Work Text:
The gaslight flickers unevenly across the Savoy Hotel's gilded wallpaper, casting Bosie's petulant pout in theatrical shadows. He sprawls across the velvet settee like a discarded theatre prop, one silk-clad leg dangling over the armrest.
"You're pretty, and you're smart," he drawls, tossing a sugared almond at Oscar's ink-stained cuff, "and you're ignoring me, so you're obviously my type."
The almond leaves a crystalline smear on Oscar's sleeve. Oscar doesn't glance up from his manuscript, quill scratching through a particularly vicious revision. The nib splutters—damnable cheap ink Bosie insisted on buying from that ornery vendor near Charing Cross.
"I'm sorry—" he murmurs absently, blotting a stray comma, "what were you saying?"
Bosie's grin unfurls slow as laudanum in milk. "Perfect." He rolls onto his stomach, kicking up the scent of bergamot and last night's absinthe. His fingers walk up Oscar's thigh like a spider along a windowsill. "You've just proven my theorem, darling. Only a man who writes sentences that glitter would be rude enough to—"
The quill snaps. Oscar finally looks at him, really looks: at the sweat-damp curl clinging to Bosie's temple, at the wine stain blooming obscenely across his collar. Somewhere below their fourth-floor window, a street vendor shouts about bruised peaches going cheap.
"Bosie," Oscar sighs, but the boy is already laughing, already victorious, already pulling him down into the ink and sugar and the glorious, terrible arithmetic of attraction.