fic: odds are [6/6]
Last bit!
Title: Odds Are (We’re Gonna Be All Right Tonight) [6/6]
Word Count: 2,584 for this chapter
Rating: R for sex
Warnings: mention of past self-harm, unintentional abuse of prescription drugs, D/s undertones
Summary: In which Chris Evans reads a book, Sebastian Stan holds Chris’s hand, stories matter, and Martians are important.
In this chapter: Happy endings.
Notes: many thanks to
ilovetakahana for looking this over (I mean the whole fic), when I panicked about plot development and pacing! Title from the Barenaked Ladies song "Odds Are."
six: we’re gonna be all right for another night
The dark’s not all-encompassing. Chris tells himself that. Chris tells himself to believe that. They’re going to be fine, they’ll get through this, he’ll get them through this. He’s got camping skills, he’s got first-aid skills, he can-he can-
Unfamiliar shapes loom in towers of black. Not his hotel room. A dresser that might be a gaping chasm. A bed-corner that’s sharpening teeth for unwary travelers. The faintest outline of Sebastian’s face, white and still amid the grey.
You and me, he thinks. Together. You said so.
Okay. Together. Breathing. Sebastian thinks he can. So he can. For those blue eyes. He pulls distraught anguished pieces into functioning order. His phone’s next to his hand, and reception’s out, of course, but the battery’s fine, which means the flashlight works. The light’s icy and white and artificial, but it takes up arms against the darkness and wins back some space to maneuver.
He finds Sebastian’s throat, the bared line of that graceful neck, and checks his pulse. It’s there: sluggish, slow, but there. He holds his palm over soft lips: Sebastian’s also breathing, and Chris has a momentary breakdown of gratitude and tears at that point, crumpling into Sebastian’s shoulder, clutching limp hands in his.
He can’t cry for too long. Has to find the next step.
They could leave the room. Sebastian’s got long legs and lovely muscle, but Chris could handle carrying him. Chris would. But he’s not sure that stumbling around an unknown hotel in the dark during an epic deluge is a good idea.
He could leave and try to find help, but that’d mean leaving Sebastian. He can’t. He won’t. Same thing. The rain screeches past the windowpanes, driven by sadistic wind. No lights show through the hotel-room curtains. No illumination.
He says, sitting on the bed where they’d so lately laughed and made love, “Please be all right,” and presses Sebastian’s lax hand to his mouth, to his face: needing to feel him, to breathe him, to fight grief with Sebastian beside him.
He says, “Please wake up now,” knowing it won’t help. “I’ll be upset with you,” he says. “I seriously will be this time, for doing this, for leaving me, so fuckin’ angry, but you can wake up now, anytime you want.”
He whispers, “No I’m not, I’m not angry with you, I won’t be, I swear, if you’ll just open your eyes.”
Sebastian doesn’t stir. Chris’s phone battery loses two percent. The skies mourn in ugly purple-black and leaden sheets of rain.
“You did tell me,” he says. “You told me this time, when you weren’t feeling-I know how brave that was. Or I guess I don’t, I don’t know all your stories, but I want to. I’ll be here for you and you’ll be here for me, sound good?” and then he hears how much that sounds like bargaining, like one of those steps toward inevitable morbid acceptance, and he has to look away, out of the light.
He thinks of something. Finds the now-cool tea by the glimmer of his phone. Uses a fingertip: drops of sweetness, of liquid, across Sebastian’s lips, into his mouth. “Blueberry,” he points out. “Extra sugar.”
When he picks up his phone, he catches sight of the time. Can’t be right. Barely five minutes. How can that be an eternity?
He leans in to press a kiss to Sebastian’s lips. They’re chilly and taste like tea and salt, though the latter’s Chris’s own fault.
He doesn’t expect the kiss to work. This isn’t a fairytale. Sebastian’s not bespelled or cursed, and Chris is no dragon-slaying knight in armor. Only human, flattered under the fragments of the night.
He just wants Sebastian to know he’s here. A promise.
“You said it,” he tells closed eyes. “At dinner. You said it first, and I don’t know if you meant it, I don’t know if you meant to say it, but just so you know, I was thinking it first.”
