REC:
This site is actual food porn. That's even its name.
I made
these tonight (and they are GODLY). And then I wrote this. It's been a good day.
title: Hors d'oeuvres
paiting/characters: J2, with appearances by JDM, Patrick Dempsey, and Jessica Alba
rating: PG-13
word count: 2400
note: A
Food Porn timestamp. Schmoop pretty much just for the sake of schmoop. Un-beta'd.
summary: Jensen gets a job offer and Ross graduates the fifth grade. The hors d'oeuvres are incredibly disappointing.
“Please tell me that you’re not planning on wearing that in public,” Jared says, coming to a dead stop in the bedroom doorway from the bathroom. Jensen can hear a series of explosions downstairs, the familiar sounds of Ross kicking ass at Halo.
Jensen looks down. Dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled back, dark jeans, scuffed brown boots. It looks good. He’s going to be the best-looking dad there. “Uh… well, I was,” he says. He gives Jared a patient, questioning look.
Jared sighs and rubs his eyebrow. “No.”
Mentally counting to ten, Jensen looks back down at his clothes and exhales. “Okay then,” he says tightly.
He’s had this conversation before, of course. There seems to be a running theme in Jensen’s life that he shouldn’t be permitted to dress himself.
He and Jess were getting ready to meet her parents for dinner, a few weeks before Ross was born. She had spent the last half-hour locked in the bathroom, while Jensen sat on the couch and watched South Park.
“I’m sorry!” she said, coming into the living room. “I couldn’t find my brown eyeliner, and I’m wearing brown, so it’s not like I could use black, you know?”
He grunted noncommittally and hoisted himself off the couch. Jess waddled past, headed for the door, and then she paused and stared at him for a second. Then she looked away, took two more steps, stopped again, and looked back at him. “Yeah, no,” she said, wincing. “This isn’t going to work.”
“What?” he asked, looking down.
“You are no longer allowed to dress yourself. That’s just… no. Come on.” She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back to the bedroom. “Sit,” she said, pointing at the end of the bed.
He sat, still confused, and watched her throw open the closet doors and rifle through his side. He would have protested, but she was starting to approach the point where she was wider than she was tall, and he didn’t want to piss her off more. He teased her that he was scared she was going to roll over on him while he was sleeping and crush him, but he was also a little bit serious.
She held out a long-sleeved sweater, another hanger bearing a button-down threaded over the hook of the sweater’s hanger. “Sweater vests offend my father,” she said. “You are not going to dinner with my parents wearing one.”
He pointed at her bedside table, where there was a photograph of her parents smiling sunnily at the camera. “Your father is wearing a sweater vest in that picture,” he pointed out. It was green, just like the one Jensen was wearing.
“Fine then!” she snapped back. “Sweater vests offend me!”
She held out the sweater. He glanced out the window, where the heat was shimmering up from the pavement in visible waves. “It’s July!” he squawked.
She considered that for a moment and nodded, removing the button-down from the attached hanger and holding it back to him. “Here. You can roll the sleeves up your forearms. And no, you may not wear a short-sleeved shirt,” she added when he opened his mouth to protest. “Do you have any idea how tacky that looks? No, don’t answer that. Honestly.” She shoved the sweater back in the closet and wiped imaginary dust off on her maternity tunic.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You know, you’re really pretty scary for somebody who looks like a Koosh ball right now,” he said.
She threw the shirt at his head and stalked out of the room. “You have five minutes!” she yelled over her shoulder.
He wore the shirt. Her parents loved it.
“Dude?” Jared says, snapping his fingers in front of Jensen’s face.
“What?”
“You okay? You were lookin’ kind of dazed there for a second.” Jared gives him a funny look.
Jensen makes a frustrated sound and gestures at his clothing. “Mind sharing with the class what’s wrong with this?”
Jared snorts. “Other people can see it,” he says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“What?” Jensen blinks.
Suddenly, Jared’s right in his face and backing him against the wall. Jensen still doesn’t like Jared’s bedroom. It’s basically the attic, so it has a lot of weird angles and shadowy nooks, and even with the little air conditioner in the window going full blast it’s uncomfortably hot. When Ross isn’t staying over, they sleep in Jensen’s room most nights.
