[fic] Every Last Little Light In New York City - 2/3
Title: Every Last Little Light In New York City
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Kendall/James, Kendall/Logan, past Kendall/Jo
Rating: M
Word Count: 24,538 (9,488 this part)
Warnings: Sex, bad words, AU.
Summary: Kendall Knight is an aspiring song writer with a quick temper and too much pride. James Diamond is a spoiled, idealistic wannabe superstar who just can't catch a break. They both live in the neon wash of Manhattan's electric lights, with the starless sky and the neverending pulse of life. There's no better place to start a fairytale, and that's what Kendall thinks it is when he first meets James - the beginning of a love story. Or is it?
Disclaimer: BTR and Hit List are not mine.
Author's Notes: See Part 1.
---
Three days later, there’s six feet of man-boy lurking in the doorway of Kendall’s apartment building.
In the light of day, James looks even better than the drunk, handsome guy in Kendall’s memories, freshly shaven, his hair carefully arranged to appear as though no one has carefully arranged it. The sunlight cuts him into angles, orange, gold, and white, a glowing silhouette. He’s got his fists shoved in his pockets and his lower lip tucked between his teeth, fretting it red.
Kendall exhales slowly, gathering his courage.
“That’s cute,” he calls out, cocky as he dares, “You’re stalking me.”
James’s head pivots sharply in his direction, brightening. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Kendall agrees, fumbling his keys out of his pocket and dodging around James to unlock the outer door. Uninterested in social constructs like personal space, James dogs Kendall’s footsteps, ducking inside the building without an invitation.
“I wasn’t sure if you were ever coming back.”
“I live here,” Kendall says mildly. “It had to happen sooner or later.”
James laughs nervously. “You’re mad at me.”
“I’m not mad. I hardly know you.” Kendall starts up the stairs, forcing his legs not to launch into a run. He is pissed off, because he lives ninety percent of his life angry at something and James is an easy target. But James doesn’t have to know that.
Kendall begins counting to ten in his head.
“I’d like to fix that,” James informs him. “I’m a great friend. I like to brunch and I’m always prepared to housesit.”
“And you overstay your welcome,” Kendall mutters.
One more landing, that’s all that stands between him and precious freedom from the one-night-stand that never was. He squares his shoulders and tightens his grip on his keys. Meanwhile, James falters, his boots thudding to a stop in the narrow stairwell. “I forgot you’re such a prick.”
Flatly, Kendall responds, “Please, yes, tell me about how badly I fucked up. I wasn’t aware,” before continuing on his merry way. He expects to hear James turn tail and run, but apparently, James has too much courage and not enough common sense.
He says, “You didn’t just fuck up, you did it royally. Like, this is the king of all actual fuck ups.”
“The king, really? Are you sure it’s not just the prince? Maybe even the squire?”
“You own the monarchy.”
“I anxiously await my coronation.” Kendall comes to a stop in front of the barren wood barricade of his front door. He fits his key into the lock, which much like everything else he owns, is a stubborn asshole of an inanimate object. He has to fumble around the warped metal until it agrees to turn. “Excellent chat. Let’s not do it again sometime.”
Fully intending to breeze into his apartment and slam the door in James’s face, Kendall discovers a hitch in his plan when James kicks his sturdy leather boot in between the door and the frame.
“Are you breaking and entering right now?”
James shrugs, easing back the door so that he can follow Kendall inside. “I haven’t broken a thing.”
“Lawlessness doesn’t suit you,” Kendall decides, trying to suss out whether or not punching James in the face is a good idea.
Probably not. It’d be a shame to waste such a pretty face. Besides, his opportunity is lost when James scoots past Kendall and throws himself down on the sofa, completely oblivious to the myriad stains (soda, take-out, come) he’s taken up residence upon. “Pity. I had such high hopes for a life of crime.”
I don’t remember inviting you inside, is what Kendall means to say, because he’s had about enough of this guy, with his big ideas and his unattainable dreams. Who asked him to rain on Kendall’s pessimistic parade? Not Kendall, no-siree, not him.
But there’s evidently a wire loose somewhere between his brain and his mouth, because what Kendall actually does is plop down on the couch beside James and ask, “You want a drink?”
He doesn’t have much to offer other than beer, apple juice, and month old Yoohoo, but whatever, James nestles in close to Kendall’s side and tells him, softly casual, “I’d rather have you,” so he probably isn’t going to be checking the expiration date on their chocolate milk anyway.
A lone butterfly trundles it’s way awkwardly around Kendall’s stomach, unsure how to swoop and soar. He hasn’t had the warm fuzzies for anyone in ages, long enough that the dizzying sensation makes him vaguely nauseous.
James says, “I shouldn’t have stormed off like that before. I can make it up to you.”
Kendall regards him warily, firmly not taking in how nice he smells or the way his shirt bunches pretty attractively over what he suspects are washboard abs. Eventually he allows, “Shouldn’t that be my line?”
“Let’s start over. Come out with me.”
“I’d rather stay in.”
The joke’s easy. The meaning behind it isn’t; Kendall’s one hundred percent certain he’s going to screw this up again, which, no. Missing out on the opportunity to see James naked twice might actually be the death of him.
“There’ll be time for that,” James assures him, palming his hands across Kendall’s hips. In the stark light of day, without a drop of alcohol in his system, James’s skin crackles across Kendall’s, hot and electric. “You should get to know me. I’m not a bad guy.”
“I am,” Kendall replies without a second’s hesitation. James laughs, not understanding that it isn’t a joke. Kendall insists, “I’m the worst. You should get out immediately,” but apparently, his voice lacks authority.
James squeezes Kendall’s hips a little forcefully and murmurs, “Well, at least you can acknowledge your flaws.”
“You call them flaws, I call them charming quirks. We’ve reached an irrevocable difference of opinions.”
“Rad. We’ll have something to talk about on our date.”
“I didn’t agree to go out with you.”
James talks right over him, “I’ll meet you in Times Square around seven,” and it would be incredibly obnoxious if he wasn’t watching Kendall so carefully while he does it.
The full force of James’s attention is a sun-warm glow between Kendall’s ribcage and his spine. He rebels against it. Slumping back against the threadbare cushions and folding his arms protectively across his chest, he complains, “That’s so far.”
“Make it six thirty,” is James’s cheerful reply. He extricates himself from the confines of the couch too gracefully. “Don’t be late.”
“I never said I’d come!” Kendall protests. Besides, “Are you sure you aren’t setting me up? I have nightmares about being trampled by camera-toting tourists.”
James bares his teeth, pearly white and blinding. “Not a chance. I’ve got plans for you, Kendall Knight.”
He punctuates his words by bending down and brushing his lips against the corner of Kendall’s, the specter of a kiss short circuiting his doubts, including the errant voice asking what plans James means.
---
“You look like you could use a hero,” a muffled voice proclaims, the owner scooching about a foot too far into Kendall’s personal space. He smells boozey and unwashed, and not like anything Kendall wants to touch.
“Cool your boots, Iron Man,” he replies, glaring down the costumed man. “Not interested.”
This is the third street artist to approach him in the last minute, preceded by a rather shaggy looking Elmo and a cowboy in a gold thong. Kendall hates Times Square.
Iron Man gives him a one fingered salute and totters off to trick other tourists into donating some cash in exchange for a picture, carrying with him the stench of sweat and stale alcohol. Kendall hasn’t read comic books in a long time, but he doesn’t remember Tony Stark ever being
that strapped for cash.
He taps his foot impatiently against glitter-glass asphalt, partitioned off from traffic by concrete pillars that barely come up to his thighs. The nonstop barrage of advertisements is offending his eyes, the pushy Eastern European families on vacation stepping on his toes, and every flash-snap of a camera makes him feel too paranoid. This place is hell on his nerves.
A hand lands on Kendall’s shoulder, and he rounds on the perp, shouting, “Look, prick, I told you to take your impotent iron cock elsewhere-“
His words taper off at James’s bemused expression.
“You must have me confused with someone else,” he announces, loudly enough that all the tourists milling around can hear. James ropes his arms around Kendall’s waist, grabbing Kendall by the ass and pushing in close enough to confide, “No one’s called me impotent before.”
“I strive to be original,” Kendall replies dryly. He bounds up on the balls of his feet, pretending to go in for a kiss. He ends up nipping James’s earlobe instead, grumbling, “Never make me come to this hellhole again.”
“Ah, violent anger and extreme cynicism in the face of our local landmarks. You’re becoming a true New Yorker.”
Kendall balks, his true-blue Minnesota blood going cold in his veins at the idea of assimilating. “Aren’t you supposed to be romancing me? I was promised a whirlwind of erotic passion and ardor, not insults to my honor.”
“Here I thought you’d be low maintenance.” James squeezes Kendall’s butt through the fabric of his back pockets.
He wiggles out of James’s grip, lest any random stranger starts thinking they’re like, a couple. “Way to make me feel like a toolshed. We’re off to a raring good start.”
“Trust. I’ve got something planned.”
There’s an inscrutability about James’s face that doesn’t fit, a falsehood that Kendall can inexplicably see through, even though James is
playing at keeping it well hidden beneath the twinkle of day-glo bulbs all around them, the ticker tape listing off the Dow Jones and the eight million well-lit Target ads.
Kendall takes a few steps back, jostling a Korean family with his wayward elbows and knees. They scatter like startled fish, gape-mouthed and cursing, probably, but fuck it, Kendall doesn’t speak Korean. He tells James, “You don’t have to wine and dine me to get into my pants.”
“Clearly you’ve discovered my nefarious design.”
“I’m serious.”
“As far as I can tell, you’re always serious. And never.” He shrugs, the broad span of his shoulders slipping beneath his plain, too-tight tee.
“You don’t go on many dates.”
“Presumptuous much?”
James grins, his teeth brighter than the neon billboards outlining his entire body in a white-light glow. “I’m not trying to offend you. I’m trying to tell you that you’re worth more than cheap sex.”
Kendall falters, the sudden tabula rasa of his mind a clear warning sign that this guy and his not-so-superficial charm is bad news bears.
Fuck. How does he say that cheap sex is all he’s really prepared for?
He manages, “You’re really smooth, you know that?”
“All the girls say so.”
Falling into step beside James, Kendall struggles to get his mental flirt factory working again. They dodge and weave between gawping vacationers, speeding cars, and the occasional desperate promoter. Times Square drowns everything in artificial light.
“Girls, huh? What about the guys?”
Unselfconsciously, James replies, “You’re the first, so. Jury’s still out.”
Kendall trips right off the curb.
---
James drags him onto the 3, all the way down to Greenwich Village. He leads the way through the bastion of seething creativity and student-life with his head held high, a part of the dizzying melee in a way Kendall never could be.
The streets are alive. Compact tables littered with heaps of cheap silver jewelry, raggedy scarfs, blown glass bongs, and plastic knickknacks bustle, the cat calls of the vendors trailing them down the street. Freshmen from NYU mill around the glowing white faces of their cell phones, one foot in reality, one captured by the magnetic pull of social media outlets. So and so checked in at Off The Wagon. Look, see, so and so’s Friday night is happening.
James navigates the streets without ever stopping to check his position amongst the stars, or with Siri, making a beeline through the milling crowds towards his destination. Kendall’s entertaining high hopes for a bar of some kind, but that seems less and less likely as they begin to veer away from civilization.
Their reflections play across the glossy black windows of darkened storefronts like an old-time movie screen. Kendall catches James checking out his hair more than once. He probably shouldn’t find that blatant narcissism attractive, but no one ever accused Kendall of being bright.
Intent on being as much of a prick as humanly possible to counteract the pinpoint of warmth in his chest, Kendall bounds up on his tippy toes and ruffles James’s hair. The grimace and growl he gets in return warm him in a different way, his blood doing a victory lap in his veins.
Brazenly, he tells James, “You look better this way. Less like a mannequin.”
Fire snaps in James’s eyes, gold blazing bright against tawny brown, but when he speaks, he’s mild. His voice is laced with laughter. “Got a problem with perfection?”
“When I see it, I’ll let you know,” Kendall retorts defiantly, all the while that he is being the opposite of suave.
James’s hackles raise and then James’s hackles fall. His automatic prissy face levels out into something more controlled, the instant change wrapping as tightly around him as a magic spell. Purposefully, he reaches for Kendall’s hand, a double image of them watery in the monochrome glass of a closed boutique behind him.