Was that a sound? A sigh? A reaction? He waits, heart climbing into his throat, but it doesn’t come again.
“You said you love me,” he says. “Which, yeah, it’s been like two days, and I love you too, I think I always have, some kind of you-shaped space just waiting for us to meet, and okay, that sounded way less weird and creepy in my head, but you know what I mean. I love you. So, y’know, you’re not the only one who can say it out loud.”
Movement? Eyelashes flickering? Shadows?
“You said we were a story,” he murmurs, and Sebastian’s eyelashes flutter a second time, and Chris starts crying so hard that he can’t answer when that wonderful voice breathes his name, bewildered.
“Chris,” Sebastian asks again, and tries to reach for him with the hand Chris isn’t clutching, though he’s thwarted by overjoyed blankets. “What…are you…you’re crying…”
“Of course I’m fucking crying,” Chris retorts, “you fucking idiot, I thought you were going to die, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for swearing at you, I love you,” and kisses him, but gently, carefully, worshipfully, drowned in tears.
“I feel,” Sebastian says a few minutes later, after he’s been propped up by pillows and tea and Chris’s arms, “like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. And missed the most important part of the story. Did I hear you say-did you say, when I woke up, or did I imagine…”
“I love you,” Chris fills in. “I love you.” He can’t say it enough. Has to say it as many times as possible in all the time to come. The power’s not back on yet, but they’ve got his phone and Sebastian’s, spilling joint electronic incandescence over joined hands and shared touches and traded kisses. “Just rest. Please.”
“I’m entirely up to talking.” Sebastian mock-scowls at him. Head on Chris’s shoulder. “In fact I feel oddly better. As if everything just gave up and shut down for a while and hit some sort of terrifying reset button. I’m sorry for scaring you. I love you.”
“That is the worst analogy you could ever-” Chris begins, because they’re both writers and so a critique of metaphors at the brink of death will signal a return to ordinariness, and even more because in fact it’s a usefully descriptive turn of phrase but he’s too lingeringly afraid to admit as much; and then he says, “…you what?”
“I love you,” Sebastian says, eyes serious and elated and relieved and definite, that rare elusive watercolor hue that Chris’s never known anyplace else: flower-petals and topaz and layer upon layer of pale blue. “Te iubesc. I love you. I meant it when I said it at dinner. Though I wish I’d been more romantic about saying it, considering it was the first time-”
“I fucking love you,” Chris says, and kisses him.
This kiss goes on for several seconds. The bedside lamps stutter, kindle gold, flare back into life. Power restored. Energy pouring into bedraggled sheets and tranquil walls and that stalwart dresser. Sebastian laughs into the kiss, catches breath, nods without hesitation when Chris demands to know he’s okay.
“I’m still taking you to the hospital,” Chris decrees. Statement of fact. Unassailable. “As soon as you feel like getting up.”
“You’ll be there with me.”
“Right there.” One more kiss. “With you.”
“Like our Martian and his human,” Sebastian agrees. “A love story.” Chris’s heart skips a beat-when were there Martians, oh God, hallucinations, delirium- and then remembers and then does jubilant emotional acrobatics. “You were awake for that?”
“I’m in if you are,” Sebastian says, twining fingers through Chris’s, smiling at him in the night.
They’re both in, of course. For forever.
They do end up at the local hospital, where a white-faced Margarita comes running through double doors to throw arms around Sebastian and then around Chris, who hugs her back. The physician on duty gives Sebastian stern-faced lectures about the dangers of overdoses and the importance of following dosage guidelines, and simultaneously switches his headache-related painkillers to something less inclined to interfere with his ability to breathe, plus some gratifyingly colorful insults to whoever wrote out an initial prescription with those side effects for someone recovering from a respiratory illness. Sebastian, being Sebastian, tries to apologize. Chris says, “Do you think Captain America would want to punch your original doctors in the face, or in the stomach, over this? I mean, if it were Bucky.” Sebastian’s surprised enough to stop assuming the whole disaster’s his own fault, which is exactly Chris’s goal, so that works out.
