Este triste carnival
Fernando Morientes/David Villa, Raúl Gonzalez/David Villa, Raúl Gonzalez/Fernando Morientes/David Villa, R.
His true unravelling begins after a bruising fuck.
There’s a breath, a hand on his thigh, brushing past his spent member.
A whispered voice in his ear, belonging to someone else altogether, someone who's lips could barely drop filthy words just five minutes before.
His breaths ragged, David lies on the mattress, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. In stunned silence, his mind buzzes at a thousand miles per minute.
When David was in university, he made two girls cry.
He didn’t even know how he had gotten himself in that position.
On the phone with his mother, he had expected some sympathy. Instead, she told him off for sleeping with them, leading them down a path he had no desire with either of them to walk.
Looking back, that should have given him a clue.
For David, it begins like this.
One of the-many, if he's grudgingly honest-‘up and coming' journalists in the leading daily broadsheet in the country assigned to research a massive financial scandal involving several government ministers, some athletic clubs, business leaders. His assignment? Interview the leading financial experts. Which is why he had been chasing this guy from his lecture hall, to a conference, to the courtroom, and finally to the university department.
The assistant Dean had let him into the room, and he waited in the cluttered office.
“David...er...Villa?” Fernando Morientes walks in, leather bag heaving with books slung across his shoulder which he places on the table before him. David stands up.
“My apologies for being late...”
“It's no problem,” David lies, taking the offered hand.
This man looks different up close, he notes to himself-for purely professional reasons. Morientes leans back in his chair and looks at him, a small smile on his face as if he can read right through him.
It's hard not to think about the way the man's eyes raked over him. For some reason, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Looking back, he should have trusted himself with that warning. Instead he thought it was the thrill. Of the chase. The article, he means, the article.
Who’s he kidding?
He can't remember the interview much after that. But he remembers the headlines that hit the stands a few weeks later, and the telephone call a few days after.
“You set me up.”
“Señor Morientes?” David sits up in his chair, the pen sliding out from between his lips and onto the floor between his desk and Pepe’s. The other man looks up, eyeing the phone with curiosity. David turns his chair, facing the flashing screen of his laptop.
“I think we're way beyond that,” the voice comes clear over the line, surprisingly youthful for what David assumes is about to come. "You've taken my four year's worth of work and essentially wrote my book."
David frowns. “You were under no obligation to speak-”
A laugh interrupts him, boyish. It takes him back even more.
“I have tenure.”
David doesn't say anything.
“I'd hardly ever heard of you before. But you impress me.”
“...Thank...you.” It comes out as more of a question and he kicks himself for sounding weak, especially in the light of such a backhanded comment.
The nasty response about to roll off his tongue to make up for that dies with, “How about we have dinner now that your story's essentially been put to bed and you can impress me some more.”
David blinks. “What?”
A chuckle comes down the line, “Should I not have brought up the idea of a bed so early in this conversation?”
It also starts like this.
Snowed in, in Copenhagen. The editor tells him to send the article over and stay the weekend on the paper.
“Don’t risk driving, your dead frozen corpse does me no good,” Emery murmurs down the line and hangs up.
David stares outside his window at the dark whiteness of the city in blizzard. It’s cold.
Later he finds himself practically alone at the sleek Scandinavian bar downstairs, nursing a tumbler of whisky. To warm up, he says to the uninterested bartender.
Just as he makes to turn and trudge back up to his cold, sterile room, there’s a shuffle and a noise, and a body drops into the seat next to him.
He eyes him through the corner of his eye as the man orders a drink.
“And one for him too,” the man says, and turns to David, with a startling dark gaze.
His name is Raúl and he’s also from Spain.
Actually, David recognises him the minute he saw him but the investigative journalist in him keeps that fact to himself. A memory of an article in the Literature & Arts section of his paper-something about, eagerly awaiting for a sophomore effort-flashes across his mind immediately as he locks on his identity.
“I’m a writer.” Raúl says against the pillow, after their second fuck that night.
“Actually, I know,” David shrugs, tugging the sheets his way, because yeah, ok, you’re cold, we know, I am too-and the way Raúl looks at him, like he’s expecting more than just that from him, makes him add, harshly, “And not a very good one.”
