[fic] How To Tame Your Hockey Player - 2/2
Title: How To Tame Your Hockey Player
Author: garnetice
Pairing: Dak/Logan
Rating: K
Word Count: 4,645 (of 9,099)
Warnings: None
Summary: Dak never wanted a roommate. So he's really confused about Logan's presence in his house.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author Notes: New story! New story that comes with a story. Right, so a looooong, long, long time ago, like, pre-Big Time Moms, I wanted to write a story where BTR broke up and James and Kendall were poor(ish) and living in a beach bungalow, surfing all day and serving coffee to locals and busking for cash. I may have mentioned this once or twice. Anyway, that fic only exists on the privacy of my computer, because it's not done. This beast here grew as a prequel for that, because I needed a way to explain why Dak and Logan came over for dinner dates. Why is that important? Mostly because there are some throwaway lines in here mentioning Kendall and James sharing an apartment. Also relevant: this is another spinoff of this same universe, if you are ever tempted to read about kames and their christmas tree. The main fic getting those two together will probably go up...er...one day. Other random tidbits: as mentioned, I began this a long while ago. Dak is a bit...er...grumpier than I'd write him now. Yes. Let's put it that way. (At this point, this is one of those stories I hate so much I can't look at it without cringing. So here, have.)
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4. Hockey players smell.
---
Logan, unlike Dak, has not taken deportment classes since he was ten.
That’s not exactly Logan’s fault, because Dak was a child star, and his mother was very invested in making sure he could never be completely comfortable around another human being. She ensured that Dak would always be invested in making sure whoever he is with is happily captivated by his company. Logan has never appeared to be particularly enthralled by Dak’s very presence, but that does not mean that Dak feels at ease dropping the act around him.
For the first few months of Mitchell’s term as live-in guest, Dak valiantly takes great pains not to get too relaxed around Logan. Which is why he finds it particularly off-putting that Logan suffers no such obligation. He burps, he belches, he breathes onions in Dak’s face. He walks around after yoga covered in a sheen of his own sweat instead of showering immediately, and that’s…really distracting for Dak.
Logan handles himself pretty okay outside the mansion, acting with grace and dignity amongst his fellow classmates or the rare girl he manages to woo, but at home? Logan’s barely presentable.
Dak doesn’t have any brothers, and he’s made most of his friends on the acting circuit, which is to say that none of them are close enough to regularly share their bodily functions in his presence. He’s not a priss, exactly, Dak just, you know, prefers that his body’s gases pass discretely into the ether.
It grates, having to be one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time, but he politely does it for Logan’s sake.
That all changes the night he makes the mistake of deleting the last three episodes of Grayson’s off the DVR. Logan spent the day with James and Kendall, taking time off from the endless torment of med-schooling, and it’s made him feisty. As punishment for Dak’s transgressions, Logan tackles him to the ground, pinning him just long enough to fart right in Dak’s personal space, wafting it towards Dak’s nose with his hand.
Dak is relatively certain that he might pass out from the smell.
Smirking, Logan demands, “Sorry now?” and Dak can imagine him having the same kind of scuffle with Carlos or James or Kendall back in the day. He thinks if he really, honestly wants to be friends with this guy, he should say something snarky and maybe start a wrestle-match.
Instead, he gags, “I need a gas mask. What happens in your stomach? This is unnatural.”
Logan shrugs happily, moving to let Dak up. “Teach you to touch my stuff.”
“It’s not your stuff though,” Dak says, and it sounds wrong the second his words hit the slightly nauseating air. Dak is the one who let Logan tramp into his home, let him set up camp and eat Dak’s food and drink Dak’s special-occasion microbrewery ales. This is where Logan lives now, at least for the time being.
Logan, for his part, isn’t as offended as he should be. He inclines his head to the side, thoughtful. “You’ve brought that up before. Maybe it is time I started looking for my own place.”
He means he wants to leave. That is…not as appealing an idea out loud as Dak thought it would be five minutes ago.
“Nah man,” Dak replies, his voice taking on a frantic edge. “I was kidding. You have like, eighty hours of school a week. You don’t have time to apartment hunt. Stay.”
Logan purses his lips. Brown hair tumbles into his eyes, grown too long in the midst of his pursuit of knowledge.
“Stay,” Dak insists, wondering where his abrupt jumble of nerves is coming from. He doesn’t do uncertain; he’s Dak Zevon.
Logan leans in close, staring at him with his big, brown eyes as if he can see through Dak’s head to the truth of the matter. Up in Dak’s personal space, he doesn’t smell bad at all, but sort of wonderful, a combination of spilled cappuccino, spiciness, and shared styling mousse.
Only one of those scents is inherently Logan, but Dak doesn’t want to think about where the scents of coffee and hair product came from, about the closeness shared between friends that Dak’s just never had the opportunity to experience.
“Okay.” Logan pulls back as quickly as he’d darted in and helping Dak to his feet. Conversationally he says, “You know, you should audition to be on Grayson’s. You’d be a really great guest star.”
“You think?” Dak asks, trying not to be flattered.
He’s gotten better compliments.
He just can’t remember ever getting one from Logan.
---
5. They make a mess. Of everything.
---
In the before-years, Dak assumed Logan was a clean person. He’s pretty anal-retentive about a lot of things, so why wouldn’t his natural habitat be one of them?
Dak was wrong. So wrong. Logan leaves mountains of clothes everywhere he goes, worn out from classes and too lazy to do much more than strip. He conscientiously does his dishes but forgets to put away old containers of Chinese food. He does not know what a coaster is. And asking him to clean the bathroom is a surefire way to get Logan to hide out in his bedroom for a week.
Dak gets it, sort of. Logan’s not much of a control freak about anything other than his education, maybe because he’s always had people like Kendall pulling the strings on his destiny. Also, being a med student is tough. But getting it does not mean that Dak enjoys being a maid.
“Is it really that damn hard to put your socks in a hamper?” He demands, practically every day.
On this particular day, Logan blinks up at him innocently and says, “Oops.” He holds up a text book and explains, “Big test.”
Dak softens, even though they both know that Logan would be equally messy without a single exam in sight. He really, really needs to stop coddling the-future-Dr.-Mitchell, because Dak is number nine on the newest Most Eligible Bachelor list published by Individual magazine, and
Eligible Bachelors do not impress girls (or boys) with poor housekeeping habits. Plus, there is a very real possibility that his weekly maid, Rosita, might riot.