He says, “Yeah. You will,” and Kendall needs a cryptograph to decode all the nuance in those words, the ambition and desire and promise woven so tightly together that none of it sounds like truth.
Not for the first time that night, Kendall wonders at James’s motives behind this entire farce of a date. This doesn’t happen in real life - you don’t get to be a complete jackoff to a hot guy and then have him come back for seconds, unless that guy is say, Logan.
But Logan’s got years of history and loyalty tied into his backstory with Kendall, while James has got a few drunken conversations and some pretty insane, if not unmistakable, chemistry sparking between the two of them. That’s all there is.
To Kendall, that’s all that matters. He’s going to get laid if it kills him, and afterwards he’s not going to spare even a second of thought to the beguilingly sweet way James squeezes his fingers before letting him go.
Unfairly ignorant of Kendall’s internal bitchout, James begins sauntering back in the direction they’ve been heading in for approximately forever.
“Alright, where are you taking me?” Kendall asks, jogging to catch up. It is the mark of an extraordinarily cruel word that James can walk backwards as gracefully as he can forwards - he spins on his boot heel to face Kendall without ever slowing his pace.
“Mmm, nope. Can’t tell.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell? Do you not know?”
“Oh, I know.” James lifts his index finger in midair, deliberately tracing the tip of it against his lower lip, edging it against the plush pink of the top. He goes so far as to lick a stretch of his own skin, the fucking beautiful tease - he’s practically begging Kendall to push him down on his knees, right there in the middle of a New York City block, just to see what those perfect lips look like around his cock - before he presses his entire finger against his mouth. “It’s a secret.”
When he puts it that way he makes an incredibly compelling argument. Kendall swallows. “I’m not sure I have the self-control required to manage an entire date with you, man.”
James’s delight is sudden and genuine. He quips, “I reward good behavior.”
“Define good.” He tries to loop his fingers around James’s belt, but James dances away.
No kisses for Kendall. Again.
But to soften the blow, James grabs for Kendall’s hand, and this time, he doesn’t even try to let go.
---
They end up in front of a cement block building with grates on all the windows and a homunculi of a man in tight black clothes standing guard at the door. Kendall searches out a distinguishing sign, but he can’t find anything, and the man waves James right on in the door like he’s seen him before.
The door leads to a massive, dimly lit stairwell that is equally as concrete and gray. Two flights up, a high, throaty moan echoes across every surface.
“This is an orgy,” Kendall says with complete conviction. “You’ve brought me to an orgy.”
“So close,” James replies, marching to the next floor faster than Kendall can walk. “Only not.”
He doesn’t comment on Kendall’s ridiculous predilection for sex, but his quiet grin speaks for itself.
On the landing of the third floor, James pulls back an ominous door, spray-painted black with purple construction paper blocking the rectangular viewing window. He smirks back at Kendall and demands, “Are you ready for this?”
Kendall has no idea what this is, but he lives under the impression that he’s ready for anything at any time. He says, “I was born ready,” and means it wholeheartedly.
Behind the door, there’s a big black room, lined with garish green lockers and a single bare black-light bulb. James begins emptying his pockets into the lockers, the sleek flicker of his cell phone screen before he shoves it inside nearly blinding. Kendall follows suit, despite having no idea what’s going on.
The only things he has to store are a battered cell, an exponentially more battered and empty wallet, and his lone apartment key, the burnished gold dulled to an ugly bronze in the ugly room. Regardless, he makes a show of arranging them on an empty locker shelf while
James unloads an entire apartment’s worth of junk from his pants.
Skinny jeans should not be able to hide that much.
Both horrified and fascinated, Kendall covertly stares until James instructs, “Put this on,” and hands him what appears to be a plastic chest plate. Flecks of red stain the grooves of black, garish as blood in the dimly lit room.
Kendall blinks, finally sussing out the game. “Paintball is your idea of romance?”
James beams. “Zombie paintball.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Shoving a big black gatling into his arms, James explains, “It means you shoot when you see zombies. And they, uh, hopefully don’t eat your brain.”
There’s a bang at the door separating them from what is apparently a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Actors groan and moan and hunger for their internal organs or whatever.
Kendall’s adrenaline pumps. He loves this shit - campy and fun and thrilling, all at once. Spinning out a smile so big and wide it actually hurts, he tells James, “You’ve delivered me to an undead horde. I may have overestimated your ability to woo.”
“To woo?” James arches his eyebrows. “Nice word, Sir Lancelot.”
“I do love it when people compliment my vocabulary,” he leers in reply, brandishing his gun in the air. “It’s extensive.”
James glances pointedly towards Kendall’s crotch. “I imagine it’s not the only thing.”
“Hey, I’ve offered,” he retorts. “No need to imagine.”
“Get your gear on. If you survive the night, maybe I’ll give you a kiss.”
“You’re cute when you play hard to get. Just so you know, you’re cuter when you’re trying to swallow my tongue.”
Maturely, James makes a face at him. Kendall returns it too easily. He’s not used to flirting this way, caught between slow simmering lust and the cautious recognition of what could grow to be friendship. It’s nice.
James is really nice.
Fuck. Whatever, it doesn’t change a thing. Kendall hefts his gun and prompts, “Prepared to kick some ass?”
Mirroring him, James slings his paintball gun across one shoulder. “Let’s do this.”
---
The playing field is an endless stretch of concrete flooring, littered with props. Half a rusted out car, wooden barricades, netting placed strategically across cardboard cutouts of melty-skinned monsters, and scorch marks blackening the walls.
Kendall takes out three actors with decorative face paint in a matter of minutes, two of them zombies and one of them an “insurgent” with a paintball gun of her own, and all he wants to know is how a person ends up getting hired to play paintball all day? He wants this job like burning.
Forty minutes in, he and James are tied for the number of brainless corpses they’ve taken out. They’re taking a breather, hiding behind a lean to that might be papier-mâché when the sound of recorded gunfire to the left startles the hell out of them both. Kendall turns on his heel and James spins right into him.
They go sprawling across the hard floor, Kendall landing on James with the sick crack of plastic and a jarring pain in his right knee. He twists to the left just in time to shoot one of the oncoming zombies in the chest.
“Nice aim,” James tells him breathlessly, shifting his weight. He’s right under Kendall, his body long and hard, even beneath the added inches of plastic.
Up close, he’s every bit as sexy as he is from afar. Another spray of recorded, tinny gunfire rings out around them, but it’s distant, background noise compared to the soft pant of James’s breath and the relentless thunder of Kendall’s heart.
Without Thinking About It should be the title of his autobiography, because that’s exactly how it goes when he drops his head to touch his mouth to James’s.
It’s quick and dirty, tongue-slick and over too quickly for what Kendall wants. But if their first kiss was starshine, this one is shattered galaxies, fractured light that blazes out the edges of Kendall’s vision.
Stunned, James asks, “What was that for?”
Kendall sits back on his heels, flushed. His tennis shoes squeak against the gray slab floor. “To say thank you. For all this.”
“Right.” James squirms underneath him, hands hovering self-consciously above Kendall’s waist. “Uh. You’re very welcome.”
“You still didn’t have to do this. This date thing. I’m. I don’t deserve it, after how I acted.” It’s the closest thing to an apology he’s ever going to be able to say.
James catches his gaze. His eyes are greedy, devouring Kendall from the inside out, like he can’t stop looking. He sounds out, “You deserve a lot of things.”
And then he says, “Duck,” and the moment breaks, as a flesh-hungry zombie dives in on Kendall’s six.
---
They stay out until four. Demolishing zombies turns into bickering about hockey, once they’re forcibly ejected from the paintball playing field at closing time.
They carry their argument straight on over to a hole-in-the-wall falafel stand, where James drowns his chickpea patty in so much hot sauce that Kendall can taste it burning on his tongue when they part ways at the subway.
He kisses James deep, his tongue searching, his hands on the roam. It’s a kiss about wanting, about taking and giving, and the longer it goes on, the more Kendall feels like the scuffed tile of the station has given way beneath his feet.
James pulls back with a ragged noise, a startled, needy thing that he buries in Kendall’s neck. Breathing in, breathing out, he says, “What am I going to do with you?”
“Something scandalous, I hope,” Kendall replies, going for cocky and mostly sounding winded.
They’re holding each other, James propped against Kendall and Kendall propped against James, balanced like a house of cards. Kendall prefers to continue this arrangement, lest his knees give out and condemn them to catching something icky on the station floor.
Laughter rumbles through James’s ribcage and echoes in Kendall’s bones. “You have a one track mind.”
Tilting his head until his lips are pressed against James’s ear, Kendall agrees, “At least I’m honest about it. I want you to fuck me.”
He can feel James shudder, taste the way he shakes. All this potential is brewing in the inches between their hips, and James just - flat out refuses to grab the bull by the horns. Or Kendall by the dick.
“Duly noted.”
That is not the response to which Kendall’s pick-up lines are accustomed. He debates the merits of pointing out that he’s never ended a date with one measly goodnight kiss before, but then James murmurs, “See you soon,” and it feels exactly like a promise.
---
Logan waves something thin and papery in front of Kendall’s face. “Hey. Get dressed. Get up. Katie sent us tickets to the Zwagger concert at MSG.”
Kendall groans and buries his head in the crook of his elbow.
“What’sat hafta do wi’ me?”
Tugging his well-worn comforter down and away, exposing Kendall’s hips to the chilly air, Logan replies, “We’re going to go.”
“I hate pop.”
“You also hate waking up and putting on pants, but too bad. Those are things you’re doing.”
“Logan,” Kendall whines. The blanket inches past his knees and no, that is not okay, it’s cold. Irritably, he sneers, “Blow me.”
“Okay,” Logan says. “But you have to get up afterwards.”
That’s not what Kendall meant at all, but he isn’t about to start arguing when Logan’s thumbs trace the waistband of his boxers, dipping beneath elastic to touch the soft skin below. His breath is hot against Kendall’s belly button, his tongue licking stripes against a golden treasure trail of his hair, and fuck, fuck, this is not how he intended to start this day.
His traitorous cock twitches against Logan’s chin. Logan snorts softly, pressing a kiss through the thin plaid. “When’s the last time someone did this for you?”
Kendall’s breath hitches in his throat. “You know I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Was it last night?” Logan demands, rough. “With that guy? I know you went out with him again. Striking out once wasn’t enough?”
“No. Logan-“ Kendall starts to sit up, but Logan’s stronger than he looks. A firm hand against his chest keeps Kendall pinned while Logan works his boxers down with his teeth.
Kendall makes a guttural noise when the elastic of his underwear catches against the head of his cock, slumping back into his pillows.
“You can’t be jealous,” he tells the ceiling. “You don’t get to be jealous. You know how this works.”
“I know,” Logan agrees, his consonants sharp and bitten off.
Kendall gets exactly half a second to consider what is going wrong here before his dick’s in Logan’s mouth, and then he’s not thinking about anything but tightwetgood. He bunches his fingers in Logan’s hair and tells him ever so eloquently, “Fuck,” doubts dying on his tongue.
Logan’s got a nice mouth, a great mouth, and he’s known how to use it on Kendall since they were fourteen and his tentative crush was growing full-fledged wings. He sucks Kendall off with the kind of enthusiasm that implies there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing, lips a tight red ring that steadily grows plumper and more abused. Kendall bucks up and Logan takes it, swallows down around him like an actual pro.
He moans when he does that, the vibration resonant down the thick flesh of Kendall’s shaft, turning liquid inside his bones. Hell. Maybe he’d stop letting Logan give him head if Logan stopped being so damned good at it, but Logan is not getting with the problem at all.
While Kendall fucks his mouth, he kneads his knuckles into Kendall’s thighs, skims his fingertips across his knees. Kendall groans, an incoherent noise, and Logan fondles his balls. He licks out, his tongue practically flame.
Everything is unbearably warm, a pressure building beneath his skin, and his dick looks so hot this way, disappearing between Logan’s lips again and again and again. Everything is skin and warm morning sunlight, the slick of Logan sucking him and the slow circle of his fingertips against Kendall’s sac.
It’s safe and it’s home, Logan the only real barrier against the rest of the world that Kendall has ever known. He comes cradled against his best friend’s tongue, held tight in the hot confines of his mouth, and Logan watches him. He shudders and quakes and floods Logan’s mouth with bitter, salty warmth and Logan’s dark, coffee colored eyes never once leave his face.
Christ, this is bad.
Sitting back on his heels, Logan’s neck bobs with swallowing. Dark and guarded, he tells Kendall, “You could fuck me,” which.
