[oneshot] and take my waking slow
Title: and take my waking slow
Pairing: brad colbert/ray person
Rating: nc17
Genre: slice-of-life, romance
Warnings: swearing, homophobic/ableist/sexist language, sexual themes
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: sequel to the kids are all right and we are all going forward. set after brad's last two tours in iraq. 5,447 words. also on ao3. now with podfic by the wonderful chemm80 and chinese translations by the lovely sandy!
"This has become a very disturbing trend," Ray says when he pulls the door open and slouches against the frame, hand up to shade the sun from his eyes. "Are you like, physically unable to drop a line before you come crash-landing into my specifically calibrated environment? Does it give you a migraine? Make you nauseous? You should see someone about it-I know a guy."
Brad grins. "Don't you like surprises, Ray? Surprises are supposed to be fun. Variety is the spice of life."
"This is your idea of fun?" he splutters. "What happened to you as a child? Was it lack of TLC, or were you dropped repeatedly on the head that you turned out like this?"
"You love it."
"I most certainly do not, and I don't fucking appreciate you casting aspersions on my person like this," Ray says, but he shuffles out of the way so Brad can step in.
"I like the new place," he says. "It's bigger."
"Thank you, Captain Obvious," Ray says, and jerks Brad's bags into the guest room off the main hallway.
"When'd you move?"
"Last fall, homes. Mike and Ramona wanted to come out here for the band-some label in LA signed us on-and it's not like I had anything particular tying me down in Missouri."
"You kept the paisley sofa."
"Yeah, just for you," he says flatly. "It was a fucking bitch to ship, by the way, so you better be fucking grateful."
Ray grabs a couple of beers from the fridge and hands one to Brad, who's plastered on the couch like he owns the damn thing.
He kicks a pair of jeans off the armchair and folds himself into the squashy seat, legs tucked underneath his chin and an arm wrapped around his shins pretzel-style.
Brad scans him over, slow and systematic, like he's taking inventory of all the things that have changed-the sweep of his longer hair, a new tattoo on his left arm peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his shirt, calluses on his fingers in different places from playing electric seven days a week instead of fixing bum radios and hotwiring humvees for the platoon.
Brad's skin is tinted ashen; he's got a strange cadence to his step and he's twitchy and tired as hell, but he's smiling at Ray around the rim of his can and fuck it all if it isn't comforting to see that after three years.
"How long's your leave this time?" Ray asks. "Gunnery Sergeant of H&S, can't be gone too long, right? We can see if any of the other boys are in town, get drinks-drive down to San Diego to see if Rudy's still hanging around the area with his super gay, super Zen personal trainer bullshit-"
"Ray. Please shut up."
Ray sticks his tongue out and hooks a leg over the armrest. "Seriously, though," he says after a minute, and Brad rolls his eyes. "When do you go back?"
"I'm out," Brad says.
"Okay," Ray says, and then he fully processes the words that just came out of Brad's mouth and gapes at him, blinks a couple of times. Brad, because he is an asshole, looks faintly amused. "Hold up." Ray untangles himself, stands and goes to the window. Brad's goddamned Yamaha's parked out on the other side of the street in all its glory.
The two suitcases sitting in Ray's guest room, then, have to be packed full with all of Brad's essentials.
"You son of a bitch," he breathes, turning away from the glass, arms crossed. "You're out. That's it."
"Yes," Brad agrees.
"So what are you gonna do now? The Corps was your fucking life, dude."
Brad shrugs.
"You son of a bitch," he repeats with feeling. "No offense to your mother, who is quite lovely and doesn't deserve a complete ass for a son. Which you are." Ray rubs a hand over the bridge of his nose. Things click quietly into place. "You understand you're going to have to pay rent and shit, yes?"
Brad's smiling again, his feet propped up on the coffee table with no regard for the leftover takeout still stacked on top of it.
"Christ. You could've at least given me a heads up or something. Where'd the manners your parents instilled in you fuck off to? What the hell is wrong with you?"
"A lot of things," Brad says, casual as you please-but Ray can see residual shadows from Nad-e Ali and Fallujah in the startling blankness on his face, a yawning chasm of space that Ray's not quite sure how to bridge.
He'll figure it out, though. "Yeah, you're right. For instance: this truly alarming proclivity you've got for showing up at my door uninvited, you dick," he huffs, shaking his head. Brad crushes his empty beer can in a hand and laughs, the sound dull and chalky. He's gotten better at putting on a show, but Ray's the fucking expert, here, and he sees through all of it like it doesn't even exist.
So maybe that's what Brad is counting on.
Ray rolls his shoulders. He's got his fucking work cut out for him.
There were emails, of course. One letter and one satellite call and four perfunctory email exchanges spaced out over the course of three years, the occasional wave from half a world away that says, beneath layers of witty repartee: hey, I'm alive, command hasn't gotten me blown up yet.
It's not like Ray doesn't understand that war messes with people, needles underneath the skin and festers there. I'm fine, Brad says, keeps saying the first couple of weeks-but waking up in a cold sweat after half an hour of sleep and staying awake for the rest of the day out of sheer stubbornness isn't any definition of fine that Ray recognizes.
He would fucking know. It happened to him, too.
Brad goes out for long rides on the motorcycle and racks up about fifty speeding tickets every single time. That part's the same as it's always been. So is the part where the only place in the house that looks like a tornado hit it is Ray's room, because Brad is an anal-retentive freakazoid and refuses to let the rest of the condo descend into Ray's preferred mode of methodological madness.
In mid-May, two weeks after he moves in, Ray comes home from the studio and finds Brad in the kitchen, scrubbing at dishes that are already pristine.
"Hey," Ray says, leaning against the counter. Brad's gaze slides over to meet his, bright and calculating. Brad's lips turn up a little at the corners. He shuts the water off.
Ray coaxes the soapy sponge out of Brad's hand and drops it into the sink, wipes wayward suds off on his jeans. The rest of his rambling monologue dies in his throat when Brad leans in and kind of collapses into him, forehead pressed against Ray's shoulder and arms draped loosely down his back.
"Get off me. I'm suffocating-you're crushing me, you giant," Ray murmurs, but he can't find it in himself to push Brad away. The weight is reassuringly solid. He doesn't realize Brad's half-fallen asleep standing up until he rocks forward into Ray's chest, breathing measured and even.
At the end of the month, Rudy comes calling. He's in town for a fitness training conference and Ray drags Brad out to get drinks with him. "You should come to the talk I'm giving," Rudy says, ever earnest, and Brad accepts the stack of brochures Rudy hands him with relative aplomb. Ray's pretty sure they're going to burn them all in a bonfire on the lawn after Rudy drives back to his hotel, but that's neither here nor there.
Six shots of gin later, Ray's smashed enough to go up to the open mic and warble a malformed version of some half-remembered Wheaten Fields original for the late night crowd. He bums a cigarette off the bartender on his way back to their table. Rudy is shaking his head when Ray slips into his chair, beaming with self-satisfaction.