Dak musters up the breath to yell. Then he lets it out. Taking care of Logan is becoming second nature.
One day, when Mitchell accepts the Nobel Peace Prize for curing cancer or whatever, Dak hopes he gets a mention in the speech.
“You’ll ace it,” Dak tells him confidently. “Do you want to go out for dinner afterwards and celebrate?”
“Love to,” Logan says, giving him a sheepish smile. “But I already agreed to meet up with Camille. We haven’t seen each other in ages.”
Dak knows Camille, having met her recently when she landed the starring role opposite him in the romantic comedy Love Will Keep Us Apart.
Camille played a lonely zombie looking for a prom date, while Dak was the handsome slayer of all things ghoulish who could not help but be enthralled by her beauty.
Then they saved their small town in Ohio from a horde of werewolves.
It was fun.
“Oh. Are you guys…?” Dak doesn’t really know what he’s asking. He’s relatively well informed about Logan’s old relationships, but prying has never been his thing. Logan’s business is not actually Dak’s. They’re just roommates. That’s probably why the unexpected surge of jealousy in his chest is unnerving. Dak catches the thread of his sentence quickly, managing, “Are you catching a town car, or do you need a ride?”
“I’ve got it covered.” Logan beams brightly before ushering Dak out of his bedroom.
Well then.
Dak spends most of the day trying to occupy his time with housework and meditation. When that doesn’t work, he does what he usually defaults to when he’s down; he goes on a social media spree. Something about poor grammar and fans scrambling to say the stupidest thing possible to get his attention lifts his spirits, at least temporarily.
Right up until he makes the unwise decision to visit Logan’s rarely used Scuttlebutter account, where Logan’s most recent status details the danger of crossing the street without looking both ways first. In the @ section, Dak finds much more interesting material, mostly in the form of Kendall, James, and Carlos’s accounts urging their best friend to get some.
They’re joking, Dak decides, staring at the screen hard enough to bore holes in it. Logan said it wasn’t a date.
Not that it’s a big deal if it is. Logan goes on dates all the time. Or all the time for Logan, which is like once a year. Dak distinctly remembers Logan going out with at least one girl since moving in.
But that girl wasn’t Camille, who was one of Dak’s cuter co-stars, and funny to boot. She and Logan have history, history that Dak wasn’t there for because he was too busy worrying over whether or not the guys would trample through his Zen garden to bother trying to befriend them. Who knows how much weight all that history carries?
He reads one particularly graphic tweet from Carlos, who wouldn’t know subtlety if it punched him in the face and grits his teeth. That is certainly enough.
Dak is a man of action. All his movie reviews say so. He grabs his keys, his phone, and a baseball cap, ready to do…something.
He doesn’t exactly have a plan when he knocks on Jett Stetson’s door with a six pack of blueberry flavored imported Belgian beer, but after blackmailing his way through the door - “I have a date,” Jett had cried, bitch face firmly in place. “I have obscene pictures of you and a llama,”
Dak had retorted with the smug authority of a man who knows he has the upper hand - the two of them begin to formulate a plan.
Their plan mostly forms after they’ve blown through Dak’s beer and Jett’s less artisan case of Corona, but hey, sheer drunkenness has gotten Dak through many a trouble.
“Why do you even care, anyway?” Jett asks with a sneer.
For the millionth time Dak wonders why exactly he likes the arrogant asshole. Together they filmed a Sundance flick about the bromantic billionaire creators of Scuttlebutter, earning Dak a nod from the film critics everywhere and boosting Jett out of D-List obscurity. The movie was awesome, but their relationship on set never quite clicked. It was a miracle when they continued to hang out long after awards season ended, basking in each other’s starshine and sense of narcissism.
“I don’t care,” Dak replies immediately, drawing his spine straight. Caring is stupid. “But. Logan’s my roommate. And he sucks at relationships.
I don’t want him to spend a month crying, I’ll drown in a river of his tears. Drown, Jett. Do you want me to drown?”
Jett reluctantly agrees that he does not want Dak to drown, although Dak suspects that one day soon there will be a tabloid expose about how
Dak’s an undercover drama queen. Discretion, even in friendship, is not really Jett’s thing.
Jett dons a baseball cap of his very own, and they set out into the bright neon glow of Hollywood. Dak knows exactly which café Logan and Camille are at, because aside from Perez Hilton’s constant coverage of Camille’s every move, Logan chose to respond to his friends’ Twitter-catcalling with some choice words of his own, replacing the crosswalk-safety tweet with a bevy of information that ends with, you Neanderthals.
Like that will stop the three horsemen of Moron-land from sexually harassing his account.
Dak directs Jett’s town car chauffeur to a spot down the block from the restaurant, hoping against hope that neither he nor Jett will draw much attention to themselves.
It’s a futile hope, obviously. Their clever disguises hold up for all of a minute and a half, giving them just enough time to be seated at the outdoor patio before they are consumed by a blinding slew of camera flashes. It takes even less time for Jett to give in, shucking his cap and giving the photographers a pearly white smile.
Movie stars make terrible spies.
Questions are shouted at an entirely inappropriate volume, including, and Dak has to suppress a gag at this one - are you two on a date? Because sure, Dak’s been out of the bisexual closet for a while, but it’s Jett. Grody.
The ruckus attracts the attention of basically everyone there, including Camille and Logan, who are sitting about three tables away with a paparazzi entourage of their own. Even through the flashes, Dak can see the moment a wrinkle appears between Logan’s eyebrows.
He slides back his chair and scrambles to his feet, hoping to put an end to the night before Logan gets a whiff of his beer breath.
Unfortunately, coordination is rejecting his friend requests.
“Dak, what are you doing here?” Logan demands, catching Dak before he can sprawl across the ground. He has no trouble supporting Dak’s weight; Logan’s got pretty good balance for such a little guy.
“We,” Jett declares, with more pomp and circumstance than the situation warrants, but the paps are hanging onto his every word, so he must be doing something right. “Are eating.”
Logan makes a derisive noise. Dak always forgets that he knows Jett from before. “I see that. Why are you eating here? Is everything alright?” His face pales. “Is it Mr. Mistoffelees?”
Mr. Mistoffelees is the beta fish that Logan insists upon keeping on Dak’s kitchen counter. He has big bug eyes that he uses for glaring whenever Dak is in the middle of making a protein shake.