Raúl narrows his eyes.
“I just mean, when’s your follow up novel coming out?” He pauses. “Will it ever?”
David doesn’t expect him to stay now, but Raúl does.
When the blizzard clears, two days later, they both check out and share cab to the airport. But their flights are different and they don’t ask for each other’s numbers.
When he comes gets home, his place is water damaged from the kitchen to the bathroom and there's a two-month notice on the door. He drops his keys on the counter and swears out loud.
His phone rings. “You’re back?”
Fernando.
He tries to blow him off as he surveys the damage in his home, but the man is persistent.
“It’s my turn to be late,” he remarks as he sits down with a heavy sigh, eyeing him gratefully. “Don’t you look like a sight for sore eyes.”
“Clichés? From a journalist?” Fernando hangs up the phone-witha whispered ciao Raúl that would sound pretentious from anybody else. He should have known but how would he, with this man, grinning at him. “Why, what’s wrong? The story went alright?”
He opens his mouth, and then frowns, shakes his head, “Nah, it’s nothing, let’s just eat.”
David presses his lips to the freckle against a tanned shoulder and watches Fernando smoke-just one-before he sighs and threatens to put out the next cigarette in his ear.
“Not in my bed.”
Fernando grins, slipping off the bed easily and going outside to stick his head out of David’s tiny balcony.
David falls back on the bed. He’s scratching at his chin when Fernando walks back in, holding the notice in his hand.
“Stay with me.”
David pauses and looks at him questioningly.
Fernando shrugs, “While you look for a new place.”
And that leads him back to the here and now.
Rather, two hours ago.
His suitcase was barely in the door of the flat when Raúl from fucking Copenhagen steps out of the doorway to his left.
In shock, he turns around, searching for Fernando behind him.
“David, hi, I’m Raúl,” he starts as if they had only just met. As if Copenhagen had never happened. And then-“Fernando’s my partner.”
He watches in shock as Raúl breaches the distance between them with a hard kiss.
In the daze, he hears footsteps, goosebumps against the back of his neck standing up.
“It was Fernando's idea,” Raúl whispers.
David turns his head to him. “Why?”
He tries to ignore the soft press of Fernando’s steady hands against his thighs. Shifts out of his grip.
Raúl doesn't say anything for a long time but it's implicit even before he voices it out. “There are things you do for certain people you would not do for just anybody.”
He sits up, the sheets falling to his waist, looking at Fernando from over David's shoulder.
“Did you-“
Raúl brushes past him, lowering his gaze, feeling dirty, feeling...something. He nods curtly with his back to him, abandoning his suitcase in the foyer of their apartment.
Fernando is persistent, walking up behind up, tugging his coat off.
He sighs, tired, turns around, pushing out of his grip. “Nando, por fa-” the words die on his lips as Nando pushes him against the wall, kissing him so bruisingly he doesn’t know if the coppery taste of blood is his or Nando’s.
Later, when he’s on his back, body trembling and pliant, he looks up at the darkness, Fernando’s eyes boring into him. He wants to say something but it doesn’t come.
Fernando does, though.
He reads the glance that's not meant for him and he's never felt like an outsider more.
Something in him wills him to get up out of the bed, scrabbling for his clothes. Walk away walk away walk away. Behind him Raúl's eyes follow Fernando's eyes following him.
When he makes it to the hallway, there's the sound of two pairs of footsteps. “David, wait-” A hand on his shoulder.
When he turns around, Raúl stops abruptly and glares. At Fernando. He opens his mouth, "Are you fucking kidding me--" Raúl turns on his heel, wrenching his arm out from where Fernando is holding it.
Fernando lets out a sigh, running his now free hand through his hair. "David, look--"
“This is fucked up,” David mumbles. “I can't be here just so I can spice up some fucked up relationship.”
“It’s not that.”
“How is it not? Look, there’s you, there’s me, there’s Raúl-”
Fernando reaches out to him, “you like us both, don’t you?”
David starts. He hasn’t really thought about it.
“And you don’t exactly have anywhere else to go.”
David sinks onto a chair.
Fernando disappears into the bathroom and he imagines-or his subconscious registers- the two of them, whispering heatedly.