“I can’t,” Kendall replies.
He hates himself at fourteen, at sixteen, now, because this is a thing he should have ended a long time ago. Or never even started. But he’s helpless to change any of it, helpless to change himself, so he lets Logan jerk off furiously all over his face, until there’s cum on Kendall’s lips, dripping down his throat, because it’s the only way he knows how to apologize.
---
Come out with me tonight, James texts him at 2:45 pm.
Can’t. Kendall replies at 2:50. Roommate’s dragging me to see Zwagger.
There’s a long pause. Long enough that Kendall thinks James forgot all about him. Then, at 3:52 pm: I thought you hated Zwagger.
I do, Kendall says. I don’t want to go.
At 4:10 pm, James says, Your life is so hard.
Kendall frowns down at his phone. Is it a joke? An insult? Is James actually mad?
He’s a stranger, is the thing. A stranger who clicks right with Kendall, but that means little to nothing. This is not a case of love at first sight, or second, or third, because it can’t be. Because Kendall absolutely, positively doesn’t believe in that sappy bullcrap.
The one thing Kendall stands by is that using his dick as a compass has never (always) lead him wrong before, and that’s what drives him now. He texts James a smiley face and an offer to look him up later, steamrolling right over the niggling fear that he’s done something wrong.
In his experience, hurt feelings have never stopped anybody from taking off their pants.
---
Zwagger is the actual worst.
Okay, maybe he’s not. His singing voice is oddly beautiful, ringing out across the seats with a strength that seems completely at odds with the short, dark haired boy it comes from.
Regardless…
“I hate pop music,” Kendall grumps over the phone.
“Shut your trap and let me listen,” Katie barks back, her no-nonsense bite laced through with fondness.
Obediently, Kendall lifts the mouthpiece of his cell higher, so that Katie can maybe pick up a note or three.
“He is! He’s going flat at the end of the chorus. I told them-“
“Good for you, baby sister. Can I hang up now?”
Dangling a phone from his ear in the second row of a sold out concert is kind of embarrassing. Zwagger’s brood of teenaged fans keep trying to stab him with their crazed side-eyes. A year ago, nobody ever heard of Zwagger. Now he’s got a teenaged horde that’s way more terrifying than the undead brood Kendall and James fought off at paintball.
Katie snaps, “No,” which means there’s a very real chance Kendall’s going to die. He rolls his eyes at Logan over the opening strains of
Reach For Me, Zwagger’s biggest hit single.
It’s impossible to go anywhere these days without the damned song assaulting your ears; Kendall tunes out instantly, even though the bass thrums relentless through his rib cage.
Zwagger sings, “…at night when the bright stars are burning high over Manhattan, all washed out in neon, and hidden from view. But when the power goes out and you look out from Brooklyn, will you reach for me, reaching out for you…”
“Flat again!” Katie crows. Her glee is completely out of place in the middle of the ballad. The girl on Kendall’s left glowers like she can force Kendall to hang up through sheer force of will.
She can’t. Kendall’s way more scared of his little sister than he is of any random fan, even if she takes to accidentally elbowing him for the rest of the song.
Oblivious to - or plainly not caring about - Kendall’s plight, Katie prattles on about her victory. She works as a production assistant at Colossal Records, one of the biggest labels in Los Angeles. Zwagger reigns as Colossal’s biggest star, and also the artist least susceptible to any criticism ever in the eyes of the label’s musical overlords. He has made them a shit-ton of cash, after all.
But Katie hates it. She thinks invulnerability is a myth, possibly because she lives to exploit weaknesses to her own advantage. This is definitely not the first time she’s discreetly sent Kendall and Logan to a show to scout out flaws in Colossal’s talent. It probably won’t be the last.
“Gloating isn’t nice,” Kendall chides in an attempt to be a role model.
Katie shoots back, “Really? It feels spectacular.”
Drat. Foiled again.
Logan snickers, crashing against Kendall’s side. He probably doesn’t even have to hear Katie’s side of the conversation to know what she said.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of letting him practically live with them when they were all younger and less likely to be at a pop concert.
Zwagger’s melody weaves together with the laughter of his best friend and his little sister, all of it climbing high on a crescendo that builds and builds, towering over the audience in a wave of sound. For the briefest of moments, Kendall closes his eyes and thinks about being up there, about singing his own songs.
It would be a rush, he thinks. Better than fucking, or liquor, or drugs.
Better than anything Kendall has ever tasted on his tongue, and so outright impossible that it’s better not to dream.
---
James is standing at the bottom of the steps, wearing tight jeans and a shirt he must have glued on, looking better than sex, or candy, or both.
Kendall skids to a halt, Logan slamming right into his back. “Hey! What the- oh,” he finishes flatly when he sees James. “It’s your boyfriend.”
“Is that what he’s calling me?” James asks, smug as fuck.
“Right now I’m labeling you a stalker, I think,” Kendall retorts breezily. “What are you doing here?”
“Whisking you off on an adventure. I hear that’s what you do when you’re trying to woo.”
“Funny. You’re a funny man,” Kendall tells James and his stupid, sassy grin.
James opens his mouth to retort, probably with something that will tread the line between rude and pleasant. “I-“
“Kendall’s busy.”
Logan slides an arm possessively around Kendall’s shoulders, even though he has to stand on his tippy toes to do it. He’s glaring at James with an intensity he must have learned from all those teenage girls flocking inside Madison Square Garden, like he’s got literal daggers hiding behind his corn-syrup colored eyes. It’s not even a little bit okay.
Kendall shrugs his arm off. “I’m not.”
James purses his lips, eyes tracking back and forth between them. “If this is a bad time…?”
“It’s not great,” Logan responds bluntly.
“It’s fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine.” Kendall levels Logan with his best impression of stern.
It might have been more effective if Logan weren’t the tiniest, most tenacious person in the world. Absolutely belligerent, he says, “I’m not fine. I am the opposite of fine.”
“Cut the melodrama,” Kendall replies, before James can jump in with a heroic save and do something stupid, like leave. “Logan.”
“Kendall,” Logan echoes. Surliness flickers across his lips, pinches his eyes and scrunches his chin. “You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Out into the city, not Timbuktu. Chillax.”
Intent on being the worst at helping, James squeezes Kendall’s shoulder and goes, “Nobody says chillax anymore.”
Logan’s not the only one who used the past two hours to hone their glaring skills. James backs down, quick.
Cupping his hand against his forehead like that might ward off an impending headache, Logan says. “Great. Ditch me. Reinforce my beliefs about the power of friendship.”
“No really,” James tells the air, because Kendall is sure as shit not paying attention. “I can go.”
Beaming at James, Kendall says, “’scuse us for a minute.” Then he proceeds to manhandle Logan back up the steps through a steady stream of hurried concert-goers, each more irritated than the last at being jostled. They’re barely far enough out of earshot before Kendall demands,
“What do you want? No, tell me. What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to achieve here?”
Logan rearranges his features with all the precision of an Etch-A-Sketch. It’s all there - his irritation, his concerm, sloppy and too-clear.
“You’re being a dick.”
“That shouldn’t shock you,” Kendall answers incredulously.
“Do you like this guy?”
“I like the way his ass looks in those jeans. Is that a crime?”
Stubborn as fuck, Logan says, “You’ve been on five dates.”
“Three. This would be number three.”
“Big difference there. Not.” Urgently, Logan says, “Just. You’ve always been a sucker for pretty faces. So you should, you know, try not to be that this time.”
Oh. Right. Logan’s doing that thing Kendall hates, where he uses his brain so much it’s got to be overheating. He’s a thinker, and normally, that’s fine. He likes to ponder the mysteries of the universe, like who actually came up with the invention of fire and why anyone ever thought harem pants were a good idea. Thinking is his thing, but so is overthinking, which leads to worrying, and Kendall hatehatehates it when Logan worries about him.
“Why?” He demands, even knowing the reason.
Unflinching, Logan stares him down. Shortstack barely reaches Kendall’s forehead, but he’s still scary, like a rabid koala or something. He says, “You know why. Don’t let this guy break your heart.”
Words are thick on Kendall’s tongue.
He plays it off with a sassy salute and an agreement of, “Will do, mon capitan,” but his smile doesn’t quite reach his lips. Logan’s eyes are boring into his skull.
Kendall ignores it, because Kendall’s really good at pretending nothing is wrong. If denial was a profession, he’d be CEO in a hot lick minute.
He bounds down the stairs, marches up to James, and tells him, “Somebody got their hall pass. Somebody being me.”
James tangles their fingers together. “Rad. Now I can show you the world.”
“Shining, shimmering, splendid?” Sticking his tongue between his lips, Kendall bites the tip and crosses his eyes. “Only you’re definitely the Princess in this scenario.”
Sternly, James pulls his hand away and replies, “I’m not taking you anywhere if you can’t behave.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll lay off the tiara jokes. Tonight.” Kendall grins. “Lead the way. The world is waiting.”
He allows James to guide him through the whiz-bang-pop of New York City traffic, every street-crossing a life-threatening thrill. Pedestrians flood all available surfaces, shoulders pressing in on them both, but James holds his head tall and navigates through them with the same ease as the night before, passing untouched through the crowd. Kendall isn’t afforded the same grace; he’s battered back and forth like a wayward sail.
Reaching the sidewalk is a small triumph. Kendall shimmies his hips and searches out James, the tan skin at the nape of his neck and the strong span of his shoulders and the rich scent of his cologne straight ahead, his compass north. He trips forward and wrangles his arm up around James’s throat. “I’m going to guess where we’re headed. Is it bigger than a breadbox?”
James bumps their noses together, an almost kiss that Kendall tries to follow through. He’s thwarted by James’s quick reflexes and his laughing response of, “How was the concert?”
“Katie says Zwagger flattens his high notes,” Kendall replies sagely, whisking James off down the avenue. This is New York in starts and stops, every block a new street-crossing adventure.
Together, they step off a sidewalk, James so much less graceful with Kendall hunkering him down. He asks, “…is Katie what you call Logan when you’re alone together?”
“Katie’s my baby sister.” Kendall rolls his eyes, making sure to use one hundred percent more sass than usual. “She works for Colossal Studios.”
It doesn’t feel like the wrong thing to say, right up until James tenses beneath his arm. He’s rigid muscle and simmering unease, and he demands, “Let me get this straight. Your sister works for one of the biggest record labels in LA and she can’t get you a job?”
Kendall imitates a wrong buzzer noise. “Incorrect, you fine gentleman. Let me tell you a thing. One, Katie’s only an intern. Two, I’ve explicitly forbidden her from trying, even if she could throw her weight around and bully somebody into giving me a shot.”
“Why would you forbid it?” The look James gives him is completely reptilian, colder than Antarctica and tinted envy-green. Kendall falls back a step or three in an attempt to escape it, but the chill never quite leaves his spine.
“Scoring a job through my baby sister is not the definition of living the dream.”
“Pride’s deadly, you know.”
“Pride’s the only thing I have left,” he replies, too honest, too raw, and James doesn’t get it at all. Kendall can tell from the furrow between his eyebrows, every nuance quizzical.
From the way he concludes, “I think you’re scared,” instead of asking what else Kendall could have possibly lost.
That’s okay. James doesn’t have to be prescient to look really nice naked.
“Scared of begging for favors?” Kendall challenges. He’s never worn fear well.
James skids to a halt, right in the middle of an overcrowded crosswalk. Shoulders squared, he retorts, “Scared of fame. Of people knowing what you can really do.”
“You’re right.” Kendall watches the redyellowgreen of a traffic light play across James’s cheekbones. “I’m terrified of superstardom. Also, clowns.”
“And you’re off,” James comments softly, “Speeding down the track with enough sarcasm to scare off anyone with common sense.”
The asphalt beneath Kendall’s sneakers has a pulse, a rumble of oncoming traffic and the beatbeatbeat of Kendall’s traitorous heart. He swallows around a golf ball size lump in his throat and tries not to break James’s gaze. “I don’t see you rabbiting away.”
“Common sense is overrated.” Huffing a laugh, James conducts a forward march, in the lead again. It’s clear that’s where he prefers to be, dead center of Kendall’s attention. “Come along now.”
Hastily, Kendall dodges about eight bajillion pedestrians, falling all over himself to catch up. That’s becoming a theme with him and James that he’ll have to evaluate sometime that is not now. “You’re a big fan of the city scavenger hunts. I see that. Where are we going now?”