“Did you feed him sea bass again?” Logan demands.
“That was one time,” Dak replies meekly, scanning his head for a suitable excuse. Stalking you just doesn’t have the same ring out loud, especially when Dak can’t explain why he felt the need to do it in the first place. “I’m on a date with Jett.”
That…is not actually what he meant to say out loud.
Jett’s slow blink is the only expression of his shock, but they aren’t actors for nothing, and he recovers quickly. “Yes. We are exploring our passionate, burning love.”
Dak grimaces. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Wouldn’t you, Snuggle Muffin?”
“Alright. I…am really weirded out by this,” Logan announces, and Dak can’t figure out if he actually is wearing his wounded-face or if that’s just wishful thinking. “Camille, let’s go.”
Logan drops Dak’s arm and storms back to his table, where Camille is already gathering up her stuff, a neutral tilt to her lips.
“Logan, no, wait,” Dak tries to go after him, but the fucking paparazzi aren’t making anything easy tonight, getting in his way, cockblocking
him, or…uh.
Yeah, wait, no. Hold up.
Dak pauses, not even bothering to chase after Logan now, because he does know exactly where the guy lives. Abruptly, he’s got more important things on his mind, like cock - specifically Logan’s - and even more specifically how he is wondering what it looks like.
Tastes like.
Feels like.
Dak’s never denied that Logan is handsome, because ninety five percent of Logan is very obviously handsome. But Dak’s never given serious consideration to how Logan would look handsome in his bed.
It’s an awkward revelation to have in the midst of a flock of reporters.
And Jett.
Dak tugs at his baseball cap, frustrated. “We should go.”
Jett huffs a laugh. “We never should have come.”
He puts up a fuss about leaving because it photographs well, but when they go back to Jett’s apartment, he doesn’t say no to Dak sleeping over. Jett’s couch puts an awful crick in Dak’s neck and he blow-dries his hair through Dak’s entire morning mediation ritual, but in the end, Jett’s a good friend.
Dak still refuses to kiss him in front of the reporter hiding on his balcony, though.
---
Coda: They’re shockingly good kissers.
---
On a normal day, Logan has all the grace and poise of a bull in a china shop, but today, he doesn’t even try for stealth. He knocks over three antique lamps and a picture frame filled by Dak and the President’s smiling faces before he makes it to the kitchen and demands, “Are you seriously dating Jett Stetson?”
“No,” Dak snorts without thinking about it, because yeah, that mistake is all over the front of every newspaper, magazine, and entertainment news channel. Their publicists are going to have to get together and brew up a tactful way to break them up, because all of Dak’s cognitive processing is dedicated to figuring out when he began crushing on Logan, and why.
Why?
For real. Logan’s intolerable. He monologues about the benefits of sun block and yet refuses to let Dak put moisturizer on him. He whines his way through their yoga classes, drinks all of the orange juice Dak imports from Spain, added Skrillex to Dak’s music library, and hid every single one of Dak’s scented candles. He frequently kicks Dak’s ass in video games and never takes off his shoes when he comes in the house.
He’s a menace, just like his stupid friends.
He’s also kind of nice.
Dak’s gotten used to sharing his stuff. He doesn’t mind watching doctor drama marathons or listening to Logan detail the steps in creating his new med-student study app. He actually likes the way that Logan hums some of his old songs when he doesn’t think anyone else is listening, and the mess…Eh, Dak can live with it.
He wants to live with it. He wants to live with Logan.
As long as Logan doesn’t kill him, which looks like it might be a thing that is in the cards, judging by the murderous fire in Logan’s dark eyes.
Behind Dak’s floor to ceiling windows, the sky stretches on endless, touching blue on everything. Even Logan is framed by that cool, pale light, his hair laced with the sun, his throat hollowed with shadows. He looks…bewildered. Frazzled. A tiny bit hurt.
He declares, “Good.” Then, “Why did you say that?”
Dak answers with all the grace and elegance afforded to him via a million elocution classes.
“I dunno.”
Apparently, Logan deems that is not an acceptable answer. He smacks Dak upside the head with unnecessary force. “Idiot.”
“Ow? That’s assault, you know.” Dak massages his fingers into his skull. This is what happens when Good Samaritans invite brutes into their homes, really. He should have anticipated future concussions. “I could have you arrested.”
Logan is unimpressed with Dak’s threats. He agrees, “You could try.”
“What do you mean I could try? It’s not that hard. I pick up my cell phone, I call the cops, I-“
“Shut up and give me a straight answer,” Logan crosses his arms and taps his foot against the floor, turning his irritation rhythmic.
He avoids Dak’s eyes. That makes him more nervous than anything else; Mitchell usually doesn’t have much of a problem being upfront when he’s questing for knowledge. Dak informs him, “You’re bossy.”
“You’re dodging the question.” Logan instructs carefully, “Answer me.”
Dak decides it’s easier to be an ass.
“I could, but you know, this assertive thing is a new look for you, and I’m not sure if I like it-“
“Dak.”
Logan’s voice is a hard, cold thing. It dissuades Dak from his next, instinctive attempt to turn this whole situation into a joke. What’s happening right now matters, even if Dak isn’t quite sure why. He explains meekly, “I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”
He feels stupid admitting that out loud, but the previous evening wasn’t one of his finer moments. It’s probably not supposed to sound grandiose.
Dak adds, “Jett was there.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?” Logan scrunches up his face, rather cutely, like a confounded child. “The truth, which is…what?”
Awkward.
“Uh. Okay, look. If I tell you the truth you have to promise not to get mad.”
“Why would I get mad?”
“Because stalking is not socially acceptable, and I know that, honest, I do, I shouldn’t have spied on your date, but if we’re straight-talking here then let me say that you should not be considering going out with Camille again. She is a heartbreaker. She will break your heart.”
Logan waves away that rather redundant conclusion in favor of answering, “Alright.”
“Alright?” Dak inquires dumbly.
“Alright, I won’t go out with Camille again. It wasn’t a date, Dak. We’re friends.”
Dak mutters, “Boys and girls can’t be friends.”
He starred in a movie titled that once, so he is really reigning authority on the subject.
Logan wrinkles his nose. “We’ll address that really horrible, awful, tremendously bad misconception later. Are you interested in Camille?”