The train-tracks become gradually cleared of mudslides and floods as the storm passes, as the rain dries up, as flowers bloom from saturated ground. Chris moves into Sebastian’s hotel suite; they wake up entangled in each other, safe and sound, and on the morning of the fifth day Chris opens his eyes to find Sebastian smiling at him, and promptly says, “You know I’m not letting you finish your book tour alone.”
“I like waking up with you,” Sebastian whispers back, “every day.”
They get on the train together. Chris sends postcards and text messages home: to Scott, to his mother, to friends. Scott texts back a message that contains only exclamation points, followed by I CAN’T EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE YOU’RE BANGING SEBASTIAN STAN NO I REFUSE THIS IS SO UNFAIR YOU’RE MY BROTHER AT LEAST TELL ME ONE DETAIL. Chris is still working on a reply when Sebastian takes his phone, sticks his tongue in Chris’s ear, snaps the picture, and hits send.
They sign books-Margarita makes some calls, and a box with Chris’s name on it turns up mysteriously at the next stop, and people buy the contents-in New Orleans and Austin and Denver. They watch grain-fields ripple by through train-windows and scribble drafted scenes for chapters of that science-fiction travelogue-epic-gay-romance (“no, they’d completely stop at the giant ball of twine,” Sebastian asserts, eyes dancing, “you can’t tell me that wouldn’t be the greatest welcome-to-Earth moment ever, which one of us had the coming-to-America immigrant experience, trust me on this,” and Chris says, “okay, what about diner food?”) and hold hands under Midwest stars. Sebastian’s cough goes away for good and the headaches get better and he stops bothering with the prescription painkillers except for one or two very crowded publicity-stuffed days that tax his recovering strength. Chris holds him at night, and breathes in the scent of his hair, and wonders anew at how lucky he himself is, and says thank you, in his heart.
In Utah Chris buys a tent big enough for two and teaches Sebastian how to make s’mores, surrounded by towering red rocks and the freewheeling dome of the sky. Sebastian licks chocolate and marshmallow from long fingers and gets graham-cracker crumbs in his shirt and tastes like laughter when Chris tackles him into their sleeping bag.
Writing with Sebastian is-easy. Fluid. Like nothing Chris has felt before: words race out of them both, ideas upon ideas, prose building itself into dancing cathedrals. Sparks on a page, sparks in bed, sparks when he holds Sebastian’s hand. He thinks that feeling might never go away. He thinks he could want this every single day.
In Los Angeles they walk along a beach, carrying shoes, getting rolled-up pant-legs wet in the surf. The air tingles with salt and sunshine, gold and blue and white, made of palm trees and boundless horizons and California dreams. Their shoulders bump as they walk through sand, companionably sharing space; Chris slides his hand to the back of Sebastian’s neck after the third time, drawing him in for a kiss. Sebastian tips his face up: earnest and devout, belonging to Chris by choice, with sand between their toes.
“I love you,” Chris says, Chris tells him, hand stroking the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, thumb rubbing over skin, deliberate in the way they both enjoy.
“I love you,” Sebastian says right back. “I like it here. The ocean. The sound of waves.”
“You like Southern California?” He’ll buy a house on the beach if it’ll make blue eyes smile. Ten houses. “I could learn to cook. Mexican food.”
“By all means, but not what I was thinking.” Sebastian grins. “I do also love New York. I’d never want to move, but maybe vacations…if we need to be in Hollywood in any case…”
“Um,” Chris says. His family’s in Boston. His family’s got roots. He cheers for the Patriots and drinks Sam Adams beer. He’ll stick by the mental vow about beach houses, but a lot of homesickness might be involved. “Hollywood?”
“Yes, I meant to tell you, the producers of the Captain America films called…inquiring about rights for any upcoming properties, considering what a lucrative asset I am…I may have mentioned your name. Our project. It’s only a thought. We’re not even done writing. I said as much.”
“Our project.” The waves bend and break against the shore. Booming, cyclical, resonant. “It could be a movie?”
“There’s interest, at least. No promises.”