"What the hell were the label execs thinking when they signed you on, brother?" Rudy says, elbowing him in the ribs.
"Don't be fooled," Brad remarks flatly. "Stingy fucker has a voice, but he'll only let you hear it if you pay for tickets."
"You're so fucking sweet that it's a little gross." Ray blows smoke into Brad's face and lets out a husky laugh before turning to Rudy again. "I also accept alternative forms of payment, if you know what I mean."
He wiggles his eyebrows, eyes wide, teeth gleaming. Rudy rolls his eyes indulgently and orders another round of shots.
There's a wicked-looking scar running across Brad's lower back, straight through the ink of his tattoo. Ray only realizes this because Brad starts walking around shirtless after the goddamn AC putters to a halt and George the truant landlord takes a fucking age to call someone about getting it fixed.
Brad's fiddling with the thermostat and trying to get it to work when Ray sees it. Before he really knows what he's doing, Ray's behind him, fingertips tracing over the raised skin.
Brad whirls around and grabs Ray's wrists, thrumming with a tense sort of energy that gradually bleeds out as he takes in the situation. "Ray."
"Iceman," he replies calmly, inclining his head.
Brad exhales and loosens his grip so that Ray can extricate his aching hands. "Sorry."
"Ain't no thing," he drawls, flopping into the armchair. "So how the fuck did you get that? Come on. Humor me. Story time with your dearest pal Josh Ray."
A flicker of genuine amusement passes over Brad's face and Ray grins.
"Or, you know, I can make up some wildly inaccurate and emasculating account involving Delta Company and negligent discharges to tell the others-"
"Our last month in the AO, we were ambushed en route to Fallujah," Brad interrupts smoothly. "Remember when you said the Iraqis didn't really seem that good at fighting?"
Ray nods.
"They got better." He shrugs easily, like he's talking about the fucking weather. "War necessitates a steep learning curve, but you knew that."
"Yeah," he says, running a hand through his hair. "What was it, an RPG?"
"Loose shrapnel from another humvee that was hit in front of us as we were going over the side of the berm," Brad says, and his voice is mechanical, now, which is kind of the complete opposite of what Ray wanted. It must show on his face because Brad's forehead wrinkles with concern-and isn't that just fucking backwards?
"Is that why you left?" Ray blurts out, because it suddenly occurs to him that he doesn't actually know, and would like to.
He wishes he could take it back when a strange expression settles on Brad's features. "You think I left the Corps because of some superficial injury I sustained in a firefight?"
"No, I just-" Ray mutters. "That's not what I meant."
Brad leans against the wall. "I left because I was tired, Ray. And it took me a while, but I was numb, and once you get numb, you get out. Because being numb makes you sloppy, and no one deserves that."
There's something else, but Ray's not going to fix things by pressing the matter, so he lets it go. "Well," Ray says, after a moment of silence, "I'm pretty fucking glad you're around."
"Really," Brad says, his mouth twitching.
"Yep," he says, shit-eating grin plastered on tight. "The shit you cook is way better than anything I could make, Martha Stewart."
May bleeds into muggy June. A whole parade of Recon guys stream in to visit at Ray's needling behest; he might as well be ticking them off on a goddamn checklist.
Pappy drives up from Oceanside and they go fishing. It's an unmitigated disaster, but Pappy manages to catch a couple of nice halibut for his troubles, and Brad dumps the extra anchovy bait in the backyard for the stray cats that wander by in the evenings.
Walt spends a couple nights at their house and talks their ears off about his girlfriend, after which Brad, Debbie Downer extraordinaire, tries to persuade him out of proposing. "I heard this entire lecture when you gave it to Trombley on the way to Baghdad," Walt reminds him drily, and proceeds to roundhouse kick both their asses in a game of Halo.
Poke's stationed somewhere in Virginia with Blackwater, but he flies in for a weekend so he can take his little girl to Disneyland during her summer vacation. Brad and Ray are coerced into tagging along, and the three of them win a total of something like ten different shooting games with their badass range skills so Zoe Espera can go home with a bunch of stuffed animals that are all taller than she is.
"There should probably be some law prohibiting professional warriors like ourselves from taking advantage of the system like this," Tony says, juggling Spongebob Squarepants and Bugs Bunny in one hand.
"If you don't take advantage of the system, homes, it'll take advantage of you," Ray says around a mouthful of cotton candy.
"Sometimes you do make sense, Person."
"How dare you. I always make sense," he argues, brandishing the cotton candy at him. He turns to Zoe, who's blinking up at him solemnly. "Uncle Brad and Uncle Ray-Ray are gonna go get you some funnel cake, okay?"
Brad's standing in front of one of the gift shops littered around the amusement park. "I fucking hate these places," he declares when Ray tugs him in line. A couple of screaming kids run past, holding balloons in their hands.
Ray laughs. "Too many children, too much noise, too much fun being had, or all of the above?"
Brad glares at him and pulls a crisp ten-dollar bill out for the food.
See-Brad's not so much the hyperemotional fall-to-pieces type. He calmly folds in on himself instead, hides in his shell like a fucking hermit crab or something. If Ray were a lesser man, he'd be running for the hills by now.
As it is, this is Brad, and despite everything, Ray knows him like he knows the lines on his own palm. Brad's the big goof who waves at children after riding open top through an ambush even though he professes to hate them, who reads Shakespeare and listens to the entire oeuvre of classical music in his spare time, who could probably kill him seventy different ways with a can of Red Bull, but not before Ray put up a hell of a fight.
Despite his emphatic protestations otherwise, the absolute normalcy of civilian life seems to be doing Brad some good. He sleeps longer, eats more, and fills out a little. They go jogging in the mornings. Ray's finally allowed to start dumping laundry in the living room again.
In mid-June, Brad gets a summer job at a private shooting range, training people how to handle weaponry.
"They're all pussies," he comments at the end of his first week. "But the pay's okay."
The thing is-Ray is fairly certain that Brad's not happy. Or, if he is, he's doing a phenomenal job of hiding it, because he sure as hell doesn't look it at all. Brad seems muted, more so than usual, like he's biding his time, waiting for something to happen.
In July, Ray walks into the kitchen and says, "You need to go back."
Brad glances down from where he's shelving new boxes of cereal and raises an eyebrow. "You should've told me what you wanted before I went to the supermarket, Ray."
Ray shakes his head. "No, not the goddamn groceries." He fiddles with the frayed edge of his shirt. "You need to go back to Pendleton. The Marine Corps. You know, semper fi, motherfucker."
Brad blinks. "What are you talking about?"
Ray presses his hip into the counter and frowns. "You're obviously not happy away from Recon," he snaps. "In fact, I am pretty fucking sure that the happiest I've seen you is whenever command passed down our next mission and you got to do something out there."
"Yes, and?"
"What do you mean, yes, and?" Ray sputters, waving his arms around in haphazard fashion. Brad rescues the coffeemaker before Ray puts his fist through the kettle. "Hey, listen to me, asshole. I'm trying to help you."
