Generation Kill Fanfic: Melancholy is a Hotel Room (you always eventually leave it)
Title: Melancholy is a hotel room (you always eventually leave it)
Author: someonesgrlbomb
Rating: RàNC-17ish
Pairing: Brad/Nate
Word count: 5100
Summary: After Nate left the Marine Corps, Brad and Nate met up when they could while leading separate lives. This was one of those times.
Author's Notes/Disclaimer: I don’t know if Brad was in England when Nate was in college, and I know that wouldn’t be hard to figure out. It’s just not about that for me. These are fictional characters in a story that, as usual, took off in a direction I didn’t plan but I enjoyed the ride. I can see it is a clear-cut case of me writing what I know. Four years is long enough to linger around on my hard drive - time to send this baby out into the world.
Brad was awake twenty-two minutes before his alarm was to go off. He exhaled, resigning. He knew when sleep was eluding him. He'd had extensive experience.
Nate's peaceful body lay next to him, facing away, ass sweaty and pressed against Brad’s hip as they both lay naked under the portions of the white hotel sheet that they’d bothered wrangling over themselves a couple of hours ago. They’d long since relieved it of its tucked in status. The fitted sheet, too, had been affected by their activities, and had popped off the corner on Brad's side near his feet, revealing a sad mattress pad. It stretched under the mattress corner by a fraying elastic string. It was not nightmarish to see the mattress. This was not the Bates motel. This was a legit skyrise hotel, where staff opened the door of your cab in the driveway and the lobby was large and there were at least three bar/restaurant lounges and a coffee bar, and a fountain and fresh greenery in huge planters, and of course lots and lots of ballroom and meeting room space. It was a solid 3.5 star hotel in an old, tired, major east coast city. The drab vision of the mattress and its skimpy pad simply revealed a cut corner in the management of the facilities. 3.5 stars, not 4.
Everything here was like that - seemed smooth, classy, put together, but it was all just the surface. Brad didn’t care, but he registered these things, classified them in his head. If you looked in, under, around, closely, below, or above any element of the room, you found out it was less than it appeared. Behind the entry door to the room, the wall moldings were chipped and dusty. There wasn't a fan in the bathroom. The showerhead looked like it had 6 massage settings but a few of the holes where water should flow were crusted with mineral and the whole thing no longer rotated.
But Brad didn’t need amenities.
Brad and Nate’s four pillows were in various contortions under their heads and arms. Brad could turn his head to the right and see Nate. No view of Nate was wrong, as long as he was in one piece. The closer to Brad Nate was, the better, of course. It had been years since Brad had to worry Nate was in bodily danger, via deployment or military exercises where accidents happen. Brad found he could still revel in the relief of seeing Nate safe. He didn't get to see Nate much at all - just these haphazard, every-few-months get togethers, which amounted to inadequate opportunity to habituate. Phone calls and electronic communications, almost daily in between, didn't have the visceral heft needed.
It was little wonder Brad was having trouble sleeping. This entire four-day rendezvous occurred in a time warp, with multiple sources of strange pace. Time was obnoxiously slow when Nate could not be there with Brad. Brad would do all he could to kill time, devoting more than reasonable amounts of it to workouts and long showers and eating and reading and gadgetry and Nate STILL wasn’t back from his day of seminars and panels and khakis and polos and buffet lunches and mingling coffee breaks. Brad wasn’t bad at waiting. But he still had to do it. Had to respect this part of Nate’s life.
On the other hand, time would speed up when Nate was there, especially in the daylight. They would be talking and joking and clock glancing because it had been 5pm and suddenly it was 6:30pm and Brad had to keep glancing as if to catch time and keep it from getting away entirely. It felt nice to just hang out and engage in casual foreplay-like stuff. It was good humored, even-keeled. It was shoulder massages leading to shoulder biting and hands roaming down into pants, while they caught each other up on the last few days of their separate lives: What happened on a test for Nate in his fluff medieval literature course. What failures Brad observed during exercises he drilled the Brits on. It felt good, but a little unconnected, unsatisfying. Daylight was too intense a light for all the emotions to emerge in. Some topics, some feelings, were too raw, too easily burnt.
Then, there was night. When it was night, Brad and Nate were granted some stretches of moments where time stood still. It was as if they knew how to entwine their bodies in a perfect contortion to be a key fitting a lock that held back time’s progression. And the dark permitted the desperation to come through. They gripped each other, and wanted, and had, all at the same time. Wanting and having at once - this dissonance also, perhaps, cancelled time.
In the dark, they talked quietly and kissed a lot and screwed while holding on tight, forehead to forehead, and whispered hopes and suffered silences after unclear responses. They reeled in suggested futures and soured in modifying uncertainties. Then back to light wrestling and kissing, reassurance of some kind.
And then it would be light again.
So, who could sleep in such bending and stretching of time?
Then, on top of all of that, Brad’s body was on U.K. time. Nate was on US Eastern and so hadn’t left his time zone for this conference on some kind of foreign policy thought. Nate had offered to make time if Brad got himself there. They each tried to be awake for one another as much as was reasonable, an easy feat for Brad. Nate had to sleep sometimes - he had to stay awake in the seminars. Even though Nate was highly accomplished at functioning in sleep deprived conditions, it was a much more difficult feat to stay awake in lectures than when invading a country. Brad could understand that.
Nate was making effort to divide his time to maximize it with Brad, as he said he would. They had one afternoon when Nate felt the seminar offerings of his conferece were of low enough interest that he skipped them. But that night, Nate was obliged to have dinner with mentors and colleagues rather than Brad. But overall, Nate was doing what he could. Brad had been correct that it would be worth his while to fly over.
They had two morning jogs together - rare slices of public time side by side. Neither noted this aloud. They never bumped into anyone Nate felt obliged to stop to talk to, so Brad didn't know how it would go, if Nate would introduce Brad, and if he did, how it would come across. Nate only waved to a couple of people at some distance.
In planning this, Nate had sounded so urgent about needing to see Brad, about making the case for Brad to come. That had been a heavily weighted factor in Brad's decision. Total transit time there and back was roughly half the actual time there - a factor against. But it didn’t outweigh the sound of need in Nate. So Brad came.