“You’re doing all the talking to studio heads, kid.”
“Yes, Chris.”
“What else?” He knows that voice, those expressions, better than he knows his own, these days. Sebastian’s not bothered about the studio negotiations-Chris’s anxiety makes meetings with authority figures a special kind of hell, but they can handle that hell if Sebastian does most of the discussion, and Sebastian’s excellent at making everybody fall in love with him, winsome and likeable and eager to please and so charmingly genuine that producers and publishers tend to give him anything he wants, a fact which some of them may have cause to regret. There’s something under the surface, though. He can tell. “Tell me what you were thinking. I mean, I’d like it if you told me. I mean please?”
“Yes, Chris…oh, no, I mean it, I am saying yes, I brought it up, I want to tell you. Or ask you. I didn’t have words yet. About places. Where we go after this, if we go…home.”
“Home.” Sebastian will want him to come to New York, then. City streets and neon glare and noisy lively neighborhoods packed with bodies. A sky he won’t be able to see.
There’ll be good times. Stillness and calm at unlikely moments. Autumn leaves in Central Park, the scent of coffee on sleepy mornings, museums bubbling over with history and art, a kaleidoscope of humanity. Sebastian in his arms at night. Safe harbor, and the stories they’ve yet to tell.
“About that. I wanted to ask. If you-”
“Of course I’ll come with-”
“We could write in New York,” Sebastian says, tentative in a way he rarely is these days, tentative but not looking away, “half the time, and in Boston half the time, and…see what happens? Where this goes? It’s an idea. I just thought. If you wanted to. Think about it.”
“…home,” Chris repeats. The ocean runs in to tickle his toes, frothy and euphoric. He’s leaning in, nudging Sebastian’s nose with his. “Where we go. Together.”
“Yes?”
“I love you,” Chris says once more, thinking about Hollywood adaptations and fame he never could’ve pictured for himself, thinking about the exuberant crash of waves and the warmth of Sebastian’s sunlit skin under his hand, thinking about stories and futures and the far-off misty shape of wedding-rings, pure and true. “Yes.”
Title: Odds Are (We’re Gonna Be All Right Tonight) [6/6]
Word Count: 2,584 for this chapter
Rating: R for sex
Warnings: mention of past self-harm, unintentional abuse of prescription drugs, D/s undertones
Summary: In which Chris Evans reads a book, Sebastian Stan holds Chris’s hand, stories matter, and Martians are important.
In this chapter: Happy endings.
Notes: many thanks to
ilovetakahana for looking this over (I mean the whole fic), when I panicked about plot development and pacing! Title from the Barenaked Ladies song "Odds Are."
six: we’re gonna be all right for another night
The dark’s not all-encompassing. Chris tells himself that. Chris tells himself to believe that. They’re going to be fine, they’ll get through this, he’ll get them through this. He’s got camping skills, he’s got first-aid skills, he can-he can-
Unfamiliar shapes loom in towers of black. Not his hotel room. A dresser that might be a gaping chasm. A bed-corner that’s sharpening teeth for unwary travelers. The faintest outline of Sebastian’s face, white and still amid the grey.
You and me, he thinks. Together. You said so.
Okay. Together. Breathing. Sebastian thinks he can. So he can. For those blue eyes. He pulls distraught anguished pieces into functioning order. His phone’s next to his hand, and reception’s out, of course, but the battery’s fine, which means the flashlight works. The light’s icy and white and artificial, but it takes up arms against the darkness and wins back some space to maneuver.
He finds Sebastian’s throat, the bared line of that graceful neck, and checks his pulse. It’s there: sluggish, slow, but there. He holds his palm over soft lips: Sebastian’s also breathing, and Chris has a momentary breakdown of gratitude and tears at that point, crumpling into Sebastian’s shoulder, clutching limp hands in his.
He can’t cry for too long. Has to find the next step.
They could leave the room. Sebastian’s got long legs and lovely muscle, but Chris could handle carrying him. Chris would. But he’s not sure that stumbling around an unknown hotel in the dark during an epic deluge is a good idea.