“Over, sideways, and under,” James hums, and no way Kendall is going to admit that he knows that much of a Disney song out loud.
The gaping maw of Greely Square’s subway entrance, limned by wrought iron fencing and the PATH to the side, looms in front of them like a well-tiled sinkhole. James practically skips down into the bowels of Manhattan, taking the steps two at a time.
Too competitive to let that slide, Kendall’s hot at his heels. Only, at the bottom, James skids to an abrupt stop. He asks, “By the way, should I be worried?”
Kendall windmills his arms, flailing at bit to keep from collapsing onto him. He pants, “About the number of times you’ve seen Aladdin? Very possibly.”
Benevolently, James lets the insult slide. “About the heart-to-heart you had with your bodyguard earlier.”
“You like Logan,” Kendall objects, because James totally didn’t mind Mr. Sassypants when he dropped by the apartment that first night.
Tonight Logan was a mite more abrasive, but that can’t change - anything.
It just can’t.
“Logan seems pretty dope,” James concedes, and something unknots in Kendall’s chest. “That’s why I want to make sure there’re no hard feelings.”
“What.” Kendall blinks in the face of James’s absolute perfection, because God did not create people this nice. “Do you volunteer at soup kitchens and help old ladies cross the street too?”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. Logan is. There’s a thing.” He holds up a hand to ward off James’s impending questions. “We don’t talk about the thing. But now he overreacts. It’s his replacement thing.”
James taps his Metro Card out of his wallet and flashes Kendall some teeth. “I’m going to pretend that made sense.”
He sashays through the turnstiles like there’s a runway underneath them. Kendall has to swipe his stupid subway card three times before it bothers to read. Next to James, he feels about as graceful as a water buffalo, all his athletic prowess leeching away.
Not that he cares about being impressive. It’s just irritating, is all. He grimaces at the muck caking the subway rails.
They have to wait five minutes for a Q train to come rattling down the tracks, whooshing over the sodden mess of mud and detritus in a blur of silver, orange, and black. Inside, the cabin’s near empty, but James scoots too close on the ugly orange plastic seats regardless.
“I’ve never volunteered,” he offers.
“Pardon?”
“In a soup kitchen. Or anywhere. My mom’s not a big fan of charity unless it’s theoretical.”
“Don’t think we covered theoretical charity in Physics 101.”
“The kind you can throw money at,” James clarifies. “Diamond Cosmetics is a philanthropic organization, you know.”
“I think I read that in the pamphlet.” Kendall nods sagely. It’s sharing time, probably. It seems like sharing time. He tries, “I used to volunteer at a hospital. I never got much out of it, other than an inoculation for gore.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Lack of warm, fuzzy, helping-humanity feelings aside? I.” Down the aisle, a college aged girl examines her cuticles as if they hold the secrets of the universe. Two teenage boys leer at her legs while simultaneously bickering over the new Call of Duty. A homeless man settles down against a row of three seats, everyone else giving him a wide berth. Kendall continues, “I was in my last year of high school, and there were parties-“
He hesitates, because wow, does that sound like a selfish reason to give up on charity, even if it’s true. The sleeping hobo is judging him from behind closed eyelids. “I had no time. And then…then. I guess, after everything that happened, it seemed like a dumb idea to try to help
anyone else when I could barely help myself.” Minutely ashamed, he adds, “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a grownup.”
James touches his knee, fingers warm through denim. He squeezes. “You are. You just have to try harder.”
“Your faith in humanity is gripping.”
“And your lack of faith makes me sad. We’re going to work on that.”
Immediately latching onto the sub-textual insult, Kendall retorts, “I’m not a DIY project. You can’t fix me up.”
Saint James snorts. “’Course not. I like you exactly the way you are. But as a member of the human race, you want to improve yourself.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyone. We all want to be better. Doesn’t mean we need to be - you’re you, and I think you’re…” He pauses, expression too earnest, too open, too raw. “I think you’re as close to perfect as anyone can get.” His thumb traces tiny figure eights against Kendall’s knee. It’s
distracting Kendall from like, breathing. “Only you don’t think that. You don’t like yourself much, Kendall Knight.”
Kendall gulps down air, struggling to suck it in.
“I like myself just fine, thanks.”
“Nah,” James replies slowly. “You want to be better. So I’ll help.”
Inside, Kendall’s melting all over, and damn. His heart isn’t supposed to be subject to global warming. He manages, “I don’t know what I’d do without you to slay all my dragons,” but there’s no bite. James is defanging him.
He says, “You’re the knight, Knight.”
This isn’t going at all like Kendall planned.
At Canal Street, James practically pushes Kendall off the subway, guiding him with long fingers beneath his shoulder blades. The air smells like dumplings and sewage, although that’s mostly the grate separating the street from the trains below. Chinatown is alive at this time of the evening, everything gilded gold and blazing red. Packs of humanity mill in front of stalls hawking fake purses, Ray-Bans, and Rolexes, while adept denizens of the area duck and weave in their forward trek. Whole chickens dangle brown and juicy in one window. The next is bedecked in sapphires and topaz. At least three times, Kendall is stopped by storekeepers with increasingly more impressive pitches, but James skips past all the sparkle. He disappears down Mulberry, where the entire landscape morphs; green stacked on white stacked on red, Christmas
colors exploding everywhere.
Little Italy thrives off the night. Strings of fairy lights create a canopy of white and burnished yellow, the twinkle outmatching the stars. The soundtrack from La Dolce Vita spills onto the street, echoing out of at least nine similarly adorned restaurants, all decorated with grape leaves and cherubs and tiny placards declaring their food authentic.
James pulls Kendall straight into the center of it, colors flashing bright everywhere he looks, saffron yellow and coral pink, red brighter than a street walker’s lips and a blue he wants to dive into, swim in, immerse himself under until he’s drowning with it. Penguin suited hosts and hostesses smile too wide and beckon, but James spins Kendall on his toes, tugs him into this dance that neither of them know the steps to, and they’re off.
Each step and turn takes them further down the street, weaving through a sidewalk obstacle course of clapboard signs that advertise ravioli, caprese, gnocchi and veal marsala. James’s palm hovers over the small of Kendall’s back, a warm, steady presence that wavers between tangible and imagined.
Down a side alley, the melody tapers into a softer, more fragile thing, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning a standard about dancing cheek to cheek. James’s face looms close, his breath a hot spot against Kendall’s skin, and fuck it if Logan wasn’t right. Kendall needs to check himself before he wrecks himself, because he’s been through enough head-on collisions to last a lifetime.
He steps on James’s foot, accidentally on purpose.
It achieves nothing.
Frank Sinatra picks up the tail end of the canned song and James knows every single word. He nuzzles against him and sings, subdued, “You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?”
Kendall is acutely uncomfortable with all this…atmosphere. Sex. That’s all he wanted. Good old fashioned horizontal mambo-type dancing, not the slow tangle of bodies that is happening all up over the asphalt, making his heart thud too hard and his ribcage feel like it’s irreparably split.
He says, “James, I-“
“Want the best éclair in town?” James murmurs huskily. “Because that’s where we’re going.”
Kendall gapes, completely forgetting his dick and its mission, insomuch as he ever forgets his equipment. He accuses, “You want me to get fat. You’re going to feed me éclairs and croon pretty things at me and I’m not going to fit in my skinny jeans anymore.”
“I’ll take you jogging after.”
“There are better ways to get me all sweaty.”
“Probably,” he agrees, inappropriately smug for a guy who’s turning down sex. Again. “But none of them involve watching you lick pink frosting flowers.”
“They can! They totally can!” Kendall protests, “I’ve got icing back at my place!”
Alas. He is thwarted again. Their second date, much like their first, involves James leaving Kendall at the subway station, half-hard in his jeans and not even a little abashed about it.
He says, “I’ll call you soon,” and Kendall absolutely does not wonder how long he’ll have to wait for soon to arrive. He falls back into routine - he goes to work, he comes home, he bickers with Logan, or Katie on the phone, and he resolutely refrains from mentioning James to anybody. Because.
Because people keep telling him dumb shit, like that he looks happy. Happiness is a ploy Kendall refuses to buy into; euphoria’s for suckers.
There’s no way up and no way out except heartbreak, apathy, or death. Which, in order, are Kendall’s least favorite things.
To counteract the onslaught of people celebrating his newfound glow - including a cackling Katie and Minerva, but minus an extremely sullen Logan, because he’s eight times the fatalist Kendall could ever be - he resolves to pursue a few ill-advised past-times. All that gets him is a hangover Logan outright refuses to nurse and probably hypothermia. Falling into the East River in mid-winter; not his best plan.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Logan grumbles, watching Kendall pull off his boxers with thinly-veiled lust in his eyes.
“Not the actions of a smitten man, right?” Kendall replies cheerfully, shivering in the empty space of the loft.
Logan sighs and tosses a worn, fuzzy blanket his way. Kendall gratefully wraps it around his shoulders, hiding his junk from view. He almost misses the plaintive way Logan replies, “I guess not.”
Kendall hesitates, pasting on a carefree smile that sits in total contrast to the throbbing in his head. “We’re buds. You know that, right?”
“Buds,” Logan repeats dully. “Duh. What else would we be?”
---
Kendall’s cursed, or something. Cursed. Because about five minutes after Logan’s rapid departure to do future-doctor things, James shows up.
“You look like shit.”
Tightening his grip on the fuzzy blue blanket, Kendall beams. Or tries to. He’s in a state of unrelenting agony thanks to the kickdrum pounding in his head, which is exacerbated in turn by sunlight, noise, and particularly pungent smells. The long trek from his loft-bed to the door helps nothing. “Did you come here to insult me, or is this visit solely for business?”
“Nope. All pleasure,” James replies smoothly, grinning right back. He brought his A-game today, Kendall sees.
“There are these newfangled inventions you may have heard of. Sir Thomas Edison created them. I think they’re called phones.”
“Yours is off.”
“It is not. My phone never dies. It’s fucking immortal.” Kendall fishes his cell out of the sodden lump that is his jeans. “Immortal, I tell you. It
totally is not d - oh. Er. I guess immortality doesn’t hold a candle to being like, waterproof. Oopsie daisy.”
“On the one hand, I’m really attracted to you all naked and wet. On the other, you just said oopsie daisy.” James slinks through the door, his natural, obnoxious grace making Kendall’s head throb. “Rough night?”
“You could say that. I just got in.”
“I can tell.” James pauses. “It’s one pm.”
“You can’t police my schedule. You haven’t been to the schedule policing academy.”
“Your teeth are chattering.”
“That is astute. You have said an astute thing,” Kendall mumbles through chattering teeth. As an afterthought, he declares, “I’d like to sit down.”
The complete opposite of a gentleman, James plops his fine, fine specimen of an ass down on Kendall’s ratty sofa. But then he goes and all sweetly pats his lap, and no way is Kendall turning down an opportunity to nuzzle his dick. He’d gallop over there like a sparkly unicorn if the world wasn’t spinning - but his obedient trot is equally as impressive, he’s sure.
Kendall sprawls across the couch in a catastrophe of limbs and skin and his face planted firmly between James’s thighs, which is not quite as sexy as he’d hoped.
“I think I’m asphyxiating,” he tells James’s pants.
Helpfully, James frees his breathing-holes from the cage of his legs, turning Kendall on his back with sure, steady hands. “You’re a mess.”
“You said that already.”
“I said you look like shit.”
“These are not the compliments a lady hopes to receive,” Kendall retorts, sticking out his tongue and then deciding his mouth tastes gross. Kind of salty and garbagey, like he’s bathed in the sloughed-off skin of dead mob bosses.
Ew, East River. Ew.
Oblivious to his internal struggle, James strokes Kendall’s hair. Pinpricks of heat tremble against Kendall’s scalp, warm and gentle and too intimately James. They haven’t even fucked yet. Kendall shouldn’t have memorized his touch.
He shouldn’t have, but.
Softly, James tells him, “You’re still beautiful. For a guy who looks like he went through a car wash sans the car. You shouldn’t be so beautiful.”
Kendall peers up at him, bleary-eyed and skeptical. “Admit it. You only like me for my body.”
“Caught me.”
“Knew it.” Kendall shades his face from the harsh fluorescence of the apartment’s lights, cuddling into the hard planes of James’s stomach.
“Gon’ sleep now. You stay here, ‘kay?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” James promises, and because Kendall maybe possibly is more of a sucker than he lets on, he chooses to happily believe that.