But really, Brad would have come even if Nate had not sounded that way, but instead had only casually tossed out the idea.
So now, on this final night, in their final hours together, Brad had finally dozed off at about 3AM. But it was now 5:08AM and Brad was awake. It hadn't been much sleep, nor, in final summation, had it been much time with Nate. Or, no, that wasn’t it - Nate seemed to genuinely be dividing his time as best he could. Brad could understand Nate needed to balance these two parts of his life. It just wasn’t the right kind of time with Nate, in sum. Or the right connecting. Something. Nate had tried, hadn’t he?
Brad needed his brain to quit adding up time and other things.
The frustrating but familiar difference he was also aware of was that one hundred twenty eight minutes of sleep could have been 150 but would not be. Calculating minutes of possible sleep vs. actual sleep was one of Brad's automated functions.
His various gadgets’ alarms would now not be necessary since he was awake. He had set multiple alarms out of some need to make the plane on time, to exit smoothly. He didn’t want to leave Nate; he knew that, knew Nate would know it, but wanted to get the leaving over with, and get it right. Not rushed, not leisurely. Just, right.
Accepting he was awake was different from leaving the bed. Leaving meant severing the points of physical contact with Nate. At some level, Brad's body was aching to move - just the regular repositioning usually done without even knowing it - but Brad was consciously overriding this. Maximizing the time he had was his only defense against the logical march of time. But ultimately time would win and he would get out of bed.
He could get some sleep on the plane to make up for the minutes he could have been asleep for right now.
It wasn't about getting sleep.
It was about leaving, not knowing when he'd be with Nate again. It was about the insanity of pretty much knowing you have something that feels so right, but it doesn’t fit with anything else you want or with how the world is set up.
Fuck but Brad wanted his brain to shut down.
Awake 22 minutes early when already exhausted. Why? One culprit had to be the temperature control unit, currently set to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit. Indeed the superior scale to Celcius, for its capacity to express greater subtlies of the air temperature status without calling upon decimals. The logic of the zero point of Celcius was mildly compelling but ultimately arbitrary. The most true-to-concept scale was Kelvin but one would have to acknowledge that when talking to people, discussing the weather had to remain a feasible option, so getting too fluid with thinking in Kelvins was not...
Brad really wanted to roll over and stretch his legs, but remained motionless, plastered to a peaceful, elegant Nate.
The crappy thermostat may or may not have explained the sweatiness of the moment. Brad and Nate had constantly fiddled with the A/C to maximize their comfort. Who touched it last? Brad could not remember. Didn't matter. It's not like they were some dueling couple, one always turning it up, the other always turning it down. They didn't have that particular couple-thing. They had, since the beginning, the fucking-you-with-eyes thing, and the complete-each-others’-actions thing, and the thing where Nate caught Brad staring more than vice versa...but not the petty thermostat battle. They were just trying to be comfortable. Funny. They had existed in serious weather extremes before and hadn’t been fussy about it.
Brad resisted the urge to stretch his toes and rotate his ankles. Nate was so still, breathing rhythmically, such warmth coming off his skin.
That was a life removed, that one where any desire to exert temperature control over the environment would have been a pathway to quick mental collapse, that former life deployed in the desert. Maybe making up for that time was the thing justifying the interest in maximizing comfort now, constantly adjusting the room temperature control. They could appreciate temperature control as a luxury better than most first-world residents, and the room cost the same whether they fiddled with the knobs or not.
Temperature adjustments frequently came up based on Brad and Nate's level of activity, but there were also times when immediate temperature control adjustment was not sought, as being collapsed next to one another was comfortable enough, no past or future in mind, no minding the sweat. Just a perfect fit of bodies, the sense of total acceptance, fulfillment. Felt like the most right thing in the world, like justice, like the universe sighing in relief, like home.
Sometimes, though, those moments turned into times where there was awareness that there was nothing being said. Such times were chances to say what lingered in the air all the time - "This feels so right, right?" "Can't you imagine a way to do your thing where I have to stay to do mine?" "How long till we will do this again, and how annoying is it to live with that question?" "What do you mean, then, when you say you love me?" At such moments where such phrases bore down, it was kind of welcome to have that "mind if I turn it down in here?" thing to say and then the discussion about that and then the 20 seconds it took to make the adjustment and then evaluate the results, and then, if necessary, fine tune. That process nicely filled gaps.
Left to their own devices, gaps were not good.
Gaps quickly flooded with oppressive uncertainty and fostered a desire to press for answers and predictions, to wonder about promises, all judged futile and unfair by Nate and so fucking annoying to not just stay tamped down under a lid of reason by Brad…
Aside from its marginal capacity to keep the room comfortable, the blower was one of those units where the fan never ceased, just a compressor or heating element kicked in and the fan blew out whatever air was generated. It was probably 15-20 years old, so sounded like a truck and had an inconsistent faint rattle as well. Clearly infrastructure upgrades lost to face-value upgrades at this hotel, probably because fixing the innards was more work and more costly than just getting flat-front TVs and updated bedspreads.
Nate slept soundly, bothered neither by his sweaty ass plastered to Brad's hip, nor the kick-on/kick-off cycles of the a/c compressor amidst the unending fan droning and rattling endlessly. It was beautiful to watch him sleep. In the past year or so of these meet-ups, Brad had observed Nate’s troubled sleep thanks to Iraq. But here, Nate was exhausted attending to his work and to Brad and maybe that helped. Or, perhaps being so solidly on his school and career path helped him be more at peace, as he created more and more distance from who he was and what he experienced. Nate’s future was actively shaping up, was an exciting trajectory into worlds of smart use of intelligence, power and influence. That achievement of consistent, peaceful sleep was good to witness. Really good.