Brad shuts the cabinet and steps forward, a pleased expression on his face.
"Why the fuck are you smiling, you dick? This is serious!"
"You want me to be happy?" Brad asks, eyes crinkling at the corners.
Ray slaps a hand over his forehead. "Can you not? When you put it like that it sounds like some weak-titty bullshit straight out of, like, Titanic or something. Hey, Brad. I'll never let go. Draw me like one of your Australian whores."
"Ray." He's close enough that Ray can smell his aftershave. Jesus.
Ray swallows, folds his arms over his chest, edge of the counter digging a groove into the small of his back. "Yes?"
"Shut the fuck up."
Ray doesn't realize he's holding his breath until Brad strolls out, his stupid fucking eau de cologne trailing after him.
"You're right, you know," Brad says, later, when they're sitting in the living room. Ray's got his acoustic in his lap and Brad's reading, like, Aristotle or some shit.
"I'm always right," Ray says blandly. Brad sends him a quelling look.
"Recon's not going back there anymore, not after the president pulled us out," he continues. "It was a huge clusterfuck right from the start, anyway. So I thought, okay, it's over. Might as well get out while I'm ahead, right?"
Ray nods absently. "But?"
"I don't have to be in the field to be happy," Brad says. "There are other things I can do."
"What's your point?" he asks, and gives the guitar a couple of strums.
Brad shrugs. "I volunteered for drill instructor duty."
Ray nearly chokes on his own saliva. "Sweet Mary, mother of God."
"What?"
"You are actually insane, you fucker," he breathes.
"It'll be good," Brad says, which doesn't help with Ray's renewed sense that he is living in close quarters with a crazy person. "Training starts in the fall at MCRD San Diego."
Ray shakes his head. "God, they're going to pound your ass into the ground, and then when you graduate from whatever the fuck drill instructor school, you're going to perpetuate the vicious cycle by tormenting new recruits in boot camp. This is the worst, Brad."
Brad cocks his head to the side. "Are you mad?"
Ray twangs his E-string with the pick in his right hand. "No, dumbass. I'm happy. This is me being happy for you, because you seem ecstatic, which is incomprehensible to me, but. You know. There it is."
"Oh." Brad stretches languidly on the couch and grins. "Thanks."
"You kept him!" is the first exclamatory out of Ramona's mouth when she and Mike come by for dinner after a gig in August.
Ray rolls his eyes and ignores Brad's curious glance from the dining table.
There's salad and burgers and a plentiful fount of alcohol, and at the end of it, Ray's shirt is splattered with an aesthetically pleasing palette of ranch and mustard. "Can't you train that out of him?" Ramona complains at Brad, which is just completely uncalled for. Ray makes a face at her and cracks open another beer.
Mike cajoles a tipsy Ramona home sometime after midnight. Ray inhales the last of the leftovers and lies down on the couch in a food coma as Brad clatters around, cleaning up.
He's pretty buzzed but still semi-coherent, and has the presence of mind to change into the clean shirt that Brad tosses at him.
"So you're going to move to San Diego, right?" Ray says. He slants his head back against the armrest of the sofa to look at him. "I bet Rudy could help you find some sweet beachside property down there."
"No," Brad says, looking at him askance. "They've got barracks at the recruit depot, and when I'm on leave I can drive back up here."
"That's really fucking impractical," he points out, brow furrowing. "You-I could move to San Diego. Be your kept woman, haha."
"What? Don't be an idiot. No one's moving to San Diego, Ray." Brad pauses, lifts a shoulder. "I have a home."
Ray closes his eyes. His head clears a little. "Okay," he says into the darkness.
When he opens them again, Brad is hovering above him, the line of his body casting shadows against the wall.
"Hi," Ray says, grinning crookedly.
"I keep trying to tell you," Brad says, dry, "but you just don't get it, do you?"
Ray squints up at the determined set of Brad's shoulders, the tilt of his mouth, the forward list of his torso when he braces his hands on the couch, and thinks he might have some idea. "You know," he says conversationally, flinging his arms over his head, "I wasn't kidding about the whole kept woman thing, even though it's a little backward. You're the one who actually does all the cooking and cleaning, so we should probably renegotiate those terms-"
"Will you ever learn when to stop talking?" Brad cuts in, voice deep with amusement, and leans down to kiss him.
Ray opens his mouth and lets him in, slips a hand under Brad's shirt and trails it against the ridge of the scar on Brad's back when he reaches it. Brad gives this long, full-bodied shiver and looks at him like he's not quite sure this is happening, that Ray is real and here-and that's just absurd. Why would he stop? This, like everything, makes perfect sense. Ray tries to tell him with the brush of his tongue and the press of his fingers. Brad seems to understand.
It's as natural as breathing, as if they've been doing it for as long as they've known each other instead of dancing around the elephant in the room like fucking ballerinas at the zoo. Okay, so that analogy got away from him, but the central idea of it is sound-which is really not what he wants to be thinking about right now, stupid mixed metaphors about animals and dancers, so he stops and lets his mind wander to how Brad smells faintly of dish detergent and smoke, and is a pretty fucking fantastic kisser. Ray might have to reevaluate in the morning when he's sober, but right now he just scrapes his teeth against the swell of Brad's lower lip, sucks Brad's tongue into his mouth and hums around it.
Brad bites back, hard enough to draw blood, and fuck if the sting of it doesn't make Ray's dick jump in his pants.
There's no cognitive dissonance, here, nothing to assimilate or acclimate-it's just another piece of the puzzle that slots in and fits and feels right, feels fucking amazing, especially when Brad's hand slides across the jut of Ray's collarbone and the stray thought that Brad could probably snap it right in half if he wanted to rises through the heady, burgeoning wave of arousal and smacks him right in the face.
That-that really shouldn't make it even harder for him to breathe, like something in his chest's about to burst open. Brad tucks a leg in between his; Ray jerks his pelvis up and Brad presses him back down into the sofa with his entire body, fucking two hundred plus pounds of solid Marine, and looses a laugh into Ray's mouth.
"If I'd known this would shut you up so effectively," Brad murmurs, "I would've done it a lot sooner."
"You love listening to me talk. Also, my lungs are on fire, you inconsiderate ass, I must respire," Ray says, wriggling, hipbone digging into Brad's stomach. Brad pulls back, lips twisting up at the corners, and drags his mouth down to lave the skin of Ray's neck in lieu.
Comfortable is not the right word. There is nothing comfortable about the sudden desire for Brad's hands to be everywhere, or the desperation when Brad's goddamn bottomless reserves of patience come into play, the thigh wedged between Ray's barely enough friction for his painful hard-on to do fuck-all with.
There's just something achingly familiar about this push-pull, like this is all just an organic extension of their relationship instead of something completely new.