---
Part Three
---
Author:
garnetice
Pairing: Kendall/James, Kendall/Logan, past Kendall/Jo
Rating: M
Word Count: 24,538 (9,488 this part)
Warnings: Sex, bad words, AU.
Summary: Kendall Knight is an aspiring song writer with a quick temper and too much pride. James Diamond is a spoiled, idealistic wannabe superstar who just can't catch a break. They both live in the neon wash of Manhattan's electric lights, with the starless sky and the neverending pulse of life. There's no better place to start a fairytale, and that's what Kendall thinks it is when he first meets James - the beginning of a love story. Or is it?
Disclaimer: BTR and Hit List are not mine.
Author's Notes: See Part 1.
---
Three days later, there’s six feet of man-boy lurking in the doorway of Kendall’s apartment building.
In the light of day, James looks even better than the drunk, handsome guy in Kendall’s memories, freshly shaven, his hair carefully arranged to appear as though no one has carefully arranged it. The sunlight cuts him into angles, orange, gold, and white, a glowing silhouette. He’s got his fists shoved in his pockets and his lower lip tucked between his teeth, fretting it red.
Kendall exhales slowly, gathering his courage.
“That’s cute,” he calls out, cocky as he dares, “You’re stalking me.”
James’s head pivots sharply in his direction, brightening. “There you are.”
“Here I am,” Kendall agrees, fumbling his keys out of his pocket and dodging around James to unlock the outer door. Uninterested in social constructs like personal space, James dogs Kendall’s footsteps, ducking inside the building without an invitation.
“I wasn’t sure if you were ever coming back.”
“I live here,” Kendall says mildly. “It had to happen sooner or later.”
James laughs nervously. “You’re mad at me.”
“I’m not mad. I hardly know you.” Kendall starts up the stairs, forcing his legs not to launch into a run. He is pissed off, because he lives ninety percent of his life angry at something and James is an easy target. But James doesn’t have to know that.
Kendall begins counting to ten in his head.
“I’d like to fix that,” James informs him. “I’m a great friend. I like to brunch and I’m always prepared to housesit.”
“And you overstay your welcome,” Kendall mutters.
One more landing, that’s all that stands between him and precious freedom from the one-night-stand that never was. He squares his shoulders and tightens his grip on his keys. Meanwhile, James falters, his boots thudding to a stop in the narrow stairwell. “I forgot you’re such a prick.”
Flatly, Kendall responds, “Please, yes, tell me about how badly I fucked up. I wasn’t aware,” before continuing on his merry way. He expects to hear James turn tail and run, but apparently, James has too much courage and not enough common sense.
He says, “You didn’t just fuck up, you did it royally. Like, this is the king of all actual fuck ups.”
“The king, really? Are you sure it’s not just the prince? Maybe even the squire?”
“You own the monarchy.”
“I anxiously await my coronation.” Kendall comes to a stop in front of the barren wood barricade of his front door. He fits his key into the lock, which much like everything else he owns, is a stubborn asshole of an inanimate object. He has to fumble around the warped metal until it agrees to turn. “Excellent chat. Let’s not do it again sometime.”
Fully intending to breeze into his apartment and slam the door in James’s face, Kendall discovers a hitch in his plan when James kicks his sturdy leather boot in between the door and the frame.
“Are you breaking and entering right now?”
James shrugs, easing back the door so that he can follow Kendall inside. “I haven’t broken a thing.”
“Lawlessness doesn’t suit you,” Kendall decides, trying to suss out whether or not punching James in the face is a good idea.
Probably not. It’d be a shame to waste such a pretty face. Besides, his opportunity is lost when James scoots past Kendall and throws himself down on the sofa, completely oblivious to the myriad stains (soda, take-out, come) he’s taken up residence upon. “Pity. I had such high hopes for a life of crime.”
I don’t remember inviting you inside, is what Kendall means to say, because he’s had about enough of this guy, with his big ideas and his unattainable dreams. Who asked him to rain on Kendall’s pessimistic parade? Not Kendall, no-siree, not him.
But there’s evidently a wire loose somewhere between his brain and his mouth, because what Kendall actually does is plop down on the couch beside James and ask, “You want a drink?”
He doesn’t have much to offer other than beer, apple juice, and month old Yoohoo, but whatever, James nestles in close to Kendall’s side and tells him, softly casual, “I’d rather have you,” so he probably isn’t going to be checking the expiration date on their chocolate milk anyway.
A lone butterfly trundles it’s way awkwardly around Kendall’s stomach, unsure how to swoop and soar. He hasn’t had the warm fuzzies for anyone in ages, long enough that the dizzying sensation makes him vaguely nauseous.
James says, “I shouldn’t have stormed off like that before. I can make it up to you.”
Kendall regards him warily, firmly not taking in how nice he smells or the way his shirt bunches pretty attractively over what he suspects are washboard abs. Eventually he allows, “Shouldn’t that be my line?”
“Let’s start over. Come out with me.”
“I’d rather stay in.”
The joke’s easy. The meaning behind it isn’t; Kendall’s one hundred percent certain he’s going to screw this up again, which, no. Missing out on the opportunity to see James naked twice might actually be the death of him.
“There’ll be time for that,” James assures him, palming his hands across Kendall’s hips. In the stark light of day, without a drop of alcohol in his system, James’s skin crackles across Kendall’s, hot and electric. “You should get to know me. I’m not a bad guy.”
“I am,” Kendall replies without a second’s hesitation. James laughs, not understanding that it isn’t a joke. Kendall insists, “I’m the worst. You should get out immediately,” but apparently, his voice lacks authority.
James squeezes Kendall’s hips a little forcefully and murmurs, “Well, at least you can acknowledge your flaws.”
“You call them flaws, I call them charming quirks. We’ve reached an irrevocable difference of opinions.”
“Rad. We’ll have something to talk about on our date.”
“I didn’t agree to go out with you.”
James talks right over him, “I’ll meet you in Times Square around seven,” and it would be incredibly obnoxious if he wasn’t watching Kendall so carefully while he does it.
The full force of James’s attention is a sun-warm glow between Kendall’s ribcage and his spine. He rebels against it. Slumping back against the threadbare cushions and folding his arms protectively across his chest, he complains, “That’s so far.”
“Make it six thirty,” is James’s cheerful reply. He extricates himself from the confines of the couch too gracefully. “Don’t be late.”
“I never said I’d come!” Kendall protests. Besides, “Are you sure you aren’t setting me up? I have nightmares about being trampled by camera-toting tourists.”
James bares his teeth, pearly white and blinding. “Not a chance. I’ve got plans for you, Kendall Knight.”
He punctuates his words by bending down and brushing his lips against the corner of Kendall’s, the specter of a kiss short circuiting his doubts, including the errant voice asking what plans James means.
---
“You look like you could use a hero,” a muffled voice proclaims, the owner scooching about a foot too far into Kendall’s personal space. He smells boozey and unwashed, and not like anything Kendall wants to touch.
“Cool your boots, Iron Man,” he replies, glaring down the costumed man. “Not interested.”
This is the third street artist to approach him in the last minute, preceded by a rather shaggy looking Elmo and a cowboy in a gold thong. Kendall hates Times Square.
Iron Man gives him a one fingered salute and totters off to trick other tourists into donating some cash in exchange for a picture, carrying with him the stench of sweat and stale alcohol. Kendall hasn’t read comic books in a long time, but he doesn’t remember Tony Stark ever being
that strapped for cash.
He taps his foot impatiently against glitter-glass asphalt, partitioned off from traffic by concrete pillars that barely come up to his thighs. The nonstop barrage of advertisements is offending his eyes, the pushy Eastern European families on vacation stepping on his toes, and every flash-snap of a camera makes him feel too paranoid. This place is hell on his nerves.
A hand lands on Kendall’s shoulder, and he rounds on the perp, shouting, “Look, prick, I told you to take your impotent iron cock elsewhere-“
His words taper off at James’s bemused expression.
“You must have me confused with someone else,” he announces, loudly enough that all the tourists milling around can hear. James ropes his arms around Kendall’s waist, grabbing Kendall by the ass and pushing in close enough to confide, “No one’s called me impotent before.”
“I strive to be original,” Kendall replies dryly. He bounds up on the balls of his feet, pretending to go in for a kiss. He ends up nipping James’s earlobe instead, grumbling, “Never make me come to this hellhole again.”
“Ah, violent anger and extreme cynicism in the face of our local landmarks. You’re becoming a true New Yorker.”
Kendall balks, his true-blue Minnesota blood going cold in his veins at the idea of assimilating. “Aren’t you supposed to be romancing me? I was promised a whirlwind of erotic passion and ardor, not insults to my honor.”
“Here I thought you’d be low maintenance.” James squeezes Kendall’s butt through the fabric of his back pockets.
He wiggles out of James’s grip, lest any random stranger starts thinking they’re like, a couple. “Way to make me feel like a toolshed. We’re off to a raring good start.”
“Trust. I’ve got something planned.”
There’s an inscrutability about James’s face that doesn’t fit, a falsehood that Kendall can inexplicably see through, even though James is
playing at keeping it well hidden beneath the twinkle of day-glo bulbs all around them, the ticker tape listing off the Dow Jones and the eight million well-lit Target ads.
Kendall takes a few steps back, jostling a Korean family with his wayward elbows and knees. They scatter like startled fish, gape-mouthed and cursing, probably, but fuck it, Kendall doesn’t speak Korean. He tells James, “You don’t have to wine and dine me to get into my pants.”
“Clearly you’ve discovered my nefarious design.”
“I’m serious.”
“As far as I can tell, you’re always serious. And never.” He shrugs, the broad span of his shoulders slipping beneath his plain, too-tight tee.
“You don’t go on many dates.”
“Presumptuous much?”
James grins, his teeth brighter than the neon billboards outlining his entire body in a white-light glow. “I’m not trying to offend you. I’m trying to tell you that you’re worth more than cheap sex.”
Kendall falters, the sudden tabula rasa of his mind a clear warning sign that this guy and his not-so-superficial charm is bad news bears.
Fuck. How does he say that cheap sex is all he’s really prepared for?
He manages, “You’re really smooth, you know that?”
“All the girls say so.”
Falling into step beside James, Kendall struggles to get his mental flirt factory working again. They dodge and weave between gawping vacationers, speeding cars, and the occasional desperate promoter. Times Square drowns everything in artificial light.
“Girls, huh? What about the guys?”
Unselfconsciously, James replies, “You’re the first, so. Jury’s still out.”
Kendall trips right off the curb.
---
James drags him onto the 3, all the way down to Greenwich Village. He leads the way through the bastion of seething creativity and student-life with his head held high, a part of the dizzying melee in a way Kendall never could be.
The streets are alive. Compact tables littered with heaps of cheap silver jewelry, raggedy scarfs, blown glass bongs, and plastic knickknacks bustle, the cat calls of the vendors trailing them down the street. Freshmen from NYU mill around the glowing white faces of their cell phones, one foot in reality, one captured by the magnetic pull of social media outlets. So and so checked in at Off The Wagon. Look, see, so and so’s Friday night is happening.
James navigates the streets without ever stopping to check his position amongst the stars, or with Siri, making a beeline through the milling crowds towards his destination. Kendall’s entertaining high hopes for a bar of some kind, but that seems less and less likely as they begin to veer away from civilization.
Their reflections play across the glossy black windows of darkened storefronts like an old-time movie screen. Kendall catches James checking out his hair more than once. He probably shouldn’t find that blatant narcissism attractive, but no one ever accused Kendall of being bright.
Intent on being as much of a prick as humanly possible to counteract the pinpoint of warmth in his chest, Kendall bounds up on his tippy toes and ruffles James’s hair. The grimace and growl he gets in return warm him in a different way, his blood doing a victory lap in his veins.
Brazenly, he tells James, “You look better this way. Less like a mannequin.”
Fire snaps in James’s eyes, gold blazing bright against tawny brown, but when he speaks, he’s mild. His voice is laced with laughter. “Got a problem with perfection?”
“When I see it, I’ll let you know,” Kendall retorts defiantly, all the while that he is being the opposite of suave.
James’s hackles raise and then James’s hackles fall. His automatic prissy face levels out into something more controlled, the instant change wrapping as tightly around him as a magic spell. Purposefully, he reaches for Kendall’s hand, a double image of them watery in the monochrome glass of a closed boutique behind him.
He says, “Yeah. You will,” and Kendall needs a cryptograph to decode all the nuance in those words, the ambition and desire and promise woven so tightly together that none of it sounds like truth.