It sucked that Brad hadn't been able to witness the transformation up close, tracking the details day by day from direct observation. Most days they only sent each other emails, making a dark humored observation about a political situation, a scathing criticism of a silver-spoon peer, a memory of a difficult time they endured together deployed in the desert. In a way, those memories were the sweetest because they saw each other every day then, even if that’s all it was at the time - just doing their jobs in their unit together every day, enjoying one another’s adeptness and challenging one another regularly. It was also, of course, a pot brought slowly to simmer, and the heat turned up later, near the time Nate decided to leave the Marines. That had been a fun weekend…
Memories of growing this connection to Nate while on deployment - partaking in an invasion - made Brad think it was just about worth it to have lived through it all, as it was the start of “them.” It was difficult, it was gritty, it was under-resourced, it was chaos. But it was worth it because it was the duty they signed up for and because it brought them together.
And Brad wondered over and over - what was so different now? What challenges were so much more difficult now to be endured but to seemingly be losing to? How could what they were contending with now be any more difficult than OEF/OIF? Brad really wanted to know.
Brad knew a partial answer was about practicalities, but also of priorities. Logistics. Fucking logistics. Nate did not feel he could start over from where he was. Fair.
But when they were together it just felt…and didn’t that make some costs worth….
A sliver of light was cast through the crack of the almost-closed bathroom door. Leaving it set up that way was a habit formed from drunken hotel stay experiences, where the wisdom of leaving a clear path to the bathroom door was hard-earned. Ray imparted wisdom like that. This light allowed Brad to watch the fabric of the curtains hovering over the blower vent sway. Even the dangling rods on each curtain layer - that no one in real life has on their curtains - also swayed in the blowing air.
Ray was in Brad’s head mocking Brad's own private thoughts - echoing with giggles and guffaws at "dangling rods."
Brad shook his head briskly. His mind was certainly wandering not only ridiculously thoroughly through this hotel room, but was now conjuring Ray. Was Brad really that bad off?
Nate sighed in his sleep. Brad's heart sped up a shred at the possibility Nate might wake up.
Nate returned to steady breaths.
There was no consistent pattern to the rod and curtain swaying that Brad could discern. He kept vigilant in case he was wrong.
Two minutes till alarms would start going off.
Pathetic.
A final glance to Nate at his side, on his skin, one last moment of being next to him in bed. So brilliant a mind, so disciplined a body. Wanting to touch, to grasp, to slide up against, lick down…never unwrap his arms from...
Brad stopped his thoughts with another head shake, then threw the sheet off his hips and legs, gently pulled away from Nate and extracted himself from the bed. First he turned off all the alarms - set to go off in staggered in one minute intervals, but none needed now. First his wristwatch, then laptop, then travel clock.
Then, Brad headed for the bathroom at 5:29am to shower.
A few minutes later Brad was clean and departed the bathroom with two glasses of tap water to brew coffee at the console across from the bed.
There wasn’t much extra room for a living space in this particular hotel room. Just a stretch of conveniences lined up - the console with the coffee maker, the tv, the minifridge, two built in drawers, a desk. There were two chairs and a small table between the bed and window. The table had become a pile of Nate's conference materials, empty beer bottles, and crumbs. They had permitted no maid service. Just asked for fresh coffee packets and Nate asked for fresh towels.
Brad ripped open the pouch with the prefilled filter. He had to make the whole little pot because of the filter pack, an amount suited for two drinkers. Brad became annoyed with himself for hoping that the scent of coffee could be a good incentive for Nate to get conscious and say something. Like those stupid commercials from his childhood of adults all over the house rousing and happy the moment the brew is on. The best part of waking up...
What with Brad leaving soon and all, maybe Nate would think of something he meant to say.
The coffee began brewing and Nate was still.
Brad got dressed and packed, and turned on CNN to quietly chatter in the background. Any hotel in the world Brad stayed in had CNN. It’s didn’t always have the American broadcast, of course. Overseas it tends to be a Brit-accented person - whether from the UK or one of its former colonies - but it was all Euro-focused and old-empire focused and anywhere else America has forgotten. It made the world seem so much smaller, just as Brad knew it was. It was most depressing here in the U.S., where coverage of celebrity drama and “epidemics of obesity” took time from reporting on the state of affairs in most places on Earth - dilapidated and oppressed and it’s the culture in power's own fault. Stuff that Nate points out rightly as important, that Brad can see his point on, though not have to own it, earning Nate's ire everytime.
As the coffee maker chortled, signifying the end of its brew cycle, Nate shifted a few times. Brad became convinced Nate was pretending to be asleep. He opened his eyes occasionally, but seemed to stay in limbo. From where Brad was sitting in the chair next to the tv, up close so he could hear it, Brad could not tell how much choice was involved in Nate's twilight.
Brad didn’t blame him for pretending to sleep, and even forgave him as he could admire the shape of Nate under the sheets, his ass draped perfectly under yards of white percale as he laid on his stomach, hands under a pillow above his head. His face was not visible to Brad behind another pillow next to him. Nate was at an angle, legs spilling well into what was Brad’s side. He must have shifted into that space when Brad went to the bathroom. Was he seeking heat, or just getting more comfortable in the space Brad had left?
That ass. Just a few hours ago Brad was at a magnificent vantage point relative to that ass, right before Nate finally fell asleep.
Fucking Nate then had been intense and serious. It was understood to be definitely-for-sure-this-time the last fuck. It wasn't slow and dragged out like you'd think the last one would be. It was on the quicker side because it really wasn't fun and everyone was sore. It was aching pleasure. It was right in that way. It was a little fraught. Nate put up with it. Brad boxed it into denial as fast as he could. It felt like a sex filibuster, keeping them from talking or from the end being reached, or both.
The fuck a few hours before that was also believed to be the last, where Nate was fucking Brad and there was all seriousness but also a stream of whisperings of solidarity and exclusivity and gratitude.
"Just you, Brad, only ever you.” “So glad to be with you, Brad. So fucking glad.” “Thank you for coming Brad, God it is good to be with you.” “I love you, Brad.” “We should do this more often.”
“Yeah.” “Me too.” “You're welcome.” “I love you, Nate.” “All the time would be nice.”
So that time had been thought to be the last fuck, and Nate had a plan, first sucking Brad off slowly, then prepping Brad meticulously, and then slowly fucking him, adding lots of neck bites and stopping pumping when he did so it was never too much all at once and kept himself from coming. Nate dragged it out masterfully.