“What? No.” Dak rubs his cheek instinctively, remembering all the times she slapped him on the set of their movie. “I bruise easily.”
“Then?” Logan prompts.
“Then,” Dak repeats, unsure what he’s supposed to say next.
Love confessions aren’t his realm of expertise here. His last three girlfriends and boyfriends all basically threw themselves at his feet, because yeah, he’s Dak Zevon. Logan is really making him work for this.
“It is marginally feasible that I might - possibly - find you a little bit attractive.”
“Marginally feasible,” Logan repeats slowly, the plush shape of his lips taking care with every syllable. “I hope you don’t say that to all the girls.”
Dak’s heart kicks up, his nerve endings on fire. This is another thing hockey players do, apparently - they play coy once they know they’ve
won. And here, right now, Logan definitely knows. He steps in close to Dak while Dak splutters, “You’re not a girl.”
“It’s really nice that you noticed.”
Logan stands on his tip toes and presses his mouth against Dak’s. It’s clumsy and fumbling and over much too quick. He has the gall to look
embarrassed when he reels back, his inexperience written clearly across his features, but Dak isn’t interested in staring, not right now, not when they can do that all over again.
The second try goes better. It’s a kiss that melts slow against Dak’s lips, and it tastes like sunshine and vaguely of something that likely has artificial preservatives. Logan cages Dak’s face with his hands, guiding the kiss until it takes a shape between them, gains a rhythm, forms some heat.
Dak slips Logan some tongue. Patience isn’t his middle name. Logan doesn’t seem to mind. He gasps and presses his body pretty firmly to Dak’s, wrapping his arms around his neck. Dak is a big fan of this plan.
Not so much of when Logan pulls back and announces, “Alright, ground rules.”
“Now? You seriously want to talk about this now?”
Logan barrels right over him, going, “One. No more stalking. It’s creepy and invasive, and leads to everyone in the world thinking you’re dating Jett Stetson. Do you want to date Jett Stetson?”
“We were having a moment,” Dak complains. “It was beautiful. Why are you ruining the moment?”
Sternly, Logan continues, “Rule Two. No dating Jett Stetson. Both of your egos won’t be able to fit in the same bed. It will crack and fall through the floor and you’ll die.”
Dak buries his head against Logan’s neck and mutters, “Die. Yes. Exactly like the moment.”
He supposes he shouldn’t hold out for any more games of kissy-face in the next millennia. Or at least the next forty five minutes. What a trial.
“Three,” Logan counts off. “No more sending poor Rosita to ninja-clean my room. I like my room the way it is, and it’s hurtful when I find her
wearing a gas mask.”
Dak snickers.
Logan insists, “My socks don’t smell that bad.”
The gas mask was Dak’s idea. Rosita, in her gracious housekeeper way, claimed it was unnecessary. Dak, as an awesome employer, forced the issue, because he only has her best interests at heart. “You’ve obviously never smelled your socks.”
“I wash them,” Logan protests, shoving back even more. Now Dak’s head is just dangling sadly over open space, unkissed and unloved.
Falling for a scold is the worst idea he’s ever had. “And my feet! Just because I don’t let goldfish nibble on my toes once a week don’t mean I’m a leper-“
“You could do with a pedicure,” Dak suggests mildly.
“-and it’s weird to find her touching my underwear.”
Dak shrugs. “C’est la vie. Lifestyles and the rich and famous, and all that.”
“Let me rephrase. If you want to touch my underwear, you’re going to make Rosita stop.”
Dak swallows thickly. Smushing his mouth against Logan’s face is fun, but underwear-touching is a tempting siren song. Begrudgingly, he admits, “Your socks don’t smell that bad.”
Logan grins and rewards him with a soft, sweet peck on the lips. Dak chases him for more, but the kid’s already rattling off his next bullet point in the list of things sure to suck all the joy from Dak’s life.
“You have to stop calling my friends names.”
“What names?” Dak challenges, because he’s been very, very careful to never refer to the idiots as anything crude within hearing distance.
“You know what names,” Logan replies all uptight and joy-sucking.
Dak stands his ground. No way Kendall and James ever heard him call them butt monkeys.
Sighing, Logan steps back into Dak’s personal space again and says, “Rule five.”
“This is a lot of rules,” Dak objects.
“Rule five,” Logan repeats firmly. “Kiss me again?”
Okay. Dak can live with that last one.
---
They celebrate their newfound romance with a Season One marathon of Grayson’s Anatomy. Logan settles into Dak’s side, his feet propped up on the coffee table, and Dak wonders if he should come up with his own set of rules to discourage scuff-marks.
Only, thinking back on it, all the irritating things that Logan does - from eating anything that moves to recording over all of Dak’s entertainment television - don’t really irritate him anymore. Logan’s a pretty great guy underneath his hockey-headed quirks, if not a bit accident prone. Dak likes that. Dak likes all of him. And as long as he doesn’t accidentally continue to date Jett, Logan likes him too.
He presses his mouth against soft tufts of Logan’s hair, simply because he can. Onscreen, doctors prattle about their extremely dramatic, extremely unrealistic lives, straight on through the commercial break. Dak wonders if his agent ever pushed through his request to audition for this show.
It’d be a nice surprise for Logan.
Logan, who takes advantage of a snack break by suggesting, “I could teach you how to play hockey.”
Aghast, Dak inquires, “Have you seen my face? I can’t put all this at risk.”
He waves a hand across the bridge of his nose and the ridge of his cheekbones emphatically.
“That never stopped James.”
“James doesn’t have the face of a young god,” Dak retorts prissily. There is a minor possibility that Jett’s been rubbing off on him. That or he’s always been this arrogant. Both are viable options.
Fondly, Logan touches Dak’s chin and agrees, “Yeah, you’re alright looking.”
“Alright looking? Are you blind?”
His irritation trickles away as Logan bursts into laughter, completely undaunted by Dak’s outrage. It takes him a full minute to realize that Dak has stopped blustering, and when he does, he asks, “What, we’re done with the thesis on how you’re a beautiful creature?”
“I am a beautiful creature,” Dak agrees, worn out but fond. “And you know, when you smile like that, you’re pretty alright looking too.”
Logan beams, burrowing further into the couch, digging his sneakered heels into the coffee table. He twines his fingers with Dak’s, and okay, he’s definitely still a trainwreck of a hockeyhead.
