Big Wolf on Campus -- snippet -- Holding Pattern
Title: Holding Pattern (1/1)
Author: Northlight
email: temporary_blue [at] yahoo.ca
Fandom: Big Wolf on Campus
Summary:
Pairing: Merton/Tommy
Rating:
Distribution: List archives and those who ask.
Disclaimer: Not mine. I am in no way affiliated with the show. No profit is being made from this fan work. No harm is intended.
Date: May 17, 2003.
Friday evening, and the Factory is full. Noise fills the air: music and voices and the nearly maniac clinking of glass against glass. It is loud nearly to the point of pain and Tommy has to lean in close--one arm slung over Merton's shoulder, his face angled tightly towards Merton's--in order to hear his best friend at all. Scent winds about him: sweat and over-perfumed bodies and teenage lust that might, at the most, cumulate in awkward groping in shadowed corners. This close to Merton, Tommy can ignore the rest and keep his focus on the familiar scent of oddly sweet hair-gel and spices and milk-fresh skin.
Merton's scent spikes sharply: "--girl of my *dreams.*" His thigh shifts easily against Tommy's beneath their table.
Tommy rumbles in reply, casting a sidelong glance at the girl in question. She is slight of build with pale skin and pouty lips. Tommy thinks: short and waxy-faced. She is looking in their direction, and Tommy does not like the soft curve of her lips or the way her fingers play along the length of her glass. Tommy tightens his grip around Merton's shoulders and turns a sympathetic grin towards his friend as he says: "keep on dreaming, buddy--that one's out of your league."
It goes like this: Tommy jokes about Merton's love life, and more importantly, the lack thereof. Merton will flush and bluster while Tommy grins at him. Tommy will never leave Merton floundering for too long before he slings his arm around his best friend's shoulders and tugs him into Tommy's side. Merton bears the jokes because Tommy is his friend and he's seen enough of other boys to think it natural. Tommy sometimes thinks that he should stop, because for all that he tries, Merton isn't just one of the guys and Tommy's jokes sting more than they otherwise might.
The comments aren't meant to be *mean*--they're just meant to keep Merton in his place while Tommy figures things out.
Tommy notices things about Merton that he's not sure that a best friend should. Sometimes, noticing how the polished beads and stones and metals of Merton's necklaces nestle in the hollow of his throat feels so ordinary that Tommy hardly wonders at it at all. There are days, too, when Tommy studies how those tightly wound black cords ride the column of Merton's neck and knows himself to be balancing the ever finer line between what he always has been and what he might yet become.
Tommy isn't sure that he wants to be anything but who and what he is right now. He is frightened, he is exhilerated and he can't step back and won't step forward.
He can't not watch Merton.
Tommy knows the precise curve of Merton's hands when he is at rest. Merton's hands are almost always in motion and Tommy found himself staring, unexpectedly fascinated, the first time he found Merton asleep at his desk. His hands curl towards his body while his fingers loosely hook towards his palms when Merton stills. Tommy has learned the pale blue tracery of veins in Merton's inner arms and has touched his fingertips to the thin skin at Merton's pulse. Merton looks oddly vulnerable when not in motion, when not humming with excitment about a thousand different things--but Tommy knows the strength in those hands: he has felt it against his wrist and elbow, shoulders and back a hundred different times.
Tommy knows Merton's wardore as well as--better than--he does his own. He has studied the sikly glide of material over Merton's arms and shoulders and chest. He knows exactly how freshly washed cotton stretches across the sharpness of Merton's shoulder-blades and creases in the crook of his arms. Tommy has watched the hem of Merton's shirts rise, leaving visible a thin line of pale flesh at his belly or spine. Tommy has thought about touching that skin; has thought of comparing it to that of Merton's hands and arms, the nape of his neck and the angle of his jaw.
Tommy isn't as nice as everyone thinks. If he were, he would tell Merton the truth or let him go. He wouldn't slip his arm around Merton every time a girl approached him with a promise in her eyes. He would tell Merton that the pretty blonde two seats down and three across in Biology spends the entire class casting covert glances in Merton's direction. He would introduce Sheila-from-English to Merton and would leave them to their passionately incomprehensible discussion of Gothic literature. If he were as nice as he was supposed to be, Tommy wouldn't resent the time that Merton and Lori spend without him, alone together.
He's *not* that nice, though--so Tommy doesn't do anything and doesn't say anything.
It isn't as though Tommy doesn't have a good idea as to how Merton would react if he told him. He has heard the catch in Merton's throat when Tommy moves in a certain way: rolls his shoulders, flexes his arms, cocks his hip to lean against his locker. And because it's *Merton,* he's smelt desire when Tommy says something smart or something that shows that he's been listening to Merton, no matter how bored he may sometimes look. That's awesome: that brain and body and wolf, Merton wants him.