That Nate was engaged in a drawn out pursuit was not lost on Brad. Brad was happy to be Nate's receptacle for self-challenge and to hear Nate’s utterings. So when Nate finally came, when Brad begged him to, because Nate said he wanted Brad to beg for it, Brad was very spent, raw, completely fulfilled. After that satisfaction, Brad dozed off for 20 minutes, and came to with a start when Nate sneezed from where he was spooning Brad. Brad was mad at himself for falling asleep, missing time, taking the lead in sleeping, allowing Nate to fall asleep, too, cutting off any chance to follow-up on a pause in Nate's response to Brad saying he wished they were together all the time. They could email and chat about it later, but when he could see Nate’s eyes as they spoke - that was better.
Those final hours were nothing like the second hour after Brad had checked in. He had picked up his key from the desk, knowing Nate was at his conference when Brad arrived. Nate already had been there for a couple of days. Settling into their room might be a little like moving into Nate's place, Brad mused. Nate’s clothes were hanging in the closet, toiletries in their places, reading materials on the nightstand, beer in the mini fridge. Brad was annoyingly giddy at the moving-in analogy as he tossed his shaving kit next to Nate's, hung a shirt in the closet.
There weren’t enough hangers left for Brad’s stuff, but he made do, putting multiple shirts on one hanger.
When the sounds of Nate sliding his key card registered, Brad's heart raced and he had a split second of doubt that Nate really wanted him there fucking up his important networking opportunities...but doubts were blasted by Nate's helpless smile when he saw Brad there lounging on the bed in his boxer briefs.
"Glad to see you had no reservations about making yourself comfortable," Nate said, stopping to stare, leather bag on his shoulder, threatening to wrinkle his fucking business casual black knit polo.
Seeing Nate disarmed, Brad's confidence returned and he swigged the beer he'd commandeered, grinning back. "Care to get confortable with me, Nate? Or do you have," and Brad started rising to his knees and moving to where Nate stood, still grinning, "reservations we need to work through?"
Nate fixed in succession on Brad's chest and waist and underwear and lips. He dropped his bag to the ground and grasped Brad's face for a full-on, welcome home kiss.
Brad did not wonder what made it a welcome home kiss.
"You look so much better in person than you do as your little instant message icon, awake or asleep or studying or whatever all your high tech statuses are."
They kissed again like they meant it, hands sliding all over.
"Nothing like public fucking via ‘talk’ in a computer lab of soldiers with stiff upper lips," Brad grinned continuously.
Nate swallowed Brad's carrying on. "Fuck that. Real action. Real fucking. Now."
It was a relief they found no pretenses necessary after their 3 month-long stint of only phone calls, emails and online chatting - instant messaging but not fancy America Online stuff. Old school command line interface, via Nate’s university and Brad’s military mainframe computer labs offering user terminals to access the internet. So behind the times, behind the browser revolution.
Brad lifted Nate's shirt over his head.
"No 'how was the flight?'" Brad joked as Nate stepped away to drape his pants and shirt on a chair.
"How was the flight?" Nate said, fairly sincerely but also focused on his task.
"Shitty. Thanks. No time for me to ask how the conference is going?"
Nate was naked and at the bedside again. "Ask."
Brad reached for one of Nate's hands and their collective busy, excited fingers wrung round and around each other. "How was the conference, after you knew I was up here?"
Nate took Brad's other hand, pulled them solidly together for another kiss, a kiss with some intent, a kiss leading a charge, knowing it had kick-ass backup on the way to take it all to the next level. "I’ve been holding steady in some anticipation of your arrival, of course."
Brad wrapped an arm around Nate's back and squeezed him in, making Nate arc, and Brad started sucking and biting and licking. "That moment when the hour was here, when I might be at the hotel, and with each passing minute after my E.T.A., you were more and more distracted. Totally not aware of anything said to you. Hoping like hell no one saw your hard on."
"Yeah, pretty much," Nate laughed, necking back, pushing back, tangling their legs together as they knelt body to body, kissing, grabbing, grinding. Gleefully together. Hunger unleashed, satiety in sight, finally. Months since their last get together.
Senses and arms filled with Nate, Brad said on an exhale, "You feel so fucking good." Breathe in. "As good as I remember. Why don’t we do this more often?”
Nate did not answer and that did not seem weird because they were barreling forward in ways neither wanted to stop.
After that lunch break, Nate had to go attend seminars again.
He came back when he could. "Informative meetings?" Brad would say, staring at the magazine or TV when Nate entered. Nate would ignore Brad's attempt at coolness and rub Brad's shoulders. "Yeah, I guess, but I’m glad to be here now," he would practically whisper. And then Brad would grasp Nate's hands and pull him down, down till he could kiss him, and Nate could reach Brad's fly to open it and so on.
“Miss me?” Nate said when he came back at the end of the second day.
Brad gave a slight grin, and showed Nate the answer with a lovely blow job.
“When I’m up for reassignment I can request Boston.”
“You can try,” Nate shrugged.
“Or I can quit.”
“Shame,” Nate said, rather than “really?”
Now it was almost time for Brad to go. All dressed. Boots on. Brad hesitated where he stood, next to ostensibly-sleeping Nate. Brad knew he should just go. He knew whether or not he bothered to get one more kiss or one more tumble, it made no difference in a big picture kind of way. It might be weakness to give into wanting to do it now. Really, what would be the point?
Or maybe, such things actually were the point. Being together. They should be together. Otherwise, the whole trip might fall in the column of “why bother.”
The grayish light of morning peaked through the edges of the rippling curtains.
Brad bent down. “I gotta go,” he said quietly.
Nate opened his eye (other one pressed down on the bed), realizing. He closed his eye again. “Yeah, I know.” He inhaled. “Wish you didn’t.” Exhaled. He didn’t really move.
Brad reached out, dragging his fingers along Nate’s contours lightly. Nate probably wouldn’t initiate anything now, wouldn’t get in the way of Brad’s schedule, of Brad conducting his life. Coinciding nicely with Nate’s need to conduct his life.
Yes, this connecting to Nate felt so right. Brad ached for it. This probably was the point.
Nate still didn’t stir, didn’t respond to Brad’s touch, eyes closed again.
