[fic] Saddle Up, Baby (A Storm Is On The Horizon) - 1/2
Title: Saddle Up, Baby (A Storm Is On The Horizon)
Author: garnetice
Pairing: Logan/Kendall, past Kendall/James
Rating: M
Word Count: 8,822 (part one), 11,081 (total)
Warnings: Zombies, sex, POTENTIAL main character death (not Logan or Kendall, and no, I can't tell you whether the character is actually dead or not), minor character death (the 'rents and other zombies), did I mention sex?
Summary: All the battles are over. The war is won. For once, the four plucky hockey players from Minnesota didn't come out on the winning side.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author Notes: The apocalypse is for feelings and smut, obviously. And James just could not stay out of it because he is apparently my apocalyptic muse? Ahem, anyway, this is for swagtastickatie, who asked for post-apocalyptic kogan on Tumblr a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to write a straight up zombie story for a while, and you know I have a problem saying no to the end of the world. I borrowed some ideas straight from Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry and I am disclaiming them right here, and I'm pretty sure this was heavily influenced by Zombieland and the entire Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy by Carrie Ryan, because I love quiet love triangles/quadrangles in the midst of a dystopia. Title is from the Storm by Elenowen. All the love in the world to my super amaze betas, jblostfan16 and breila_rose.
---
Logan’s not like, scared of the zombies.
Really, he’s not. He has a scientific mind, and he is fully able to recognize that the driving force behind this little apocalypse is parasitic in nature. He knows all about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the combination of fungi that can overpower an ant’s brain and turn it into a mindless slave, only to kill the poor creature dead once its assigned tasks are done. He did a report in school about the baculovirus, which kills gypsy moth caterpillars and causes their body to liquefy and subsequently infect their kin in this cataclysmic chain of contagion. Logan’s hip to the research, and he knows that Mother Nature likes to cut down just as much as she likes to create.
This infection, just like any other contagion, is the Earth returning to its natural state; chaos.
Pure.
Beautiful.
Untamed.
But, okay, it’s hard to be scientifically objective or particularly dispassionate when one of the foul things is lurching towards Logan, jaw half hinged, eyes sunken and milky. The stench of dead flesh is thick in the air.
“Get in the car,” Kendall yells from inside a black four door sedan, pushing the passenger door out towards Logan. He’s frantic, white surrounding the thin green ring of his irises, skin as pale as the thing looking to take a bite out of them both. “Logan, get in the fucking car.”
“But James,” Logan says.
“Forget about James, damnit. Get. In. The. Car.” Kendall lunges across leather to grab at Logan’s wrist. He pulls him stumbling back into the passenger seat. Logan has just enough presence of mind to tuck his feet inside the car and yank the door closed behind him before Kendall slams down on the gas, and then they’re free, flying, out onto the empty back roads and through rural Kansas.
They are surrounded by cornfields that blur golden.
Out there, in one of them, is James, clutching his gun, with a bright red stain on his shirt, and-
Logan swallows. He fiddles with the radio, but of course, there’s nothing but white noise. One of the bigger stations is still playing the Emergency Broadcast System, the piercing shriek of a flatline, but even that will go dead, soon enough.
It’s only been three months since the world ended. Chaos is easy. Decay takes more time. In a few years, the asphalt will crack and break down from disuse. Saplings will grow. Nature will officially reclaim America. All the places where people lived and loved will be nothing more than fossils.
Logan wonders if he’ll be alive to see it. The thing with James’s dad happened so fast. Logan blinked and it was over. Is that what’s in his future?
It could be. Every time he’s faced with a monster, he freezes. All his hockey instincts, all his muscles, toned from dancing, just…stop. It doesn’t matter that he knows it’s all caused by a stupid infection. When faced with the reality of it, all he sees are monsters.
Kendall finds a stash of mixtapes hidden in the backseat. They watch the sun crest over Middle America listening to classic rock that both of them only know half the words to, but they don’t stop driving until the engine splutters to a stop.
“Shit. We’re out of gas.” Kendall punches the steering wheel, hard. Darkness is falling, the bloody victory of sunset over the landscape coming to a standstill, but Logan just watches the fan of Kendall’s eyelashes against his fair skin. He wants to reach out and touch him, to stroke the shape of his cheekbone and thumb over his lips.
It’s not anything new.
“We’re going to have to find a new car,” Kendall says, tone grave.
Logan bites his lower lip. James is the one who hot wires for them. His family is- was- rich as fuck because of his mom, but he grew up with a bunch of white trash cousins who taught him everything he knew. Only two days back, he was tinkering around in the leg well beneath the steering wheel of the car Logan’s still sitting in, connecting this wire and that wire while Logan and Kendall stood guard with their rifles cocked. James always wore this inexplicably proud smile when the engine roared to life, like he’d gotten away with something. But that doesn’t matter now, because they left James in the middle of a cornfield with a fully loaded gun and his dad, who was midway through the change.
They both wanted to stay and wait it out, but James told them to leave with a kind of ice in his voice that Logan had never heard before, and Kendall forced Logan away. He made them both run from that place, even though he’d known James for longer, even though he’d promised to take care of all of them.
All Logan can think about is how, when he looked back, James was just sitting there, gun clutched in his hand, the bright white of his lucky v-neck stained with blood from the attack. The field was empty, but town was nearby, and the second the gun fired, the zombies would hear.
They always hear.
“It’s dark,” Logan says, even though that’s beyond obvious. “We should wait until morning.”
Kendall wants to argue. It’s clear in the way his jaw muscles jump. But he says okay and rummages around in the back until he comes up with a blanket, always prepared. He’s like a motherfucking boy scout, and he’s really handling the apocalypse in stride. He’s got this inner badass that’s actually got a knack for taking down a walking corpse, and who even knew a power drill could do some of the things Kendall’s put his to use on?
Or a gun.
Or a machete.
Or fucking lawn shears.
Logan tries to keep his resentment to a minimum, but things weren’t supposed to be like this. They were in Minnesota when the contagion hit, visiting their families. Kendall was crashing at his grandma’s house because Katie had an audition in Hollywood, and Mrs. Knight had to stay back with her. It was supposed to be a carefree, stress-less week.
Instead, the end of the world came and went.
Kendall’s first thought was making it back to California, to find his mom and his sister. Logan was immediately onboard, because, well. He hasn’t quite come to terms with that part yet.
Nearly getting mauled to death by your parents isn’t exactly the kind of thing you deal with gracefully.
Logan can’t forget the deadness in his mom’s eyes, or the great jagged gash where her skin peeled away from her forehead. He’d never seen bone like that before, up close and personal, outside of TV or a textbook. He can’t erase the red sheen of his dad’s smile either, wet with their next door neighbor’s blood. Every time he closes his eyes, he can hear the noises they made, like they were choking on their own bile. He can still feel the grip of the hockey stick he squeezed tight in his hands and the way fear turned his marrow to ice.
He’s not really sure his insides ever melted.
Logan did what he had to.
James’s mom wasn’t lucky enough to make it through, either, and his dad signed on as a chaperone for their little cross-country road trip after the pretty young new Mrs. Diamond tried to make him a eunuch.
Carlos had to stay back, with his family, with all his little brothers and sisters, but it was okay, or as okay as things could get. They had their own little wacky crew of misfits all prepped and ready to go.
Mr. Diamond was pretty cool, for an old dude. He cracked joke after joke to try to lighten the mood, to try to make them forget that their homes were burning behind them.
Still.
What should have been a weeklong trip has turned into a three month exodus. The highways aren’t close to clear of abandoned cars, and not everywhere is as empty as Kansas’s countryside. Once or twice Logan left his map of America in the console of some hijacked vehicle, and they had to hunt down a new one, which wasn’t always as easy as it should be. The safety precautions some people took before the apocalypse are just abysmal. A GPS doesn’t know everything.
Plus there’s all the backtracking and the times they’re on foot and the way they try to avoid major cities. It’s like they’re running around in a maze, hitting brick walls at every turn. And with each day that passes, the lines at the corners of Kendall’s eyes grow deeper, the shadows turning to bruises. Sure, outwardly he’s taking all of this in stride, but it doesn’t exactly mean it’s not taking a toll on him deep down inside.
Today was the icing on the shitty apocalyptic cake. James is gone.
Maybe he’ll manage to catch up with them.
Probably not.
It’s a new moon, and the sky turns dark, soft, cloudless. It is so big, and Logan had forgotten this, caught up in the neon glow of LA. It’s huge and black and seemingly endless. It looks like the darkness might creep down and swallow them whole, crack the Earth into pieces and turn them both to stardust. And the stars, they sparkle like diamonds. They are breathtaking.
Logan thinks about wishing on one of them, but what use is it? Shooting stars, in all actuality, are just meteors; the chances that he’d actually spot a hypervelocity star are almost completely nil. Besides, no chunk of rock or space dust ever made anything come true.
Through the sunroof, he traces his finger over the shapes of familiar constellations. He recites the names of each cluster beneath his breath, because Kendall’s breathing is slow and deep, like unconsciousness has already claimed him. The night pools on his face, across the jut of his chin, in the indent of a dimple, on the blue-violet curve of his eyelid. There is a tightness to the line of his lips that never used to be there, a rigidity to his shoulders that Logan wants to ease away.
When he thinks about it, clearly, Kendall has taken on the end of the world like he does everything else, with that hypocritical air of reluctant authority, like even though he’d prefer an alternative, it’s his responsibility alone now. And the truth is that Logan’s always hated how Kendall never shares the burden of leadership with anyone.
He also admires it, because he knows the reason. He knows that Kendall doesn’t ever want any of them to get hurt in the event that things go wrong. But this is different. This isn’t like the time they threw a baseball through Mrs. Magikowski’s window, or some zany plot to get back at Gustavo. This is death, everywhere. It’s come and gone, sweeping over the world quicker than a solar flare. All the battles are over. The war is won.
For once, the four plucky hockey players from Minnesota didn’t come out on the winning side.
This is not something Kendall can fix, no matter how hard he tries, and the worst part is that Logan thinks he knows it.
He’s the one who found Logan, curled up in a ball in his bedroom next to what was left of his parents. He’s the one who wiped the blood from Logan’s skin and pried the hockey stick from his hands. Armed with his dad’s old service pistol and the ever-present shield of his own courage, Kendall is the one who found them all in the midst of chaos, who made sure that Logan and James and Carlos were safe. He tried to control the outcome, just like always, and now…look at them now.
Carlos is still back in Minnesota, with his family, with his parents, who refused to pioneer this brave, terrifying new world. And James is…somewhere. Maybe still sitting in a field of gold, spot lit by the sun as clouds drift lazily across the too-blue sky, just like he is in Logan’s memory.
Maybe.