"You think too much, Ray," Brad says, eyes glinting shrewdly, and presses a hand against the crotch of Ray's pants. If Ray possessed the capacity for embarrassment, he'd be more than a little mortified at the whining keen that comes out from the back of his throat.
He doesn't, though, and he's not, and because Brad is a fucking ninja the next thing Ray knows his jeans and his boxers are tangled around his knees and Brad's about to fucking go to town.
"So I've never done this before," Brad admits, the corners of his mouth sliding up, and it is ridiculously unfair that he's still got that discreet air of confidence about him as he says it, "but I imagine certain things carry over."
Brad approaches blowjobs with the specific brand of systematic focus he applies to everything else he does: it's all tongue and saliva and the occasional edge of teeth that has Ray's spine taut and arched like a plucked guitar string, his nose pressed into the rough fabric of the sofa and his hands curling against Brad's shoulders. A rapid-fire stream of filth drops out of his mouth and Ray can feel Brad grinning around his dick, which, seriously-fuck. Fuck.
Brad sucks firmly on the tip of his cock and rolls his lips back down, and that's it-Ray's coming, hard, the muscles of his abdomen pulled tense, breath a whisper caught in his windpipe, fingers leaving grooves in the skin at Brad's neck.
Brad swallows as much as he can and wipes the rest off with the back of his hand. He props himself up with his elbows as Ray's breathing evens out, expression thoughtful. "When's the last time you got off?"
Ray flicks a sweaty strand of hair out of his eyes and grins, lazy and delighted. "You want a detailed account of my recent sexual history? On the first date?"
"I think we left the first date realm behind a long time ago," Brad says, voice wry, and Ray kind of has to concede the point.
"Yeah, well. Not so fast, asshole. It's my turn." He sits up and tugs at Brad's shirt, which is, distressingly, still on.
Brad lifts an eyebrow and lets Ray pull everything off. "Try not to bite my dick off, yes?"
"Don't even play, Colbert," Ray says breezily, and dumps Brad's clothes on the floor. "I may be a little rusty, but I still give fucking amazing head. You've been missing out."
Brad's laugh tapers off into a choked noise when Ray clears his throat and takes the entirety of his dick down in one go. Ray smiles around the hilt and introduces tongue, swirls the flat of it against the underside of Brad's cock and brings his arms up to clamp around Brad's legs. "Jesus Christ," Brad groans. He slides his hands into Ray's hair and pulls, his hips canting up unsteadily with the quick bobs of Ray's head.
"Come on," Ray mumbles, opening his mouth wider, and Brad relaxes the tight control he always seems to possess, thrusts into the heat of Ray's mouth with a sort of reckless abandon. He hollows his cheeks and watches Brad's eyes flutter shut, a thin film of sweat gathering on his chest, his lips parting a little. Ray pulls back and wraps a hand around the base, lips pursing around the rest of it like maybe he can suck Brad's brains out through his dick.
Brad comes with a strangled shout, some incoherent hybrid of Ray's name and a bitten-off curse, and his breath hitches every time Ray's tongue makes a pass over his skin to lick him clean through the aftershock.
Ray squeezes himself in between Brad and the sofa, buries his nose in Brad's neck. "Hey, Brad," he croaks blearily. "I don't know how to break this to you, but you're kind of a huge fag."
"Thanks," Brad says, yawning, and rolls over to crush him further into the seam of the couch. "I hadn't noticed."
Ray wakes up with a battering ram in his head and a mouth that tastes like the smell of week-old road kill. He extricates himself carefully from the arm tossed over his side and careens into the bathroom, takes a two-minute shower and gargles some mouthwash before stumbling into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on.
He can hear Brad moving around in the house as the kettle comes to a boil. By the time the coffee's done and Ray's brought two mugs of it out, Brad's toweling his hair off, the sweatpants he's wearing slung low, dog tags reflecting the light streaming in from the bay window.
"Hi," Ray says. Brad accepts the cup he hands him, sits down on the couch and takes a sip. "So-how long?"
"How long what?"
Ray waves his hand in the air. "How long have you wanted to get freaky with me? Come on, I want answers, Iceman."
"Are we really going to play this game?" Brad asks wryly.
"I don't know, homes. I mean-was all of this just some long prelude to a booty call?" Ray falls back into the armchair and stares at the ceiling. "Because like, I'm cool with that, if it's what you want-"
And then Brad is scowling over him, the angle of his body caging Ray in the chair. "That's what you think I want? An easy fuck? Are you kidding-this isn't one of your stupid jokes, Ray-"
"Excuse you," he interrupts coldly, the vague stirrings of indignation beginning to rise up in his chest. "Correct me if I'm wrong, jackass, but you’re the fucked up, repressed asshole who sleeps with hundred-dollar prostitutes on his off time because, what, you don't believe in relationships? Forgive me if I'm not particularly inclined to think otherwise."
Brad runs a hand through his own hair. Ray kind of wants to tug at it, too, but he shoves the urge down, plows on.
"I am way, way too hungover right now to deal with your shitty brand of passive aggression, so please, cut me some goddamn slack-"
"Six fucking years, you idiot," says Brad, and what comes after isn't so much a kiss as it is a continuation of the conversation, raw and bruising and teeth against tongue, Ray's arms pinned uselessly at his sides, head pounding to the erratic rhythm of his heartbeat.
Oh, Ray realizes. Oh, and Brad's mouth on his right now isn't fair at all. It makes a part of him recall the overwhelming feeling of being the center of Brad's single-minded attention, of hands smearing bruises into Ray's thighs, Brad's mouth latching on to the curve of his clavicle-and it's fucking distracting when he's trying to piece all the details together in the harsh light of day.
"What the hell part of this do you not fucking understand?" Brad snaps, breathing hard when he pulls back, and Ray almost laughs because-yeah, okay. Okay. It really has been true for years.
"So I'm a world class idiot," he agrees, arching his back. "But, more importantly, you need to work on your emotional expression."
Brad stares at him, incredulous. "You're gonna blame this shit on me?"
"Brad," Ray says. "Brad, listen. You're the one who's been blueballing since Baghdad. Like-what the fuck are you, a goddamn saint? That's it. You're the Iceman, patron saint of all the sexually frustrated fuckers who don't know how to communicate with others and therefore remain needlessly celibate. Wait, do Jewish people even have saints?"
Brad doesn't seem to have an adequate reply for any of that, so he goes for the option of kissing Ray again, warm and easy, which is totally fine-great, even.
"I have a bed, you know," Ray points out, tangling their legs together. He finally manages to drag his arms up, drapes them over Brad's shoulders. "You do too, and frankly, this chair is pretty fucking disgusting. Oh, look. Some ketchup from yesterday, how wonderful."
"Stop bitching," Brad says.
"Never," Ray replies, grinning widely, and yanks him closer.
fin
A/N: this is for underhand_glory, who, once upon a time, expressed a desire for fic where brad and ray move in together and realize that they are totally married. HOPEFULLY THIS IS SOMEWHAT ACCEPTABLE, XOXO. title from "the waking" by theodore roethke.