Not for the first time that night, Kendall wonders at James’s motives behind this entire farce of a date. This doesn’t happen in real life - you don’t get to be a complete jackoff to a hot guy and then have him come back for seconds, unless that guy is say, Logan.
But Logan’s got years of history and loyalty tied into his backstory with Kendall, while James has got a few drunken conversations and some pretty insane, if not unmistakable, chemistry sparking between the two of them. That’s all there is.
To Kendall, that’s all that matters. He’s going to get laid if it kills him, and afterwards he’s not going to spare even a second of thought to the beguilingly sweet way James squeezes his fingers before letting him go.
Unfairly ignorant of Kendall’s internal bitchout, James begins sauntering back in the direction they’ve been heading in for approximately forever.
“Alright, where are you taking me?” Kendall asks, jogging to catch up. It is the mark of an extraordinarily cruel word that James can walk backwards as gracefully as he can forwards - he spins on his boot heel to face Kendall without ever slowing his pace.
“Mmm, nope. Can’t tell.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell? Do you not know?”
“Oh, I know.” James lifts his index finger in midair, deliberately tracing the tip of it against his lower lip, edging it against the plush pink of the top. He goes so far as to lick a stretch of his own skin, the fucking beautiful tease - he’s practically begging Kendall to push him down on his knees, right there in the middle of a New York City block, just to see what those perfect lips look like around his cock - before he presses his entire finger against his mouth. “It’s a secret.”
When he puts it that way he makes an incredibly compelling argument. Kendall swallows. “I’m not sure I have the self-control required to manage an entire date with you, man.”
James’s delight is sudden and genuine. He quips, “I reward good behavior.”
“Define good.” He tries to loop his fingers around James’s belt, but James dances away.
No kisses for Kendall. Again.
But to soften the blow, James grabs for Kendall’s hand, and this time, he doesn’t even try to let go.
---
They end up in front of a cement block building with grates on all the windows and a homunculi of a man in tight black clothes standing guard at the door. Kendall searches out a distinguishing sign, but he can’t find anything, and the man waves James right on in the door like he’s seen him before.
The door leads to a massive, dimly lit stairwell that is equally as concrete and gray. Two flights up, a high, throaty moan echoes across every surface.
“This is an orgy,” Kendall says with complete conviction. “You’ve brought me to an orgy.”
“So close,” James replies, marching to the next floor faster than Kendall can walk. “Only not.”
He doesn’t comment on Kendall’s ridiculous predilection for sex, but his quiet grin speaks for itself.
On the landing of the third floor, James pulls back an ominous door, spray-painted black with purple construction paper blocking the rectangular viewing window. He smirks back at Kendall and demands, “Are you ready for this?”
Kendall has no idea what this is, but he lives under the impression that he’s ready for anything at any time. He says, “I was born ready,” and means it wholeheartedly.
Behind the door, there’s a big black room, lined with garish green lockers and a single bare black-light bulb. James begins emptying his pockets into the lockers, the sleek flicker of his cell phone screen before he shoves it inside nearly blinding. Kendall follows suit, despite having no idea what’s going on.
The only things he has to store are a battered cell, an exponentially more battered and empty wallet, and his lone apartment key, the burnished gold dulled to an ugly bronze in the ugly room. Regardless, he makes a show of arranging them on an empty locker shelf while
James unloads an entire apartment’s worth of junk from his pants.
Skinny jeans should not be able to hide that much.
Both horrified and fascinated, Kendall covertly stares until James instructs, “Put this on,” and hands him what appears to be a plastic chest plate. Flecks of red stain the grooves of black, garish as blood in the dimly lit room.
Kendall blinks, finally sussing out the game. “Paintball is your idea of romance?”
James beams. “Zombie paintball.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Shoving a big black gatling into his arms, James explains, “It means you shoot when you see zombies. And they, uh, hopefully don’t eat your brain.”
There’s a bang at the door separating them from what is apparently a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Actors groan and moan and hunger for their internal organs or whatever.
Kendall’s adrenaline pumps. He loves this shit - campy and fun and thrilling, all at once. Spinning out a smile so big and wide it actually hurts, he tells James, “You’ve delivered me to an undead horde. I may have overestimated your ability to woo.”
“To woo?” James arches his eyebrows. “Nice word, Sir Lancelot.”
“I do love it when people compliment my vocabulary,” he leers in reply, brandishing his gun in the air. “It’s extensive.”
James glances pointedly towards Kendall’s crotch. “I imagine it’s not the only thing.”
“Hey, I’ve offered,” he retorts. “No need to imagine.”
“Get your gear on. If you survive the night, maybe I’ll give you a kiss.”
“You’re cute when you play hard to get. Just so you know, you’re cuter when you’re trying to swallow my tongue.”
Maturely, James makes a face at him. Kendall returns it too easily. He’s not used to flirting this way, caught between slow simmering lust and the cautious recognition of what could grow to be friendship. It’s nice.
James is really nice.
Fuck. Whatever, it doesn’t change a thing. Kendall hefts his gun and prompts, “Prepared to kick some ass?”
Mirroring him, James slings his paintball gun across one shoulder. “Let’s do this.”
---
The playing field is an endless stretch of concrete flooring, littered with props. Half a rusted out car, wooden barricades, netting placed strategically across cardboard cutouts of melty-skinned monsters, and scorch marks blackening the walls.
Kendall takes out three actors with decorative face paint in a matter of minutes, two of them zombies and one of them an “insurgent” with a paintball gun of her own, and all he wants to know is how a person ends up getting hired to play paintball all day? He wants this job like burning.
Forty minutes in, he and James are tied for the number of brainless corpses they’ve taken out. They’re taking a breather, hiding behind a lean to that might be papier-mâché when the sound of recorded gunfire to the left startles the hell out of them both. Kendall turns on his heel and James spins right into him.
They go sprawling across the hard floor, Kendall landing on James with the sick crack of plastic and a jarring pain in his right knee. He twists to the left just in time to shoot one of the oncoming zombies in the chest.
“Nice aim,” James tells him breathlessly, shifting his weight. He’s right under Kendall, his body long and hard, even beneath the added inches of plastic.
Up close, he’s every bit as sexy as he is from afar. Another spray of recorded, tinny gunfire rings out around them, but it’s distant, background noise compared to the soft pant of James’s breath and the relentless thunder of Kendall’s heart.
Without Thinking About It should be the title of his autobiography, because that’s exactly how it goes when he drops his head to touch his mouth to James’s.
It’s quick and dirty, tongue-slick and over too quickly for what Kendall wants. But if their first kiss was starshine, this one is shattered galaxies, fractured light that blazes out the edges of Kendall’s vision.
Stunned, James asks, “What was that for?”
Kendall sits back on his heels, flushed. His tennis shoes squeak against the gray slab floor. “To say thank you. For all this.”
“Right.” James squirms underneath him, hands hovering self-consciously above Kendall’s waist. “Uh. You’re very welcome.”
“You still didn’t have to do this. This date thing. I’m. I don’t deserve it, after how I acted.” It’s the closest thing to an apology he’s ever going to be able to say.
James catches his gaze. His eyes are greedy, devouring Kendall from the inside out, like he can’t stop looking. He sounds out, “You deserve a lot of things.”
And then he says, “Duck,” and the moment breaks, as a flesh-hungry zombie dives in on Kendall’s six.
---
They stay out until four. Demolishing zombies turns into bickering about hockey, once they’re forcibly ejected from the paintball playing field at closing time.
They carry their argument straight on over to a hole-in-the-wall falafel stand, where James drowns his chickpea patty in so much hot sauce that Kendall can taste it burning on his tongue when they part ways at the subway.
He kisses James deep, his tongue searching, his hands on the roam. It’s a kiss about wanting, about taking and giving, and the longer it goes on, the more Kendall feels like the scuffed tile of the station has given way beneath his feet.
James pulls back with a ragged noise, a startled, needy thing that he buries in Kendall’s neck. Breathing in, breathing out, he says, “What am I going to do with you?”
“Something scandalous, I hope,” Kendall replies, going for cocky and mostly sounding winded.
They’re holding each other, James propped against Kendall and Kendall propped against James, balanced like a house of cards. Kendall prefers to continue this arrangement, lest his knees give out and condemn them to catching something icky on the station floor.
Laughter rumbles through James’s ribcage and echoes in Kendall’s bones. “You have a one track mind.”
Tilting his head until his lips are pressed against James’s ear, Kendall agrees, “At least I’m honest about it. I want you to fuck me.”
He can feel James shudder, taste the way he shakes. All this potential is brewing in the inches between their hips, and James just - flat out refuses to grab the bull by the horns. Or Kendall by the dick.
“Duly noted.”
That is not the response to which Kendall’s pick-up lines are accustomed. He debates the merits of pointing out that he’s never ended a date with one measly goodnight kiss before, but then James murmurs, “See you soon,” and it feels exactly like a promise.
---
Logan waves something thin and papery in front of Kendall’s face. “Hey. Get dressed. Get up. Katie sent us tickets to the Zwagger concert at MSG.”
Kendall groans and buries his head in the crook of his elbow.
“What’sat hafta do wi’ me?”
Tugging his well-worn comforter down and away, exposing Kendall’s hips to the chilly air, Logan replies, “We’re going to go.”
“I hate pop.”
“You also hate waking up and putting on pants, but too bad. Those are things you’re doing.”
“Logan,” Kendall whines. The blanket inches past his knees and no, that is not okay, it’s cold. Irritably, he sneers, “Blow me.”
“Okay,” Logan says. “But you have to get up afterwards.”
That’s not what Kendall meant at all, but he isn’t about to start arguing when Logan’s thumbs trace the waistband of his boxers, dipping beneath elastic to touch the soft skin below. His breath is hot against Kendall’s belly button, his tongue licking stripes against a golden treasure trail of his hair, and fuck, fuck, this is not how he intended to start this day.
His traitorous cock twitches against Logan’s chin. Logan snorts softly, pressing a kiss through the thin plaid. “When’s the last time someone did this for you?”
Kendall’s breath hitches in his throat. “You know I’m not going to tell you that.”
“Was it last night?” Logan demands, rough. “With that guy? I know you went out with him again. Striking out once wasn’t enough?”
“No. Logan-“ Kendall starts to sit up, but Logan’s stronger than he looks. A firm hand against his chest keeps Kendall pinned while Logan works his boxers down with his teeth.
Kendall makes a guttural noise when the elastic of his underwear catches against the head of his cock, slumping back into his pillows.
“You can’t be jealous,” he tells the ceiling. “You don’t get to be jealous. You know how this works.”
“I know,” Logan agrees, his consonants sharp and bitten off.
Kendall gets exactly half a second to consider what is going wrong here before his dick’s in Logan’s mouth, and then he’s not thinking about anything but tightwetgood. He bunches his fingers in Logan’s hair and tells him ever so eloquently, “Fuck,” doubts dying on his tongue.
Logan’s got a nice mouth, a great mouth, and he’s known how to use it on Kendall since they were fourteen and his tentative crush was growing full-fledged wings. He sucks Kendall off with the kind of enthusiasm that implies there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing, lips a tight red ring that steadily grows plumper and more abused. Kendall bucks up and Logan takes it, swallows down around him like an actual pro.
He moans when he does that, the vibration resonant down the thick flesh of Kendall’s shaft, turning liquid inside his bones. Hell. Maybe he’d stop letting Logan give him head if Logan stopped being so damned good at it, but Logan is not getting with the problem at all.
While Kendall fucks his mouth, he kneads his knuckles into Kendall’s thighs, skims his fingertips across his knees. Kendall groans, an incoherent noise, and Logan fondles his balls. He licks out, his tongue practically flame.
Everything is unbearably warm, a pressure building beneath his skin, and his dick looks so hot this way, disappearing between Logan’s lips again and again and again. Everything is skin and warm morning sunlight, the slick of Logan sucking him and the slow circle of his fingertips against Kendall’s sac.
It’s safe and it’s home, Logan the only real barrier against the rest of the world that Kendall has ever known. He comes cradled against his best friend’s tongue, held tight in the hot confines of his mouth, and Logan watches him. He shudders and quakes and floods Logan’s mouth with bitter, salty warmth and Logan’s dark, coffee colored eyes never once leave his face.
Christ, this is bad.
Sitting back on his heels, Logan’s neck bobs with swallowing. Dark and guarded, he tells Kendall, “You could fuck me,” which.
“I can’t,” Kendall replies.