He could leave and try to find help, but that’d mean leaving Sebastian. He can’t. He won’t. Same thing. The rain screeches past the windowpanes, driven by sadistic wind. No lights show through the hotel-room curtains. No illumination.
He says, sitting on the bed where they’d so lately laughed and made love, “Please be all right,” and presses Sebastian’s lax hand to his mouth, to his face: needing to feel him, to breathe him, to fight grief with Sebastian beside him.
He says, “Please wake up now,” knowing it won’t help. “I’ll be upset with you,” he says. “I seriously will be this time, for doing this, for leaving me, so fuckin’ angry, but you can wake up now, anytime you want.”
He whispers, “No I’m not, I’m not angry with you, I won’t be, I swear, if you’ll just open your eyes.”
Sebastian doesn’t stir. Chris’s phone battery loses two percent. The skies mourn in ugly purple-black and leaden sheets of rain.
“You did tell me,” he says. “You told me this time, when you weren’t feeling-I know how brave that was. Or I guess I don’t, I don’t know all your stories, but I want to. I’ll be here for you and you’ll be here for me, sound good?” and then he hears how much that sounds like bargaining, like one of those steps toward inevitable morbid acceptance, and he has to look away, out of the light.
He thinks of something. Finds the now-cool tea by the glimmer of his phone. Uses a fingertip: drops of sweetness, of liquid, across Sebastian’s lips, into his mouth. “Blueberry,” he points out. “Extra sugar.”
When he picks up his phone, he catches sight of the time. Can’t be right. Barely five minutes. How can that be an eternity?
He leans in to press a kiss to Sebastian’s lips. They’re chilly and taste like tea and salt, though the latter’s Chris’s own fault.
He doesn’t expect the kiss to work. This isn’t a fairytale. Sebastian’s not bespelled or cursed, and Chris is no dragon-slaying knight in armor. Only human, flattered under the fragments of the night.
He just wants Sebastian to know he’s here. A promise.
“You said it,” he tells closed eyes. “At dinner. You said it first, and I don’t know if you meant it, I don’t know if you meant to say it, but just so you know, I was thinking it first.”
Was that a sound? A sigh? A reaction? He waits, heart climbing into his throat, but it doesn’t come again.
“You said you love me,” he says. “Which, yeah, it’s been like two days, and I love you too, I think I always have, some kind of you-shaped space just waiting for us to meet, and okay, that sounded way less weird and creepy in my head, but you know what I mean. I love you. So, y’know, you’re not the only one who can say it out loud.”
Movement? Eyelashes flickering? Shadows?
“You said we were a story,” he murmurs, and Sebastian’s eyelashes flutter a second time, and Chris starts crying so hard that he can’t answer when that wonderful voice breathes his name, bewildered.
“Chris,” Sebastian asks again, and tries to reach for him with the hand Chris isn’t clutching, though he’s thwarted by overjoyed blankets. “What…are you…you’re crying…”
“Of course I’m fucking crying,” Chris retorts, “you fucking idiot, I thought you were going to die, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for swearing at you, I love you,” and kisses him, but gently, carefully, worshipfully, drowned in tears.
“I feel,” Sebastian says a few minutes later, after he’s been propped up by pillows and tea and Chris’s arms, “like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. And missed the most important part of the story. Did I hear you say-did you say, when I woke up, or did I imagine…”
“I love you,” Chris fills in. “I love you.” He can’t say it enough. Has to say it as many times as possible in all the time to come. The power’s not back on yet, but they’ve got his phone and Sebastian’s, spilling joint electronic incandescence over joined hands and shared touches and traded kisses. “Just rest. Please.”
“I’m entirely up to talking.” Sebastian mock-scowls at him. Head on Chris’s shoulder. “In fact I feel oddly better. As if everything just gave up and shut down for a while and hit some sort of terrifying reset button. I’m sorry for scaring you. I love you.”
“That is the worst analogy you could ever-” Chris begins, because they’re both writers and so a critique of metaphors at the brink of death will signal a return to ordinariness, and even more because in fact it’s a usefully descriptive turn of phrase but he’s too lingeringly afraid to admit as much; and then he says, “…you what?”