Pairing: brad colbert/ray person
Rating: nc17
Genre: slice-of-life, romance
Warnings: swearing, homophobic/ableist/sexist language, sexual themes
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: sequel to the kids are all right and we are all going forward. set after brad's last two tours in iraq. 5,447 words. also on ao3. now with podfic by the wonderful chemm80 and chinese translations by the lovely sandy!
"This has become a very disturbing trend," Ray says when he pulls the door open and slouches against the frame, hand up to shade the sun from his eyes. "Are you like, physically unable to drop a line before you come crash-landing into my specifically calibrated environment? Does it give you a migraine? Make you nauseous? You should see someone about it-I know a guy."
Brad grins. "Don't you like surprises, Ray? Surprises are supposed to be fun. Variety is the spice of life."
"This is your idea of fun?" he splutters. "What happened to you as a child? Was it lack of TLC, or were you dropped repeatedly on the head that you turned out like this?"
"You love it."
"I most certainly do not, and I don't fucking appreciate you casting aspersions on my person like this," Ray says, but he shuffles out of the way so Brad can step in.
"I like the new place," he says. "It's bigger."
"Thank you, Captain Obvious," Ray says, and jerks Brad's bags into the guest room off the main hallway.
"When'd you move?"
"Last fall, homes. Mike and Ramona wanted to come out here for the band-some label in LA signed us on-and it's not like I had anything particular tying me down in Missouri."
"You kept the paisley sofa."
"Yeah, just for you," he says flatly. "It was a fucking bitch to ship, by the way, so you better be fucking grateful."
Ray grabs a couple of beers from the fridge and hands one to Brad, who's plastered on the couch like he owns the damn thing.
He kicks a pair of jeans off the armchair and folds himself into the squashy seat, legs tucked underneath his chin and an arm wrapped around his shins pretzel-style.
Brad scans him over, slow and systematic, like he's taking inventory of all the things that have changed-the sweep of his longer hair, a new tattoo on his left arm peeking out from beneath the sleeve of his shirt, calluses on his fingers in different places from playing electric seven days a week instead of fixing bum radios and hotwiring humvees for the platoon.
Brad's skin is tinted ashen; he's got a strange cadence to his step and he's twitchy and tired as hell, but he's smiling at Ray around the rim of his can and fuck it all if it isn't comforting to see that after three years.
"How long's your leave this time?" Ray asks. "Gunnery Sergeant of H&S, can't be gone too long, right? We can see if any of the other boys are in town, get drinks-drive down to San Diego to see if Rudy's still hanging around the area with his super gay, super Zen personal trainer bullshit-"
"Ray. Please shut up."
Ray sticks his tongue out and hooks a leg over the armrest. "Seriously, though," he says after a minute, and Brad rolls his eyes. "When do you go back?"
"I'm out," Brad says.
"Okay," Ray says, and then he fully processes the words that just came out of Brad's mouth and gapes at him, blinks a couple of times. Brad, because he is an asshole, looks faintly amused. "Hold up." Ray untangles himself, stands and goes to the window. Brad's goddamned Yamaha's parked out on the other side of the street in all its glory.
The two suitcases sitting in Ray's guest room, then, have to be packed full with all of Brad's essentials.
"You son of a bitch," he breathes, turning away from the glass, arms crossed. "You're out. That's it."
"Yes," Brad agrees.
"So what are you gonna do now? The Corps was your fucking life, dude."
Brad shrugs.
"You son of a bitch," he repeats with feeling. "No offense to your mother, who is quite lovely and doesn't deserve a complete ass for a son. Which you are." Ray rubs a hand over the bridge of his nose. Things click quietly into place. "You understand you're going to have to pay rent and shit, yes?"
Brad's smiling again, his feet propped up on the coffee table with no regard for the leftover takeout still stacked on top of it.
"Christ. You could've at least given me a heads up or something. Where'd the manners your parents instilled in you fuck off to? What the hell is wrong with you?"
"A lot of things," Brad says, casual as you please-but Ray can see residual shadows from Nad-e Ali and Fallujah in the startling blankness on his face, a yawning chasm of space that Ray's not quite sure how to bridge.
He'll figure it out, though. "Yeah, you're right. For instance: this truly alarming proclivity you've got for showing up at my door uninvited, you dick," he huffs, shaking his head. Brad crushes his empty beer can in a hand and laughs, the sound dull and chalky. He's gotten better at putting on a show, but Ray's the fucking expert, here, and he sees through all of it like it doesn't even exist.
So maybe that's what Brad is counting on.
Ray rolls his shoulders. He's got his fucking work cut out for him.
There were emails, of course. One letter and one satellite call and four perfunctory email exchanges spaced out over the course of three years, the occasional wave from half a world away that says, beneath layers of witty repartee: hey, I'm alive, command hasn't gotten me blown up yet.
It's not like Ray doesn't understand that war messes with people, needles underneath the skin and festers there. I'm fine, Brad says, keeps saying the first couple of weeks-but waking up in a cold sweat after half an hour of sleep and staying awake for the rest of the day out of sheer stubbornness isn't any definition of fine that Ray recognizes.
He would fucking know. It happened to him, too.
Brad goes out for long rides on the motorcycle and racks up about fifty speeding tickets every single time. That part's the same as it's always been. So is the part where the only place in the house that looks like a tornado hit it is Ray's room, because Brad is an anal-retentive freakazoid and refuses to let the rest of the condo descend into Ray's preferred mode of methodological madness.
In mid-May, two weeks after he moves in, Ray comes home from the studio and finds Brad in the kitchen, scrubbing at dishes that are already pristine.
"Hey," Ray says, leaning against the counter. Brad's gaze slides over to meet his, bright and calculating. Brad's lips turn up a little at the corners. He shuts the water off.
Ray coaxes the soapy sponge out of Brad's hand and drops it into the sink, wipes wayward suds off on his jeans. The rest of his rambling monologue dies in his throat when Brad leans in and kind of collapses into him, forehead pressed against Ray's shoulder and arms draped loosely down his back.
"Get off me. I'm suffocating-you're crushing me, you giant," Ray murmurs, but he can't find it in himself to push Brad away. The weight is reassuringly solid. He doesn't realize Brad's half-fallen asleep standing up until he rocks forward into Ray's chest, breathing measured and even.
At the end of the month, Rudy comes calling. He's in town for a fitness training conference and Ray drags Brad out to get drinks with him. "You should come to the talk I'm giving," Rudy says, ever earnest, and Brad accepts the stack of brochures Rudy hands him with relative aplomb. Ray's pretty sure they're going to burn them all in a bonfire on the lawn after Rudy drives back to his hotel, but that's neither here nor there.
Six shots of gin later, Ray's smashed enough to go up to the open mic and warble a malformed version of some half-remembered Wheaten Fields original for the late night crowd. He bums a cigarette off the bartender on his way back to their table. Rudy is shaking his head when Ray slips into his chair, beaming with self-satisfaction.