But Dak thinks he’ll keep him anyway.
---
Author: garnetice
Pairing: Dak/Logan
Rating: K
Word Count: 4,645 (of 9,099)
Warnings: None
Summary: Dak never wanted a roommate. So he's really confused about Logan's presence in his house.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author Notes: New story! New story that comes with a story. Right, so a looooong, long, long time ago, like, pre-Big Time Moms, I wanted to write a story where BTR broke up and James and Kendall were poor(ish) and living in a beach bungalow, surfing all day and serving coffee to locals and busking for cash. I may have mentioned this once or twice. Anyway, that fic only exists on the privacy of my computer, because it's not done. This beast here grew as a prequel for that, because I needed a way to explain why Dak and Logan came over for dinner dates. Why is that important? Mostly because there are some throwaway lines in here mentioning Kendall and James sharing an apartment. Also relevant: this is another spinoff of this same universe, if you are ever tempted to read about kames and their christmas tree. The main fic getting those two together will probably go up...er...one day. Other random tidbits: as mentioned, I began this a long while ago. Dak is a bit...er...grumpier than I'd write him now. Yes. Let's put it that way. (At this point, this is one of those stories I hate so much I can't look at it without cringing. So here, have.)
---
---
4. Hockey players smell.
---
Logan, unlike Dak, has not taken deportment classes since he was ten.
That’s not exactly Logan’s fault, because Dak was a child star, and his mother was very invested in making sure he could never be completely comfortable around another human being. She ensured that Dak would always be invested in making sure whoever he is with is happily captivated by his company. Logan has never appeared to be particularly enthralled by Dak’s very presence, but that does not mean that Dak feels at ease dropping the act around him.
For the first few months of Mitchell’s term as live-in guest, Dak valiantly takes great pains not to get too relaxed around Logan. Which is why he finds it particularly off-putting that Logan suffers no such obligation. He burps, he belches, he breathes onions in Dak’s face. He walks around after yoga covered in a sheen of his own sweat instead of showering immediately, and that’s…really distracting for Dak.
Logan handles himself pretty okay outside the mansion, acting with grace and dignity amongst his fellow classmates or the rare girl he manages to woo, but at home? Logan’s barely presentable.
Dak doesn’t have any brothers, and he’s made most of his friends on the acting circuit, which is to say that none of them are close enough to regularly share their bodily functions in his presence. He’s not a priss, exactly, Dak just, you know, prefers that his body’s gases pass discretely into the ether.
It grates, having to be one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time, but he politely does it for Logan’s sake.
That all changes the night he makes the mistake of deleting the last three episodes of Grayson’s off the DVR. Logan spent the day with James and Kendall, taking time off from the endless torment of med-schooling, and it’s made him feisty. As punishment for Dak’s transgressions, Logan tackles him to the ground, pinning him just long enough to fart right in Dak’s personal space, wafting it towards Dak’s nose with his hand.
Dak is relatively certain that he might pass out from the smell.
Smirking, Logan demands, “Sorry now?” and Dak can imagine him having the same kind of scuffle with Carlos or James or Kendall back in the day. He thinks if he really, honestly wants to be friends with this guy, he should say something snarky and maybe start a wrestle-match.
Instead, he gags, “I need a gas mask. What happens in your stomach? This is unnatural.”
Logan shrugs happily, moving to let Dak up. “Teach you to touch my stuff.”
“It’s not your stuff though,” Dak says, and it sounds wrong the second his words hit the slightly nauseating air. Dak is the one who let Logan tramp into his home, let him set up camp and eat Dak’s food and drink Dak’s special-occasion microbrewery ales. This is where Logan lives now, at least for the time being.
Logan, for his part, isn’t as offended as he should be. He inclines his head to the side, thoughtful. “You’ve brought that up before. Maybe it is time I started looking for my own place.”
He means he wants to leave. That is…not as appealing an idea out loud as Dak thought it would be five minutes ago.
“Nah man,” Dak replies, his voice taking on a frantic edge. “I was kidding. You have like, eighty hours of school a week. You don’t have time to apartment hunt. Stay.”
Logan purses his lips. Brown hair tumbles into his eyes, grown too long in the midst of his pursuit of knowledge.
“Stay,” Dak insists, wondering where his abrupt jumble of nerves is coming from. He doesn’t do uncertain; he’s Dak Zevon.
Logan leans in close, staring at him with his big, brown eyes as if he can see through Dak’s head to the truth of the matter. Up in Dak’s personal space, he doesn’t smell bad at all, but sort of wonderful, a combination of spilled cappuccino, spiciness, and shared styling mousse.
Only one of those scents is inherently Logan, but Dak doesn’t want to think about where the scents of coffee and hair product came from, about the closeness shared between friends that Dak’s just never had the opportunity to experience.
“Okay.” Logan pulls back as quickly as he’d darted in and helping Dak to his feet. Conversationally he says, “You know, you should audition to be on Grayson’s. You’d be a really great guest star.”
“You think?” Dak asks, trying not to be flattered.
He’s gotten better compliments.
He just can’t remember ever getting one from Logan.
---
5. They make a mess. Of everything.
---
In the before-years, Dak assumed Logan was a clean person. He’s pretty anal-retentive about a lot of things, so why wouldn’t his natural habitat be one of them?
Dak was wrong. So wrong. Logan leaves mountains of clothes everywhere he goes, worn out from classes and too lazy to do much more than strip. He conscientiously does his dishes but forgets to put away old containers of Chinese food. He does not know what a coaster is. And asking him to clean the bathroom is a surefire way to get Logan to hide out in his bedroom for a week.
Dak gets it, sort of. Logan’s not much of a control freak about anything other than his education, maybe because he’s always had people like Kendall pulling the strings on his destiny. Also, being a med student is tough. But getting it does not mean that Dak enjoys being a maid.
“Is it really that damn hard to put your socks in a hamper?” He demands, practically every day.
On this particular day, Logan blinks up at him innocently and says, “Oops.” He holds up a text book and explains, “Big test.”
Dak softens, even though they both know that Logan would be equally messy without a single exam in sight. He really, really needs to stop coddling the-future-Dr.-Mitchell, because Dak is number nine on the newest Most Eligible Bachelor list published by Individual magazine, and
Eligible Bachelors do not impress girls (or boys) with poor housekeeping habits. Plus, there is a very real possibility that his weekly maid, Rosita, might riot.