“I love you,” Sebastian says, eyes serious and elated and relieved and definite, that rare elusive watercolor hue that Chris’s never known anyplace else: flower-petals and topaz and layer upon layer of pale blue. “Te iubesc. I love you. I meant it when I said it at dinner. Though I wish I’d been more romantic about saying it, considering it was the first time-”
“I fucking love you,” Chris says, and kisses him.
This kiss goes on for several seconds. The bedside lamps stutter, kindle gold, flare back into life. Power restored. Energy pouring into bedraggled sheets and tranquil walls and that stalwart dresser. Sebastian laughs into the kiss, catches breath, nods without hesitation when Chris demands to know he’s okay.
“I’m still taking you to the hospital,” Chris decrees. Statement of fact. Unassailable. “As soon as you feel like getting up.”
“You’ll be there with me.”
“Right there.” One more kiss. “With you.”
“Like our Martian and his human,” Sebastian agrees. “A love story.” Chris’s heart skips a beat-when were there Martians, oh God, hallucinations, delirium- and then remembers and then does jubilant emotional acrobatics. “You were awake for that?”
“I’m in if you are,” Sebastian says, twining fingers through Chris’s, smiling at him in the night.
They’re both in, of course. For forever.
They do end up at the local hospital, where a white-faced Margarita comes running through double doors to throw arms around Sebastian and then around Chris, who hugs her back. The physician on duty gives Sebastian stern-faced lectures about the dangers of overdoses and the importance of following dosage guidelines, and simultaneously switches his headache-related painkillers to something less inclined to interfere with his ability to breathe, plus some gratifyingly colorful insults to whoever wrote out an initial prescription with those side effects for someone recovering from a respiratory illness. Sebastian, being Sebastian, tries to apologize. Chris says, “Do you think Captain America would want to punch your original doctors in the face, or in the stomach, over this? I mean, if it were Bucky.” Sebastian’s surprised enough to stop assuming the whole disaster’s his own fault, which is exactly Chris’s goal, so that works out.
The train-tracks become gradually cleared of mudslides and floods as the storm passes, as the rain dries up, as flowers bloom from saturated ground. Chris moves into Sebastian’s hotel suite; they wake up entangled in each other, safe and sound, and on the morning of the fifth day Chris opens his eyes to find Sebastian smiling at him, and promptly says, “You know I’m not letting you finish your book tour alone.”
“I like waking up with you,” Sebastian whispers back, “every day.”
They get on the train together. Chris sends postcards and text messages home: to Scott, to his mother, to friends. Scott texts back a message that contains only exclamation points, followed by I CAN’T EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE YOU’RE BANGING SEBASTIAN STAN NO I REFUSE THIS IS SO UNFAIR YOU’RE MY BROTHER AT LEAST TELL ME ONE DETAIL. Chris is still working on a reply when Sebastian takes his phone, sticks his tongue in Chris’s ear, snaps the picture, and hits send.
They sign books-Margarita makes some calls, and a box with Chris’s name on it turns up mysteriously at the next stop, and people buy the contents-in New Orleans and Austin and Denver. They watch grain-fields ripple by through train-windows and scribble drafted scenes for chapters of that science-fiction travelogue-epic-gay-romance (“no, they’d completely stop at the giant ball of twine,” Sebastian asserts, eyes dancing, “you can’t tell me that wouldn’t be the greatest welcome-to-Earth moment ever, which one of us had the coming-to-America immigrant experience, trust me on this,” and Chris says, “okay, what about diner food?”) and hold hands under Midwest stars. Sebastian’s cough goes away for good and the headaches get better and he stops bothering with the prescription painkillers except for one or two very crowded publicity-stuffed days that tax his recovering strength. Chris holds him at night, and breathes in the scent of his hair, and wonders anew at how lucky he himself is, and says thank you, in his heart.
In Utah Chris buys a tent big enough for two and teaches Sebastian how to make s’mores, surrounded by towering red rocks and the freewheeling dome of the sky. Sebastian licks chocolate and marshmallow from long fingers and gets graham-cracker crumbs in his shirt and tastes like laughter when Chris tackles him into their sleeping bag.