Brad pulled away from Nate, and left.
Author: someonesgrlbomb
Rating: RàNC-17ish
Pairing: Brad/Nate
Word count: 5100
Summary: After Nate left the Marine Corps, Brad and Nate met up when they could while leading separate lives. This was one of those times.
Author's Notes/Disclaimer: I don’t know if Brad was in England when Nate was in college, and I know that wouldn’t be hard to figure out. It’s just not about that for me. These are fictional characters in a story that, as usual, took off in a direction I didn’t plan but I enjoyed the ride. I can see it is a clear-cut case of me writing what I know. Four years is long enough to linger around on my hard drive - time to send this baby out into the world.
Brad was awake twenty-two minutes before his alarm was to go off. He exhaled, resigning. He knew when sleep was eluding him. He'd had extensive experience.
Nate's peaceful body lay next to him, facing away, ass sweaty and pressed against Brad’s hip as they both lay naked under the portions of the white hotel sheet that they’d bothered wrangling over themselves a couple of hours ago. They’d long since relieved it of its tucked in status. The fitted sheet, too, had been affected by their activities, and had popped off the corner on Brad's side near his feet, revealing a sad mattress pad. It stretched under the mattress corner by a fraying elastic string. It was not nightmarish to see the mattress. This was not the Bates motel. This was a legit skyrise hotel, where staff opened the door of your cab in the driveway and the lobby was large and there were at least three bar/restaurant lounges and a coffee bar, and a fountain and fresh greenery in huge planters, and of course lots and lots of ballroom and meeting room space. It was a solid 3.5 star hotel in an old, tired, major east coast city. The drab vision of the mattress and its skimpy pad simply revealed a cut corner in the management of the facilities. 3.5 stars, not 4.
Everything here was like that - seemed smooth, classy, put together, but it was all just the surface. Brad didn’t care, but he registered these things, classified them in his head. If you looked in, under, around, closely, below, or above any element of the room, you found out it was less than it appeared. Behind the entry door to the room, the wall moldings were chipped and dusty. There wasn't a fan in the bathroom. The showerhead looked like it had 6 massage settings but a few of the holes where water should flow were crusted with mineral and the whole thing no longer rotated.
But Brad didn’t need amenities.
Brad and Nate’s four pillows were in various contortions under their heads and arms. Brad could turn his head to the right and see Nate. No view of Nate was wrong, as long as he was in one piece. The closer to Brad Nate was, the better, of course. It had been years since Brad had to worry Nate was in bodily danger, via deployment or military exercises where accidents happen. Brad found he could still revel in the relief of seeing Nate safe. He didn't get to see Nate much at all - just these haphazard, every-few-months get togethers, which amounted to inadequate opportunity to habituate. Phone calls and electronic communications, almost daily in between, didn't have the visceral heft needed.
It was little wonder Brad was having trouble sleeping. This entire four-day rendezvous occurred in a time warp, with multiple sources of strange pace. Time was obnoxiously slow when Nate could not be there with Brad. Brad would do all he could to kill time, devoting more than reasonable amounts of it to workouts and long showers and eating and reading and gadgetry and Nate STILL wasn’t back from his day of seminars and panels and khakis and polos and buffet lunches and mingling coffee breaks. Brad wasn’t bad at waiting. But he still had to do it. Had to respect this part of Nate’s life.
On the other hand, time would speed up when Nate was there, especially in the daylight. They would be talking and joking and clock glancing because it had been 5pm and suddenly it was 6:30pm and Brad had to keep glancing as if to catch time and keep it from getting away entirely. It felt nice to just hang out and engage in casual foreplay-like stuff. It was good humored, even-keeled. It was shoulder massages leading to shoulder biting and hands roaming down into pants, while they caught each other up on the last few days of their separate lives: What happened on a test for Nate in his fluff medieval literature course. What failures Brad observed during exercises he drilled the Brits on. It felt good, but a little unconnected, unsatisfying. Daylight was too intense a light for all the emotions to emerge in. Some topics, some feelings, were too raw, too easily burnt.
Then, there was night. When it was night, Brad and Nate were granted some stretches of moments where time stood still. It was as if they knew how to entwine their bodies in a perfect contortion to be a key fitting a lock that held back time’s progression. And the dark permitted the desperation to come through. They gripped each other, and wanted, and had, all at the same time. Wanting and having at once - this dissonance also, perhaps, cancelled time.
In the dark, they talked quietly and kissed a lot and screwed while holding on tight, forehead to forehead, and whispered hopes and suffered silences after unclear responses. They reeled in suggested futures and soured in modifying uncertainties. Then back to light wrestling and kissing, reassurance of some kind.
And then it would be light again.
So, who could sleep in such bending and stretching of time?
Then, on top of all of that, Brad’s body was on U.K. time. Nate was on US Eastern and so hadn’t left his time zone for this conference on some kind of foreign policy thought. Nate had offered to make time if Brad got himself there. They each tried to be awake for one another as much as was reasonable, an easy feat for Brad. Nate had to sleep sometimes - he had to stay awake in the seminars. Even though Nate was highly accomplished at functioning in sleep deprived conditions, it was a much more difficult feat to stay awake in lectures than when invading a country. Brad could understand that.
Nate was making effort to divide his time to maximize it with Brad, as he said he would. They had one afternoon when Nate felt the seminar offerings of his conferece were of low enough interest that he skipped them. But that night, Nate was obliged to have dinner with mentors and colleagues rather than Brad. But overall, Nate was doing what he could. Brad had been correct that it would be worth his while to fly over.
They had two morning jogs together - rare slices of public time side by side. Neither noted this aloud. They never bumped into anyone Nate felt obliged to stop to talk to, so Brad didn't know how it would go, if Nate would introduce Brad, and if he did, how it would come across. Nate only waved to a couple of people at some distance.
In planning this, Nate had sounded so urgent about needing to see Brad, about making the case for Brad to come. That had been a heavily weighted factor in Brad's decision. Total transit time there and back was roughly half the actual time there - a factor against. But it didn’t outweigh the sound of need in Nate. So Brad came.
