fic: skirmish (six)
Title: Skirmish
Authors: neverwiser and sixtieshairdo
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dear Reid (Or perhaps, dear Doctor Oliver. How far into one’s soul does a person have to be before you’re on first name terms?)
Previous chapters: prologue | one | two | three | four| five
Authors' Note: As a general rule, neverwiser writes Luke and sixtieshairdo writes Reid. Warnings for angst.
Luke,
You know me too well.
Yes. My hands immediately went into my pants upon reading your words.
Both hands.
The way you’d jerk me off.
The way you’d wrap one hand around my cock, the other one teasing my balls.
I came thrice.
All of them hurt; each one worse than before.
But I relish the pain. I deserve it. I can take it.
I hate that you’re thinner now. Don’t fuck up your life because I left. Call me patronizing, I don’t care.
Just, don’t.
Fuck up your life, I mean.
I’m not worth that.
I have to confess to you something. Your letter was timely. All these months being away from you, I’d almost lost your scent, the way your voice hitches brokenly every time I pushed myself inside you deep, the way you’d come hard whenever I said your name with your cock in my mouth.
Your letter flooded my head with vivid memories. Fucking you in the back of my car. Rimming you in the shower. Blowing you in the movie theatre.
And I’d almost forgotten that one time when you tied me to your parents’ bed as you rode me, your face as angelic as your body is sin.
Your letter reminded me just how bad we were together, how good the sex was.
How good the sex will always be.
All my dreams, up to this point, have been fraught with dry leaves and a faceless crowd. Now, I hear you breathe, I smell your heady sex, I can almost feel the tremor of your heartbeat under my fingertips.
Almost, Luke.
Your letter proved to me the damage I had caused. The way I had broken you, inside and out. The way you are coping with grief - because in a way, I am speaking to you from the grave, with memories from a dead past - is proof of my poison.
Yes, I love you. Yes, I crave your body against mine.
But no, I cannot do this to you anymore.
Reid.
*
In some ways, he would have preferred less. A note, scribbled perhaps on the back of a business card. Letter received - R. Oliver, or something like it. Reid doesn’t give the least he could give, but he doesn’t give the most.
Luke sighs, sits back, knocks his head against the headboard.
The feel of the wooden headboard on his skull makes him feel stupid and ridiculous. He’s saved the letter: found it this morning just as he was leaving for work, and he let it burn a hole in his bag all day, waiting until he got home, into a room with a locked door to read it. Because he thought Reid would take the bait. He thought he’d be jerking off furiously, Reid’s silky voice echoing in his ears, a thousand dirty, pretty things strewn across the page.
He shouldn’t be surprised. This is Reid Oliver.
And yet.
His hand does creep under his waistband, his cock hardening gradually as he rereads Reid’s words and relives the memories. Reid tied to his parents bed, spread wide, arching into his mouth. The delicious debauchery. Reid was right, the sex always had been good. Even when the silences had stretched into danger, their bodies always knew what to say.
He strokes, slowly, and yet he’s so angry it’s hard to focus.
He glances back at the letter.
How good the sex will always be, he reads.
Suddenly realizing the insinuation, he comes unexpectedly, his whole body jerking around his pulsating cock.
*
When he looks down, some of his come has landed on the letter. He thinks about just sending it back directly, dry and crusty and smelling of his lust.
He’s a writer. He’s got to be able to come up with something more original than that.
*
He’s angry for the rest of the week - bombs and grenades exploding in his blood; two sides of a battle being fought in his heart. He snaps at his parents, and at Casey, and at random kids on the street.
It’s not very Luke Snyder, to be frank.
He’s not even sure why he’s angry, rereading the letter for the thousandth time. He’s got what he wanted - what he asked Reid for every day while they were together. Reid’s not trying to control him, not trying to own him: he’s letting him be. He’s being patient, and the word sounds like a gun sliding into his mouth.
Reid was always so jealous, so possessive, wanting every bit of Luke in the palm of his hand. The Reid he remembers wouldn’t crave his body and not take it. The Reid he remembers was more selfish than that. But now that he’s being so calm, so polite, so maddeningly respectful, Luke can barely breathe.
The problem, he’s starting to realize in a way that makes him not want to know, wasn’t that Reid was too possessive.
It’s that Luke couldn’t face how much he wants to be possessed.
*
He dreams of Reid fucking him and blowing him and rimming him. He dreams of that silk-soft tongue. Of those elegant legs. Of that magnificent dick.
Most of all, he dreams of those eyes, and those dreams physically hurt, because the eyes aren’t lustful, or desperate, or wanting. In these dreams he wishes he could forget the eyes are filled with disappointment.
And still, he dreams of Reid across a minefield. But something’s different. Reid doesn’t move, still, doesn’t cross the boundaries and come and find him, but in these dreams Luke gets the feeling that he wants to. In these dreams, it’s not Reid’s, but his fault that nothing’s connected.
When he wakes from this strange combination of visions, he’s angrier than before. Reid Oliver’s in his skin. He wants to shake him, to lose him, but most of all he wants to have him.
He jacks off, every night, to Reid’s name. But it makes him bitter. It makes him bleed with anger, spilling his frustration into the darkness.
*
He got mad. Now it’s time to get even.
It takes him nearly a fortnight to figure out what to do. He wants to fight back - wants to be strong just one more time, wants to push Reid fucking levelheaded Oliver right over the edge.
He wonders how depraved he’ll have to be before he gets Reid’s attention.
*
A Saturday night. A sleazy, greasy club in the middle of Chicago.
The music pumps, pumps, pumps through his bones. Flashing lights obscure his vision and blur the lines. The lines between right and wrong. Every man on the dance floor tonight looks like Reid Oliver.
He orders a coke, but nurses it as if it’s neat whiskey. It’s easier to convince someone he just wants a quick fuck if he looks savagely drunk.
In the end, he’s perfect. A little older than Luke, maybe early thirties. He’s forceful, pressing Luke into the wall at the back of the club, tracing the shell of his ear with his tongue, pressing into him harder and harder until he can’t stop. He grunts and moans into Luke’s neck, leaving toothmarks that he’s going to have to hide, the sensible part of his brain tells him.
He focuses, all the way through, on how it feels. He categorizes, documents and details.
When he gets home, he heads to his desk.