"What the hell were the label execs thinking when they signed you on, brother?" Rudy says, elbowing him in the ribs.
"Don't be fooled," Brad remarks flatly. "Stingy fucker has a voice, but he'll only let you hear it if you pay for tickets."
"You're so fucking sweet that it's a little gross." Ray blows smoke into Brad's face and lets out a husky laugh before turning to Rudy again. "I also accept alternative forms of payment, if you know what I mean."
He wiggles his eyebrows, eyes wide, teeth gleaming. Rudy rolls his eyes indulgently and orders another round of shots.
There's a wicked-looking scar running across Brad's lower back, straight through the ink of his tattoo. Ray only realizes this because Brad starts walking around shirtless after the goddamn AC putters to a halt and George the truant landlord takes a fucking age to call someone about getting it fixed.
Brad's fiddling with the thermostat and trying to get it to work when Ray sees it. Before he really knows what he's doing, Ray's behind him, fingertips tracing over the raised skin.
Brad whirls around and grabs Ray's wrists, thrumming with a tense sort of energy that gradually bleeds out as he takes in the situation. "Ray."
"Iceman," he replies calmly, inclining his head.
Brad exhales and loosens his grip so that Ray can extricate his aching hands. "Sorry."
"Ain't no thing," he drawls, flopping into the armchair. "So how the fuck did you get that? Come on. Humor me. Story time with your dearest pal Josh Ray."
A flicker of genuine amusement passes over Brad's face and Ray grins.
"Or, you know, I can make up some wildly inaccurate and emasculating account involving Delta Company and negligent discharges to tell the others-"
"Our last month in the AO, we were ambushed en route to Fallujah," Brad interrupts smoothly. "Remember when you said the Iraqis didn't really seem that good at fighting?"
Ray nods.
"They got better." He shrugs easily, like he's talking about the fucking weather. "War necessitates a steep learning curve, but you knew that."
"Yeah," he says, running a hand through his hair. "What was it, an RPG?"
"Loose shrapnel from another humvee that was hit in front of us as we were going over the side of the berm," Brad says, and his voice is mechanical, now, which is kind of the complete opposite of what Ray wanted. It must show on his face because Brad's forehead wrinkles with concern-and isn't that just fucking backwards?
"Is that why you left?" Ray blurts out, because it suddenly occurs to him that he doesn't actually know, and would like to.
He wishes he could take it back when a strange expression settles on Brad's features. "You think I left the Corps because of some superficial injury I sustained in a firefight?"
"No, I just-" Ray mutters. "That's not what I meant."
Brad leans against the wall. "I left because I was tired, Ray. And it took me a while, but I was numb, and once you get numb, you get out. Because being numb makes you sloppy, and no one deserves that."
There's something else, but Ray's not going to fix things by pressing the matter, so he lets it go. "Well," Ray says, after a moment of silence, "I'm pretty fucking glad you're around."
"Really," Brad says, his mouth twitching.
"Yep," he says, shit-eating grin plastered on tight. "The shit you cook is way better than anything I could make, Martha Stewart."
May bleeds into muggy June. A whole parade of Recon guys stream in to visit at Ray's needling behest; he might as well be ticking them off on a goddamn checklist.
Pappy drives up from Oceanside and they go fishing. It's an unmitigated disaster, but Pappy manages to catch a couple of nice halibut for his troubles, and Brad dumps the extra anchovy bait in the backyard for the stray cats that wander by in the evenings.
Walt spends a couple nights at their house and talks their ears off about his girlfriend, after which Brad, Debbie Downer extraordinaire, tries to persuade him out of proposing. "I heard this entire lecture when you gave it to Trombley on the way to Baghdad," Walt reminds him drily, and proceeds to roundhouse kick both their asses in a game of Halo.
Poke's stationed somewhere in Virginia with Blackwater, but he flies in for a weekend so he can take his little girl to Disneyland during her summer vacation. Brad and Ray are coerced into tagging along, and the three of them win a total of something like ten different shooting games with their badass range skills so Zoe Espera can go home with a bunch of stuffed animals that are all taller than she is.
"There should probably be some law prohibiting professional warriors like ourselves from taking advantage of the system like this," Tony says, juggling Spongebob Squarepants and Bugs Bunny in one hand.
"If you don't take advantage of the system, homes, it'll take advantage of you," Ray says around a mouthful of cotton candy.
"Sometimes you do make sense, Person."
"How dare you. I always make sense," he argues, brandishing the cotton candy at him. He turns to Zoe, who's blinking up at him solemnly. "Uncle Brad and Uncle Ray-Ray are gonna go get you some funnel cake, okay?"
Brad's standing in front of one of the gift shops littered around the amusement park. "I fucking hate these places," he declares when Ray tugs him in line. A couple of screaming kids run past, holding balloons in their hands.
Ray laughs. "Too many children, too much noise, too much fun being had, or all of the above?"
Brad glares at him and pulls a crisp ten-dollar bill out for the food.
See-Brad's not so much the hyperemotional fall-to-pieces type. He calmly folds in on himself instead, hides in his shell like a fucking hermit crab or something. If Ray were a lesser man, he'd be running for the hills by now.
As it is, this is Brad, and despite everything, Ray knows him like he knows the lines on his own palm. Brad's the big goof who waves at children after riding open top through an ambush even though he professes to hate them, who reads Shakespeare and listens to the entire oeuvre of classical music in his spare time, who could probably kill him seventy different ways with a can of Red Bull, but not before Ray put up a hell of a fight.
Despite his emphatic protestations otherwise, the absolute normalcy of civilian life seems to be doing Brad some good. He sleeps longer, eats more, and fills out a little. They go jogging in the mornings. Ray's finally allowed to start dumping laundry in the living room again.
In mid-June, Brad gets a summer job at a private shooting range, training people how to handle weaponry.
"They're all pussies," he comments at the end of his first week. "But the pay's okay."
The thing is-Ray is fairly certain that Brad's not happy. Or, if he is, he's doing a phenomenal job of hiding it, because he sure as hell doesn't look it at all. Brad seems muted, more so than usual, like he's biding his time, waiting for something to happen.
In July, Ray walks into the kitchen and says, "You need to go back."
Brad glances down from where he's shelving new boxes of cereal and raises an eyebrow. "You should've told me what you wanted before I went to the supermarket, Ray."
Ray shakes his head. "No, not the goddamn groceries." He fiddles with the frayed edge of his shirt. "You need to go back to Pendleton. The Marine Corps. You know, semper fi, motherfucker."
Brad blinks. "What are you talking about?"
Ray presses his hip into the counter and frowns. "You're obviously not happy away from Recon," he snaps. "In fact, I am pretty fucking sure that the happiest I've seen you is whenever command passed down our next mission and you got to do something out there."
"Yes, and?"
"What do you mean, yes, and?" Ray sputters, waving his arms around in haphazard fashion. Brad rescues the coffeemaker before Ray puts his fist through the kettle. "Hey, listen to me, asshole. I'm trying to help you."
