FIC: TLC (5/?)
Title: TLC
Rating: NC-17 eventually
Pairing: V/O and some others
Word Count: 2,677 chapter; 13,341 total
Disclaimer: I do not own any of these people and this is a work of fiction.
Summary: AU. Orlando never made LotR and never got a highway road to fame. Instead he's languished at the bottom rung and has finally gotten the break of his life. But as things come together, other things are falling apart. Still there's always hope and... a chance for love.
Previous Chapters: here
- 2005 -
“Orlando.”
Oh shit, Viggo didn’t sound please. Actually, he sounded downright pissed. Orlando grimaced instinctively and ran a hand through his curls. Of course, he had no idea why Viggo would be unhappy with him. He hadn’t done anything… nothing.
“Hi Viggo,” Orlando said softly, calmly, much more than he really felt. “How-”
“Is there a reason you didn’t tell me about your doctor visit?”
Orlando blinked slowly and decided staring at the pink flower walls was a good decision. Even though they were grossly feminine, there was something calming about the floral design. But then anything would be when confronted with a comparison to an irritated Viggo.
“ORLANDO!”
“It was a checkup, that’s all,” Orlando muttered. “Nothing’s wrong. I just had a cold.”
“I told you to take better care of yourself,” Viggo almost snapped.
“I am!” Orlando exclaimed.
“I have to if you won’t!”
“You aren’t my mother!” Orlando shouted. Not by a long shot, he thought. He definitely didn’t want to think of Viggo as his parent. That would be… nauseating, considering that he wanted something from Viggo that he didn’t think Viggo was willing to give. “You’re not!”
“Of course, I’m not,” Viggo said sharply. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care for you, what happens to you. You’re like-”
“I’m not your son!” Orlando cried out. “Don’t you even dare say it.”
“I wasn’t about to,” Viggo said, his voice having strangely lost volume. “I suppose you’re like… my best friend.”
That wasn’t what Orlando had expected at all. When Viggo had started with I suppose Orlando had been thinking that something was about to come out of Viggo’s mouth that he wouldn’t like at all. But best friends was something Orlando could take. It was better than family, much better than son.
“You’re definitely mine,” Orlando murmured. “You mean the world to me.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to confessing his real feelings for Viggo. God, all he had to do was add a couple of words and then it would be out. But he was so afraid of what Viggo would say. It was easier not to say anything and just keep things as they were.
Orlando didn’t even like to consider his true feelings for Viggo. It was too hopeless.
“I care deeply for you,” Viggo said roughly. “And if something’s wrong, you know I’ll be there for you. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. You know?”
Orlando swallowed with some difficulty. He knew from his side, that he’d go to Viggo if anything was wrong with him. But to hear the same from Viggo made him realize that even if Viggo never felt exactly the same way about him, there was still something between them no one else could touch.
“Yeah, I know. I know.”
- 1990 -
It was some months after he met Viggo that he realized he was turned on by guys. When Orlando woke up with morning wood, the dreams he remembered weren’t of breasts or soft bodies, but of cocks and hard muscles. In the showers, he would masturbate to the thought of another guy jerking him off or sucking his cock. It was never a girl that got him off. God, he knew when he had started thinking of Viggo like that, that something was wrong with him.
Viggo was old enough to be his father, for fuck’s sake.
This was screwed up. Orlando rolled around onto his stomach and onto his growing erection. He buried his face into his pillow and tried to will his cock down. “Not now,” he whispered. “Not this.”
But Viggo’s bare chest popped into his mind and Orlando groaned as he bit his bottom lip. Why did Viggo have to go shirtless around his house? Why did Viggo have to look like sex on legs? Why did Viggo have to be so goddamn gorgeous?
Orlando wiggled his hips and rubbed his hard-on against his white sheets. He breathed in heavily, torturing his cock with his slow, not enough friction movements. It wasn’t enough to get him to come, but it was enough to put him on the edge. He tingled and all it would take was one good fisting and he’d burst. But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t come if he thought of Viggo.
