurting compliments type and in no universe could his confession of “you look fantastic” could be considered anything but.
He thought Chris had stayed the night, slept—and only slept—beside him, the protrusions of his hips pressed against Darren’s lower back.
But Chris is calling him.
Chris isn’t in his apartment.
Chris didn’t come over last night.
Did he even go over to Chris’s in the first place?
Was the whole thing a fairly elaborate dream and a sign that he needs to talk to someone about his obsession with his co-star?
It hadn’t happened. The whole thing—the sweat, the speech, the kisses—was a foolish fever dream. His imagination ran wild without him to reign his thoughts in and he allowed himself to get caught up in a fantasy that Chris was remotely interested in him.
He answers the call anyway, hoping he can convincingly attribute the lump in his throat to just waking up. “‘Lo?”
“Dare,” Chris says fondly, his smile clear in his tone.“can you open your bedroom door for me? Apparently, one of us locked it last night, and I have breakfast.”
Darren paused, letting the statement hang for a few long seconds while he tried to make sense of it. “What?”
Chris sighed. “Darren, I’m half-naked and bearing food and I can’t open the door, can you just get it?”
Darren scrambled out of bed, turning the handle to find Chris, in his Batman sweatpants, hair sticking up on the left side, balancing a tray of eggs and toast with one hand.
“I can’t believe I locked myself out of your room. I had a plan, I was going to wake you with the smell of eggs and kisses.”
“Kisses don’t have a smell,” Darren says, still incredulous and backing up to sit heavily on his bed.
Chris, having been turned away from him to put the tray down on his dresser, turned his head to give him a stare that was both disparaging and disconcertingly warm. “You know what I meant.”
He turns his entire body with the individual plates in his hands, but Darren shakes his head. “Put the plates down for a minute and come here,” he says, voice rough from sleep and lingering disappointment.
Chris looks confused, but approaches Darren’s side, taking the hand offered to him and stopping to stand between Darren’s legs.
Darren places his hands on Chris’s hips, thumbs brushing against his hip bones slowly for a few moments as he feels the morning-cooled skin. When Chris makes a soft noise of questioning, Darren wraps his arms around Chris’s hips, pulling him forward roughly to press his cheek against Chris’s stomach. The softness contrasts greatly with his two-day-need-a-shave stubble, but he just can’t feel badly about marking Chris’s skin.
“Darren, what’s wrong?”
Darren shakes his head, moving his face so that he can kiss the tender skin of his belly as if in recompense for the scrape of his rough facial hair. “Just thought it was a dream for a minute,” he murmurs, lips moving against Chris’s tummy.
Chris makes a quiet, acknowledging noise and runs his fingers through Darren’s curls, scratching gently at his scalp. “Scared you?” Darren nods, exhaling slowly and shakily. Chris’s right hand slides down to rub firmly at his back. “I’m right here. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. My fault for...I don’t know, I’m sure it’s my fault.”
Chris chuckles, leaning over to kiss the crown of Darren’s head. “Me too. It’s always your fault.”
Darren lets go of his tight grip on Chris’s hips, allowing him to fetch the food from across the room.
“You didn’t have much as far as traditional breakfast food is concerned, but I found plenty of in-date eggs and bread, so, this is what you’re getting.”
“Okay,” Darren says, less than willing to argue.
“We’re going to watch Disney movies and you’re going to like it.”
“Yes, sir, Cap’n Tightpants,” Darren says, grinning as Chris throws his head back to laugh at the reference.
Chris sits down and situates himself against the headboard, telling Darren to pick a movie. When Darren puts in the DVD, Chris gestures to the space between his spread legs, directing Darren to rest his back against Chris’s chest. Darren scrambles eagerly to the suggested spot, wiggling his ass around for a minute before settling .
Chris breathes out a laugh at his child-like inability to sit still and feeds him a piece of toast. When Darren begins cheesily singing along with the sensuous beat of the song coming from the screen, Chris presses his face into Darren’s neck, stifling a snort of laughter.
“Life is just one big performance for you, isn’t it?”
Darren tilts his head to one side and then the other as if in thought. “Might be.” As he says the words, he can feel Chris’s mouth spread into a wide smile against the nape of his neck and he feels triumphant, reaching for a fork in an ambitious plan to feed Chris over his own shoulder.
He knows it isn’t going to work out, but he knows it’s at least going to make Chris laugh.
With any luck, his absurd antics will end in a duet.