Brad shuts the cabinet and steps forward, a pleased expression on his face.
"Why the fuck are you smiling, you dick? This is serious!"
"You want me to be happy?" Brad asks, eyes crinkling at the corners.
Ray slaps a hand over his forehead. "Can you not? When you put it like that it sounds like some weak-titty bullshit straight out of, like, Titanic or something. Hey, Brad. I'll never let go. Draw me like one of your Australian whores."
"Ray." He's close enough that Ray can smell his aftershave. Jesus.
Ray swallows, folds his arms over his chest, edge of the counter digging a groove into the small of his back. "Yes?"
"Shut the fuck up."
Ray doesn't realize he's holding his breath until Brad strolls out, his stupid fucking eau de cologne trailing after him.
"You're right, you know," Brad says, later, when they're sitting in the living room. Ray's got his acoustic in his lap and Brad's reading, like, Aristotle or some shit.
"I'm always right," Ray says blandly. Brad sends him a quelling look.
"Recon's not going back there anymore, not after the president pulled us out," he continues. "It was a huge clusterfuck right from the start, anyway. So I thought, okay, it's over. Might as well get out while I'm ahead, right?"
Ray nods absently. "But?"
"I don't have to be in the field to be happy," Brad says. "There are other things I can do."
"What's your point?" he asks, and gives the guitar a couple of strums.
Brad shrugs. "I volunteered for drill instructor duty."
Ray nearly chokes on his own saliva. "Sweet Mary, mother of God."
"What?"
"You are actually insane, you fucker," he breathes.
"It'll be good," Brad says, which doesn't help with Ray's renewed sense that he is living in close quarters with a crazy person. "Training starts in the fall at MCRD San Diego."
Ray shakes his head. "God, they're going to pound your ass into the ground, and then when you graduate from whatever the fuck drill instructor school, you're going to perpetuate the vicious cycle by tormenting new recruits in boot camp. This is the worst, Brad."
Brad cocks his head to the side. "Are you mad?"
Ray twangs his E-string with the pick in his right hand. "No, dumbass. I'm happy. This is me being happy for you, because you seem ecstatic, which is incomprehensible to me, but. You know. There it is."
"Oh." Brad stretches languidly on the couch and grins. "Thanks."
"You kept him!" is the first exclamatory out of Ramona's mouth when she and Mike come by for dinner after a gig in August.
Ray rolls his eyes and ignores Brad's curious glance from the dining table.
There's salad and burgers and a plentiful fount of alcohol, and at the end of it, Ray's shirt is splattered with an aesthetically pleasing palette of ranch and mustard. "Can't you train that out of him?" Ramona complains at Brad, which is just completely uncalled for. Ray makes a face at her and cracks open another beer.
Mike cajoles a tipsy Ramona home sometime after midnight. Ray inhales the last of the leftovers and lies down on the couch in a food coma as Brad clatters around, cleaning up.
He's pretty buzzed but still semi-coherent, and has the presence of mind to change into the clean shirt that Brad tosses at him.
"So you're going to move to San Diego, right?" Ray says. He slants his head back against the armrest of the sofa to look at him. "I bet Rudy could help you find some sweet beachside property down there."
"No," Brad says, looking at him askance. "They've got barracks at the recruit depot, and when I'm on leave I can drive back up here."
"That's really fucking impractical," he points out, brow furrowing. "You-I could move to San Diego. Be your kept woman, haha."
"What? Don't be an idiot. No one's moving to San Diego, Ray." Brad pauses, lifts a shoulder. "I have a home."
Ray closes his eyes. His head clears a little. "Okay," he says into the darkness.
When he opens them again, Brad is hovering above him, the line of his body casting shadows against the wall.
"Hi," Ray says, grinning crookedly.
"I keep trying to tell you," Brad says, dry, "but you just don't get it, do you?"
Ray squints up at the determined set of Brad's shoulders, the tilt of his mouth, the forward list of his torso when he braces his hands on the couch, and thinks he might have some idea. "You know," he says conversationally, flinging his arms over his head, "I wasn't kidding about the whole kept woman thing, even though it's a little backward. You're the one who actually does all the cooking and cleaning, so we should probably renegotiate those terms-"
"Will you ever learn when to stop talking?" Brad cuts in, voice deep with amusement, and leans down to kiss him.
Ray opens his mouth and lets him in, slips a hand under Brad's shirt and trails it against the ridge of the scar on Brad's back when he reaches it. Brad gives this long, full-bodied shiver and looks at him like he's not quite sure this is happening, that Ray is real and here-and that's just absurd. Why would he stop? This, like everything, makes perfect sense. Ray tries to tell him with the brush of his tongue and the press of his fingers. Brad seems to understand.
It's as natural as breathing, as if they've been doing it for as long as they've known each other instead of dancing around the elephant in the room like fucking ballerinas at the zoo. Okay, so that analogy got away from him, but the central idea of it is sound-which is really not what he wants to be thinking about right now, stupid mixed metaphors about animals and dancers, so he stops and lets his mind wander to how Brad smells faintly of dish detergent and smoke, and is a pretty fucking fantastic kisser. Ray might have to reevaluate in the morning when he's sober, but right now he just scrapes his teeth against the swell of Brad's lower lip, sucks Brad's tongue into his mouth and hums around it.
Brad bites back, hard enough to draw blood, and fuck if the sting of it doesn't make Ray's dick jump in his pants.
There's no cognitive dissonance, here, nothing to assimilate or acclimate-it's just another piece of the puzzle that slots in and fits and feels right, feels fucking amazing, especially when Brad's hand slides across the jut of Ray's collarbone and the stray thought that Brad could probably snap it right in half if he wanted to rises through the heady, burgeoning wave of arousal and smacks him right in the face.
That-that really shouldn't make it even harder for him to breathe, like something in his chest's about to burst open. Brad tucks a leg in between his; Ray jerks his pelvis up and Brad presses him back down into the sofa with his entire body, fucking two hundred plus pounds of solid Marine, and looses a laugh into Ray's mouth.
"If I'd known this would shut you up so effectively," Brad murmurs, "I would've done it a lot sooner."
"You love listening to me talk. Also, my lungs are on fire, you inconsiderate ass, I must respire," Ray says, wriggling, hipbone digging into Brad's stomach. Brad pulls back, lips twisting up at the corners, and drags his mouth down to lave the skin of Ray's neck in lieu.
Comfortable is not the right word. There is nothing comfortable about the sudden desire for Brad's hands to be everywhere, or the desperation when Brad's goddamn bottomless reserves of patience come into play, the thigh wedged between Ray's barely enough friction for his painful hard-on to do fuck-all with.
There's just something achingly familiar about this push-pull, like this is all just an organic extension of their relationship instead of something completely new.
"You think too much, Ray," Brad says, eyes glinting shrewdly, and presses a hand against the crotch of Ray's pants. If Ray possessed the capacity for embarrassment, he'd be more than a little mortified at the whining keen that comes out from the back of his throat.