He had to stop thinking about the man who could be his father like that. It wasn’t right.
- 1995 -
Another nameless face with a cock to shove up his arse. Orlando licked his lips and ripped the foil off the condom. He then rolled it up onto the stranger’s nice, thick cock. It wasn’t as long as he’d like, but the girth was very, very decent. Orlando smiled and rubbed his cheek against the stranger’s muscled stomach.
“Fuck me hard,” he almost moaned, running his finger up the condom-covered cock. “All right?”
This stranger grinned, a much kinder expression than Orlando’s last one night stand. A much nicer cock too, he thought a few minutes later when it started slowly fucking him, rubbing against his prostate ever so brilliantly.
- 2000 -
Living with Viggo caused an inherent problem to get only worse. The fact Orlando woke up most days from fantasies in which Viggo was the star with a hard-on when they hadn’t been under the same roof didn’t help his morning wood. Orlando groaned and clutched desperately at a pillow to hold on his lap when Viggo burst into the room with a breakfast tray.
“Good morning! Another late night?” Viggo asked, sounding way too chirpy in the morning, even for him. Orlando eyed the coffee with a healthy dose of interest, but the actual sight of pancakes and scrambled eggs didn’t do much to enthuse his stomach. All he wanted was to swallow some of that black stuff and get his head together so he could will down his contrary cock.
“Yeah,” Orlando muttered, his back leaning not very comfortably against the wooden headboard. He would rather be lying down, but having a pillow on his lap wouldn’t be an easy thing to explain. In his current position, it looked a lot less awkward. Though how much longer he could keep the pillow covering his erection was the ultimate question. “Night shoots are a bloody nightmare.”
“But it’s worth it, isn’t it?” Viggo said, setting the tray down-Thank God-next to him instead of making him remove the pillow from his lap. “You finally have your first credited role.”
“Took bloody forever.”
“And yet it happened,” Viggo murmured as he sat down next to him, his body so close that Orlando imagined he could taste him from the distance.
Instinctively, he held the pillow tighter against his chest, though making sure it still covered his groin decently. “Yeah, I do."
- 2005 -
Sightseeing in NYC had been much more fun than Orlando had even anticipated. Who would have thought that Eric was a bit of a kid when it came to seeing stuff? He would goggle after the simplest things like it was something incredible. It was a wide-eyed innocence that reminded Orlando of himself when he was a bite-size thing, something that he certainly hadn’t expected out of big and tough Bana.
If anything, it’d brought them closer than drinking had done. Orlando grinned and buried his face into his pillow. God, why did it have to be morning again? Mornings, in his opinion, were overrated misery. He would like nothing better than to sleep in until past noon. Unfortunately, Mendes liked to work in the morning. The earlier the better, he said.
Orlando raised his head when he heard loud knocking in his door. “Who is it?” he called. He wasn’t about to get up because some bloody maid wanted to get her job done as soon as possible. It was only eight o’clock! It wasn’t even a decent hour and it didn’t help that he felt like shit again. Ugh, why weren’t the bloody antibiotics working?
“ERIC! Now open up, you stinking Brit!”
Orlando’s eyes immediately widened as he scrambled out of his bed, knowing better than to keep Eric waiting. What he’d realized in the three-or had it already been a month?-weeks he’d known Eric was the man wasn’t patient. What he wanted, he wanted now. Waiting for something wasn’t in his small list of virtues. But Eric was becoming a good friend, a really good friend.
“I don’t stink,” Orlando declared after he opened his hotel room door. “You’re the stinker.”
Eric grinned and held up a bag. “Breakfast?”
Orlando stepped aside and gestured for Eric to come in. Somehow, he thought with bemusement, he always made friends with blokes that liked to feed him. He wasn’t that skinny, dammit!
- 2000 -
It had been a good, forgotten-in-the-shuffle type of film. Orlando sighed as he read the review from an Independent Film magazine. They were kind, even mentioning his name, but it wasn’t enough if the big reviewers like New York Times or Premiere or Entertainment Weekly or anything of that sort didn’t pick it up. Death knell.