But really, Brad would have come even if Nate had not sounded that way, but instead had only casually tossed out the idea.
So now, on this final night, in their final hours together, Brad had finally dozed off at about 3AM. But it was now 5:08AM and Brad was awake. It hadn't been much sleep, nor, in final summation, had it been much time with Nate. Or, no, that wasn’t it - Nate seemed to genuinely be dividing his time as best he could. Brad could understand Nate needed to balance these two parts of his life. It just wasn’t the right kind of time with Nate, in sum. Or the right connecting. Something. Nate had tried, hadn’t he?
Brad needed his brain to quit adding up time and other things.
The frustrating but familiar difference he was also aware of was that one hundred twenty eight minutes of sleep could have been 150 but would not be. Calculating minutes of possible sleep vs. actual sleep was one of Brad's automated functions.
His various gadgets’ alarms would now not be necessary since he was awake. He had set multiple alarms out of some need to make the plane on time, to exit smoothly. He didn’t want to leave Nate; he knew that, knew Nate would know it, but wanted to get the leaving over with, and get it right. Not rushed, not leisurely. Just, right.
Accepting he was awake was different from leaving the bed. Leaving meant severing the points of physical contact with Nate. At some level, Brad's body was aching to move - just the regular repositioning usually done without even knowing it - but Brad was consciously overriding this. Maximizing the time he had was his only defense against the logical march of time. But ultimately time would win and he would get out of bed.
He could get some sleep on the plane to make up for the minutes he could have been asleep for right now.
It wasn't about getting sleep.
It was about leaving, not knowing when he'd be with Nate again. It was about the insanity of pretty much knowing you have something that feels so right, but it doesn’t fit with anything else you want or with how the world is set up.
Fuck but Brad wanted his brain to shut down.
Awake 22 minutes early when already exhausted. Why? One culprit had to be the temperature control unit, currently set to 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit. Indeed the superior scale to Celcius, for its capacity to express greater subtlies of the air temperature status without calling upon decimals. The logic of the zero point of Celcius was mildly compelling but ultimately arbitrary. The most true-to-concept scale was Kelvin but one would have to acknowledge that when talking to people, discussing the weather had to remain a feasible option, so getting too fluid with thinking in Kelvins was not...
Brad really wanted to roll over and stretch his legs, but remained motionless, plastered to a peaceful, elegant Nate.
The crappy thermostat may or may not have explained the sweatiness of the moment. Brad and Nate had constantly fiddled with the A/C to maximize their comfort. Who touched it last? Brad could not remember. Didn't matter. It's not like they were some dueling couple, one always turning it up, the other always turning it down. They didn't have that particular couple-thing. They had, since the beginning, the fucking-you-with-eyes thing, and the complete-each-others’-actions thing, and the thing where Nate caught Brad staring more than vice versa...but not the petty thermostat battle. They were just trying to be comfortable. Funny. They had existed in serious weather extremes before and hadn’t been fussy about it.
Brad resisted the urge to stretch his toes and rotate his ankles. Nate was so still, breathing rhythmically, such warmth coming off his skin.
That was a life removed, that one where any desire to exert temperature control over the environment would have been a pathway to quick mental collapse, that former life deployed in the desert. Maybe making up for that time was the thing justifying the interest in maximizing comfort now, constantly adjusting the room temperature control. They could appreciate temperature control as a luxury better than most first-world residents, and the room cost the same whether they fiddled with the knobs or not.
Temperature adjustments frequently came up based on Brad and Nate's level of activity, but there were also times when immediate temperature control adjustment was not sought, as being collapsed next to one another was comfortable enough, no past or future in mind, no minding the sweat. Just a perfect fit of bodies, the sense of total acceptance, fulfillment. Felt like the most right thing in the world, like justice, like the universe sighing in relief, like home.
Sometimes, though, those moments turned into times where there was awareness that there was nothing being said. Such times were chances to say what lingered in the air all the time - "This feels so right, right?" "Can't you imagine a way to do your thing where I have to stay to do mine?" "How long till we will do this again, and how annoying is it to live with that question?" "What do you mean, then, when you say you love me?" At such moments where such phrases bore down, it was kind of welcome to have that "mind if I turn it down in here?" thing to say and then the discussion about that and then the 20 seconds it took to make the adjustment and then evaluate the results, and then, if necessary, fine tune. That process nicely filled gaps.
Left to their own devices, gaps were not good.
Gaps quickly flooded with oppressive uncertainty and fostered a desire to press for answers and predictions, to wonder about promises, all judged futile and unfair by Nate and so fucking annoying to not just stay tamped down under a lid of reason by Brad…
Aside from its marginal capacity to keep the room comfortable, the blower was one of those units where the fan never ceased, just a compressor or heating element kicked in and the fan blew out whatever air was generated. It was probably 15-20 years old, so sounded like a truck and had an inconsistent faint rattle as well. Clearly infrastructure upgrades lost to face-value upgrades at this hotel, probably because fixing the innards was more work and more costly than just getting flat-front TVs and updated bedspreads.
Nate slept soundly, bothered neither by his sweaty ass plastered to Brad's hip, nor the kick-on/kick-off cycles of the a/c compressor amidst the unending fan droning and rattling endlessly. It was beautiful to watch him sleep. In the past year or so of these meet-ups, Brad had observed Nate’s troubled sleep thanks to Iraq. But here, Nate was exhausted attending to his work and to Brad and maybe that helped. Or, perhaps being so solidly on his school and career path helped him be more at peace, as he created more and more distance from who he was and what he experienced. Nate’s future was actively shaping up, was an exciting trajectory into worlds of smart use of intelligence, power and influence. That achievement of consistent, peaceful sleep was good to witness. Really good.
It sucked that Brad hadn't been able to witness the transformation up close, tracking the details day by day from direct observation. Most days they only sent each other emails, making a dark humored observation about a political situation, a scathing criticism of a silver-spoon peer, a memory of a difficult time they endured together deployed in the desert. In a way, those memories were the sweetest because they saw each other every day then, even if that’s all it was at the time - just doing their jobs in their unit together every day, enjoying one another’s adeptness and challenging one another regularly. It was also, of course, a pot brought slowly to simmer, and the heat turned up later, near the time Nate decided to leave the Marines. That had been a fun weekend…
Memories of growing this connection to Nate while on deployment - partaking in an invasion - made Brad think it was just about worth it to have lived through it all, as it was the start of “them.” It was difficult, it was gritty, it was under-resourced, it was chaos. But it was worth it because it was the duty they signed up for and because it brought them together.