He doesn't, though, and he's not, and because Brad is a fucking ninja the next thing Ray knows his jeans and his boxers are tangled around his knees and Brad's about to fucking go to town.
"So I've never done this before," Brad admits, the corners of his mouth sliding up, and it is ridiculously unfair that he's still got that discreet air of confidence about him as he says it, "but I imagine certain things carry over."
Brad approaches blowjobs with the specific brand of systematic focus he applies to everything else he does: it's all tongue and saliva and the occasional edge of teeth that has Ray's spine taut and arched like a plucked guitar string, his nose pressed into the rough fabric of the sofa and his hands curling against Brad's shoulders. A rapid-fire stream of filth drops out of his mouth and Ray can feel Brad grinning around his dick, which, seriously-fuck. Fuck.
Brad sucks firmly on the tip of his cock and rolls his lips back down, and that's it-Ray's coming, hard, the muscles of his abdomen pulled tense, breath a whisper caught in his windpipe, fingers leaving grooves in the skin at Brad's neck.
Brad swallows as much as he can and wipes the rest off with the back of his hand. He props himself up with his elbows as Ray's breathing evens out, expression thoughtful. "When's the last time you got off?"
Ray flicks a sweaty strand of hair out of his eyes and grins, lazy and delighted. "You want a detailed account of my recent sexual history? On the first date?"
"I think we left the first date realm behind a long time ago," Brad says, voice wry, and Ray kind of has to concede the point.
"Yeah, well. Not so fast, asshole. It's my turn." He sits up and tugs at Brad's shirt, which is, distressingly, still on.
Brad lifts an eyebrow and lets Ray pull everything off. "Try not to bite my dick off, yes?"
"Don't even play, Colbert," Ray says breezily, and dumps Brad's clothes on the floor. "I may be a little rusty, but I still give fucking amazing head. You've been missing out."
Brad's laugh tapers off into a choked noise when Ray clears his throat and takes the entirety of his dick down in one go. Ray smiles around the hilt and introduces tongue, swirls the flat of it against the underside of Brad's cock and brings his arms up to clamp around Brad's legs. "Jesus Christ," Brad groans. He slides his hands into Ray's hair and pulls, his hips canting up unsteadily with the quick bobs of Ray's head.
"Come on," Ray mumbles, opening his mouth wider, and Brad relaxes the tight control he always seems to possess, thrusts into the heat of Ray's mouth with a sort of reckless abandon. He hollows his cheeks and watches Brad's eyes flutter shut, a thin film of sweat gathering on his chest, his lips parting a little. Ray pulls back and wraps a hand around the base, lips pursing around the rest of it like maybe he can suck Brad's brains out through his dick.
Brad comes with a strangled shout, some incoherent hybrid of Ray's name and a bitten-off curse, and his breath hitches every time Ray's tongue makes a pass over his skin to lick him clean through the aftershock.
Ray squeezes himself in between Brad and the sofa, buries his nose in Brad's neck. "Hey, Brad," he croaks blearily. "I don't know how to break this to you, but you're kind of a huge fag."
"Thanks," Brad says, yawning, and rolls over to crush him further into the seam of the couch. "I hadn't noticed."
Ray wakes up with a battering ram in his head and a mouth that tastes like the smell of week-old road kill. He extricates himself carefully from the arm tossed over his side and careens into the bathroom, takes a two-minute shower and gargles some mouthwash before stumbling into the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on.
He can hear Brad moving around in the house as the kettle comes to a boil. By the time the coffee's done and Ray's brought two mugs of it out, Brad's toweling his hair off, the sweatpants he's wearing slung low, dog tags reflecting the light streaming in from the bay window.
"Hi," Ray says. Brad accepts the cup he hands him, sits down on the couch and takes a sip. "So-how long?"
"How long what?"
Ray waves his hand in the air. "How long have you wanted to get freaky with me? Come on, I want answers, Iceman."
"Are we really going to play this game?" Brad asks wryly.
"I don't know, homes. I mean-was all of this just some long prelude to a booty call?" Ray falls back into the armchair and stares at the ceiling. "Because like, I'm cool with that, if it's what you want-"
And then Brad is scowling over him, the angle of his body caging Ray in the chair. "That's what you think I want? An easy fuck? Are you kidding-this isn't one of your stupid jokes, Ray-"
"Excuse you," he interrupts coldly, the vague stirrings of indignation beginning to rise up in his chest. "Correct me if I'm wrong, jackass, but you’re the fucked up, repressed asshole who sleeps with hundred-dollar prostitutes on his off time because, what, you don't believe in relationships? Forgive me if I'm not particularly inclined to think otherwise."
Brad runs a hand through his own hair. Ray kind of wants to tug at it, too, but he shoves the urge down, plows on.
"I am way, way too hungover right now to deal with your shitty brand of passive aggression, so please, cut me some goddamn slack-"
"Six fucking years, you idiot," says Brad, and what comes after isn't so much a kiss as it is a continuation of the conversation, raw and bruising and teeth against tongue, Ray's arms pinned uselessly at his sides, head pounding to the erratic rhythm of his heartbeat.
Oh, Ray realizes. Oh, and Brad's mouth on his right now isn't fair at all. It makes a part of him recall the overwhelming feeling of being the center of Brad's single-minded attention, of hands smearing bruises into Ray's thighs, Brad's mouth latching on to the curve of his clavicle-and it's fucking distracting when he's trying to piece all the details together in the harsh light of day.
"What the hell part of this do you not fucking understand?" Brad snaps, breathing hard when he pulls back, and Ray almost laughs because-yeah, okay. Okay. It really has been true for years.
"So I'm a world class idiot," he agrees, arching his back. "But, more importantly, you need to work on your emotional expression."
Brad stares at him, incredulous. "You're gonna blame this shit on me?"
"Brad," Ray says. "Brad, listen. You're the one who's been blueballing since Baghdad. Like-what the fuck are you, a goddamn saint? That's it. You're the Iceman, patron saint of all the sexually frustrated fuckers who don't know how to communicate with others and therefore remain needlessly celibate. Wait, do Jewish people even have saints?"
Brad doesn't seem to have an adequate reply for any of that, so he goes for the option of kissing Ray again, warm and easy, which is totally fine-great, even.
"I have a bed, you know," Ray points out, tangling their legs together. He finally manages to drag his arms up, drapes them over Brad's shoulders. "You do too, and frankly, this chair is pretty fucking disgusting. Oh, look. Some ketchup from yesterday, how wonderful."
"Stop bitching," Brad says.
"Never," Ray replies, grinning widely, and yanks him closer.
fin
A/N: this is for underhand_glory, who, once upon a time, expressed a desire for fic where brad and ray move in together and realize that they are totally married. HOPEFULLY THIS IS SOMEWHAT ACCEPTABLE, XOXO. title from "the waking" by theodore roethke.