He knew the director would submit it to some of the independent film festivals, it would get seen by some, but there was simply nothing great about it to make it stand out. They had been counting on its somewhat commercial appeal, even if it was an indie. After all, it was a love story. A dysfunctional marriage, but still a romance.
And it was going down the drain. Like his fucking career, Orlando thought, tossing the review aside. So much for first credited role bringing him anywhere. Sometimes it was better to be an extra in nothing until something big came about than to have a supporting role in something that was a huge failure.
His box office receipts were looking mighty poor.
- 2005 -
“You’re not getting better, are you?” Eric asked bluntly after they’d polished off the croissants. Well, Eric had ended up eating most of them, but Orlando counted on that being because he was just a bigger man with an appetite to suit. “You still look like shit and it’s been almost two weeks since you started those pills.”
So it’d been a month then, Orlando mused. Time was going so fast that it didn’t really feel like it’d been four week, or even twenty-eight days, or however long it really was. “Thanks, Eric, you really do something for someone’s ego,” Orlando muttered. “One day, someone’s going to smack you upside the head.”
“Won’t be you,” Eric retorted. “My kids have more muscle than you do.”
“Your kids do not!” Orlando exclaimed, trying to look horribly offended at the thought of two little pipsqueaks having more muscles than he does, but he ended up failing. “I’ll have you know, I’m in perfectly good shape!”
Eric rolled his eyes with great exaggeration. “You’re skinny like a rail and it doesn’t help that you look like you’ve been steamrollered. Even that black gunk you drink,” he said, waving at the coffee, “doesn’t seem to snap you up.”
“I’m fine, the meds just aren’t working,” Orlando mumbled and then abruptly pressed his mouth shut.
Eric narrowed his dark brown eyes. “I thought you said they were starting to work.”
If he could have hidden behind something, Orlando would have dived for it. But unfortunately there was nothing in sight that could cover him. “I guess they aren’t.”
“I could have told you that last week,” Eric retorted.
“Well, they take a while to kick in!” Orlando exclaimed. “They’re not miracle pills.”
“They should be,” Eric muttered and Orland had to grin. That tone reminded him of the childish, sightseeing Eric he’d spent one entire weekend with. Too bad they were too drained from filming to do a sequel to that. “Orlando Bloom.”
Orlando raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Go see the doctor again.”
He really hated doctors, but he knew better than to argue with Eric when he had that serious, earnest and concerned look. “All right,” Orlando said. “I’ll make another appointment.”
- 2005 -
“Back again, I see,” Dr. Valentine said as he shuffled into the room with a clipboard in hand. “You look worse.”
Orlando rolled his eyes at the obvious. “Thank you, Jason. I think I know that.”
“It would be the reason you’re putting money into my bank account,” Jason said with a grin. “Well, I can see that the antibiotics aren’t working.”
“No, they aren’t,” Orlando replied wryly.
“I thought they’d do the trick,” Jason said, a frown marring his smooth forehead. “I don’t really know why they wouldn’t at least improve you a bit. I think we should do some blood tests. I don’t think it’s just a cold or even the flu.”
Jerking his face toward the doctor, Orlando then froze. “Blood test?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. It’s all quite normal and a good way to make sure that it’s not something else,” Jason replied, jotting something down on his clipboard. “If you really want to be brave, I’ll even insert the damn needle myself. But I’ll warn you, Mandy’s a lot better at sticking people than I am.”
Orlando tried really hard not to blanch, but from the slow spreading smile on Jason’s face, he definitely didn’t succeed. “Whatever you think is best.”
“I’ll call Mandy,” Jason said. He set his clipboard down and as he passed Orlando, he placed on hand on his shoulder. “Everything is going to be fine. Routine stuff, this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Orlando said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
The doctor stuck his head out the door and called in a somewhat loud voice, “Sara, can you get Mandy in here?”
- 2005 -
“Hey.”