He hates himself at fourteen, at sixteen, now, because this is a thing he should have ended a long time ago. Or never even started. But he’s helpless to change any of it, helpless to change himself, so he lets Logan jerk off furiously all over his face, until there’s cum on Kendall’s lips, dripping down his throat, because it’s the only way he knows how to apologize.
---
Come out with me tonight, James texts him at 2:45 pm.
Can’t. Kendall replies at 2:50. Roommate’s dragging me to see Zwagger.
There’s a long pause. Long enough that Kendall thinks James forgot all about him. Then, at 3:52 pm: I thought you hated Zwagger.
I do, Kendall says. I don’t want to go.
At 4:10 pm, James says, Your life is so hard.
Kendall frowns down at his phone. Is it a joke? An insult? Is James actually mad?
He’s a stranger, is the thing. A stranger who clicks right with Kendall, but that means little to nothing. This is not a case of love at first sight, or second, or third, because it can’t be. Because Kendall absolutely, positively doesn’t believe in that sappy bullcrap.
The one thing Kendall stands by is that using his dick as a compass has never (always) lead him wrong before, and that’s what drives him now. He texts James a smiley face and an offer to look him up later, steamrolling right over the niggling fear that he’s done something wrong.
In his experience, hurt feelings have never stopped anybody from taking off their pants.
---
Zwagger is the actual worst.
Okay, maybe he’s not. His singing voice is oddly beautiful, ringing out across the seats with a strength that seems completely at odds with the short, dark haired boy it comes from.
Regardless…
“I hate pop music,” Kendall grumps over the phone.
“Shut your trap and let me listen,” Katie barks back, her no-nonsense bite laced through with fondness.
Obediently, Kendall lifts the mouthpiece of his cell higher, so that Katie can maybe pick up a note or three.
“He is! He’s going flat at the end of the chorus. I told them-“
“Good for you, baby sister. Can I hang up now?”
Dangling a phone from his ear in the second row of a sold out concert is kind of embarrassing. Zwagger’s brood of teenaged fans keep trying to stab him with their crazed side-eyes. A year ago, nobody ever heard of Zwagger. Now he’s got a teenaged horde that’s way more terrifying than the undead brood Kendall and James fought off at paintball.
Katie snaps, “No,” which means there’s a very real chance Kendall’s going to die. He rolls his eyes at Logan over the opening strains of
Reach For Me, Zwagger’s biggest hit single.
It’s impossible to go anywhere these days without the damned song assaulting your ears; Kendall tunes out instantly, even though the bass thrums relentless through his rib cage.
Zwagger sings, “…at night when the bright stars are burning high over Manhattan, all washed out in neon, and hidden from view. But when the power goes out and you look out from Brooklyn, will you reach for me, reaching out for you…”
“Flat again!” Katie crows. Her glee is completely out of place in the middle of the ballad. The girl on Kendall’s left glowers like she can force Kendall to hang up through sheer force of will.
She can’t. Kendall’s way more scared of his little sister than he is of any random fan, even if she takes to accidentally elbowing him for the rest of the song.
Oblivious to - or plainly not caring about - Kendall’s plight, Katie prattles on about her victory. She works as a production assistant at Colossal Records, one of the biggest labels in Los Angeles. Zwagger reigns as Colossal’s biggest star, and also the artist least susceptible to any criticism ever in the eyes of the label’s musical overlords. He has made them a shit-ton of cash, after all.
But Katie hates it. She thinks invulnerability is a myth, possibly because she lives to exploit weaknesses to her own advantage. This is definitely not the first time she’s discreetly sent Kendall and Logan to a show to scout out flaws in Colossal’s talent. It probably won’t be the last.
“Gloating isn’t nice,” Kendall chides in an attempt to be a role model.
Katie shoots back, “Really? It feels spectacular.”
Drat. Foiled again.
Logan snickers, crashing against Kendall’s side. He probably doesn’t even have to hear Katie’s side of the conversation to know what she said.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of letting him practically live with them when they were all younger and less likely to be at a pop concert.
Zwagger’s melody weaves together with the laughter of his best friend and his little sister, all of it climbing high on a crescendo that builds and builds, towering over the audience in a wave of sound. For the briefest of moments, Kendall closes his eyes and thinks about being up there, about singing his own songs.
It would be a rush, he thinks. Better than fucking, or liquor, or drugs.
Better than anything Kendall has ever tasted on his tongue, and so outright impossible that it’s better not to dream.
---
James is standing at the bottom of the steps, wearing tight jeans and a shirt he must have glued on, looking better than sex, or candy, or both.
Kendall skids to a halt, Logan slamming right into his back. “Hey! What the- oh,” he finishes flatly when he sees James. “It’s your boyfriend.”
“Is that what he’s calling me?” James asks, smug as fuck.
“Right now I’m labeling you a stalker, I think,” Kendall retorts breezily. “What are you doing here?”
“Whisking you off on an adventure. I hear that’s what you do when you’re trying to woo.”
“Funny. You’re a funny man,” Kendall tells James and his stupid, sassy grin.
James opens his mouth to retort, probably with something that will tread the line between rude and pleasant. “I-“
“Kendall’s busy.”
Logan slides an arm possessively around Kendall’s shoulders, even though he has to stand on his tippy toes to do it. He’s glaring at James with an intensity he must have learned from all those teenage girls flocking inside Madison Square Garden, like he’s got literal daggers hiding behind his corn-syrup colored eyes. It’s not even a little bit okay.
Kendall shrugs his arm off. “I’m not.”
James purses his lips, eyes tracking back and forth between them. “If this is a bad time…?”
“It’s not great,” Logan responds bluntly.
“It’s fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine.” Kendall levels Logan with his best impression of stern.
It might have been more effective if Logan weren’t the tiniest, most tenacious person in the world. Absolutely belligerent, he says, “I’m not fine. I am the opposite of fine.”
“Cut the melodrama,” Kendall replies, before James can jump in with a heroic save and do something stupid, like leave. “Logan.”
“Kendall,” Logan echoes. Surliness flickers across his lips, pinches his eyes and scrunches his chin. “You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Out into the city, not Timbuktu. Chillax.”
Intent on being the worst at helping, James squeezes Kendall’s shoulder and goes, “Nobody says chillax anymore.”
Logan’s not the only one who used the past two hours to hone their glaring skills. James backs down, quick.
Cupping his hand against his forehead like that might ward off an impending headache, Logan says. “Great. Ditch me. Reinforce my beliefs about the power of friendship.”
“No really,” James tells the air, because Kendall is sure as shit not paying attention. “I can go.”
Beaming at James, Kendall says, “’scuse us for a minute.” Then he proceeds to manhandle Logan back up the steps through a steady stream of hurried concert-goers, each more irritated than the last at being jostled. They’re barely far enough out of earshot before Kendall demands,
“What do you want? No, tell me. What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to achieve here?”
Logan rearranges his features with all the precision of an Etch-A-Sketch. It’s all there - his irritation, his concerm, sloppy and too-clear.
“You’re being a dick.”
“That shouldn’t shock you,” Kendall answers incredulously.
“Do you like this guy?”
“I like the way his ass looks in those jeans. Is that a crime?”
Stubborn as fuck, Logan says, “You’ve been on five dates.”
“Three. This would be number three.”
“Big difference there. Not.” Urgently, Logan says, “Just. You’ve always been a sucker for pretty faces. So you should, you know, try not to be that this time.”
Oh. Right. Logan’s doing that thing Kendall hates, where he uses his brain so much it’s got to be overheating. He’s a thinker, and normally, that’s fine. He likes to ponder the mysteries of the universe, like who actually came up with the invention of fire and why anyone ever thought harem pants were a good idea. Thinking is his thing, but so is overthinking, which leads to worrying, and Kendall hatehatehates it when Logan worries about him.
“Why?” He demands, even knowing the reason.
Unflinching, Logan stares him down. Shortstack barely reaches Kendall’s forehead, but he’s still scary, like a rabid koala or something. He says, “You know why. Don’t let this guy break your heart.”
Words are thick on Kendall’s tongue.
He plays it off with a sassy salute and an agreement of, “Will do, mon capitan,” but his smile doesn’t quite reach his lips. Logan’s eyes are boring into his skull.
Kendall ignores it, because Kendall’s really good at pretending nothing is wrong. If denial was a profession, he’d be CEO in a hot lick minute.
He bounds down the stairs, marches up to James, and tells him, “Somebody got their hall pass. Somebody being me.”
James tangles their fingers together. “Rad. Now I can show you the world.”
“Shining, shimmering, splendid?” Sticking his tongue between his lips, Kendall bites the tip and crosses his eyes. “Only you’re definitely the Princess in this scenario.”
Sternly, James pulls his hand away and replies, “I’m not taking you anywhere if you can’t behave.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll lay off the tiara jokes. Tonight.” Kendall grins. “Lead the way. The world is waiting.”
He allows James to guide him through the whiz-bang-pop of New York City traffic, every street-crossing a life-threatening thrill. Pedestrians flood all available surfaces, shoulders pressing in on them both, but James holds his head tall and navigates through them with the same ease as the night before, passing untouched through the crowd. Kendall isn’t afforded the same grace; he’s battered back and forth like a wayward sail.
Reaching the sidewalk is a small triumph. Kendall shimmies his hips and searches out James, the tan skin at the nape of his neck and the strong span of his shoulders and the rich scent of his cologne straight ahead, his compass north. He trips forward and wrangles his arm up around James’s throat. “I’m going to guess where we’re headed. Is it bigger than a breadbox?”
James bumps their noses together, an almost kiss that Kendall tries to follow through. He’s thwarted by James’s quick reflexes and his laughing response of, “How was the concert?”
“Katie says Zwagger flattens his high notes,” Kendall replies sagely, whisking James off down the avenue. This is New York in starts and stops, every block a new street-crossing adventure.
Together, they step off a sidewalk, James so much less graceful with Kendall hunkering him down. He asks, “…is Katie what you call Logan when you’re alone together?”
“Katie’s my baby sister.” Kendall rolls his eyes, making sure to use one hundred percent more sass than usual. “She works for Colossal Studios.”
It doesn’t feel like the wrong thing to say, right up until James tenses beneath his arm. He’s rigid muscle and simmering unease, and he demands, “Let me get this straight. Your sister works for one of the biggest record labels in LA and she can’t get you a job?”
Kendall imitates a wrong buzzer noise. “Incorrect, you fine gentleman. Let me tell you a thing. One, Katie’s only an intern. Two, I’ve explicitly forbidden her from trying, even if she could throw her weight around and bully somebody into giving me a shot.”
“Why would you forbid it?” The look James gives him is completely reptilian, colder than Antarctica and tinted envy-green. Kendall falls back a step or three in an attempt to escape it, but the chill never quite leaves his spine.
“Scoring a job through my baby sister is not the definition of living the dream.”
“Pride’s deadly, you know.”
“Pride’s the only thing I have left,” he replies, too honest, too raw, and James doesn’t get it at all. Kendall can tell from the furrow between his eyebrows, every nuance quizzical.
From the way he concludes, “I think you’re scared,” instead of asking what else Kendall could have possibly lost.
That’s okay. James doesn’t have to be prescient to look really nice naked.
“Scared of begging for favors?” Kendall challenges. He’s never worn fear well.
James skids to a halt, right in the middle of an overcrowded crosswalk. Shoulders squared, he retorts, “Scared of fame. Of people knowing what you can really do.”
“You’re right.” Kendall watches the redyellowgreen of a traffic light play across James’s cheekbones. “I’m terrified of superstardom. Also, clowns.”
“And you’re off,” James comments softly, “Speeding down the track with enough sarcasm to scare off anyone with common sense.”
The asphalt beneath Kendall’s sneakers has a pulse, a rumble of oncoming traffic and the beatbeatbeat of Kendall’s traitorous heart. He swallows around a golf ball size lump in his throat and tries not to break James’s gaze. “I don’t see you rabbiting away.”
“Common sense is overrated.” Huffing a laugh, James conducts a forward march, in the lead again. It’s clear that’s where he prefers to be, dead center of Kendall’s attention. “Come along now.”
Hastily, Kendall dodges about eight bajillion pedestrians, falling all over himself to catch up. That’s becoming a theme with him and James that he’ll have to evaluate sometime that is not now. “You’re a big fan of the city scavenger hunts. I see that. Where are we going now?”
“Over, sideways, and under,” James hums, and no way Kendall is going to admit that he knows that much of a Disney song out loud.