Writing with Sebastian is-easy. Fluid. Like nothing Chris has felt before: words race out of them both, ideas upon ideas, prose building itself into dancing cathedrals. Sparks on a page, sparks in bed, sparks when he holds Sebastian’s hand. He thinks that feeling might never go away. He thinks he could want this every single day.
In Los Angeles they walk along a beach, carrying shoes, getting rolled-up pant-legs wet in the surf. The air tingles with salt and sunshine, gold and blue and white, made of palm trees and boundless horizons and California dreams. Their shoulders bump as they walk through sand, companionably sharing space; Chris slides his hand to the back of Sebastian’s neck after the third time, drawing him in for a kiss. Sebastian tips his face up: earnest and devout, belonging to Chris by choice, with sand between their toes.
“I love you,” Chris says, Chris tells him, hand stroking the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, thumb rubbing over skin, deliberate in the way they both enjoy.
“I love you,” Sebastian says right back. “I like it here. The ocean. The sound of waves.”
“You like Southern California?” He’ll buy a house on the beach if it’ll make blue eyes smile. Ten houses. “I could learn to cook. Mexican food.”
“By all means, but not what I was thinking.” Sebastian grins. “I do also love New York. I’d never want to move, but maybe vacations…if we need to be in Hollywood in any case…”
“Um,” Chris says. His family’s in Boston. His family’s got roots. He cheers for the Patriots and drinks Sam Adams beer. He’ll stick by the mental vow about beach houses, but a lot of homesickness might be involved. “Hollywood?”
“Yes, I meant to tell you, the producers of the Captain America films called…inquiring about rights for any upcoming properties, considering what a lucrative asset I am…I may have mentioned your name. Our project. It’s only a thought. We’re not even done writing. I said as much.”
“Our project.” The waves bend and break against the shore. Booming, cyclical, resonant. “It could be a movie?”
“There’s interest, at least. No promises.”
“You’re doing all the talking to studio heads, kid.”
“Yes, Chris.”
“What else?” He knows that voice, those expressions, better than he knows his own, these days. Sebastian’s not bothered about the studio negotiations-Chris’s anxiety makes meetings with authority figures a special kind of hell, but they can handle that hell if Sebastian does most of the discussion, and Sebastian’s excellent at making everybody fall in love with him, winsome and likeable and eager to please and so charmingly genuine that producers and publishers tend to give him anything he wants, a fact which some of them may have cause to regret. There’s something under the surface, though. He can tell. “Tell me what you were thinking. I mean, I’d like it if you told me. I mean please?”
“Yes, Chris…oh, no, I mean it, I am saying yes, I brought it up, I want to tell you. Or ask you. I didn’t have words yet. About places. Where we go after this, if we go…home.”
“Home.” Sebastian will want him to come to New York, then. City streets and neon glare and noisy lively neighborhoods packed with bodies. A sky he won’t be able to see.
There’ll be good times. Stillness and calm at unlikely moments. Autumn leaves in Central Park, the scent of coffee on sleepy mornings, museums bubbling over with history and art, a kaleidoscope of humanity. Sebastian in his arms at night. Safe harbor, and the stories they’ve yet to tell.
“About that. I wanted to ask. If you-”
“Of course I’ll come with-”
“We could write in New York,” Sebastian says, tentative in a way he rarely is these days, tentative but not looking away, “half the time, and in Boston half the time, and…see what happens? Where this goes? It’s an idea. I just thought. If you wanted to. Think about it.”
“…home,” Chris repeats. The ocean runs in to tickle his toes, frothy and euphoric. He’s leaning in, nudging Sebastian’s nose with his. “Where we go. Together.”
“Yes?”
“I love you,” Chris says once more, thinking about Hollywood adaptations and fame he never could’ve pictured for himself, thinking about the exuberant crash of waves and the warmth of Sebastian’s sunlit skin under his hand, thinking about stories and futures and the far-off misty shape of wedding-rings, pure and true. “Yes.”