“Hey you,” Orlando said, smiling when he recognized the voice on the other side of the line. “How’s the whole artistic retreat going?”
“Good, but over,” Viggo replied. “Are you feeling better?”
Orlando hesitated before answering truthfully, “No. I feel like shit.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” Viggo asked, concern coloring his tone.
“Yeah, just yesterday.”
“That’s good, what did he say?”
Orlando rolled onto his stomach and propped the phone down on the bed, placing his ear over it and using both pillows to cushion his head over the receiver. “He doesn’t quite know, but he did a blood test just to make sure it’s nothing serious like that. He doesn’t sound too worried.”
“Maybe you should see another doctor,” Viggo said. “Just to get another opinion. Maybe this doctor’s missing something.”
“I’m sure everything will come back fine,” Orlando responded. “Maybe I’m low on some kind of vitamin or something. Just let’s wait and get the blood test results back, all right?”
Viggo sighed. “All right.”
“So…” Orlando began, pulling the covers over his chilled body, “are you back in L.A.?”
“For now.”
“Got another film project? What’s it this time? God, I hope it’s not another one of you being the bloody hero,” Orlando mock groaned. “Seriously though, what is it?”
“You know I haven’t signed any new projects, or even read any,” Viggo said. “I would have ranted or raved about them if I did. No, I was thinking of flying to New York and seeing you. If you wanted.”
“You would?!”
“Yeah, why not? I haven’t gotten any script that I really want to sign to do and I’ve finally got some time off and I can kick your ass if you’re not taking care of yourself if I’m there.”
“I’m sooo looking forward to that,” Orlando said dryly.
“If you don’t want me to come-”
“I DO!” Orlando exclaimed and was glad they were talking over the phone because his cheeks started to burn. “I… I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too, you little minx,” Viggo said with a good deal of affection. “I should be out there at the end of the week. How does that sound?”
“Great. Wonderful,” Orlando murmured. “I can’t wait.”
“Just a few days.”
Orlando smiled and echoed, “A few days.”
TBC
Rating: NC-17 eventually
Pairing: V/O and some others
Word Count: 2,677 chapter; 13,341 total
Disclaimer: I do not own any of these people and this is a work of fiction.
Summary: AU. Orlando never made LotR and never got a highway road to fame. Instead he's languished at the bottom rung and has finally gotten the break of his life. But as things come together, other things are falling apart. Still there's always hope and... a chance for love.
Previous Chapters: here
- 2005 -
“Orlando.”
Oh shit, Viggo didn’t sound please. Actually, he sounded downright pissed. Orlando grimaced instinctively and ran a hand through his curls. Of course, he had no idea why Viggo would be unhappy with him. He hadn’t done anything… nothing.
“Hi Viggo,” Orlando said softly, calmly, much more than he really felt. “How-”
“Is there a reason you didn’t tell me about your doctor visit?”
Orlando blinked slowly and decided staring at the pink flower walls was a good decision. Even though they were grossly feminine, there was something calming about the floral design. But then anything would be when confronted with a comparison to an irritated Viggo.
“ORLANDO!”
“It was a checkup, that’s all,” Orlando muttered. “Nothing’s wrong. I just had a cold.”
“I told you to take better care of yourself,” Viggo almost snapped.
“I am!” Orlando exclaimed.
“I have to if you won’t!”
“You aren’t my mother!” Orlando shouted. Not by a long shot, he thought. He definitely didn’t want to think of Viggo as his parent. That would be… nauseating, considering that he wanted something from Viggo that he didn’t think Viggo was willing to give. “You’re not!”
“Of course, I’m not,” Viggo said sharply. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care for you, what happens to you. You’re like-”
“I’m not your son!” Orlando cried out. “Don’t you even dare say it.”
“I wasn’t about to,” Viggo said, his voice having strangely lost volume. “I suppose you’re like… my best friend.”
That wasn’t what Orlando had expected at all. When Viggo had started with I suppose Orlando had been thinking that something was about to come out of Viggo’s mouth that he wouldn’t like at all. But best friends was something Orlando could take. It was better than family, much better than son.