If James was here, he’d be able to make Kendall smile, to ease the thick, corded muscle in his neck. James has always known how to strike just the right chord inside of their best friend, like he could see inside Kendall’s head. He always made him laugh, even when things got too heavy.
Logan wishes he shared that ability. He feels worse than useless.
He misses James.
He misses Carlos.
He misses his mom and dad.
And he misses feeling like he had a modicum of control over his own destiny.
All Logan can do now is count the fucking stars.
---
In the morning, they walk down a gravel path, shotguns slung over one arm. They reload on ammunition every chance they get, because life is not a movie, and sometimes it’s hard to find a gun shop that hasn’t been picked clean in the middle of this warzone. Kendall also has his own tiny arsenal, because of that aforementioned badass thing. Just five feet from the shell of their old ride, he shoots three zombies right between the eyes with the kind of precision and steady hands he didn’t have three months ago.
Show off.
He’s always been like this. Logan remembers meeting Kendall when he was eight years old, new in the neighborhood and scared to venture outside without a book in hand to take away the awkwardness of being that kid no one recognized. Kendall showed up at his door, rumpled blond hair and a gap toothed smile, a big black and blue bruise blossoming across one cheek.
“My mom made casserole,” he had said wearily, thrusting plastic Tupperware towards Logan’s face.
Logan looked down through the clear cover, confused, and said, “But half of it is gone.”
“Yep.” Kendall’s lips quirked. “I got hungry. Uh. Don’t tell?”
Logan shrugged. He thought casserole was kind of gross anyway. “I’ll go give it to my mom.”
“Hey, wait.” Kendall called after him. “I’m kind of, uh. My friends are a little…grounded, right now.” He shuffled from foot to foot, shoving his hands in his pockets and then removing them, raking through his already messy hair. “If I go home, mom’s not going to let me leave my room again for the next millennia.”
“What did you do?” Logan asked suspiciously, the black eye making him feel uneasy.
“Nothing bad,” Kendall rushed to say. Then, “Nothing that bad. But. Being grounded is boring. Do you play hockey?”
“No,” Logan replied immediately, thinking of his books upstairs, entire worlds waiting where he could get lost and be anyone other than the new kid.
But there was something about Kendall, about the way his smirk promised more adventures than Logan would ever be able to get up to on his own, and the way he said, “Well I’m kind of a prodigy, so. Want to learn?”
Logan snorts, thinking of how hard Kendall kicked his ass that day, and most of the days following. Cocky bastard.
The laugh is followed by something else, a flush of emotion so thick and hot that it makes him choke, his heart thudding hard in his chest, because James. The thing is, it’s guilt that burns so deep inside of him. Shame. Because for the briefest instant, when they left James behind on the slow jog to the car on the outskirts of that small farming town, Logan had this thought.
This awful, terrible, horrifying thought:
That for once he would finally have Kendall all to himself.
He hated it the second it flitted through his head. But you can’t take back a thought, no matter how wrong it is, and no matter how much you rebel against it. Logan is the kind of person who, for one grotesque, frozen moment, was happy his best friend was getting left behind.
Even if he regrets it, it’s true, and he hates that he’s capable of that.
Hates it, but is not surprised by it. This is Logan’s biggest fear, and has been since he was too small to reach high book shelves; he worries that he is nothing but a hollow boy with a heartbeat that screams Kendall’s name.
While they walk, they play this game where they choose people they know and theorize about whether or not they’ve survived. Sometimes it is not anything resembling fun, but other times it is, like when they talk about Mr. Bitters keeping a secret arsenal of weapons beneath the floor of the Palmwoods, or Jo going all kung fu on some zombie’s ass.
The latter theory falls a little flat when they realize that Jo’s stuck in New Zealand now, with no planes to get her back to the mainland, unless she can requisition a boat. But then Kendall starts a story where she lives as a sheep herder in the hills and pops the zoms from miles off, and that makes it better, somehow. It makes Kendall smile, and it’s the same now as it was when Logan was eight.
In Kendall’s grin there is the promise of things that Logan can’t even begin to imagine.
They find a car abandoned on the side of the road with enough gas in the tank that the branch Logan sticks in there experimentally comes back dripping. It’s an older model Ford, old enough that it hasn’t got an alarm to sound off when Logan jimmies open the automatic locks with the thin point of Kendall’s knife. They don’t like to break the windows, because there’s always the chance of a deadhead trying to peek in, so this is pretty lucky. All they have to do is figure out this whole hot wiring thing and they’ll be in business.
“Can we sleep in a real bed tonight?” Logan ventures, because his spine did not appreciate the cramped night in the car.
“Transportation first, Loginator.”
Logan obediently stands guard while Kendall sets to work on that, trying to recall from memory how James used to make engines roar to life.
Logan wonders where James is now, if he’s requisitioned a Lamborghini and is driving it down empty highways, either back to Minnesota, to Carlos, or towards LA, searching for them. Logan almost hopes James heads back home, where it’s reasonably safer. The good friend part of him doesn’t like the idea of James crossing deserts all alone.
The bad friend part of him just doesn’t want to be found.
He’s sitting cross legged on the hood of their potential ride, his gun propped on his knees, soaking in the sunlight. The metal is warm, even through the denim of Logan’ jeans, and it really is beautiful out. The birds are singing sweet notes that Logan tries to imitate, humming a melody that turns into a song full of nonsense words. Kendall joins in on some parts, his voice drifting from the open driver’s side door between grunts and curses as he tries to fit this wire with that one.
He has a beautiful voice. Logan has always, always thought so. Even before the band. At sleepovers, Kendall used to hum lullabies until Logan drifted off to sleep. It was a tradition, until they stopped having sleepovers.
That was mostly Logan’s fault. He didn’t want to be around Kendall that often, that close, making his heartstrings tangle and pull the way they did ever since the day he figured out Kendall and James were something more than Kendall and Logan would ever get to be.
He’d walked into the locker room early at the beginning of their sophomore year, intent on showing Kendall the new play he formulated in Calc II, which was totally going to win them nationals. He was excited, bouncing up off his heels, because he just knew Kendall was going to smile at him all wide open and happy; that smile that made Logan tingle all the way down to his toes.
But that’s not actually what happened.
Instead, Logan found Kendall and James, already smiling, only for each other. Kendall’s skin was a pale contrast against James’s, his mouth red where their lips met, and Logan couldn’t keep watching once James’s fingers dipped beneath the waistband of Kendall’s boxers.
It shouldn’t even matter now, because the world is wild and untamed in a way that it never could have been while humanity thrived, while they crushed and molded and smoothed the surface of the earth over in their own image, and James isn’t here. He can’t ruin anything, anymore.
Logan’s never asked Kendall about his weird relationship with their mutual best friend before, but here, in the sunlight and the birdsong and the emptiness, he feels weird. Brave. Daring. Like he deserves an answer.
“Hey, were you and James-“ Logan stops, takes a deep breath. It’s dumb to feel so embarrassed when there’s nobody around for miles. Nobody except for Kendall and his stupidly green eyes hidden behind the car’s steering wheel and the way he makes Logan’s heart pound. Logan turns to face the windshield, props his elbows against glass and says, a little louder, “Were you guys together?”
Kendall doesn’t pretend not to know what Logan means, and Logan appreciates that. He expects it, even. Kendall is good with honesty.
“In high school,” he says back, without a hint of shame. He peeks up over the dashboard of the car and shields his eyes from the sun, but the light still reflects off them, silvers them like the surface of a green glass lake. It’s strange to talk to him with the car between them, odd to be looking at him through a barrier. “We were just fooling around. It didn’t go anywhere. We want- wanted- different things.”
The edges of Kendall’s smile crack.
“Want,” Logan corrects. “James isn’t dead.”
Kendall shrugs, turning away from Logan to check the wires. Still no go.
“James isn’t dead,” Logan repeats, because he needs the reassurance.
Kendall won’t look at him. He says, “The rest of the world is. It’s not like I can really become center for the Wild now, unless the zombies are looking to start up a new team.” There is bitterness in Kendall’s voice that has nothing to do with hockey. “Everyone’s dead.”
“Everyone’s not dead,” Logan says quietly. “There’s us. And whoever else survived. And…”
“And?” Kendall challenges, fierce, blazing, ready for a fight.
“It’s just a disease. A virus. One percent of the population has to be immune. That’s how science works.”
“You think this has anything to do with science? This is hell.” Kendall slams his fist against the seat, anger shimmering off his skin in waves, like heat off the pavement. It’s the jolt that gets the engine running, a steady purr that hums beneath Logan’s butt.
They pile in the car, and there is an iPod in the dash filled with Disney music. They end up singing along to Hannah Montana for miles on end, and in a move that surprises no one, Kendall knows all the lyrics to Best of Both Worlds.
They drive and they drive, finally passing into Colorado. Logan has to ask.
“Why did you start again? With James? I saw you. A few weeks ago. I-“ Logan bites off his words, holds them deep inside of him where the only thing they can injure is maybe his heart.
If he even really has one.
Kendall’s knuckles on the steering wheel turn white, bone sticking through flesh. He does not lie. “Because we were scared. And we needed each other.”
“So you love him.” It’s an accusation.
“I’ll always love him,” Kendall admits, a soft fondness on his face that Logan is reasonably sure he’s never had directed his way. He swallows jealousy, a lump of coal that sits wrong in his esophagus. Kendall shakes his head then, straightens in his seat. “If you’re asking if we were in love, though, then no.”
Blunt, Logan retorts, “But you were sleeping together.”
“It was only for the past few weeks. It was, I don’t know, a comfort thing.” Kendall shifts, looking anything but comfortable.
“So it could just as well have been me.”
Kendall’s reply is immediate. “No.”
“Why not? If it was just a comfort thing,” Logan spits.
“Logan, no. Just. We’re buds. James and I knew each other a long time-“
“I’ve known you a long time.”
“James knew me longer,” Kendall says patiently. “We had history.”
“And we don’t?”
Kendall’s turning a little red, the muscle in his jaw jumping. “You’re twisting my words, dude. James was… “
“James is,” Logan corrects. “James is what?”
“He was the first person I kissed. He was the first person I did a lot of things with. We’ve got a different kind of history, so we weren’t…there was nothing to lose.”
“And there’s something to lose with me?”
“Of course. You’re my bud,” Kendall says again, and he doesn’t get it. Logan doesn’t want to be his fucking bud. “Why do you even care? You really want in my pants that much?”
Kendall’s joking now, his tone light, his smile brazen, self-assured. Logan refuses to rise to the bait. He stares out the window, where there are shadows in the canyons, eyes that reflect back the car’s headlights as night begins to fall. He pulls his legs up onto his seat, shivering a little.
They’re driving towards mountains. He wonders how zombies fare in the snow.
“Hey,” Kendall says, cranking the heat, his smile dropping. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Nothing’s okay,” Logan tells him. “How can you even say that?”