Dak musters up the breath to yell. Then he lets it out. Taking care of Logan is becoming second nature.
One day, when Mitchell accepts the Nobel Peace Prize for curing cancer or whatever, Dak hopes he gets a mention in the speech.
“You’ll ace it,” Dak tells him confidently. “Do you want to go out for dinner afterwards and celebrate?”
“Love to,” Logan says, giving him a sheepish smile. “But I already agreed to meet up with Camille. We haven’t seen each other in ages.”
Dak knows Camille, having met her recently when she landed the starring role opposite him in the romantic comedy Love Will Keep Us Apart.
Camille played a lonely zombie looking for a prom date, while Dak was the handsome slayer of all things ghoulish who could not help but be enthralled by her beauty.
Then they saved their small town in Ohio from a horde of werewolves.
It was fun.
“Oh. Are you guys…?” Dak doesn’t really know what he’s asking. He’s relatively well informed about Logan’s old relationships, but prying has never been his thing. Logan’s business is not actually Dak’s. They’re just roommates. That’s probably why the unexpected surge of jealousy in his chest is unnerving. Dak catches the thread of his sentence quickly, managing, “Are you catching a town car, or do you need a ride?”
“I’ve got it covered.” Logan beams brightly before ushering Dak out of his bedroom.
Well then.
Dak spends most of the day trying to occupy his time with housework and meditation. When that doesn’t work, he does what he usually defaults to when he’s down; he goes on a social media spree. Something about poor grammar and fans scrambling to say the stupidest thing possible to get his attention lifts his spirits, at least temporarily.
Right up until he makes the unwise decision to visit Logan’s rarely used Scuttlebutter account, where Logan’s most recent status details the danger of crossing the street without looking both ways first. In the @ section, Dak finds much more interesting material, mostly in the form of Kendall, James, and Carlos’s accounts urging their best friend to get some.
They’re joking, Dak decides, staring at the screen hard enough to bore holes in it. Logan said it wasn’t a date.
Not that it’s a big deal if it is. Logan goes on dates all the time. Or all the time for Logan, which is like once a year. Dak distinctly remembers Logan going out with at least one girl since moving in.
But that girl wasn’t Camille, who was one of Dak’s cuter co-stars, and funny to boot. She and Logan have history, history that Dak wasn’t there for because he was too busy worrying over whether or not the guys would trample through his Zen garden to bother trying to befriend them. Who knows how much weight all that history carries?
He reads one particularly graphic tweet from Carlos, who wouldn’t know subtlety if it punched him in the face and grits his teeth. That is certainly enough.
Dak is a man of action. All his movie reviews say so. He grabs his keys, his phone, and a baseball cap, ready to do…something.
He doesn’t exactly have a plan when he knocks on Jett Stetson’s door with a six pack of blueberry flavored imported Belgian beer, but after blackmailing his way through the door - “I have a date,” Jett had cried, bitch face firmly in place. “I have obscene pictures of you and a llama,”
Dak had retorted with the smug authority of a man who knows he has the upper hand - the two of them begin to formulate a plan.
Their plan mostly forms after they’ve blown through Dak’s beer and Jett’s less artisan case of Corona, but hey, sheer drunkenness has gotten Dak through many a trouble.
“Why do you even care, anyway?” Jett asks with a sneer.
For the millionth time Dak wonders why exactly he likes the arrogant asshole. Together they filmed a Sundance flick about the bromantic billionaire creators of Scuttlebutter, earning Dak a nod from the film critics everywhere and boosting Jett out of D-List obscurity. The movie was awesome, but their relationship on set never quite clicked. It was a miracle when they continued to hang out long after awards season ended, basking in each other’s starshine and sense of narcissism.
“I don’t care,” Dak replies immediately, drawing his spine straight. Caring is stupid. “But. Logan’s my roommate. And he sucks at relationships.
I don’t want him to spend a month crying, I’ll drown in a river of his tears. Drown, Jett. Do you want me to drown?”
Jett reluctantly agrees that he does not want Dak to drown, although Dak suspects that one day soon there will be a tabloid expose about how
Dak’s an undercover drama queen. Discretion, even in friendship, is not really Jett’s thing.
Jett dons a baseball cap of his very own, and they set out into the bright neon glow of Hollywood. Dak knows exactly which café Logan and Camille are at, because aside from Perez Hilton’s constant coverage of Camille’s every move, Logan chose to respond to his friends’ Twitter-catcalling with some choice words of his own, replacing the crosswalk-safety tweet with a bevy of information that ends with, you Neanderthals.
Like that will stop the three horsemen of Moron-land from sexually harassing his account.
Dak directs Jett’s town car chauffeur to a spot down the block from the restaurant, hoping against hope that neither he nor Jett will draw much attention to themselves.
It’s a futile hope, obviously. Their clever disguises hold up for all of a minute and a half, giving them just enough time to be seated at the outdoor patio before they are consumed by a blinding slew of camera flashes. It takes even less time for Jett to give in, shucking his cap and giving the photographers a pearly white smile.
Movie stars make terrible spies.
Questions are shouted at an entirely inappropriate volume, including, and Dak has to suppress a gag at this one - are you two on a date? Because sure, Dak’s been out of the bisexual closet for a while, but it’s Jett. Grody.
The ruckus attracts the attention of basically everyone there, including Camille and Logan, who are sitting about three tables away with a paparazzi entourage of their own. Even through the flashes, Dak can see the moment a wrinkle appears between Logan’s eyebrows.
He slides back his chair and scrambles to his feet, hoping to put an end to the night before Logan gets a whiff of his beer breath.
Unfortunately, coordination is rejecting his friend requests.
“Dak, what are you doing here?” Logan demands, catching Dak before he can sprawl across the ground. He has no trouble supporting Dak’s weight; Logan’s got pretty good balance for such a little guy.
“We,” Jett declares, with more pomp and circumstance than the situation warrants, but the paps are hanging onto his every word, so he must be doing something right. “Are eating.”
Logan makes a derisive noise. Dak always forgets that he knows Jett from before. “I see that. Why are you eating here? Is everything alright?” His face pales. “Is it Mr. Mistoffelees?”
Mr. Mistoffelees is the beta fish that Logan insists upon keeping on Dak’s kitchen counter. He has big bug eyes that he uses for glaring whenever Dak is in the middle of making a protein shake.