And Brad wondered over and over - what was so different now? What challenges were so much more difficult now to be endured but to seemingly be losing to? How could what they were contending with now be any more difficult than OEF/OIF? Brad really wanted to know.
Brad knew a partial answer was about practicalities, but also of priorities. Logistics. Fucking logistics. Nate did not feel he could start over from where he was. Fair.
But when they were together it just felt…and didn’t that make some costs worth….
A sliver of light was cast through the crack of the almost-closed bathroom door. Leaving it set up that way was a habit formed from drunken hotel stay experiences, where the wisdom of leaving a clear path to the bathroom door was hard-earned. Ray imparted wisdom like that. This light allowed Brad to watch the fabric of the curtains hovering over the blower vent sway. Even the dangling rods on each curtain layer - that no one in real life has on their curtains - also swayed in the blowing air.
Ray was in Brad’s head mocking Brad's own private thoughts - echoing with giggles and guffaws at "dangling rods."
Brad shook his head briskly. His mind was certainly wandering not only ridiculously thoroughly through this hotel room, but was now conjuring Ray. Was Brad really that bad off?
Nate sighed in his sleep. Brad's heart sped up a shred at the possibility Nate might wake up.
Nate returned to steady breaths.
There was no consistent pattern to the rod and curtain swaying that Brad could discern. He kept vigilant in case he was wrong.
Two minutes till alarms would start going off.
Pathetic.
A final glance to Nate at his side, on his skin, one last moment of being next to him in bed. So brilliant a mind, so disciplined a body. Wanting to touch, to grasp, to slide up against, lick down…never unwrap his arms from...
Brad stopped his thoughts with another head shake, then threw the sheet off his hips and legs, gently pulled away from Nate and extracted himself from the bed. First he turned off all the alarms - set to go off in staggered in one minute intervals, but none needed now. First his wristwatch, then laptop, then travel clock.
Then, Brad headed for the bathroom at 5:29am to shower.
A few minutes later Brad was clean and departed the bathroom with two glasses of tap water to brew coffee at the console across from the bed.
There wasn’t much extra room for a living space in this particular hotel room. Just a stretch of conveniences lined up - the console with the coffee maker, the tv, the minifridge, two built in drawers, a desk. There were two chairs and a small table between the bed and window. The table had become a pile of Nate's conference materials, empty beer bottles, and crumbs. They had permitted no maid service. Just asked for fresh coffee packets and Nate asked for fresh towels.
Brad ripped open the pouch with the prefilled filter. He had to make the whole little pot because of the filter pack, an amount suited for two drinkers. Brad became annoyed with himself for hoping that the scent of coffee could be a good incentive for Nate to get conscious and say something. Like those stupid commercials from his childhood of adults all over the house rousing and happy the moment the brew is on. The best part of waking up...
What with Brad leaving soon and all, maybe Nate would think of something he meant to say.
The coffee began brewing and Nate was still.
Brad got dressed and packed, and turned on CNN to quietly chatter in the background. Any hotel in the world Brad stayed in had CNN. It’s didn’t always have the American broadcast, of course. Overseas it tends to be a Brit-accented person - whether from the UK or one of its former colonies - but it was all Euro-focused and old-empire focused and anywhere else America has forgotten. It made the world seem so much smaller, just as Brad knew it was. It was most depressing here in the U.S., where coverage of celebrity drama and “epidemics of obesity” took time from reporting on the state of affairs in most places on Earth - dilapidated and oppressed and it’s the culture in power's own fault. Stuff that Nate points out rightly as important, that Brad can see his point on, though not have to own it, earning Nate's ire everytime.
As the coffee maker chortled, signifying the end of its brew cycle, Nate shifted a few times. Brad became convinced Nate was pretending to be asleep. He opened his eyes occasionally, but seemed to stay in limbo. From where Brad was sitting in the chair next to the tv, up close so he could hear it, Brad could not tell how much choice was involved in Nate's twilight.
Brad didn’t blame him for pretending to sleep, and even forgave him as he could admire the shape of Nate under the sheets, his ass draped perfectly under yards of white percale as he laid on his stomach, hands under a pillow above his head. His face was not visible to Brad behind another pillow next to him. Nate was at an angle, legs spilling well into what was Brad’s side. He must have shifted into that space when Brad went to the bathroom. Was he seeking heat, or just getting more comfortable in the space Brad had left?
That ass. Just a few hours ago Brad was at a magnificent vantage point relative to that ass, right before Nate finally fell asleep.
Fucking Nate then had been intense and serious. It was understood to be definitely-for-sure-this-time the last fuck. It wasn't slow and dragged out like you'd think the last one would be. It was on the quicker side because it really wasn't fun and everyone was sore. It was aching pleasure. It was right in that way. It was a little fraught. Nate put up with it. Brad boxed it into denial as fast as he could. It felt like a sex filibuster, keeping them from talking or from the end being reached, or both.
The fuck a few hours before that was also believed to be the last, where Nate was fucking Brad and there was all seriousness but also a stream of whisperings of solidarity and exclusivity and gratitude.
"Just you, Brad, only ever you.” “So glad to be with you, Brad. So fucking glad.” “Thank you for coming Brad, God it is good to be with you.” “I love you, Brad.” “We should do this more often.”
“Yeah.” “Me too.” “You're welcome.” “I love you, Nate.” “All the time would be nice.”
So that time had been thought to be the last fuck, and Nate had a plan, first sucking Brad off slowly, then prepping Brad meticulously, and then slowly fucking him, adding lots of neck bites and stopping pumping when he did so it was never too much all at once and kept himself from coming. Nate dragged it out masterfully.