He is surrounded by all these monsters, but they don’t know what they’re doing. Logan does. He’s the one who is still alive, who can still feel, and the amount of relief he feels at being out from beneath his parents’ thumb, away from James’s flawlessness? It’s not right. He’s worse than any dead thing.
Kendall must read something on Logan’s face. His eyebrows knit together, and he smooths his hands across the steering wheel, saying, “How about we find you a bed for the night?”
They find a town at the base of a mountain that looks ghostly. They park the car near the cheerful sign declaring population 1,905, an X through the numbers and the word dead spray-painted in crimson red.
Walking is dangerous, especially this close to sunset, but they’re trying not to draw attention to themselves with the lights and the engine’s roar. Logan almost immediately steps wrong on a twig, the crack loud in the still mountain air, and at first they can’t figure out why there isn’t a plethora of dead upon them, even in the outskirts of this place. But only half a block later they see; someone has tied a group of zoms to their picket fence, line after line of the creatures with slack jawed smiles. They’ve been there a while, and they’re weak, keening for Kendall and Logan as they walk past. Through the rotted ribcage of one, Logan can see a half-digested hand. He shudders, repulsed by the sight of the monsters, disgusted by the brutal person that thought this was an acceptable alternative to shooting the poor beasts in the brains.
Where is the humanity in this?
Humanity is such a weird word when the life you’re supposed to live doesn’t exist anymore. Does it even have a place here, in the middle of all this death?
Maybe it’s just Logan who worries about that kind of thing. He isn’t sure how Kendall feels about the whole subject of retaining one’s morals or whatever in the middle of a battleground. He doesn’t look particularly pleased by the fence of rotting flesh, but he doesn’t exactly look averse to the idea of it, either. Kendall simply tugs Logan along, three houses down until they are standing in a garden that smells like it sprang from one of his mom’s antique perfume bottles.
It makes him think of his mom and blood and bits of brain splattered on the wall. Logan gags with it, trying to keep his stomach from staging an inopportune coup.
Kendall does a perimeter check like he’s stepped out of a spy movie, rifle cocked in his hands. Logan remembers London, playing at being James Bond in tuxedos and mostly failing hard at it. He almost smiles.
Almost.
There is a corpse in the basement, but it’s not the kind that’s likely to move.
“Starved to death, probably,” Logan says, trying to sound unemotional, even though the very sight of the thing makes his emotions go haywire.
Kendall shrugs, better at keeping his feelings in check. He says, “Rustle up some food. I’m going to try to get clean.”
The word clean is almost reverent, because it’s not exactly a luxury they enjoy very often. Logan searches the cabinets until he finds some Campbell’s soup in flavors he doesn’t exactly like, but won’t balk at, not when he spends so much time hungry. He concocts a fire from old newspaper and matches in the grates of the gas stove, boiling a pot of lentil whatever while Kendall stands off to the side, sponging himself off with a rag and a bucket.
The washcloth sticks to grime that’s accumulated in his hairline. He is all wiry muscle now, built less like a center forward and more like a dancer, but the silhouette of his body is generally the same, every bit as irresistible as Logan remembers.
He thinks about getting on his knees and kissing the backs of Kendall’s thighs, charting his way up until he can press his tongue inside of him. He could work Kendall open, make him wet and loose and ready for Logan and- fuck.
He bites his tongue, blood blossoming sick and sweet in his mouth. He’s had similar fantasies, back at the Palmwoods when he accidentally walked in on Kendall in the shower once or twice or eight times. But it’s different now, dangerous, because Logan could. James is not here because James is off, alone, abandoned, and isn’t that reason enough to push the idea of it away?
Kendall left him.
Kendall left James.
They eat in silence, and then Logan sponges himself off too while Kendall raids the drawers of the upstairs bedrooms for pjs that might kind of be their size. He fails, badly, coming up with pastel drawstring sweatpants and a t-shirts covered in daisies for himself, and a long, long, neon pink t-shirt that proudly declares Ski Bunny for Logan.
“I don’t know how to ski,” he objects.
“But the color suits you,” Kendall says with a smirk. “Sleep?”
“Sleep,” Logan confirms, but no way are they sleeping apart, even with all the doors locked and their guns propped next to the bed.
The bedroom they choose smells like roses, and roses still smell like death. Logan winces. They light candles to make up for the lack of electricity and moonlight, casting the whole room in shadows. There is a picture of the family who used to live here sitting on the night stand, but Kendall turns it frame down, shielding their happy faces from view.
It’s not the first time they’ve slept together, in that completely platonic, friends laying side by side kind of way. But it’s the first time in a long time that James or Carlos hasn’t been cuddled in between them, crushing the circulation out of Logan’s arms or legs.
They do not touch, inches between them that might as well be light years, for all that Logan is capable of crossing them.
The house is too quiet without the steady snores of James and his dad. Logan jumps at every creak. He doesn’t actually recognize that he’s doing it until Kendall ropes him in with his arms, snuggles Logan close to his chest. Kendall smoothes his fingers through Logan’s hair and hums a little, one of their songs that would have been on the new album they were supposed to make, once they returned to LA. It’s just like freshman year, before Logan figured out what James and Kendall were. It’s comforting.
Except then Kendall shivers, and Logan knows that he’s thinking of his mom and his sister, alone in LA. He’s terrified for them, even though he hides it well. Logan is scared for them too. Of course he is. Mrs. Knight and Katie are as much his family as his own parents were, but he’s having a hard time right now, figuring out what family means. He wonders if what he did- fuck, he can still feel the grip of his old hockey stick in his hand- means that he never really belonged to his parents the way a son is supposed to.
Was he too cold?
Too disconnected?
If the roles had been reversed, and they were in California when the outbreak occurred, would he be the one leading an odyssey across the United States to save his mom and dad?
He’s really, really worried that the answer is no.
Logan doesn’t want to be icy or distant. He wants heat. He wants love. And there, wrapped up in Kendall’s arms in the too-empty house in the too-empty town in the too-empty world, he thinks, screw it. He has always been the kind of person who thinks before he acts, but just this once, he wants to do first and figure it all out later.
The end of the world calls for special circumstances, right?
It’s a bad idea. James has only been gone for two days, and even if Kendall says he wasn’t in love with him, it’s still too fast, too soon. If he makes a move on Kendall now, he’ll just be taking advantage of him. Even knowing that, Logan does it anyway, shifting until he’s looking up at Kendall and his luminescent eyes. Logan rolls all the way over, covering Kendall’s body with his own, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. His body fits in all the places where Kendall’s dips, and Kendall’s heartbeat is a steady metronome in his chest. The rise and fall of his breath is a lullaby.
Only Kendall is stiff beneath him, tense muscles and pinched eyebrows. He exhales, shaky, and says, “Hi there.”
Logan rolls his eyes. Only Kendall would try to act like he’s still totally in control of this situation, even when the bewildered edge to his voice belies how he has no utter idea what’s going on. Logan pushes up off his chest, gets some distance between the exhilarating taste of Kendall every time he breathes in. He is straddling Kendall’s hips now, and he doesn’t know if it’s his imagination or not, but Kendall doesn’t seem totally disinterested in what’s happening. Logan can feel him, half hard through his thin sweats, digging into Logan’s ass.
Kendall is a decent person. He does not blush, but he wiggles a little, says, “Logan, you should, uh. Get off.”
Logan stays firmly put. He wants to be daring, to cross his arms and say something all sassy about how he certainly plans to get off. But he’s Logan Mitchell. He doesn’t have much of an attitude, and he’s not sure how to play the sly coquette. Indecisiveness pricks at his spine, makes him feel like he’s doing the wrong thing, the right thing, off track, exactly where he needs to be. Logan rolls his hips against Kendall’s, testing, grinding back a little on that heat. His breath is caught somewhere between his lungs and his mouth, held close like a secret.
Kendall’s eyes narrow, darken for a quicksilver moment where Logan thinks they might not even need to talk. He knows that look, the perilous amalgam of mischief and defiance that’s lead to every death-defying stunt Logan has ever been roped into. It’s the expression that Kendall used to wear when he rushed the net as the count ticked down, regardless of how big and scary the other team was.
Never before has Logan ever had that expression directed squarely at him.
It gives him the courage he needs to keep hitching his hips down, one palm spread across the plane of Kendall’s stomach. Kendall’s mouth drops open, an oval of bitten lips and perfect teeth and the pink of his tongue where it is pressed tight inside his cheek. His eyes squeeze shut, and he is working himself into a speech, Logan can tell.
He fucking hates speeches. He doesn’t need Kendall to deliver a sermon about why this is wrong. He doesn’t need a pep talk about the glories of platonic friendship. What he needs is for Kendall to take off his goddamned pants so that he can thaw all the places where Logan is frigid inside. Logan rolls his hips again and again. He can feel the way Kendall’s dick fattens against his thigh. Kendall actually sighs with it, and just once, his hips roll back against Logan’s, slow, the movement controlled, deliberate.
Then his eyes snap back open.
“Hey, stop, no,” Kendall grabs Logan’s wrist, holds it tight. He feels like he is falling apart inside, like Kendall’s grip is the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. He just wants this so much. He’s never wanted anything more.
“Just,” Logan fists his free hand in the hem of Kendall’s ugly t-shirt and leans forward, presses a kiss to the hinge of his jaw, “Please. Just this once. I hate it, Kendall. I hate being alone.”
“No. It’s wrong. You’re sad, and-“
“Stop talking,” Logan orders, curling his fingers around Kendall’s neck, cupping his heartbeat in his palm. “I’m asking you to. I want this. I’m sick of being lonely. Please.”
“Logan,” Kendall’s voice breaks.
“You did it with James,” Logan insists, and he’s supposed to be the smart one, but this is not smart. He nudges his nose against Kendall’s jaw, tilts his hips in for more friction. “Why not me?”
It’s a dirty move, bringing James up, but it also makes sense, because this is something James would do. Logan has always resented that about James; his ever present ability to get the very thing Logan had been longing for.
Kendall cringes and says, “You don’t really want this.”
“I do,” Logan argues. “I don’t want to just wait around to die. I want this. I want you.”
Logan presses his fingers against Kendall’s lips, watches his skin whiten and then red flood back in.
“You think, in the middle of all this, it’s possible to live?” Kendall asks, morose, torn. He watches Logan’s face, seeing something that Logan isn’t able to pin down or identify. And Logan does think that, he hopes it, he needs to believe it. He nods, slow, because words aren’t proving anything.
And he kisses Kendall, brushes their lips together, soft. Then harder, pressing in, trying to imprint himself on Kendall’s mouth so that this won’t be a moment he can ever, ever forget. The movement is enough that Kendall’s hands settle heavy on his hips, lead weights dragging them both down. He mumbles something that might be an okay and catches Logan’s lips again, and it’s better than anything Logan has ever fantasized about. Kendall flips them, tilts Logan back on the bed with one hand cradled under his neck, his tongue coaxing its way into Logan’s mouth, the right mixture of soft and demanding.