“Did you feed him sea bass again?” Logan demands.
“That was one time,” Dak replies meekly, scanning his head for a suitable excuse. Stalking you just doesn’t have the same ring out loud, especially when Dak can’t explain why he felt the need to do it in the first place. “I’m on a date with Jett.”
That…is not actually what he meant to say out loud.
Jett’s slow blink is the only expression of his shock, but they aren’t actors for nothing, and he recovers quickly. “Yes. We are exploring our passionate, burning love.”
Dak grimaces. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Wouldn’t you, Snuggle Muffin?”
“Alright. I…am really weirded out by this,” Logan announces, and Dak can’t figure out if he actually is wearing his wounded-face or if that’s just wishful thinking. “Camille, let’s go.”
Logan drops Dak’s arm and storms back to his table, where Camille is already gathering up her stuff, a neutral tilt to her lips.
“Logan, no, wait,” Dak tries to go after him, but the fucking paparazzi aren’t making anything easy tonight, getting in his way, cockblocking
him, or…uh.
Yeah, wait, no. Hold up.
Dak pauses, not even bothering to chase after Logan now, because he does know exactly where the guy lives. Abruptly, he’s got more important things on his mind, like cock - specifically Logan’s - and even more specifically how he is wondering what it looks like.
Tastes like.
Feels like.
Dak’s never denied that Logan is handsome, because ninety five percent of Logan is very obviously handsome. But Dak’s never given serious consideration to how Logan would look handsome in his bed.
It’s an awkward revelation to have in the midst of a flock of reporters.
And Jett.
Dak tugs at his baseball cap, frustrated. “We should go.”
Jett huffs a laugh. “We never should have come.”
He puts up a fuss about leaving because it photographs well, but when they go back to Jett’s apartment, he doesn’t say no to Dak sleeping over. Jett’s couch puts an awful crick in Dak’s neck and he blow-dries his hair through Dak’s entire morning mediation ritual, but in the end, Jett’s a good friend.
Dak still refuses to kiss him in front of the reporter hiding on his balcony, though.
---
Coda: They’re shockingly good kissers.
---
On a normal day, Logan has all the grace and poise of a bull in a china shop, but today, he doesn’t even try for stealth. He knocks over three antique lamps and a picture frame filled by Dak and the President’s smiling faces before he makes it to the kitchen and demands, “Are you seriously dating Jett Stetson?”
“No,” Dak snorts without thinking about it, because yeah, that mistake is all over the front of every newspaper, magazine, and entertainment news channel. Their publicists are going to have to get together and brew up a tactful way to break them up, because all of Dak’s cognitive processing is dedicated to figuring out when he began crushing on Logan, and why.
Why?
For real. Logan’s intolerable. He monologues about the benefits of sun block and yet refuses to let Dak put moisturizer on him. He whines his way through their yoga classes, drinks all of the orange juice Dak imports from Spain, added Skrillex to Dak’s music library, and hid every single one of Dak’s scented candles. He frequently kicks Dak’s ass in video games and never takes off his shoes when he comes in the house.
He’s a menace, just like his stupid friends.
He’s also kind of nice.
Dak’s gotten used to sharing his stuff. He doesn’t mind watching doctor drama marathons or listening to Logan detail the steps in creating his new med-student study app. He actually likes the way that Logan hums some of his old songs when he doesn’t think anyone else is listening, and the mess…Eh, Dak can live with it.
He wants to live with it. He wants to live with Logan.
As long as Logan doesn’t kill him, which looks like it might be a thing that is in the cards, judging by the murderous fire in Logan’s dark eyes.
Behind Dak’s floor to ceiling windows, the sky stretches on endless, touching blue on everything. Even Logan is framed by that cool, pale light, his hair laced with the sun, his throat hollowed with shadows. He looks…bewildered. Frazzled. A tiny bit hurt.
He declares, “Good.” Then, “Why did you say that?”
Dak answers with all the grace and elegance afforded to him via a million elocution classes.
“I dunno.”
Apparently, Logan deems that is not an acceptable answer. He smacks Dak upside the head with unnecessary force. “Idiot.”
“Ow? That’s assault, you know.” Dak massages his fingers into his skull. This is what happens when Good Samaritans invite brutes into their homes, really. He should have anticipated future concussions. “I could have you arrested.”
Logan is unimpressed with Dak’s threats. He agrees, “You could try.”
“What do you mean I could try? It’s not that hard. I pick up my cell phone, I call the cops, I-“
“Shut up and give me a straight answer,” Logan crosses his arms and taps his foot against the floor, turning his irritation rhythmic.
He avoids Dak’s eyes. That makes him more nervous than anything else; Mitchell usually doesn’t have much of a problem being upfront when he’s questing for knowledge. Dak informs him, “You’re bossy.”
“You’re dodging the question.” Logan instructs carefully, “Answer me.”
Dak decides it’s easier to be an ass.
“I could, but you know, this assertive thing is a new look for you, and I’m not sure if I like it-“
“Dak.”
Logan’s voice is a hard, cold thing. It dissuades Dak from his next, instinctive attempt to turn this whole situation into a joke. What’s happening right now matters, even if Dak isn’t quite sure why. He explains meekly, “I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”
He feels stupid admitting that out loud, but the previous evening wasn’t one of his finer moments. It’s probably not supposed to sound grandiose.
Dak adds, “Jett was there.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?” Logan scrunches up his face, rather cutely, like a confounded child. “The truth, which is…what?”
Awkward.
“Uh. Okay, look. If I tell you the truth you have to promise not to get mad.”
“Why would I get mad?”
“Because stalking is not socially acceptable, and I know that, honest, I do, I shouldn’t have spied on your date, but if we’re straight-talking here then let me say that you should not be considering going out with Camille again. She is a heartbreaker. She will break your heart.”
Logan waves away that rather redundant conclusion in favor of answering, “Alright.”
“Alright?” Dak inquires dumbly.
“Alright, I won’t go out with Camille again. It wasn’t a date, Dak. We’re friends.”
Dak mutters, “Boys and girls can’t be friends.”
He starred in a movie titled that once, so he is really reigning authority on the subject.
Logan wrinkles his nose. “We’ll address that really horrible, awful, tremendously bad misconception later. Are you interested in Camille?”