That night, Fernando has an evening lecture and it is just the two of them, sitting at the table, eating the dinner Nando prepared in silence.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Raúl glares at him for the umpteenth time.
“I need to know. Is this some sort of...game?” He snarls, pushing his barely touched plate aside. “Because it’s....”
Raúl determinedly keeps his eye on his plate, forcing down bites of food. “I never forced you in Copenhagen.”
“I didn’t know how you were then.”
“And you could have left this afternoon.”
He has a point, and David has to sit on it.
“And you never asked,” Raúl shrugs, “for a journalist, you’re shit with awareness.”
David snorts. “I’ll take your criticism when you’ve written that follow up novel they say you’re going to write but so far haven’t seen a word of.”
He watches as Raúl balls his fists, a delicious spark of triumph running through him.
Fernando is still gone when David packs his unpacked things.
The house is silent for the sounds of fingers against a computer keyboard enduring abuse.
He stands in the hallway, trying to wrench the key from his keychain when a shadow falls.
He looks up. Raúl is eyeing him much in the same scrutinising manner as that morning in Copenhagen.
“I love him-” Raúl mutters angrily as he thrusts.
David bites back a moan, meeting each thrust, eyeing him from under his sweat slicked hair.
“I may not like you-”
David snorts. Or he tries to, but a goddamned moan escapes him.
“But you do something,” thrust, “to me,” thrust.
And he responds with an orgasm, pressing his fingers deep into Raúl’s skin, leaving marks that will last.
When David was twenty-two, he had made two girls cry.
He makes it to his flat after a late deadline.
The hallway floods with light and Fernando’s shamelessly naked, eyes blinking back sleep as he stands in the doorway of his bedroom. “Hey, you. Late night?”
Looking past his shoulder, David can just see the silhouette of Raúl, sheets twisted around his otherwise bare body. He sighs as a strange emotion floods through him.
Fernando tugs on his arm. “Come to bed.”
It all starts because David didn’t take his mother’s advice.
Or perhaps it began when a man with soulful glance fell for someone with an easy smile.
Maybe it is when a man falls in love with two men.
David stays, Raúl will say, typically arrogant-like a writer-because he has no idea how this will end.
Note:
Prompt from a Secret Santa challenge exchange.
His true unravelling begins after a bruising fuck.
There’s a breath, a hand on his thigh, brushing past his spent member.
A whispered voice in his ear, belonging to someone else altogether, someone who's lips could barely drop filthy words just five minutes before.
His breaths ragged, David lies on the mattress, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. In stunned silence, his mind buzzes at a thousand miles per minute.
When David was in university, he made two girls cry.
He didn’t even know how he had gotten himself in that position.
On the phone with his mother, he had expected some sympathy. Instead, she told him off for sleeping with them, leading them down a path he had no desire with either of them to walk.
Looking back, that should have given him a clue.
For David, it begins like this.
One of the-many, if he's grudgingly honest-‘up and coming' journalists in the leading daily broadsheet in the country assigned to research a massive financial scandal involving several government ministers, some athletic clubs, business leaders. His assignment? Interview the leading financial experts. Which is why he had been chasing this guy from his lecture hall, to a conference, to the courtroom, and finally to the university department.
The assistant Dean had let him into the room, and he waited in the cluttered office.
“David...er...Villa?” Fernando Morientes walks in, leather bag heaving with books slung across his shoulder which he places on the table before him. David stands up.
“My apologies for being late...”
“It's no problem,” David lies, taking the offered hand.
This man looks different up close, he notes to himself-for purely professional reasons. Morientes leans back in his chair and looks at him, a small smile on his face as if he can read right through him.
It's hard not to think about the way the man's eyes raked over him. For some reason, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Looking back, he should have trusted himself with that warning. Instead he thought it was the thrill. Of the chase. The article, he means, the article.
Who’s he kidding?
He can't remember the interview much after that. But he remembers the headlines that hit the stands a few weeks later, and the telephone call a few days after.
“You set me up.”
“Señor Morientes?” David sits up in his chair, the pen sliding out from between his lips and onto the floor between his desk and Pepe’s. The other man looks up, eyeing the phone with curiosity. David turns his chair, facing the flashing screen of his laptop.