“You’re definitely mine,” Orlando murmured. “You mean the world to me.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to confessing his real feelings for Viggo. God, all he had to do was add a couple of words and then it would be out. But he was so afraid of what Viggo would say. It was easier not to say anything and just keep things as they were.
Orlando didn’t even like to consider his true feelings for Viggo. It was too hopeless.
“I care deeply for you,” Viggo said roughly. “And if something’s wrong, you know I’ll be there for you. It doesn’t matter what’s going on. You know?”
Orlando swallowed with some difficulty. He knew from his side, that he’d go to Viggo if anything was wrong with him. But to hear the same from Viggo made him realize that even if Viggo never felt exactly the same way about him, there was still something between them no one else could touch.
“Yeah, I know. I know.”
- 1990 -
It was some months after he met Viggo that he realized he was turned on by guys. When Orlando woke up with morning wood, the dreams he remembered weren’t of breasts or soft bodies, but of cocks and hard muscles. In the showers, he would masturbate to the thought of another guy jerking him off or sucking his cock. It was never a girl that got him off. God, he knew when he had started thinking of Viggo like that, that something was wrong with him.
Viggo was old enough to be his father, for fuck’s sake.
This was screwed up. Orlando rolled around onto his stomach and onto his growing erection. He buried his face into his pillow and tried to will his cock down. “Not now,” he whispered. “Not this.”
But Viggo’s bare chest popped into his mind and Orlando groaned as he bit his bottom lip. Why did Viggo have to go shirtless around his house? Why did Viggo have to look like sex on legs? Why did Viggo have to be so goddamn gorgeous?
Orlando wiggled his hips and rubbed his hard-on against his white sheets. He breathed in heavily, torturing his cock with his slow, not enough friction movements. It wasn’t enough to get him to come, but it was enough to put him on the edge. He tingled and all it would take was one good fisting and he’d burst. But he’d promised himself he wouldn’t come if he thought of Viggo.
He had to stop thinking about the man who could be his father like that. It wasn’t right.
- 1995 -
Another nameless face with a cock to shove up his arse. Orlando licked his lips and ripped the foil off the condom. He then rolled it up onto the stranger’s nice, thick cock. It wasn’t as long as he’d like, but the girth was very, very decent. Orlando smiled and rubbed his cheek against the stranger’s muscled stomach.
“Fuck me hard,” he almost moaned, running his finger up the condom-covered cock. “All right?”
This stranger grinned, a much kinder expression than Orlando’s last one night stand. A much nicer cock too, he thought a few minutes later when it started slowly fucking him, rubbing against his prostate ever so brilliantly.
- 2000 -
Living with Viggo caused an inherent problem to get only worse. The fact Orlando woke up most days from fantasies in which Viggo was the star with a hard-on when they hadn’t been under the same roof didn’t help his morning wood. Orlando groaned and clutched desperately at a pillow to hold on his lap when Viggo burst into the room with a breakfast tray.
“Good morning! Another late night?” Viggo asked, sounding way too chirpy in the morning, even for him. Orlando eyed the coffee with a healthy dose of interest, but the actual sight of pancakes and scrambled eggs didn’t do much to enthuse his stomach. All he wanted was to swallow some of that black stuff and get his head together so he could will down his contrary cock.
“Yeah,” Orlando muttered, his back leaning not very comfortably against the wooden headboard. He would rather be lying down, but having a pillow on his lap wouldn’t be an easy thing to explain. In his current position, it looked a lot less awkward. Though how much longer he could keep the pillow covering his erection was the ultimate question. “Night shoots are a bloody nightmare.”
“But it’s worth it, isn’t it?” Viggo said, setting the tray down-Thank God-next to him instead of making him remove the pillow from his lap. “You finally have your first credited role.”
“Took bloody forever.”
“And yet it happened,” Viggo murmured as he sat down next to him, his body so close that Orlando imagined he could taste him from the distance.