“What? No.” Dak rubs his cheek instinctively, remembering all the times she slapped him on the set of their movie. “I bruise easily.”
“Then?” Logan prompts.
“Then,” Dak repeats, unsure what he’s supposed to say next.
Love confessions aren’t his realm of expertise here. His last three girlfriends and boyfriends all basically threw themselves at his feet, because yeah, he’s Dak Zevon. Logan is really making him work for this.
“It is marginally feasible that I might - possibly - find you a little bit attractive.”
“Marginally feasible,” Logan repeats slowly, the plush shape of his lips taking care with every syllable. “I hope you don’t say that to all the girls.”
Dak’s heart kicks up, his nerve endings on fire. This is another thing hockey players do, apparently - they play coy once they know they’ve
won. And here, right now, Logan definitely knows. He steps in close to Dak while Dak splutters, “You’re not a girl.”
“It’s really nice that you noticed.”
Logan stands on his tip toes and presses his mouth against Dak’s. It’s clumsy and fumbling and over much too quick. He has the gall to look
embarrassed when he reels back, his inexperience written clearly across his features, but Dak isn’t interested in staring, not right now, not when they can do that all over again.
The second try goes better. It’s a kiss that melts slow against Dak’s lips, and it tastes like sunshine and vaguely of something that likely has artificial preservatives. Logan cages Dak’s face with his hands, guiding the kiss until it takes a shape between them, gains a rhythm, forms some heat.
Dak slips Logan some tongue. Patience isn’t his middle name. Logan doesn’t seem to mind. He gasps and presses his body pretty firmly to Dak’s, wrapping his arms around his neck. Dak is a big fan of this plan.
Not so much of when Logan pulls back and announces, “Alright, ground rules.”
“Now? You seriously want to talk about this now?”
Logan barrels right over him, going, “One. No more stalking. It’s creepy and invasive, and leads to everyone in the world thinking you’re dating Jett Stetson. Do you want to date Jett Stetson?”
“We were having a moment,” Dak complains. “It was beautiful. Why are you ruining the moment?”
Sternly, Logan continues, “Rule Two. No dating Jett Stetson. Both of your egos won’t be able to fit in the same bed. It will crack and fall through the floor and you’ll die.”
Dak buries his head against Logan’s neck and mutters, “Die. Yes. Exactly like the moment.”
He supposes he shouldn’t hold out for any more games of kissy-face in the next millennia. Or at least the next forty five minutes. What a trial.
“Three,” Logan counts off. “No more sending poor Rosita to ninja-clean my room. I like my room the way it is, and it’s hurtful when I find her
wearing a gas mask.”
Dak snickers.
Logan insists, “My socks don’t smell that bad.”
The gas mask was Dak’s idea. Rosita, in her gracious housekeeper way, claimed it was unnecessary. Dak, as an awesome employer, forced the issue, because he only has her best interests at heart. “You’ve obviously never smelled your socks.”
“I wash them,” Logan protests, shoving back even more. Now Dak’s head is just dangling sadly over open space, unkissed and unloved.
Falling for a scold is the worst idea he’s ever had. “And my feet! Just because I don’t let goldfish nibble on my toes once a week don’t mean I’m a leper-“
“You could do with a pedicure,” Dak suggests mildly.
“-and it’s weird to find her touching my underwear.”
Dak shrugs. “C’est la vie. Lifestyles and the rich and famous, and all that.”
“Let me rephrase. If you want to touch my underwear, you’re going to make Rosita stop.”
Dak swallows thickly. Smushing his mouth against Logan’s face is fun, but underwear-touching is a tempting siren song. Begrudgingly, he admits, “Your socks don’t smell that bad.”
Logan grins and rewards him with a soft, sweet peck on the lips. Dak chases him for more, but the kid’s already rattling off his next bullet point in the list of things sure to suck all the joy from Dak’s life.
“You have to stop calling my friends names.”
“What names?” Dak challenges, because he’s been very, very careful to never refer to the idiots as anything crude within hearing distance.
“You know what names,” Logan replies all uptight and joy-sucking.
Dak stands his ground. No way Kendall and James ever heard him call them butt monkeys.
Sighing, Logan steps back into Dak’s personal space again and says, “Rule five.”
“This is a lot of rules,” Dak objects.
“Rule five,” Logan repeats firmly. “Kiss me again?”
Okay. Dak can live with that last one.
---
They celebrate their newfound romance with a Season One marathon of Grayson’s Anatomy. Logan settles into Dak’s side, his feet propped up on the coffee table, and Dak wonders if he should come up with his own set of rules to discourage scuff-marks.
Only, thinking back on it, all the irritating things that Logan does - from eating anything that moves to recording over all of Dak’s entertainment television - don’t really irritate him anymore. Logan’s a pretty great guy underneath his hockey-headed quirks, if not a bit accident prone. Dak likes that. Dak likes all of him. And as long as he doesn’t accidentally continue to date Jett, Logan likes him too.
He presses his mouth against soft tufts of Logan’s hair, simply because he can. Onscreen, doctors prattle about their extremely dramatic, extremely unrealistic lives, straight on through the commercial break. Dak wonders if his agent ever pushed through his request to audition for this show.
It’d be a nice surprise for Logan.
Logan, who takes advantage of a snack break by suggesting, “I could teach you how to play hockey.”
Aghast, Dak inquires, “Have you seen my face? I can’t put all this at risk.”
He waves a hand across the bridge of his nose and the ridge of his cheekbones emphatically.
“That never stopped James.”
“James doesn’t have the face of a young god,” Dak retorts prissily. There is a minor possibility that Jett’s been rubbing off on him. That or he’s always been this arrogant. Both are viable options.
Fondly, Logan touches Dak’s chin and agrees, “Yeah, you’re alright looking.”
“Alright looking? Are you blind?”
His irritation trickles away as Logan bursts into laughter, completely undaunted by Dak’s outrage. It takes him a full minute to realize that Dak has stopped blustering, and when he does, he asks, “What, we’re done with the thesis on how you’re a beautiful creature?”
“I am a beautiful creature,” Dak agrees, worn out but fond. “And you know, when you smile like that, you’re pretty alright looking too.”
Logan beams, burrowing further into the couch, digging his sneakered heels into the coffee table. He twines his fingers with Dak’s, and okay, he’s definitely still a trainwreck of a hockeyhead.
But Dak thinks he’ll keep him anyway.
---