He kisses in a way that Logan can taste, less like the kissing is a means to an ends and more like Logan is something he wants to explore. When he pulls back, his lips are red, like they’ve been berry-stained.
Kendall works his way down Logan’s body, flipping up the edge of his hideous night shirt. He is blatant in the way that he stares at the swell of Logan’s cock, licking his lips, all of his uncertainty lost in the wind. He bites at Logan’s hipbone and the skin beneath his navel, lathes his tongue along the dark trail of hair leading straight to his dick. Kendall licks across the length of it, swirls his tongue against the head, and it’s almost too much.
Logan never had much of a problem landing girls; something about the combination of brains, brawn, and dimples always sort of reeled them in, and singing never hurt. But at the same time he’s never been this eager for it, wanted physical affection in such a desperate way.
Of course, he’s not even surprised, because it’s Kendall.
From the beginning, it’s always been Kendall.
He can feel those fingers of Kendall’s splayed light across his balls, toying with them when he takes Logan inside his mouth. He’s not at all hesitant, and Logan can’twon’t think about why that is, about how much practice Kendall has had at sucking another dude off. But he’s good at it, amazing at it, with those plush lips and the teasing way he mouths up and down the shaft of his dick, letting his spit cool at the base before taking him back in so deep that Logan thinks he can feel Kendall’s tonsils. It’s just the right amount of suction, just the right amount of damp and not even a hint of teeth, even when his lips are pressed up against wiry hair and his cheeks are dark hollows, capable of cutting glass. He watches Logan the whole time, gauges his reaction and adjusts accordingly, focused on all the little things he does with his tongue that makes Logan rut up into the wet heat of his mouth.
Kendall presses his thumbs into Logan’s hips, pins him against the bed and curls his tongue along the underside of him, pulling up so that Logan can feel it, the suck and the long lick of it; two different sensations that make his nerves jumpjangletighten. And when Kendall pushes back down all he feels is softwetsinful, and he pulses in his mouth.
Logan curses, whines, tries to get more.
When he dreamed of this, he was better, steadier, sexier, but he is falling to pieces, and it isn’t just him. Kendall is good, but when he looks at Logan there is something desperate in his eyes, and Logan feels one of his hands leave, tries to discern the dark space down where Kendall is maybe cupping the hard press of his own cock. Logan thinks of returning the favor, of mouthing around Kendall and making him moan. He has to press his hands into the gold strands of Kendall’s hair, force his face down and make Kendall take him deep, because damn.
Kendall’s throat is tight, warm, perfect and Logan knows he won’t last, barely is able to get out Kendall’s name before he’s flooding his mouth.
Kendall only swallows half of it, cum pooling white on his tongue. He shows Logan, opens his mouth and crosses his eyes in a way that’s kind of cute, like a puppy waiting for a treat, but then he tackles him back onto the bed, his body all hard ridges. He pushes his tongue into Logan’s mouth, and it should be gross, except he can feel how desperate Kendall is for him in the insistent poke of his dick and the hard crush of his lips, and even though he can taste himself, sharp and textured and a little unpleasant, it’s underlined by accents of Kendallness that Logan doesn’t know how to put into words.
The salt of himself on his tongue makes him want Kendall more.
Logan reaches between them, hand inside Kendall’s garish sweatpants, twisting his fist over Kendall’s cock. He thumbs against precum and smears it across the head. Kendall wiggles out of those pants with ease, yanks his shirt up and over his head while Logan hunts around the room for something to make this work. He finds a drawer full of shit that he doesn’t question and tries hard not to touch because eurgh, unsanitary. Delicately, he extracts a bottle of lube from where it is nestled in the center. It’s one of those weird ones they always advertise- used to advertise- that are supposed to make big moments bigger or something ridiculous like that.
Those dumb commercials made Logan wonder when orgasm became a dirty word, but he doesn’t wonder about it now, can’t think of anything except for the press of Kendall’s knee against his thigh when he settles back onto the bed. He shucks his ugly long t-shirt, fully naked now.
Kendall has drawn into himself, is uncharacteristically quiet, and Logan wantsneedshas to change that, because he’s so sure that Kendall will change his mind. Logan is not James, is not anything like tall or tan or radiantly beautiful, and even if it’s some sick manifestation of grief or delirium that’s making Kendall consent to this, he’ll figure that out soon enough. But maybe if Logan can make it worth his while, if he can prove he’s better somehow, he can…
He shakes his head. The chances that he’ll be better in bed than James Diamond are very, very small, and thinking about it is psyching him out in a bad way. He turns back to Kendall, who is watching him, guarded, curious, naked, and god. This is actually happening. Logan is kneeling while Kendall is sitting, and for once he is tall enough that he towers over his best friend. He can see the way the candlelight turns Kendall’s hair to flame, dancing along the part and flickering orange-gold at the ends. His eyes are dark, unreadable, gorgeous.
Logan leans down and kisses him, his lips soft, plush, damp. He opens his mouth for Logan without hesitation, his arms wrapping around Logan’s lower back, fingers pressing into the dimples adjacent to his spine. Kendall’s tongue is wet velvet heat, the only thing that Logan can focus on, even as his dick is back, fighting for his attention. Kendall pulls Logan down, into his lap, hands at his hips again.
“Really?” He asks, his voice rough, like he’s been yelling all day in a crowded club instead of mutely staring at trees and zombies and walls.
“Really,” Logan replies, and he doesn’t sound smooth as silk either, the word leaden with everything that he doesn’t know how to say about how long he has been waiting.
“Okay,” Kendall says again, soft. “You do me.”
“Are you sure?” Logan asks, because that wasn’t how he expected this would go. He’s fully hard again, ridiculously turned on by the idea of it.
“You never have, right?” Kendall sounds certain, like he knows that Logan’s never let himself get fucked, and Logan wants to argue, but Kendall is right.
Kendall doesn’t look like it’s anything to be ashamed of, just turns around and props himself on all fours, ass in the air. Logan has the weirdest thought then, about how there is evil that exists inside of people, that springs from want when it simmers to a boil inside your chest. His heart is making a fervent attempt to beat out of his ribcage, but even so, there is a part of him that is still cold, detached. Victorious.
He made this happen. He is manipulating his way straight into Kendall’s arms. And the larger part of him is disgusted by it, thinks no, this was always supposed to occur. But that distant scientific part of him knows.
He is too smart for self-deceit.
The lube has been lying, momentarily forgotten, near the pillows. It makes Logan’s fingers tingle when he slicks it across his skin.
Kendall’s only half right, because it’s not his first time doing this, exactly. Girls in Hollywood are kinky, experienced, and they’ve let Logan get away with a lot of things the high school girls he knew back in Minnesota would never have tolerated. But he’s always kind of had the impression that backdoor sex is better for him than it is for the chicks he’s tried it with, and that is where this wildly differs. Kendall tolerates being stretched apart like a pro, the skin inside of him silky soft, crazy hot. It doesn’t take a lot before Logan can plunge three fingers in and out of him in a slow slide, imitating what he wants to do with his dick, and Kendall likes it more than girls ever have, bucking back to meet the collision course of his fingertips and nearly sobbing with how good it feels.
“Shit,” Kendall growls, “What’s in that lube? Fire?”
“Bad?” Logan murmurs, crooking his fingers just to watch Kendall jump.
He mumbles a curse word into one of the pillows and tells Logan to get on with it already, and Logan’s already got his dick in hand, ready to go. He slathers himself with lubricant, one handed, and thrusts forward hard just to shut Kendall up. Kendall actually yelps, his hands fisting in the bedsheets, and Logan stays there, buried hot and tight inside of him. He leans down to kiss the protrusion of Kendall’s spine, but kissing turns to licking, sucking, and Kendall hisses, “Logan, don’t be a tease.”
So Logan won’t be, isn’t. He wraps his hand around Kendall’s front, palming over his dick, getting a firm grip while he begins to pump inside him, slow. His free hand rests against Kendall’s hip, thumb pressing into skin until he feels like he is overheating, his heart staccato beneath his ribs.
Kendall is rutting up into his hand and riding back on his dick, and there is an elasticity in Logan’s body that is pulling tight. Logan bobs back, watches the place where his cock enters Kendall. It glistens wet, red from the stretch, twitches around him when he leans back on his heels and angles a little more to the right. Kendall groans, biting into the pillow, his hands braced against the headboard of the bed now, and there is a flush creeping along his back. Logan follows it with his hand, tracing up the line of Kendall’s spine and the wings of his shoulder blades with each paced thrust of his hips until he’s got his fingertips wound in Kendall’s hair and he is pulling him up, away from the pillows. Kendall is arched in the air, fucked onto Logan, totally malleable in his hands.
The arc of his neck and the crook of his back is sexy, negative space between them that makes Logan’s dick throb, a little drizzle of precum escaping and giving them more friction, because the lube is turning tacky, still intense, but thick.
Logan licks out at a bead of sweat in the center of Kendall’s neck, bites a tattoo there and on down to the knob at the base. He untangles his hand from Kendall’s hair and reaches around, caresses his face, lets Kendall suck his fingers inside the cave of his mouth. He keeps waiting for Kendall to slip up and call him James, but he never does.
That’s a fucked up thing to wait for in the first place, and maybe Kendall’s telling the truth. Maybe he’s not waiting for James to swing up out of the wings like some postapocalyptic Rambo, ready to sweep him back into his arms. Instead Kendall is firmly here. He pops Logan’s fingertips from his lips and twists their hands together, saying, “Logan, Logan, Logan.”
It turns all the chilly places inside Logan to light, makes him feel like he is strong and safe and home. Logan fucks into him harder, jarring pumps of his hips that make the bed shake beneath their knees, echo through the still, silent walls where the shadows of candle-flames dance.
Kendall breaks. He begs. Logan remakes him under his hands, puts Kendall back together the way that he’s supposed to be, that cocksure smile and the impish glint in his eyes. He uses his mouth to map out the skin of his throat, pressing prayers and promises and oaths into his flesh while he wrecks him with his hips, with his dick. He strokes up across Kendall while he slots himself deep inside him, balls pressed flush to his ass, and that is how Kendall comes undone, spurting over the shape of Logan’s knuckles, slimy between his fingers, wet in the valley of his palm.
Logan rides him through it, Kendall’s ass clenching hard around his dick in a way that is both painful and amazing, heightened by the moan that leaves his lips like a song, like Logan’s name drawn out and sexified. Logan pushes his fingers through the mess Kendall has made, through the cum cooling on his balls as he quakes, and he can’t hold on anymore. He lets go, shudders inside of Kendall for the second time that day, biting a hickey into Kendall’s shoulderblade while his vision breaks off into stars.