That Nate was engaged in a drawn out pursuit was not lost on Brad. Brad was happy to be Nate's receptacle for self-challenge and to hear Nate’s utterings. So when Nate finally came, when Brad begged him to, because Nate said he wanted Brad to beg for it, Brad was very spent, raw, completely fulfilled. After that satisfaction, Brad dozed off for 20 minutes, and came to with a start when Nate sneezed from where he was spooning Brad. Brad was mad at himself for falling asleep, missing time, taking the lead in sleeping, allowing Nate to fall asleep, too, cutting off any chance to follow-up on a pause in Nate's response to Brad saying he wished they were together all the time. They could email and chat about it later, but when he could see Nate’s eyes as they spoke - that was better.
Those final hours were nothing like the second hour after Brad had checked in. He had picked up his key from the desk, knowing Nate was at his conference when Brad arrived. Nate already had been there for a couple of days. Settling into their room might be a little like moving into Nate's place, Brad mused. Nate’s clothes were hanging in the closet, toiletries in their places, reading materials on the nightstand, beer in the mini fridge. Brad was annoyingly giddy at the moving-in analogy as he tossed his shaving kit next to Nate's, hung a shirt in the closet.
There weren’t enough hangers left for Brad’s stuff, but he made do, putting multiple shirts on one hanger.
When the sounds of Nate sliding his key card registered, Brad's heart raced and he had a split second of doubt that Nate really wanted him there fucking up his important networking opportunities...but doubts were blasted by Nate's helpless smile when he saw Brad there lounging on the bed in his boxer briefs.
"Glad to see you had no reservations about making yourself comfortable," Nate said, stopping to stare, leather bag on his shoulder, threatening to wrinkle his fucking business casual black knit polo.
Seeing Nate disarmed, Brad's confidence returned and he swigged the beer he'd commandeered, grinning back. "Care to get confortable with me, Nate? Or do you have," and Brad started rising to his knees and moving to where Nate stood, still grinning, "reservations we need to work through?"
Nate fixed in succession on Brad's chest and waist and underwear and lips. He dropped his bag to the ground and grasped Brad's face for a full-on, welcome home kiss.
Brad did not wonder what made it a welcome home kiss.
"You look so much better in person than you do as your little instant message icon, awake or asleep or studying or whatever all your high tech statuses are."
They kissed again like they meant it, hands sliding all over.
"Nothing like public fucking via ‘talk’ in a computer lab of soldiers with stiff upper lips," Brad grinned continuously.
Nate swallowed Brad's carrying on. "Fuck that. Real action. Real fucking. Now."
It was a relief they found no pretenses necessary after their 3 month-long stint of only phone calls, emails and online chatting - instant messaging but not fancy America Online stuff. Old school command line interface, via Nate’s university and Brad’s military mainframe computer labs offering user terminals to access the internet. So behind the times, behind the browser revolution.
Brad lifted Nate's shirt over his head.
"No 'how was the flight?'" Brad joked as Nate stepped away to drape his pants and shirt on a chair.
"How was the flight?" Nate said, fairly sincerely but also focused on his task.
"Shitty. Thanks. No time for me to ask how the conference is going?"
Nate was naked and at the bedside again. "Ask."
Brad reached for one of Nate's hands and their collective busy, excited fingers wrung round and around each other. "How was the conference, after you knew I was up here?"
Nate took Brad's other hand, pulled them solidly together for another kiss, a kiss with some intent, a kiss leading a charge, knowing it had kick-ass backup on the way to take it all to the next level. "I’ve been holding steady in some anticipation of your arrival, of course."
Brad wrapped an arm around Nate's back and squeezed him in, making Nate arc, and Brad started sucking and biting and licking. "That moment when the hour was here, when I might be at the hotel, and with each passing minute after my E.T.A., you were more and more distracted. Totally not aware of anything said to you. Hoping like hell no one saw your hard on."
"Yeah, pretty much," Nate laughed, necking back, pushing back, tangling their legs together as they knelt body to body, kissing, grabbing, grinding. Gleefully together. Hunger unleashed, satiety in sight, finally. Months since their last get together.
Senses and arms filled with Nate, Brad said on an exhale, "You feel so fucking good." Breathe in. "As good as I remember. Why don’t we do this more often?”
Nate did not answer and that did not seem weird because they were barreling forward in ways neither wanted to stop.
After that lunch break, Nate had to go attend seminars again.
He came back when he could. "Informative meetings?" Brad would say, staring at the magazine or TV when Nate entered. Nate would ignore Brad's attempt at coolness and rub Brad's shoulders. "Yeah, I guess, but I’m glad to be here now," he would practically whisper. And then Brad would grasp Nate's hands and pull him down, down till he could kiss him, and Nate could reach Brad's fly to open it and so on.
“Miss me?” Nate said when he came back at the end of the second day.
Brad gave a slight grin, and showed Nate the answer with a lovely blow job.
“When I’m up for reassignment I can request Boston.”
“You can try,” Nate shrugged.
“Or I can quit.”
“Shame,” Nate said, rather than “really?”
Now it was almost time for Brad to go. All dressed. Boots on. Brad hesitated where he stood, next to ostensibly-sleeping Nate. Brad knew he should just go. He knew whether or not he bothered to get one more kiss or one more tumble, it made no difference in a big picture kind of way. It might be weakness to give into wanting to do it now. Really, what would be the point?
Or maybe, such things actually were the point. Being together. They should be together. Otherwise, the whole trip might fall in the column of “why bother.”
The grayish light of morning peaked through the edges of the rippling curtains.
Brad bent down. “I gotta go,” he said quietly.
Nate opened his eye (other one pressed down on the bed), realizing. He closed his eye again. “Yeah, I know.” He inhaled. “Wish you didn’t.” Exhaled. He didn’t really move.
Brad reached out, dragging his fingers along Nate’s contours lightly. Nate probably wouldn’t initiate anything now, wouldn’t get in the way of Brad’s schedule, of Brad conducting his life. Coinciding nicely with Nate’s need to conduct his life.
Yes, this connecting to Nate felt so right. Brad ached for it. This probably was the point.
Nate still didn’t stir, didn’t respond to Brad’s touch, eyes closed again.
Brad pulled away from Nate, and left.