Work Text:
It’s the first time Monroe’s smoked in at least ten years, but Nick has left his new vices burning in an ashtray on Monroe’s coffee table, still smoldering and sendring tendrils up to mix with brewing coffee in the air. Tell the truth, it’s not the smoke that’s the draw.
Monroe plucks the cigarette from the ashtray and slips the still-damp paper between his lips to take a drag.
Nick comes back in with the coffee, says “I didn’t know you smoked” in an odd voice, and Monroe says “Neither did you, until two months ago,” and they have a drink to seal an agreement not to talk about it.
It doesn’t suit Nick, the further into addiction he gets; he looks off doing it, furtive when Monroe catches him at it outside their coffeeshop, like a freshman behind the school. Monroe enables him and guilts himself for it later- but not over dinner, when they’re in the thick of the smoking section and Nick glances at him apologetically before he lights one up. Monroe buys the ashtray, doesn’t mention it, just watches Nick notice and wait two nights before he breaths it out in Monroe’s living room.
He’s worried about him, but figures that there are worse things Nick could be doing than smoking cigarettes and cheating on his wife. Monroe’s palms reassure themselves along the inside of Nick’s thighs, the steadiness of his rising pulse. As long as Nick was only split in two, Monroe figures, he can keep this part of him safe and trust the rest to Juliette. He got the smoking and the violence, jazz and dinner, the stubble and sharpness of the hunt; and she got pregnant, got his ring and courthouse wedding and good morning instead of good night. Between them they should be able to keep him together.
He’d told her that the night Kelly’d left. He hadn’t meant it literally at the time.