---
Author: garnetice
Pairing: Logan/Kendall, past Kendall/James
Rating: M
Word Count: 8,822 (part one), 11,081 (total)
Warnings: Zombies, sex, POTENTIAL main character death (not Logan or Kendall, and no, I can't tell you whether the character is actually dead or not), minor character death (the 'rents and other zombies), did I mention sex?
Summary: All the battles are over. The war is won. For once, the four plucky hockey players from Minnesota didn't come out on the winning side.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author Notes: The apocalypse is for feelings and smut, obviously. And James just could not stay out of it because he is apparently my apocalyptic muse? Ahem, anyway, this is for swagtastickatie, who asked for post-apocalyptic kogan on Tumblr a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to write a straight up zombie story for a while, and you know I have a problem saying no to the end of the world. I borrowed some ideas straight from Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry and I am disclaiming them right here, and I'm pretty sure this was heavily influenced by Zombieland and the entire Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy by Carrie Ryan, because I love quiet love triangles/quadrangles in the midst of a dystopia. Title is from the Storm by Elenowen. All the love in the world to my super amaze betas, jblostfan16 and breila_rose.
---
Logan’s not like, scared of the zombies.
Really, he’s not. He has a scientific mind, and he is fully able to recognize that the driving force behind this little apocalypse is parasitic in nature. He knows all about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the combination of fungi that can overpower an ant’s brain and turn it into a mindless slave, only to kill the poor creature dead once its assigned tasks are done. He did a report in school about the baculovirus, which kills gypsy moth caterpillars and causes their body to liquefy and subsequently infect their kin in this cataclysmic chain of contagion. Logan’s hip to the research, and he knows that Mother Nature likes to cut down just as much as she likes to create.
This infection, just like any other contagion, is the Earth returning to its natural state; chaos.
Pure.
Beautiful.
Untamed.
But, okay, it’s hard to be scientifically objective or particularly dispassionate when one of the foul things is lurching towards Logan, jaw half hinged, eyes sunken and milky. The stench of dead flesh is thick in the air.
“Get in the car,” Kendall yells from inside a black four door sedan, pushing the passenger door out towards Logan. He’s frantic, white surrounding the thin green ring of his irises, skin as pale as the thing looking to take a bite out of them both. “Logan, get in the fucking car.”
“But James,” Logan says.
“Forget about James, damnit. Get. In. The. Car.” Kendall lunges across leather to grab at Logan’s wrist. He pulls him stumbling back into the passenger seat. Logan has just enough presence of mind to tuck his feet inside the car and yank the door closed behind him before Kendall slams down on the gas, and then they’re free, flying, out onto the empty back roads and through rural Kansas.
They are surrounded by cornfields that blur golden.
Out there, in one of them, is James, clutching his gun, with a bright red stain on his shirt, and-
Logan swallows. He fiddles with the radio, but of course, there’s nothing but white noise. One of the bigger stations is still playing the Emergency Broadcast System, the piercing shriek of a flatline, but even that will go dead, soon enough.
It’s only been three months since the world ended. Chaos is easy. Decay takes more time. In a few years, the asphalt will crack and break down from disuse. Saplings will grow. Nature will officially reclaim America. All the places where people lived and loved will be nothing more than fossils.
Logan wonders if he’ll be alive to see it. The thing with James’s dad happened so fast. Logan blinked and it was over. Is that what’s in his future?
It could be. Every time he’s faced with a monster, he freezes. All his hockey instincts, all his muscles, toned from dancing, just…stop. It doesn’t matter that he knows it’s all caused by a stupid infection. When faced with the reality of it, all he sees are monsters.
Kendall finds a stash of mixtapes hidden in the backseat. They watch the sun crest over Middle America listening to classic rock that both of them only know half the words to, but they don’t stop driving until the engine splutters to a stop.
“Shit. We’re out of gas.” Kendall punches the steering wheel, hard. Darkness is falling, the bloody victory of sunset over the landscape coming to a standstill, but Logan just watches the fan of Kendall’s eyelashes against his fair skin. He wants to reach out and touch him, to stroke the shape of his cheekbone and thumb over his lips.
It’s not anything new.
“We’re going to have to find a new car,” Kendall says, tone grave.
Logan bites his lower lip. James is the one who hot wires for them. His family is- was- rich as fuck because of his mom, but he grew up with a bunch of white trash cousins who taught him everything he knew. Only two days back, he was tinkering around in the leg well beneath the steering wheel of the car Logan’s still sitting in, connecting this wire and that wire while Logan and Kendall stood guard with their rifles cocked. James always wore this inexplicably proud smile when the engine roared to life, like he’d gotten away with something. But that doesn’t matter now, because they left James in the middle of a cornfield with a fully loaded gun and his dad, who was midway through the change.
They both wanted to stay and wait it out, but James told them to leave with a kind of ice in his voice that Logan had never heard before, and Kendall forced Logan away. He made them both run from that place, even though he’d known James for longer, even though he’d promised to take care of all of them.
All Logan can think about is how, when he looked back, James was just sitting there, gun clutched in his hand, the bright white of his lucky v-neck stained with blood from the attack. The field was empty, but town was nearby, and the second the gun fired, the zombies would hear.
They always hear.
“It’s dark,” Logan says, even though that’s beyond obvious. “We should wait until morning.”
Kendall wants to argue. It’s clear in the way his jaw muscles jump. But he says okay and rummages around in the back until he comes up with a blanket, always prepared. He’s like a motherfucking boy scout, and he’s really handling the apocalypse in stride. He’s got this inner badass that’s actually got a knack for taking down a walking corpse, and who even knew a power drill could do some of the things Kendall’s put his to use on?
Or a gun.
Or a machete.
Or fucking lawn shears.
Logan tries to keep his resentment to a minimum, but things weren’t supposed to be like this. They were in Minnesota when the contagion hit, visiting their families. Kendall was crashing at his grandma’s house because Katie had an audition in Hollywood, and Mrs. Knight had to stay back with her. It was supposed to be a carefree, stress-less week.
Instead, the end of the world came and went.
Kendall’s first thought was making it back to California, to find his mom and his sister. Logan was immediately onboard, because, well. He hasn’t quite come to terms with that part yet.
Nearly getting mauled to death by your parents isn’t exactly the kind of thing you deal with gracefully.
Logan can’t forget the deadness in his mom’s eyes, or the great jagged gash where her skin peeled away from her forehead. He’d never seen bone like that before, up close and personal, outside of TV or a textbook. He can’t erase the red sheen of his dad’s smile either, wet with their next door neighbor’s blood. Every time he closes his eyes, he can hear the noises they made, like they were choking on their own bile. He can still feel the grip of the hockey stick he squeezed tight in his hands and the way fear turned his marrow to ice.
He’s not really sure his insides ever melted.
Logan did what he had to.
James’s mom wasn’t lucky enough to make it through, either, and his dad signed on as a chaperone for their little cross-country road trip after the pretty young new Mrs. Diamond tried to make him a eunuch.
Carlos had to stay back, with his family, with all his little brothers and sisters, but it was okay, or as okay as things could get. They had their own little wacky crew of misfits all prepped and ready to go.
Mr. Diamond was pretty cool, for an old dude. He cracked joke after joke to try to lighten the mood, to try to make them forget that their homes were burning behind them.
Still.
What should have been a weeklong trip has turned into a three month exodus. The highways aren’t close to clear of abandoned cars, and not everywhere is as empty as Kansas’s countryside. Once or twice Logan left his map of America in the console of some hijacked vehicle, and they had to hunt down a new one, which wasn’t always as easy as it should be. The safety precautions some people took before the apocalypse are just abysmal. A GPS doesn’t know everything.
Plus there’s all the backtracking and the times they’re on foot and the way they try to avoid major cities. It’s like they’re running around in a maze, hitting brick walls at every turn. And with each day that passes, the lines at the corners of Kendall’s eyes grow deeper, the shadows turning to bruises. Sure, outwardly he’s taking all of this in stride, but it doesn’t exactly mean it’s not taking a toll on him deep down inside.
Today was the icing on the shitty apocalyptic cake. James is gone.
Maybe he’ll manage to catch up with them.
Probably not.
It’s a new moon, and the sky turns dark, soft, cloudless. It is so big, and Logan had forgotten this, caught up in the neon glow of LA. It’s huge and black and seemingly endless. It looks like the darkness might creep down and swallow them whole, crack the Earth into pieces and turn them both to stardust. And the stars, they sparkle like diamonds. They are breathtaking.
Logan thinks about wishing on one of them, but what use is it? Shooting stars, in all actuality, are just meteors; the chances that he’d actually spot a hypervelocity star are almost completely nil. Besides, no chunk of rock or space dust ever made anything come true.
Through the sunroof, he traces his finger over the shapes of familiar constellations. He recites the names of each cluster beneath his breath, because Kendall’s breathing is slow and deep, like unconsciousness has already claimed him. The night pools on his face, across the jut of his chin, in the indent of a dimple, on the blue-violet curve of his eyelid. There is a tightness to the line of his lips that never used to be there, a rigidity to his shoulders that Logan wants to ease away.
When he thinks about it, clearly, Kendall has taken on the end of the world like he does everything else, with that hypocritical air of reluctant authority, like even though he’d prefer an alternative, it’s his responsibility alone now. And the truth is that Logan’s always hated how Kendall never shares the burden of leadership with anyone.
He also admires it, because he knows the reason. He knows that Kendall doesn’t ever want any of them to get hurt in the event that things go wrong. But this is different. This isn’t like the time they threw a baseball through Mrs. Magikowski’s window, or some zany plot to get back at Gustavo. This is death, everywhere. It’s come and gone, sweeping over the world quicker than a solar flare. All the battles are over. The war is won.
For once, the four plucky hockey players from Minnesota didn’t come out on the winning side.
This is not something Kendall can fix, no matter how hard he tries, and the worst part is that Logan thinks he knows it.
He’s the one who found Logan, curled up in a ball in his bedroom next to what was left of his parents. He’s the one who wiped the blood from Logan’s skin and pried the hockey stick from his hands. Armed with his dad’s old service pistol and the ever-present shield of his own courage, Kendall is the one who found them all in the midst of chaos, who made sure that Logan and James and Carlos were safe. He tried to control the outcome, just like always, and now…look at them now.
Carlos is still back in Minnesota, with his family, with his parents, who refused to pioneer this brave, terrifying new world. And James is…somewhere. Maybe still sitting in a field of gold, spot lit by the sun as clouds drift lazily across the too-blue sky, just like he is in Logan’s memory.
Maybe.
If James was here, he’d be able to make Kendall smile, to ease the thick, corded muscle in his neck. James has always known how to strike just the right chord inside of their best friend, like he could see inside Kendall’s head. He always made him laugh, even when things got too heavy.