Instinctively, he held the pillow tighter against his chest, though making sure it still covered his groin decently. “Yeah, I do."
- 2005 -
Sightseeing in NYC had been much more fun than Orlando had even anticipated. Who would have thought that Eric was a bit of a kid when it came to seeing stuff? He would goggle after the simplest things like it was something incredible. It was a wide-eyed innocence that reminded Orlando of himself when he was a bite-size thing, something that he certainly hadn’t expected out of big and tough Bana.
If anything, it’d brought them closer than drinking had done. Orlando grinned and buried his face into his pillow. God, why did it have to be morning again? Mornings, in his opinion, were overrated misery. He would like nothing better than to sleep in until past noon. Unfortunately, Mendes liked to work in the morning. The earlier the better, he said.
Orlando raised his head when he heard loud knocking in his door. “Who is it?” he called. He wasn’t about to get up because some bloody maid wanted to get her job done as soon as possible. It was only eight o’clock! It wasn’t even a decent hour and it didn’t help that he felt like shit again. Ugh, why weren’t the bloody antibiotics working?
“ERIC! Now open up, you stinking Brit!”
Orlando’s eyes immediately widened as he scrambled out of his bed, knowing better than to keep Eric waiting. What he’d realized in the three-or had it already been a month?-weeks he’d known Eric was the man wasn’t patient. What he wanted, he wanted now. Waiting for something wasn’t in his small list of virtues. But Eric was becoming a good friend, a really good friend.
“I don’t stink,” Orlando declared after he opened his hotel room door. “You’re the stinker.”
Eric grinned and held up a bag. “Breakfast?”
Orlando stepped aside and gestured for Eric to come in. Somehow, he thought with bemusement, he always made friends with blokes that liked to feed him. He wasn’t that skinny, dammit!
- 2000 -
It had been a good, forgotten-in-the-shuffle type of film. Orlando sighed as he read the review from an Independent Film magazine. They were kind, even mentioning his name, but it wasn’t enough if the big reviewers like New York Times or Premiere or Entertainment Weekly or anything of that sort didn’t pick it up. Death knell.
He knew the director would submit it to some of the independent film festivals, it would get seen by some, but there was simply nothing great about it to make it stand out. They had been counting on its somewhat commercial appeal, even if it was an indie. After all, it was a love story. A dysfunctional marriage, but still a romance.
And it was going down the drain. Like his fucking career, Orlando thought, tossing the review aside. So much for first credited role bringing him anywhere. Sometimes it was better to be an extra in nothing until something big came about than to have a supporting role in something that was a huge failure.
His box office receipts were looking mighty poor.
- 2005 -
“You’re not getting better, are you?” Eric asked bluntly after they’d polished off the croissants. Well, Eric had ended up eating most of them, but Orlando counted on that being because he was just a bigger man with an appetite to suit. “You still look like shit and it’s been almost two weeks since you started those pills.”
So it’d been a month then, Orlando mused. Time was going so fast that it didn’t really feel like it’d been four week, or even twenty-eight days, or however long it really was. “Thanks, Eric, you really do something for someone’s ego,” Orlando muttered. “One day, someone’s going to smack you upside the head.”
“Won’t be you,” Eric retorted. “My kids have more muscle than you do.”
“Your kids do not!” Orlando exclaimed, trying to look horribly offended at the thought of two little pipsqueaks having more muscles than he does, but he ended up failing. “I’ll have you know, I’m in perfectly good shape!”
Eric rolled his eyes with great exaggeration. “You’re skinny like a rail and it doesn’t help that you look like you’ve been steamrollered. Even that black gunk you drink,” he said, waving at the coffee, “doesn’t seem to snap you up.”
“I’m fine, the meds just aren’t working,” Orlando mumbled and then abruptly pressed his mouth shut.
Eric narrowed his dark brown eyes. “I thought you said they were starting to work.”
If he could have hidden behind something, Orlando would have dived for it. But unfortunately there was nothing in sight that could cover him. “I guess they aren’t.”
“I could have told you that last week,” Eric retorted.