“I mean, seeing you in it’s giving me all these really fuckin’ dirty thoughts that I can’t help but act on,” Jared says, brushing his lips just under Jensen’s jaw. “Don’t think you want to go walking into Ross’s school and giving all the genius parents heart attacks from your hotness, right?”
Jensen groans and tightens his grip on Jared’s shirt, which is almost exactly the same as his only in pale blue. “So what? You want me to go out ugly because you’re insecure, or something?”
Jared snorts and pulls back to grin down at him. “Dude, if it wasn’t illegal, I would chain you to that bed and never let you out in public, like, ever.”
“That’s kind of sick, man,” Jensen says, but his eyes dart over to the bed. He can see the scars on the headboard where the handcuffs they use sometimes have scraped the varnish off the wood. Jared grins and leans in to kiss him.
Ross thumps up the steps just then and makes an irritated sound when he reaches the top and sees them. “Can you two, like, do that later? It’s kind of already after five and we’re supposed to be there at a quarter-after to start lining up.”
Jensen pushes Jared back and ducks around him. “Jesus, don’t they realize you’re only fifth-graders?” he says, straightening his clothes. Ross grins at him, and it’s kind of a shock for Jensen to look down at him and find that he’s actually wearing a tie and his hair isn’t sticking up in every direction for once.
“Yeah, seriously,” Jared adds. He bends his head to peck Jensen one last time, then he bounds over to the stairs to sweep Ross into the air. Ross lets out a shriek of delighted laughter as Jared carries him down the steps. “Are they this intense every year, or is this one special?”
“They’re all special,” Ross squeals.
Jensen takes one last look at himself in the mirror on the inside of the closet door and decides that yeah, he looks pretty awesome. He’s going to get hit on by at least two drunk moms. It’s going to be a great night.
--
“Jared tied my tie for me and taught me how to do it while you were fixing your hair,” Ross says proudly from the backseat. They’re taking Jared’s SUV, mostly because it was parked behind Jensen’s Altima, and also because everyone knows that there is going to be wine and fancy cheese at this shindig, and the only way Jensen’s getting through it is to get drunk.
“Did you remember to hand-vac the dog hair out of the car earlier?” Jensen asks Jared. “Because I promise you, Jess will end me if we get there and he’s wearing a brand-new Sadie- and Harley-fur coat. And it will not be pretty. There will not be enough left to bury, probably.”
Jared laughs. “Yes, I cleaned up the dog hair,” he says.
Jensen’s about to say something, but then his cell phone rings, blasting “Me So Horny” and vibrating against his ass.
He jumps, just about garroting himself with the seatbelt, and scrambles to silence it. “What in the fucking-” he blurts, while Jared throws his head back and cackles. In the backseat, Ross launches into a giggle fit as well.
“You’re insane,” Jensen says disapprovingly, frowning even more intensely when he sees the name on the caller ID. He slugs Jared on the arm. “Oh, you’re a funny guy, too. Asshole.”
“Just answer it. He probably wants your soul or something,” Jared says, merging into the right lane to get on the highway and drumming the beat on the steering wheel.
He jabs the answer button and puts the phone up to his ear. “Jeff,” he says.
“Princess! You answered for once!” Jeff says, sounding very pleased with himself.
Jensen scowls. “Fuck you. What do you want?”
“Aw, has your big, mean boyfriend been teasing you? You sound irritable. Tell Papa Bear all about it.”
“You know, that’s never not going to be creepy,” Jensen says, his anger dissipating.
“Did he do the Papa Bear thing again?” Jared laughs. Jensen glances back at Ross to find the kid with his eyes glued to his DS, stylus between his teeth. That sounds like a bad idea, and Jensen has visions of a sudden stops and that stylus ending up halfway down the kid’s throat.
“What do you want, Jeff?” he repeats. “We’re on the way to the school for the fifth grade graduation thing.” Jensen watches the highway zip past, and has to look down when Jared almost runs a teenager in a Kia off the road.
Jeff laughs at something somebody on his end says. “Yeah, I got him on the horn now,” he says to that person. “Here, Jensen, I got Patty-cakes here and he wants to talk to you about something.”
“He let you call him that to his face?” Jensen asks.
“He won motherfuckin’ Top Chef,” Jeff points out, laughing louder and more delightedly. “He has to deal with it. Don’t you, Patty-cakes?” Jensen can actually hear the other man tell Jeff to go fuck himself, and he immediately feels better about himself.