Logan wishes he shared that ability. He feels worse than useless.
He misses James.
He misses Carlos.
He misses his mom and dad.
And he misses feeling like he had a modicum of control over his own destiny.
All Logan can do now is count the fucking stars.
---
In the morning, they walk down a gravel path, shotguns slung over one arm. They reload on ammunition every chance they get, because life is not a movie, and sometimes it’s hard to find a gun shop that hasn’t been picked clean in the middle of this warzone. Kendall also has his own tiny arsenal, because of that aforementioned badass thing. Just five feet from the shell of their old ride, he shoots three zombies right between the eyes with the kind of precision and steady hands he didn’t have three months ago.
Show off.
He’s always been like this. Logan remembers meeting Kendall when he was eight years old, new in the neighborhood and scared to venture outside without a book in hand to take away the awkwardness of being that kid no one recognized. Kendall showed up at his door, rumpled blond hair and a gap toothed smile, a big black and blue bruise blossoming across one cheek.
“My mom made casserole,” he had said wearily, thrusting plastic Tupperware towards Logan’s face.
Logan looked down through the clear cover, confused, and said, “But half of it is gone.”
“Yep.” Kendall’s lips quirked. “I got hungry. Uh. Don’t tell?”
Logan shrugged. He thought casserole was kind of gross anyway. “I’ll go give it to my mom.”
“Hey, wait.” Kendall called after him. “I’m kind of, uh. My friends are a little…grounded, right now.” He shuffled from foot to foot, shoving his hands in his pockets and then removing them, raking through his already messy hair. “If I go home, mom’s not going to let me leave my room again for the next millennia.”
“What did you do?” Logan asked suspiciously, the black eye making him feel uneasy.
“Nothing bad,” Kendall rushed to say. Then, “Nothing that bad. But. Being grounded is boring. Do you play hockey?”
“No,” Logan replied immediately, thinking of his books upstairs, entire worlds waiting where he could get lost and be anyone other than the new kid.
But there was something about Kendall, about the way his smirk promised more adventures than Logan would ever be able to get up to on his own, and the way he said, “Well I’m kind of a prodigy, so. Want to learn?”
Logan snorts, thinking of how hard Kendall kicked his ass that day, and most of the days following. Cocky bastard.
The laugh is followed by something else, a flush of emotion so thick and hot that it makes him choke, his heart thudding hard in his chest, because James. The thing is, it’s guilt that burns so deep inside of him. Shame. Because for the briefest instant, when they left James behind on the slow jog to the car on the outskirts of that small farming town, Logan had this thought.
This awful, terrible, horrifying thought:
That for once he would finally have Kendall all to himself.
He hated it the second it flitted through his head. But you can’t take back a thought, no matter how wrong it is, and no matter how much you rebel against it. Logan is the kind of person who, for one grotesque, frozen moment, was happy his best friend was getting left behind.
Even if he regrets it, it’s true, and he hates that he’s capable of that.
Hates it, but is not surprised by it. This is Logan’s biggest fear, and has been since he was too small to reach high book shelves; he worries that he is nothing but a hollow boy with a heartbeat that screams Kendall’s name.
While they walk, they play this game where they choose people they know and theorize about whether or not they’ve survived. Sometimes it is not anything resembling fun, but other times it is, like when they talk about Mr. Bitters keeping a secret arsenal of weapons beneath the floor of the Palmwoods, or Jo going all kung fu on some zombie’s ass.
The latter theory falls a little flat when they realize that Jo’s stuck in New Zealand now, with no planes to get her back to the mainland, unless she can requisition a boat. But then Kendall starts a story where she lives as a sheep herder in the hills and pops the zoms from miles off, and that makes it better, somehow. It makes Kendall smile, and it’s the same now as it was when Logan was eight.
In Kendall’s grin there is the promise of things that Logan can’t even begin to imagine.
They find a car abandoned on the side of the road with enough gas in the tank that the branch Logan sticks in there experimentally comes back dripping. It’s an older model Ford, old enough that it hasn’t got an alarm to sound off when Logan jimmies open the automatic locks with the thin point of Kendall’s knife. They don’t like to break the windows, because there’s always the chance of a deadhead trying to peek in, so this is pretty lucky. All they have to do is figure out this whole hot wiring thing and they’ll be in business.
“Can we sleep in a real bed tonight?” Logan ventures, because his spine did not appreciate the cramped night in the car.
“Transportation first, Loginator.”
Logan obediently stands guard while Kendall sets to work on that, trying to recall from memory how James used to make engines roar to life.
Logan wonders where James is now, if he’s requisitioned a Lamborghini and is driving it down empty highways, either back to Minnesota, to Carlos, or towards LA, searching for them. Logan almost hopes James heads back home, where it’s reasonably safer. The good friend part of him doesn’t like the idea of James crossing deserts all alone.
The bad friend part of him just doesn’t want to be found.
He’s sitting cross legged on the hood of their potential ride, his gun propped on his knees, soaking in the sunlight. The metal is warm, even through the denim of Logan’ jeans, and it really is beautiful out. The birds are singing sweet notes that Logan tries to imitate, humming a melody that turns into a song full of nonsense words. Kendall joins in on some parts, his voice drifting from the open driver’s side door between grunts and curses as he tries to fit this wire with that one.
He has a beautiful voice. Logan has always, always thought so. Even before the band. At sleepovers, Kendall used to hum lullabies until Logan drifted off to sleep. It was a tradition, until they stopped having sleepovers.
That was mostly Logan’s fault. He didn’t want to be around Kendall that often, that close, making his heartstrings tangle and pull the way they did ever since the day he figured out Kendall and James were something more than Kendall and Logan would ever get to be.
He’d walked into the locker room early at the beginning of their sophomore year, intent on showing Kendall the new play he formulated in Calc II, which was totally going to win them nationals. He was excited, bouncing up off his heels, because he just knew Kendall was going to smile at him all wide open and happy; that smile that made Logan tingle all the way down to his toes.
But that’s not actually what happened.
Instead, Logan found Kendall and James, already smiling, only for each other. Kendall’s skin was a pale contrast against James’s, his mouth red where their lips met, and Logan couldn’t keep watching once James’s fingers dipped beneath the waistband of Kendall’s boxers.
It shouldn’t even matter now, because the world is wild and untamed in a way that it never could have been while humanity thrived, while they crushed and molded and smoothed the surface of the earth over in their own image, and James isn’t here. He can’t ruin anything, anymore.
Logan’s never asked Kendall about his weird relationship with their mutual best friend before, but here, in the sunlight and the birdsong and the emptiness, he feels weird. Brave. Daring. Like he deserves an answer.
“Hey, were you and James-“ Logan stops, takes a deep breath. It’s dumb to feel so embarrassed when there’s nobody around for miles. Nobody except for Kendall and his stupidly green eyes hidden behind the car’s steering wheel and the way he makes Logan’s heart pound. Logan turns to face the windshield, props his elbows against glass and says, a little louder, “Were you guys together?”
Kendall doesn’t pretend not to know what Logan means, and Logan appreciates that. He expects it, even. Kendall is good with honesty.
“In high school,” he says back, without a hint of shame. He peeks up over the dashboard of the car and shields his eyes from the sun, but the light still reflects off them, silvers them like the surface of a green glass lake. It’s strange to talk to him with the car between them, odd to be looking at him through a barrier. “We were just fooling around. It didn’t go anywhere. We want- wanted- different things.”
The edges of Kendall’s smile crack.
“Want,” Logan corrects. “James isn’t dead.”
Kendall shrugs, turning away from Logan to check the wires. Still no go.
“James isn’t dead,” Logan repeats, because he needs the reassurance.
Kendall won’t look at him. He says, “The rest of the world is. It’s not like I can really become center for the Wild now, unless the zombies are looking to start up a new team.” There is bitterness in Kendall’s voice that has nothing to do with hockey. “Everyone’s dead.”
“Everyone’s not dead,” Logan says quietly. “There’s us. And whoever else survived. And…”
“And?” Kendall challenges, fierce, blazing, ready for a fight.
“It’s just a disease. A virus. One percent of the population has to be immune. That’s how science works.”
“You think this has anything to do with science? This is hell.” Kendall slams his fist against the seat, anger shimmering off his skin in waves, like heat off the pavement. It’s the jolt that gets the engine running, a steady purr that hums beneath Logan’s butt.
They pile in the car, and there is an iPod in the dash filled with Disney music. They end up singing along to Hannah Montana for miles on end, and in a move that surprises no one, Kendall knows all the lyrics to Best of Both Worlds.
They drive and they drive, finally passing into Colorado. Logan has to ask.
“Why did you start again? With James? I saw you. A few weeks ago. I-“ Logan bites off his words, holds them deep inside of him where the only thing they can injure is maybe his heart.
If he even really has one.
Kendall’s knuckles on the steering wheel turn white, bone sticking through flesh. He does not lie. “Because we were scared. And we needed each other.”
“So you love him.” It’s an accusation.
“I’ll always love him,” Kendall admits, a soft fondness on his face that Logan is reasonably sure he’s never had directed his way. He swallows jealousy, a lump of coal that sits wrong in his esophagus. Kendall shakes his head then, straightens in his seat. “If you’re asking if we were in love, though, then no.”
Blunt, Logan retorts, “But you were sleeping together.”
“It was only for the past few weeks. It was, I don’t know, a comfort thing.” Kendall shifts, looking anything but comfortable.
“So it could just as well have been me.”
Kendall’s reply is immediate. “No.”
“Why not? If it was just a comfort thing,” Logan spits.
“Logan, no. Just. We’re buds. James and I knew each other a long time-“
“I’ve known you a long time.”
“James knew me longer,” Kendall says patiently. “We had history.”
“And we don’t?”
Kendall’s turning a little red, the muscle in his jaw jumping. “You’re twisting my words, dude. James was… “
“James is,” Logan corrects. “James is what?”
“He was the first person I kissed. He was the first person I did a lot of things with. We’ve got a different kind of history, so we weren’t…there was nothing to lose.”
“And there’s something to lose with me?”
“Of course. You’re my bud,” Kendall says again, and he doesn’t get it. Logan doesn’t want to be his fucking bud. “Why do you even care? You really want in my pants that much?”
Kendall’s joking now, his tone light, his smile brazen, self-assured. Logan refuses to rise to the bait. He stares out the window, where there are shadows in the canyons, eyes that reflect back the car’s headlights as night begins to fall. He pulls his legs up onto his seat, shivering a little.
They’re driving towards mountains. He wonders how zombies fare in the snow.
“Hey,” Kendall says, cranking the heat, his smile dropping. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Nothing’s okay,” Logan tells him. “How can you even say that?”