“Well, they take a while to kick in!” Orlando exclaimed. “They’re not miracle pills.”
“They should be,” Eric muttered and Orland had to grin. That tone reminded him of the childish, sightseeing Eric he’d spent one entire weekend with. Too bad they were too drained from filming to do a sequel to that. “Orlando Bloom.”
Orlando raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“Go see the doctor again.”
He really hated doctors, but he knew better than to argue with Eric when he had that serious, earnest and concerned look. “All right,” Orlando said. “I’ll make another appointment.”
- 2005 -
“Back again, I see,” Dr. Valentine said as he shuffled into the room with a clipboard in hand. “You look worse.”
Orlando rolled his eyes at the obvious. “Thank you, Jason. I think I know that.”
“It would be the reason you’re putting money into my bank account,” Jason said with a grin. “Well, I can see that the antibiotics aren’t working.”
“No, they aren’t,” Orlando replied wryly.
“I thought they’d do the trick,” Jason said, a frown marring his smooth forehead. “I don’t really know why they wouldn’t at least improve you a bit. I think we should do some blood tests. I don’t think it’s just a cold or even the flu.”
Jerking his face toward the doctor, Orlando then froze. “Blood test?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. It’s all quite normal and a good way to make sure that it’s not something else,” Jason replied, jotting something down on his clipboard. “If you really want to be brave, I’ll even insert the damn needle myself. But I’ll warn you, Mandy’s a lot better at sticking people than I am.”
Orlando tried really hard not to blanch, but from the slow spreading smile on Jason’s face, he definitely didn’t succeed. “Whatever you think is best.”
“I’ll call Mandy,” Jason said. He set his clipboard down and as he passed Orlando, he placed on hand on his shoulder. “Everything is going to be fine. Routine stuff, this.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Orlando said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
The doctor stuck his head out the door and called in a somewhat loud voice, “Sara, can you get Mandy in here?”
- 2005 -
“Hey.”
“Hey you,” Orlando said, smiling when he recognized the voice on the other side of the line. “How’s the whole artistic retreat going?”
“Good, but over,” Viggo replied. “Are you feeling better?”
Orlando hesitated before answering truthfully, “No. I feel like shit.”
“Have you seen a doctor?” Viggo asked, concern coloring his tone.
“Yeah, just yesterday.”
“That’s good, what did he say?”
Orlando rolled onto his stomach and propped the phone down on the bed, placing his ear over it and using both pillows to cushion his head over the receiver. “He doesn’t quite know, but he did a blood test just to make sure it’s nothing serious like that. He doesn’t sound too worried.”
“Maybe you should see another doctor,” Viggo said. “Just to get another opinion. Maybe this doctor’s missing something.”
“I’m sure everything will come back fine,” Orlando responded. “Maybe I’m low on some kind of vitamin or something. Just let’s wait and get the blood test results back, all right?”
Viggo sighed. “All right.”
“So…” Orlando began, pulling the covers over his chilled body, “are you back in L.A.?”
“For now.”
“Got another film project? What’s it this time? God, I hope it’s not another one of you being the bloody hero,” Orlando mock groaned. “Seriously though, what is it?”
“You know I haven’t signed any new projects, or even read any,” Viggo said. “I would have ranted or raved about them if I did. No, I was thinking of flying to New York and seeing you. If you wanted.”
“You would?!”
“Yeah, why not? I haven’t gotten any script that I really want to sign to do and I’ve finally got some time off and I can kick your ass if you’re not taking care of yourself if I’m there.”
“I’m sooo looking forward to that,” Orlando said dryly.
“If you don’t want me to come-”
“I DO!” Orlando exclaimed and was glad they were talking over the phone because his cheeks started to burn. “I… I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too, you little minx,” Viggo said with a good deal of affection. “I should be out there at the end of the week. How does that sound?”
“Great. Wonderful,” Orlando murmured. “I can’t wait.”
“Just a few days.”
Orlando smiled and echoed, “A few days.”
TBC