“Exactly how drunk are you right now, anyway?” Jensen asks.
“Two-dollar happy hour margaritas at Pancho’s,” Jeff replies immediately. “I think they just think about waving a lime over a tequila and hand it over. I’m on number six.”
“You grow a vagina recently?” Jensen asks. Jared almost takes out an old lady in a Lumina trying to get to the exit.
“Fuck you,” Jeff says without heat. “The beer costs like nine bucks a bottle. I am secure enough with myself that I can drink a chick drink and still go home and enjoy a pussy.”
Jensen snorts. “Okay, then. You think your drunk ass can remember why you’re calling me? ‘Cause we’re almost there, and we’re already late. Shocking, I know.”
“Patty-cakes-no, fuck you, that’s your name-fine, Patrick is in town to look at space because he’s thinking of opening in Chicago, right?” Jeff pauses. Jensen grunts. Ross’s DS beeps faster, and several people lay on their horns at Jared, who waves cheerfully.
“And what does Patrick want me to say? Congrats?”
“He wants you to say yes when he offers you the head chef position, actually,” Jeff says, sounding vaguely annoyed.
Jensen drops his phone in surprise, and it lands in that narrow crevice between seat and door, where pretty much everything goes to die.
“You okay?” Jared asks, just as they’re pulling into the parking lot. Jess and Kees are sitting on the trunk of her car in the first non-handicapped space, and her face brightens when she recognizes Jared’s car. She frowns a little when he almost takes out a family of five while swerving into a parking space, though.
“I’m-I don’t know, actually,” Jensen says, unclicking his seatbelt so that he can lean forward enough to feel around under his seat for his phone.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jared wants to know.
So here’s the thing: Eric is closing Supernatural in the fall. His dad just got some scary medical diagnosis, apparently, and he has to move back to Ohio to take care of him or something, and Jensen is just sick over the whole thing. He hates feeling like he doesn’t know where he’s going to land, and with unemployment looming in a few months he’s been kind of a pissy bitch.
“Apparently Patrick wants to offer me a job at the restaurant he’s hypothetically opening in Chicago,” Jensen says. His fingertips just brush the phone, and he makes one last push with success.
Jared’s foot slips off the break and hits the gas, so the whole vehicle jumps forward a couple of feet and the bumper kisses the sign proclaiming it a viable parking space. The sign bends back a few inches, and it swings back into place when Jared slams into reverse.
“What the fuck?” Jeff yells just as Jensen gets the phone back to his ear.
“I might have just dropped my phone in shock,” Jensen explains. “I didn’t know that people actually did that.”
“You are a revolutionary man, Dad,” Ross says.
--
The food is depressingly bad. Jess takes one look at the spread and has a shit-fit, immediately bee-lining for one of the teachers she and Jensen like the least to complain. It looks like it was catered by someone who had never actually seen food prepared before, although the staff is well-dressed in smart black uniforms.
“What is this?” Ross asks, poking at a piece of puff pastry with some kind of cheese filling.
Jensen has one on his own mini-plate, so he picks it up and sniffs. “I think it’s some kind of whipped soft cheese. I don’t know.”
“It’s not bad,” Ross says, finishing his off. “You want yours?”
Jensen sneers at him and takes a big bite of his. Kid’s right, it’s not bad. Certainly better than the smoked salmon canapé.
Jared wanders over from the cluster of moms he’s been entertaining for the last ten minutes and pokes Jensen in the side. “Did you actually find something worthy?” he asks, looking interested in Jensen’s cheese puff.
“Back off,” Jensen growls.
Jared points at the mini crème brulee Jensen hasn’t gotten to yet. “That right there is purgatory on a plate, just so you know. The single most disappointing moment of the evening, including when that fat kid tripped going up the steps to the stage and didn't fall on his face.”
Ross giggles. “Tarquin Petersen. Laugh at him always. He’s a jerk.”
“I know he’s, like, ten and all,” Jensen says, “but he’s pretty much always going to be a jerk, too. Look at Jared.”
“Eat me,” Jared says.
Jensen finishes off his cheese puff and sticks his tongue out at Jared. “S’better,” he says.
“Yeah, I love you, too,” Jared says, rolling his eyes.
ETA Sunday morning @ 8am: made a couple of superficial edits for word choice, typo, etc.