He is surrounded by all these monsters, but they don’t know what they’re doing. Logan does. He’s the one who is still alive, who can still feel, and the amount of relief he feels at being out from beneath his parents’ thumb, away from James’s flawlessness? It’s not right. He’s worse than any dead thing.
Kendall must read something on Logan’s face. His eyebrows knit together, and he smooths his hands across the steering wheel, saying, “How about we find you a bed for the night?”
They find a town at the base of a mountain that looks ghostly. They park the car near the cheerful sign declaring population 1,905, an X through the numbers and the word dead spray-painted in crimson red.
Walking is dangerous, especially this close to sunset, but they’re trying not to draw attention to themselves with the lights and the engine’s roar. Logan almost immediately steps wrong on a twig, the crack loud in the still mountain air, and at first they can’t figure out why there isn’t a plethora of dead upon them, even in the outskirts of this place. But only half a block later they see; someone has tied a group of zoms to their picket fence, line after line of the creatures with slack jawed smiles. They’ve been there a while, and they’re weak, keening for Kendall and Logan as they walk past. Through the rotted ribcage of one, Logan can see a half-digested hand. He shudders, repulsed by the sight of the monsters, disgusted by the brutal person that thought this was an acceptable alternative to shooting the poor beasts in the brains.
Where is the humanity in this?
Humanity is such a weird word when the life you’re supposed to live doesn’t exist anymore. Does it even have a place here, in the middle of all this death?
Maybe it’s just Logan who worries about that kind of thing. He isn’t sure how Kendall feels about the whole subject of retaining one’s morals or whatever in the middle of a battleground. He doesn’t look particularly pleased by the fence of rotting flesh, but he doesn’t exactly look averse to the idea of it, either. Kendall simply tugs Logan along, three houses down until they are standing in a garden that smells like it sprang from one of his mom’s antique perfume bottles.
It makes him think of his mom and blood and bits of brain splattered on the wall. Logan gags with it, trying to keep his stomach from staging an inopportune coup.
Kendall does a perimeter check like he’s stepped out of a spy movie, rifle cocked in his hands. Logan remembers London, playing at being James Bond in tuxedos and mostly failing hard at it. He almost smiles.
Almost.
There is a corpse in the basement, but it’s not the kind that’s likely to move.
“Starved to death, probably,” Logan says, trying to sound unemotional, even though the very sight of the thing makes his emotions go haywire.
Kendall shrugs, better at keeping his feelings in check. He says, “Rustle up some food. I’m going to try to get clean.”
The word clean is almost reverent, because it’s not exactly a luxury they enjoy very often. Logan searches the cabinets until he finds some Campbell’s soup in flavors he doesn’t exactly like, but won’t balk at, not when he spends so much time hungry. He concocts a fire from old newspaper and matches in the grates of the gas stove, boiling a pot of lentil whatever while Kendall stands off to the side, sponging himself off with a rag and a bucket.
The washcloth sticks to grime that’s accumulated in his hairline. He is all wiry muscle now, built less like a center forward and more like a dancer, but the silhouette of his body is generally the same, every bit as irresistible as Logan remembers.
He thinks about getting on his knees and kissing the backs of Kendall’s thighs, charting his way up until he can press his tongue inside of him. He could work Kendall open, make him wet and loose and ready for Logan and- fuck.
He bites his tongue, blood blossoming sick and sweet in his mouth. He’s had similar fantasies, back at the Palmwoods when he accidentally walked in on Kendall in the shower once or twice or eight times. But it’s different now, dangerous, because Logan could. James is not here because James is off, alone, abandoned, and isn’t that reason enough to push the idea of it away?
Kendall left him.
Kendall left James.
They eat in silence, and then Logan sponges himself off too while Kendall raids the drawers of the upstairs bedrooms for pjs that might kind of be their size. He fails, badly, coming up with pastel drawstring sweatpants and a t-shirts covered in daisies for himself, and a long, long, neon pink t-shirt that proudly declares Ski Bunny for Logan.
“I don’t know how to ski,” he objects.
“But the color suits you,” Kendall says with a smirk. “Sleep?”
“Sleep,” Logan confirms, but no way are they sleeping apart, even with all the doors locked and their guns propped next to the bed.
The bedroom they choose smells like roses, and roses still smell like death. Logan winces. They light candles to make up for the lack of electricity and moonlight, casting the whole room in shadows. There is a picture of the family who used to live here sitting on the night stand, but Kendall turns it frame down, shielding their happy faces from view.
It’s not the first time they’ve slept together, in that completely platonic, friends laying side by side kind of way. But it’s the first time in a long time that James or Carlos hasn’t been cuddled in between them, crushing the circulation out of Logan’s arms or legs.
They do not touch, inches between them that might as well be light years, for all that Logan is capable of crossing them.
The house is too quiet without the steady snores of James and his dad. Logan jumps at every creak. He doesn’t actually recognize that he’s doing it until Kendall ropes him in with his arms, snuggles Logan close to his chest. Kendall smoothes his fingers through Logan’s hair and hums a little, one of their songs that would have been on the new album they were supposed to make, once they returned to LA. It’s just like freshman year, before Logan figured out what James and Kendall were. It’s comforting.
Except then Kendall shivers, and Logan knows that he’s thinking of his mom and his sister, alone in LA. He’s terrified for them, even though he hides it well. Logan is scared for them too. Of course he is. Mrs. Knight and Katie are as much his family as his own parents were, but he’s having a hard time right now, figuring out what family means. He wonders if what he did- fuck, he can still feel the grip of his old hockey stick in his hand- means that he never really belonged to his parents the way a son is supposed to.
Was he too cold?
Too disconnected?
If the roles had been reversed, and they were in California when the outbreak occurred, would he be the one leading an odyssey across the United States to save his mom and dad?
He’s really, really worried that the answer is no.
Logan doesn’t want to be icy or distant. He wants heat. He wants love. And there, wrapped up in Kendall’s arms in the too-empty house in the too-empty town in the too-empty world, he thinks, screw it. He has always been the kind of person who thinks before he acts, but just this once, he wants to do first and figure it all out later.
The end of the world calls for special circumstances, right?
It’s a bad idea. James has only been gone for two days, and even if Kendall says he wasn’t in love with him, it’s still too fast, too soon. If he makes a move on Kendall now, he’ll just be taking advantage of him. Even knowing that, Logan does it anyway, shifting until he’s looking up at Kendall and his luminescent eyes. Logan rolls all the way over, covering Kendall’s body with his own, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. His body fits in all the places where Kendall’s dips, and Kendall’s heartbeat is a steady metronome in his chest. The rise and fall of his breath is a lullaby.
Only Kendall is stiff beneath him, tense muscles and pinched eyebrows. He exhales, shaky, and says, “Hi there.”
Logan rolls his eyes. Only Kendall would try to act like he’s still totally in control of this situation, even when the bewildered edge to his voice belies how he has no utter idea what’s going on. Logan pushes up off his chest, gets some distance between the exhilarating taste of Kendall every time he breathes in. He is straddling Kendall’s hips now, and he doesn’t know if it’s his imagination or not, but Kendall doesn’t seem totally disinterested in what’s happening. Logan can feel him, half hard through his thin sweats, digging into Logan’s ass.
Kendall is a decent person. He does not blush, but he wiggles a little, says, “Logan, you should, uh. Get off.”
Logan stays firmly put. He wants to be daring, to cross his arms and say something all sassy about how he certainly plans to get off. But he’s Logan Mitchell. He doesn’t have much of an attitude, and he’s not sure how to play the sly coquette. Indecisiveness pricks at his spine, makes him feel like he’s doing the wrong thing, the right thing, off track, exactly where he needs to be. Logan rolls his hips against Kendall’s, testing, grinding back a little on that heat. His breath is caught somewhere between his lungs and his mouth, held close like a secret.
Kendall’s eyes narrow, darken for a quicksilver moment where Logan thinks they might not even need to talk. He knows that look, the perilous amalgam of mischief and defiance that’s lead to every death-defying stunt Logan has ever been roped into. It’s the expression that Kendall used to wear when he rushed the net as the count ticked down, regardless of how big and scary the other team was.
Never before has Logan ever had that expression directed squarely at him.
It gives him the courage he needs to keep hitching his hips down, one palm spread across the plane of Kendall’s stomach. Kendall’s mouth drops open, an oval of bitten lips and perfect teeth and the pink of his tongue where it is pressed tight inside his cheek. His eyes squeeze shut, and he is working himself into a speech, Logan can tell.
He fucking hates speeches. He doesn’t need Kendall to deliver a sermon about why this is wrong. He doesn’t need a pep talk about the glories of platonic friendship. What he needs is for Kendall to take off his goddamned pants so that he can thaw all the places where Logan is frigid inside. Logan rolls his hips again and again. He can feel the way Kendall’s dick fattens against his thigh. Kendall actually sighs with it, and just once, his hips roll back against Logan’s, slow, the movement controlled, deliberate.
Then his eyes snap back open.
“Hey, stop, no,” Kendall grabs Logan’s wrist, holds it tight. He feels like he is falling apart inside, like Kendall’s grip is the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. He just wants this so much. He’s never wanted anything more.
“Just,” Logan fists his free hand in the hem of Kendall’s ugly t-shirt and leans forward, presses a kiss to the hinge of his jaw, “Please. Just this once. I hate it, Kendall. I hate being alone.”
“No. It’s wrong. You’re sad, and-“
“Stop talking,” Logan orders, curling his fingers around Kendall’s neck, cupping his heartbeat in his palm. “I’m asking you to. I want this. I’m sick of being lonely. Please.”
“Logan,” Kendall’s voice breaks.
“You did it with James,” Logan insists, and he’s supposed to be the smart one, but this is not smart. He nudges his nose against Kendall’s jaw, tilts his hips in for more friction. “Why not me?”
It’s a dirty move, bringing James up, but it also makes sense, because this is something James would do. Logan has always resented that about James; his ever present ability to get the very thing Logan had been longing for.
Kendall cringes and says, “You don’t really want this.”
“I do,” Logan argues. “I don’t want to just wait around to die. I want this. I want you.”
Logan presses his fingers against Kendall’s lips, watches his skin whiten and then red flood back in.
“You think, in the middle of all this, it’s possible to live?” Kendall asks, morose, torn. He watches Logan’s face, seeing something that Logan isn’t able to pin down or identify. And Logan does think that, he hopes it, he needs to believe it. He nods, slow, because words aren’t proving anything.
And he kisses Kendall, brushes their lips together, soft. Then harder, pressing in, trying to imprint himself on Kendall’s mouth so that this won’t be a moment he can ever, ever forget. The movement is enough that Kendall’s hands settle heavy on his hips, lead weights dragging them both down. He mumbles something that might be an okay and catches Logan’s lips again, and it’s better than anything Logan has ever fantasized about. Kendall flips them, tilts Logan back on the bed with one hand cradled under his neck, his tongue coaxing its way into Logan’s mouth, the right mixture of soft and demanding.