“I think we're way beyond that,” the voice comes clear over the line, surprisingly youthful for what David assumes is about to come. "You've taken my four year's worth of work and essentially wrote my book."
David frowns. “You were under no obligation to speak-”
A laugh interrupts him, boyish. It takes him back even more.
“I have tenure.”
David doesn't say anything.
“I'd hardly ever heard of you before. But you impress me.”
“...Thank...you.” It comes out as more of a question and he kicks himself for sounding weak, especially in the light of such a backhanded comment.
The nasty response about to roll off his tongue to make up for that dies with, “How about we have dinner now that your story's essentially been put to bed and you can impress me some more.”
David blinks. “What?”
A chuckle comes down the line, “Should I not have brought up the idea of a bed so early in this conversation?”
It also starts like this.
Snowed in, in Copenhagen. The editor tells him to send the article over and stay the weekend on the paper.
“Don’t risk driving, your dead frozen corpse does me no good,” Emery murmurs down the line and hangs up.
David stares outside his window at the dark whiteness of the city in blizzard. It’s cold.
Later he finds himself practically alone at the sleek Scandinavian bar downstairs, nursing a tumbler of whisky. To warm up, he says to the uninterested bartender.
Just as he makes to turn and trudge back up to his cold, sterile room, there’s a shuffle and a noise, and a body drops into the seat next to him.
He eyes him through the corner of his eye as the man orders a drink.
“And one for him too,” the man says, and turns to David, with a startling dark gaze.
His name is Raúl and he’s also from Spain.
Actually, David recognises him the minute he saw him but the investigative journalist in him keeps that fact to himself. A memory of an article in the Literature & Arts section of his paper-something about, eagerly awaiting for a sophomore effort-flashes across his mind immediately as he locks on his identity.
“I’m a writer.” Raúl says against the pillow, after their second fuck that night.
“Actually, I know,” David shrugs, tugging the sheets his way, because yeah, ok, you’re cold, we know, I am too-and the way Raúl looks at him, like he’s expecting more than just that from him, makes him add, harshly, “And not a very good one.”
Raúl narrows his eyes.
“I just mean, when’s your follow up novel coming out?” He pauses. “Will it ever?”
David doesn’t expect him to stay now, but Raúl does.
When the blizzard clears, two days later, they both check out and share cab to the airport. But their flights are different and they don’t ask for each other’s numbers.
When he comes gets home, his place is water damaged from the kitchen to the bathroom and there's a two-month notice on the door. He drops his keys on the counter and swears out loud.
His phone rings. “You’re back?”
Fernando.
He tries to blow him off as he surveys the damage in his home, but the man is persistent.
“It’s my turn to be late,” he remarks as he sits down with a heavy sigh, eyeing him gratefully. “Don’t you look like a sight for sore eyes.”
“Clichés? From a journalist?” Fernando hangs up the phone-witha whispered ciao Raúl that would sound pretentious from anybody else. He should have known but how would he, with this man, grinning at him. “Why, what’s wrong? The story went alright?”
He opens his mouth, and then frowns, shakes his head, “Nah, it’s nothing, let’s just eat.”
David presses his lips to the freckle against a tanned shoulder and watches Fernando smoke-just one-before he sighs and threatens to put out the next cigarette in his ear.
“Not in my bed.”
Fernando grins, slipping off the bed easily and going outside to stick his head out of David’s tiny balcony.
David falls back on the bed. He’s scratching at his chin when Fernando walks back in, holding the notice in his hand.
“Stay with me.”
David pauses and looks at him questioningly.
Fernando shrugs, “While you look for a new place.”
And that leads him back to the here and now.
Rather, two hours ago.
His suitcase was barely in the door of the flat when Raúl from fucking Copenhagen steps out of the doorway to his left.
In shock, he turns around, searching for Fernando behind him.
“David, hi, I’m Raúl,” he starts as if they had only just met. As if Copenhagen had never happened. And then-“Fernando’s my partner.”
He watches in shock as Raúl breaches the distance between them with a hard kiss.
In the daze, he hears footsteps, goosebumps against the back of his neck standing up.
“It was Fernando's idea,” Raúl whispers.
David turns his head to him. “Why?”
He tries to ignore the soft press of Fernando’s steady hands against his thighs. Shifts out of his grip.