The gaping maw of Greely Square’s subway entrance, limned by wrought iron fencing and the PATH to the side, looms in front of them like a well-tiled sinkhole. James practically skips down into the bowels of Manhattan, taking the steps two at a time.
Too competitive to let that slide, Kendall’s hot at his heels. Only, at the bottom, James skids to an abrupt stop. He asks, “By the way, should I be worried?”
Kendall windmills his arms, flailing at bit to keep from collapsing onto him. He pants, “About the number of times you’ve seen Aladdin? Very possibly.”
Benevolently, James lets the insult slide. “About the heart-to-heart you had with your bodyguard earlier.”
“You like Logan,” Kendall objects, because James totally didn’t mind Mr. Sassypants when he dropped by the apartment that first night.
Tonight Logan was a mite more abrasive, but that can’t change - anything.
It just can’t.
“Logan seems pretty dope,” James concedes, and something unknots in Kendall’s chest. “That’s why I want to make sure there’re no hard feelings.”
“What.” Kendall blinks in the face of James’s absolute perfection, because God did not create people this nice. “Do you volunteer at soup kitchens and help old ladies cross the street too?”
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind. Logan is. There’s a thing.” He holds up a hand to ward off James’s impending questions. “We don’t talk about the thing. But now he overreacts. It’s his replacement thing.”
James taps his Metro Card out of his wallet and flashes Kendall some teeth. “I’m going to pretend that made sense.”
He sashays through the turnstiles like there’s a runway underneath them. Kendall has to swipe his stupid subway card three times before it bothers to read. Next to James, he feels about as graceful as a water buffalo, all his athletic prowess leeching away.
Not that he cares about being impressive. It’s just irritating, is all. He grimaces at the muck caking the subway rails.
They have to wait five minutes for a Q train to come rattling down the tracks, whooshing over the sodden mess of mud and detritus in a blur of silver, orange, and black. Inside, the cabin’s near empty, but James scoots too close on the ugly orange plastic seats regardless.
“I’ve never volunteered,” he offers.
“Pardon?”
“In a soup kitchen. Or anywhere. My mom’s not a big fan of charity unless it’s theoretical.”
“Don’t think we covered theoretical charity in Physics 101.”
“The kind you can throw money at,” James clarifies. “Diamond Cosmetics is a philanthropic organization, you know.”
“I think I read that in the pamphlet.” Kendall nods sagely. It’s sharing time, probably. It seems like sharing time. He tries, “I used to volunteer at a hospital. I never got much out of it, other than an inoculation for gore.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Lack of warm, fuzzy, helping-humanity feelings aside? I.” Down the aisle, a college aged girl examines her cuticles as if they hold the secrets of the universe. Two teenage boys leer at her legs while simultaneously bickering over the new Call of Duty. A homeless man settles down against a row of three seats, everyone else giving him a wide berth. Kendall continues, “I was in my last year of high school, and there were parties-“
He hesitates, because wow, does that sound like a selfish reason to give up on charity, even if it’s true. The sleeping hobo is judging him from behind closed eyelids. “I had no time. And then…then. I guess, after everything that happened, it seemed like a dumb idea to try to help
anyone else when I could barely help myself.” Minutely ashamed, he adds, “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a grownup.”
James touches his knee, fingers warm through denim. He squeezes. “You are. You just have to try harder.”
“Your faith in humanity is gripping.”
“And your lack of faith makes me sad. We’re going to work on that.”
Immediately latching onto the sub-textual insult, Kendall retorts, “I’m not a DIY project. You can’t fix me up.”
Saint James snorts. “’Course not. I like you exactly the way you are. But as a member of the human race, you want to improve yourself.”
“Says who?”
“Says everyone. We all want to be better. Doesn’t mean we need to be - you’re you, and I think you’re…” He pauses, expression too earnest, too open, too raw. “I think you’re as close to perfect as anyone can get.” His thumb traces tiny figure eights against Kendall’s knee. It’s
distracting Kendall from like, breathing. “Only you don’t think that. You don’t like yourself much, Kendall Knight.”
Kendall gulps down air, struggling to suck it in.
“I like myself just fine, thanks.”
“Nah,” James replies slowly. “You want to be better. So I’ll help.”
Inside, Kendall’s melting all over, and damn. His heart isn’t supposed to be subject to global warming. He manages, “I don’t know what I’d do without you to slay all my dragons,” but there’s no bite. James is defanging him.
He says, “You’re the knight, Knight.”
This isn’t going at all like Kendall planned.
At Canal Street, James practically pushes Kendall off the subway, guiding him with long fingers beneath his shoulder blades. The air smells like dumplings and sewage, although that’s mostly the grate separating the street from the trains below. Chinatown is alive at this time of the evening, everything gilded gold and blazing red. Packs of humanity mill in front of stalls hawking fake purses, Ray-Bans, and Rolexes, while adept denizens of the area duck and weave in their forward trek. Whole chickens dangle brown and juicy in one window. The next is bedecked in sapphires and topaz. At least three times, Kendall is stopped by storekeepers with increasingly more impressive pitches, but James skips past all the sparkle. He disappears down Mulberry, where the entire landscape morphs; green stacked on white stacked on red, Christmas
colors exploding everywhere.
Little Italy thrives off the night. Strings of fairy lights create a canopy of white and burnished yellow, the twinkle outmatching the stars. The soundtrack from La Dolce Vita spills onto the street, echoing out of at least nine similarly adorned restaurants, all decorated with grape leaves and cherubs and tiny placards declaring their food authentic.
James pulls Kendall straight into the center of it, colors flashing bright everywhere he looks, saffron yellow and coral pink, red brighter than a street walker’s lips and a blue he wants to dive into, swim in, immerse himself under until he’s drowning with it. Penguin suited hosts and hostesses smile too wide and beckon, but James spins Kendall on his toes, tugs him into this dance that neither of them know the steps to, and they’re off.
Each step and turn takes them further down the street, weaving through a sidewalk obstacle course of clapboard signs that advertise ravioli, caprese, gnocchi and veal marsala. James’s palm hovers over the small of Kendall’s back, a warm, steady presence that wavers between tangible and imagined.
Down a side alley, the melody tapers into a softer, more fragile thing, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning a standard about dancing cheek to cheek. James’s face looms close, his breath a hot spot against Kendall’s skin, and fuck it if Logan wasn’t right. Kendall needs to check himself before he wrecks himself, because he’s been through enough head-on collisions to last a lifetime.
He steps on James’s foot, accidentally on purpose.
It achieves nothing.
Frank Sinatra picks up the tail end of the canned song and James knows every single word. He nuzzles against him and sings, subdued, “You took the part that once was my heart, so why not take all of me?”
Kendall is acutely uncomfortable with all this…atmosphere. Sex. That’s all he wanted. Good old fashioned horizontal mambo-type dancing, not the slow tangle of bodies that is happening all up over the asphalt, making his heart thud too hard and his ribcage feel like it’s irreparably split.
He says, “James, I-“
“Want the best éclair in town?” James murmurs huskily. “Because that’s where we’re going.”
Kendall gapes, completely forgetting his dick and its mission, insomuch as he ever forgets his equipment. He accuses, “You want me to get fat. You’re going to feed me éclairs and croon pretty things at me and I’m not going to fit in my skinny jeans anymore.”
“I’ll take you jogging after.”
“There are better ways to get me all sweaty.”
“Probably,” he agrees, inappropriately smug for a guy who’s turning down sex. Again. “But none of them involve watching you lick pink frosting flowers.”
“They can! They totally can!” Kendall protests, “I’ve got icing back at my place!”
Alas. He is thwarted again. Their second date, much like their first, involves James leaving Kendall at the subway station, half-hard in his jeans and not even a little abashed about it.
He says, “I’ll call you soon,” and Kendall absolutely does not wonder how long he’ll have to wait for soon to arrive. He falls back into routine - he goes to work, he comes home, he bickers with Logan, or Katie on the phone, and he resolutely refrains from mentioning James to anybody. Because.
Because people keep telling him dumb shit, like that he looks happy. Happiness is a ploy Kendall refuses to buy into; euphoria’s for suckers.
There’s no way up and no way out except heartbreak, apathy, or death. Which, in order, are Kendall’s least favorite things.
To counteract the onslaught of people celebrating his newfound glow - including a cackling Katie and Minerva, but minus an extremely sullen Logan, because he’s eight times the fatalist Kendall could ever be - he resolves to pursue a few ill-advised past-times. All that gets him is a hangover Logan outright refuses to nurse and probably hypothermia. Falling into the East River in mid-winter; not his best plan.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Logan grumbles, watching Kendall pull off his boxers with thinly-veiled lust in his eyes.
“Not the actions of a smitten man, right?” Kendall replies cheerfully, shivering in the empty space of the loft.
Logan sighs and tosses a worn, fuzzy blanket his way. Kendall gratefully wraps it around his shoulders, hiding his junk from view. He almost misses the plaintive way Logan replies, “I guess not.”
Kendall hesitates, pasting on a carefree smile that sits in total contrast to the throbbing in his head. “We’re buds. You know that, right?”
“Buds,” Logan repeats dully. “Duh. What else would we be?”
---
Kendall’s cursed, or something. Cursed. Because about five minutes after Logan’s rapid departure to do future-doctor things, James shows up.
“You look like shit.”
Tightening his grip on the fuzzy blue blanket, Kendall beams. Or tries to. He’s in a state of unrelenting agony thanks to the kickdrum pounding in his head, which is exacerbated in turn by sunlight, noise, and particularly pungent smells. The long trek from his loft-bed to the door helps nothing. “Did you come here to insult me, or is this visit solely for business?”
“Nope. All pleasure,” James replies smoothly, grinning right back. He brought his A-game today, Kendall sees.
“There are these newfangled inventions you may have heard of. Sir Thomas Edison created them. I think they’re called phones.”
“Yours is off.”
“It is not. My phone never dies. It’s fucking immortal.” Kendall fishes his cell out of the sodden lump that is his jeans. “Immortal, I tell you. It
totally is not d - oh. Er. I guess immortality doesn’t hold a candle to being like, waterproof. Oopsie daisy.”
“On the one hand, I’m really attracted to you all naked and wet. On the other, you just said oopsie daisy.” James slinks through the door, his natural, obnoxious grace making Kendall’s head throb. “Rough night?”
“You could say that. I just got in.”
“I can tell.” James pauses. “It’s one pm.”
“You can’t police my schedule. You haven’t been to the schedule policing academy.”
“Your teeth are chattering.”
“That is astute. You have said an astute thing,” Kendall mumbles through chattering teeth. As an afterthought, he declares, “I’d like to sit down.”
The complete opposite of a gentleman, James plops his fine, fine specimen of an ass down on Kendall’s ratty sofa. But then he goes and all sweetly pats his lap, and no way is Kendall turning down an opportunity to nuzzle his dick. He’d gallop over there like a sparkly unicorn if the world wasn’t spinning - but his obedient trot is equally as impressive, he’s sure.
Kendall sprawls across the couch in a catastrophe of limbs and skin and his face planted firmly between James’s thighs, which is not quite as sexy as he’d hoped.
“I think I’m asphyxiating,” he tells James’s pants.
Helpfully, James frees his breathing-holes from the cage of his legs, turning Kendall on his back with sure, steady hands. “You’re a mess.”
“You said that already.”
“I said you look like shit.”
“These are not the compliments a lady hopes to receive,” Kendall retorts, sticking out his tongue and then deciding his mouth tastes gross. Kind of salty and garbagey, like he’s bathed in the sloughed-off skin of dead mob bosses.
Ew, East River. Ew.
Oblivious to his internal struggle, James strokes Kendall’s hair. Pinpricks of heat tremble against Kendall’s scalp, warm and gentle and too intimately James. They haven’t even fucked yet. Kendall shouldn’t have memorized his touch.
He shouldn’t have, but.
Softly, James tells him, “You’re still beautiful. For a guy who looks like he went through a car wash sans the car. You shouldn’t be so beautiful.”
Kendall peers up at him, bleary-eyed and skeptical. “Admit it. You only like me for my body.”
“Caught me.”
“Knew it.” Kendall shades his face from the harsh fluorescence of the apartment’s lights, cuddling into the hard planes of James’s stomach.
“Gon’ sleep now. You stay here, ‘kay?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” James promises, and because Kendall maybe possibly is more of a sucker than he lets on, he chooses to happily believe that.
---
Part Three
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