He kisses in a way that Logan can taste, less like the kissing is a means to an ends and more like Logan is something he wants to explore. When he pulls back, his lips are red, like they’ve been berry-stained.
Kendall works his way down Logan’s body, flipping up the edge of his hideous night shirt. He is blatant in the way that he stares at the swell of Logan’s cock, licking his lips, all of his uncertainty lost in the wind. He bites at Logan’s hipbone and the skin beneath his navel, lathes his tongue along the dark trail of hair leading straight to his dick. Kendall licks across the length of it, swirls his tongue against the head, and it’s almost too much.
Logan never had much of a problem landing girls; something about the combination of brains, brawn, and dimples always sort of reeled them in, and singing never hurt. But at the same time he’s never been this eager for it, wanted physical affection in such a desperate way.
Of course, he’s not even surprised, because it’s Kendall.
From the beginning, it’s always been Kendall.
He can feel those fingers of Kendall’s splayed light across his balls, toying with them when he takes Logan inside his mouth. He’s not at all hesitant, and Logan can’twon’t think about why that is, about how much practice Kendall has had at sucking another dude off. But he’s good at it, amazing at it, with those plush lips and the teasing way he mouths up and down the shaft of his dick, letting his spit cool at the base before taking him back in so deep that Logan thinks he can feel Kendall’s tonsils. It’s just the right amount of suction, just the right amount of damp and not even a hint of teeth, even when his lips are pressed up against wiry hair and his cheeks are dark hollows, capable of cutting glass. He watches Logan the whole time, gauges his reaction and adjusts accordingly, focused on all the little things he does with his tongue that makes Logan rut up into the wet heat of his mouth.
Kendall presses his thumbs into Logan’s hips, pins him against the bed and curls his tongue along the underside of him, pulling up so that Logan can feel it, the suck and the long lick of it; two different sensations that make his nerves jumpjangletighten. And when Kendall pushes back down all he feels is softwetsinful, and he pulses in his mouth.
Logan curses, whines, tries to get more.
When he dreamed of this, he was better, steadier, sexier, but he is falling to pieces, and it isn’t just him. Kendall is good, but when he looks at Logan there is something desperate in his eyes, and Logan feels one of his hands leave, tries to discern the dark space down where Kendall is maybe cupping the hard press of his own cock. Logan thinks of returning the favor, of mouthing around Kendall and making him moan. He has to press his hands into the gold strands of Kendall’s hair, force his face down and make Kendall take him deep, because damn.
Kendall’s throat is tight, warm, perfect and Logan knows he won’t last, barely is able to get out Kendall’s name before he’s flooding his mouth.
Kendall only swallows half of it, cum pooling white on his tongue. He shows Logan, opens his mouth and crosses his eyes in a way that’s kind of cute, like a puppy waiting for a treat, but then he tackles him back onto the bed, his body all hard ridges. He pushes his tongue into Logan’s mouth, and it should be gross, except he can feel how desperate Kendall is for him in the insistent poke of his dick and the hard crush of his lips, and even though he can taste himself, sharp and textured and a little unpleasant, it’s underlined by accents of Kendallness that Logan doesn’t know how to put into words.
The salt of himself on his tongue makes him want Kendall more.
Logan reaches between them, hand inside Kendall’s garish sweatpants, twisting his fist over Kendall’s cock. He thumbs against precum and smears it across the head. Kendall wiggles out of those pants with ease, yanks his shirt up and over his head while Logan hunts around the room for something to make this work. He finds a drawer full of shit that he doesn’t question and tries hard not to touch because eurgh, unsanitary. Delicately, he extracts a bottle of lube from where it is nestled in the center. It’s one of those weird ones they always advertise- used to advertise- that are supposed to make big moments bigger or something ridiculous like that.
Those dumb commercials made Logan wonder when orgasm became a dirty word, but he doesn’t wonder about it now, can’t think of anything except for the press of Kendall’s knee against his thigh when he settles back onto the bed. He shucks his ugly long t-shirt, fully naked now.
Kendall has drawn into himself, is uncharacteristically quiet, and Logan wantsneedshas to change that, because he’s so sure that Kendall will change his mind. Logan is not James, is not anything like tall or tan or radiantly beautiful, and even if it’s some sick manifestation of grief or delirium that’s making Kendall consent to this, he’ll figure that out soon enough. But maybe if Logan can make it worth his while, if he can prove he’s better somehow, he can…
He shakes his head. The chances that he’ll be better in bed than James Diamond are very, very small, and thinking about it is psyching him out in a bad way. He turns back to Kendall, who is watching him, guarded, curious, naked, and god. This is actually happening. Logan is kneeling while Kendall is sitting, and for once he is tall enough that he towers over his best friend. He can see the way the candlelight turns Kendall’s hair to flame, dancing along the part and flickering orange-gold at the ends. His eyes are dark, unreadable, gorgeous.
Logan leans down and kisses him, his lips soft, plush, damp. He opens his mouth for Logan without hesitation, his arms wrapping around Logan’s lower back, fingers pressing into the dimples adjacent to his spine. Kendall’s tongue is wet velvet heat, the only thing that Logan can focus on, even as his dick is back, fighting for his attention. Kendall pulls Logan down, into his lap, hands at his hips again.
“Really?” He asks, his voice rough, like he’s been yelling all day in a crowded club instead of mutely staring at trees and zombies and walls.
“Really,” Logan replies, and he doesn’t sound smooth as silk either, the word leaden with everything that he doesn’t know how to say about how long he has been waiting.
“Okay,” Kendall says again, soft. “You do me.”
“Are you sure?” Logan asks, because that wasn’t how he expected this would go. He’s fully hard again, ridiculously turned on by the idea of it.
“You never have, right?” Kendall sounds certain, like he knows that Logan’s never let himself get fucked, and Logan wants to argue, but Kendall is right.
Kendall doesn’t look like it’s anything to be ashamed of, just turns around and props himself on all fours, ass in the air. Logan has the weirdest thought then, about how there is evil that exists inside of people, that springs from want when it simmers to a boil inside your chest. His heart is making a fervent attempt to beat out of his ribcage, but even so, there is a part of him that is still cold, detached. Victorious.
He made this happen. He is manipulating his way straight into Kendall’s arms. And the larger part of him is disgusted by it, thinks no, this was always supposed to occur. But that distant scientific part of him knows.
He is too smart for self-deceit.
The lube has been lying, momentarily forgotten, near the pillows. It makes Logan’s fingers tingle when he slicks it across his skin.
Kendall’s only half right, because it’s not his first time doing this, exactly. Girls in Hollywood are kinky, experienced, and they’ve let Logan get away with a lot of things the high school girls he knew back in Minnesota would never have tolerated. But he’s always kind of had the impression that backdoor sex is better for him than it is for the chicks he’s tried it with, and that is where this wildly differs. Kendall tolerates being stretched apart like a pro, the skin inside of him silky soft, crazy hot. It doesn’t take a lot before Logan can plunge three fingers in and out of him in a slow slide, imitating what he wants to do with his dick, and Kendall likes it more than girls ever have, bucking back to meet the collision course of his fingertips and nearly sobbing with how good it feels.
“Shit,” Kendall growls, “What’s in that lube? Fire?”
“Bad?” Logan murmurs, crooking his fingers just to watch Kendall jump.
He mumbles a curse word into one of the pillows and tells Logan to get on with it already, and Logan’s already got his dick in hand, ready to go. He slathers himself with lubricant, one handed, and thrusts forward hard just to shut Kendall up. Kendall actually yelps, his hands fisting in the bedsheets, and Logan stays there, buried hot and tight inside of him. He leans down to kiss the protrusion of Kendall’s spine, but kissing turns to licking, sucking, and Kendall hisses, “Logan, don’t be a tease.”
So Logan won’t be, isn’t. He wraps his hand around Kendall’s front, palming over his dick, getting a firm grip while he begins to pump inside him, slow. His free hand rests against Kendall’s hip, thumb pressing into skin until he feels like he is overheating, his heart staccato beneath his ribs.
Kendall is rutting up into his hand and riding back on his dick, and there is an elasticity in Logan’s body that is pulling tight. Logan bobs back, watches the place where his cock enters Kendall. It glistens wet, red from the stretch, twitches around him when he leans back on his heels and angles a little more to the right. Kendall groans, biting into the pillow, his hands braced against the headboard of the bed now, and there is a flush creeping along his back. Logan follows it with his hand, tracing up the line of Kendall’s spine and the wings of his shoulder blades with each paced thrust of his hips until he’s got his fingertips wound in Kendall’s hair and he is pulling him up, away from the pillows. Kendall is arched in the air, fucked onto Logan, totally malleable in his hands.
The arc of his neck and the crook of his back is sexy, negative space between them that makes Logan’s dick throb, a little drizzle of precum escaping and giving them more friction, because the lube is turning tacky, still intense, but thick.
Logan licks out at a bead of sweat in the center of Kendall’s neck, bites a tattoo there and on down to the knob at the base. He untangles his hand from Kendall’s hair and reaches around, caresses his face, lets Kendall suck his fingers inside the cave of his mouth. He keeps waiting for Kendall to slip up and call him James, but he never does.
That’s a fucked up thing to wait for in the first place, and maybe Kendall’s telling the truth. Maybe he’s not waiting for James to swing up out of the wings like some postapocalyptic Rambo, ready to sweep him back into his arms. Instead Kendall is firmly here. He pops Logan’s fingertips from his lips and twists their hands together, saying, “Logan, Logan, Logan.”
It turns all the chilly places inside Logan to light, makes him feel like he is strong and safe and home. Logan fucks into him harder, jarring pumps of his hips that make the bed shake beneath their knees, echo through the still, silent walls where the shadows of candle-flames dance.
Kendall breaks. He begs. Logan remakes him under his hands, puts Kendall back together the way that he’s supposed to be, that cocksure smile and the impish glint in his eyes. He uses his mouth to map out the skin of his throat, pressing prayers and promises and oaths into his flesh while he wrecks him with his hips, with his dick. He strokes up across Kendall while he slots himself deep inside him, balls pressed flush to his ass, and that is how Kendall comes undone, spurting over the shape of Logan’s knuckles, slimy between his fingers, wet in the valley of his palm.
Logan rides him through it, Kendall’s ass clenching hard around his dick in a way that is both painful and amazing, heightened by the moan that leaves his lips like a song, like Logan’s name drawn out and sexified. Logan pushes his fingers through the mess Kendall has made, through the cum cooling on his balls as he quakes, and he can’t hold on anymore. He lets go, shudders inside of Kendall for the second time that day, biting a hickey into Kendall’s shoulderblade while his vision breaks off into stars.
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