Raúl doesn't say anything for a long time but it's implicit even before he voices it out. “There are things you do for certain people you would not do for just anybody.”
He sits up, the sheets falling to his waist, looking at Fernando from over David's shoulder.
“Did you-“
Raúl brushes past him, lowering his gaze, feeling dirty, feeling...something. He nods curtly with his back to him, abandoning his suitcase in the foyer of their apartment.
Fernando is persistent, walking up behind up, tugging his coat off.
He sighs, tired, turns around, pushing out of his grip. “Nando, por fa-” the words die on his lips as Nando pushes him against the wall, kissing him so bruisingly he doesn’t know if the coppery taste of blood is his or Nando’s.
Later, when he’s on his back, body trembling and pliant, he looks up at the darkness, Fernando’s eyes boring into him. He wants to say something but it doesn’t come.
Fernando does, though.
He reads the glance that's not meant for him and he's never felt like an outsider more.
Something in him wills him to get up out of the bed, scrabbling for his clothes. Walk away walk away walk away. Behind him Raúl's eyes follow Fernando's eyes following him.
When he makes it to the hallway, there's the sound of two pairs of footsteps. “David, wait-” A hand on his shoulder.
When he turns around, Raúl stops abruptly and glares. At Fernando. He opens his mouth, "Are you fucking kidding me--" Raúl turns on his heel, wrenching his arm out from where Fernando is holding it.
Fernando lets out a sigh, running his now free hand through his hair. "David, look--"
“This is fucked up,” David mumbles. “I can't be here just so I can spice up some fucked up relationship.”
“It’s not that.”
“How is it not? Look, there’s you, there’s me, there’s Raúl-”
Fernando reaches out to him, “you like us both, don’t you?”
David starts. He hasn’t really thought about it.
“And you don’t exactly have anywhere else to go.”
David sinks onto a chair.
Fernando disappears into the bathroom and he imagines-or his subconscious registers- the two of them, whispering heatedly.
That night, Fernando has an evening lecture and it is just the two of them, sitting at the table, eating the dinner Nando prepared in silence.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Raúl glares at him for the umpteenth time.
“I need to know. Is this some sort of...game?” He snarls, pushing his barely touched plate aside. “Because it’s....”
Raúl determinedly keeps his eye on his plate, forcing down bites of food. “I never forced you in Copenhagen.”
“I didn’t know how you were then.”
“And you could have left this afternoon.”
He has a point, and David has to sit on it.
“And you never asked,” Raúl shrugs, “for a journalist, you’re shit with awareness.”
David snorts. “I’ll take your criticism when you’ve written that follow up novel they say you’re going to write but so far haven’t seen a word of.”
He watches as Raúl balls his fists, a delicious spark of triumph running through him.
Fernando is still gone when David packs his unpacked things.
The house is silent for the sounds of fingers against a computer keyboard enduring abuse.
He stands in the hallway, trying to wrench the key from his keychain when a shadow falls.
He looks up. Raúl is eyeing him much in the same scrutinising manner as that morning in Copenhagen.
“I love him-” Raúl mutters angrily as he thrusts.
David bites back a moan, meeting each thrust, eyeing him from under his sweat slicked hair.
“I may not like you-”
David snorts. Or he tries to, but a goddamned moan escapes him.
“But you do something,” thrust, “to me,” thrust.
And he responds with an orgasm, pressing his fingers deep into Raúl’s skin, leaving marks that will last.
When David was twenty-two, he had made two girls cry.
He makes it to his flat after a late deadline.
The hallway floods with light and Fernando’s shamelessly naked, eyes blinking back sleep as he stands in the doorway of his bedroom. “Hey, you. Late night?”
Looking past his shoulder, David can just see the silhouette of Raúl, sheets twisted around his otherwise bare body. He sighs as a strange emotion floods through him.
Fernando tugs on his arm. “Come to bed.”
It all starts because David didn’t take his mother’s advice.
Or perhaps it began when a man with soulful glance fell for someone with an easy smile.
Maybe it is when a man falls in love with two men.
David stays, Raúl will say, typically arrogant-like a writer-because he has no idea how this will end.
Note:
Prompt from a Secret Santa challenge exchange.