Take It Off
Title: Take It Off
Author: Ninalyn/technicolornina
Fandom: Adam Lambert
Pairing/Characters: Adam/Brad, Brad/Neil, Sutan, Tommy (nominally), Cam (even more nominally)
Word Count: 4008
Spoilers: Nope, it's futurefic/AU.
Story Rating: Hovering directly between R and NC-17.
Story Summary: Adam is really sick and tired of Neil being even more of a bitch than usual. Brad decides to get to the bottom of things.
Disclaimer: Tweet this to the people whose fictitious avatars are involved and I will so disown/cut/block you so damned fast. If you are one of the people whose fictitious avatars are involved, it's all in fun and I don't think anybody believes a word of it (including me), so don't hate me, please?
Notes: Written for this prompt. Didn't turn out quite as intended く＿く I hope it pleases anyway.
Feedback: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: For the original nonny mouse requester. ♥
There's a place downtown
Where the freaks all come around
It's a hole in the wall
It's a dirty free for all
And they turn me on
When they take it off
When they take it off
Everybody take it off
--"Take It Off," Kesha
"Dammit Brad-" Neil winces where his shoulder slammed into an exposed heating pipe when Brad cuffed him. Brad almost wants to be sympathetic, but he doesn't have the time for that. The kind of strength he has, apparently disproportionate to his size and build, is one of his greatest secret weapons, and while he and Neil have messed around before-once upon a time, they entertained an entire crowd at Burning Man with what looked like an incredibly lopsided wrestling match until Brad kicked Neil's ass-it's the first time Brad's used it in a way that isn't play. If he loses his concentration now for even a moment he might as well consider his own ass well and truly kicked, and to give himself the upper hand-because Neil cuffed is not Neil disarmed, not by a long shot-he shoves Neil down into a convenient chair, arms up over his head where the handcuffs catch on the connecting pipe, and plunks down in Neil's lap.
"We need to have a talk, sugarbun. Adam told me-"
"Fuck Adam." Up close Brad can tell Neil is just a little nervous, but a little isn't enough. Brad smirks.
"Well and often and every way I can," he says, and before Neil can butt in with a "TMI, man" Brad puts a finger on his lips. "But we're not talking about Adam, sugarbun, we're talking about you." And he leans as far into Neil's personal space as he can, elbows on Neil's shoulders, face to face, almost in kissing distance. "Now let's have a little chat about you and Tommy in the hallway yesterday, shall we? What was up with pushing him so hard he almost fell down?"
Neil glowers. Brad just stares back. It's a hotel night-or, well, for half the cast it's a stay-at-home night, but it's nominally a hotel night-and there's another show in this venue tomorrow. Brad can pace himself to stay here all night, if he has to. Finally he wriggles closer, determined to get something more than a glower out of Neil.
What he gets is a sudden hitch of the hips, and then he's sitting on the floor, pouting up.
"You really shouldn't have done that, Neil." Brad pulls himself to his feet, brushing down his top-recycled from a Halloween costume, but it's green and translucent and totally appropriate for a concert where most of the audience is completely saturated in glitter-and taking note without saying a word when Neil's eyes track the places his fingers catch in the fabric. "Adam told me he wants to know what's going on, no matter what it takes." He pauses just long enough to let that idea sink in. "Adam's part of this show is an hour and a half long. Nobody's going to be in here. And these rooms are soundproofed. You can talk to me now, or I can make use of every single second of that hour and a half and I promise you, Neil, you so do not want me to do that." He flicks a glance up to the cuffs, then smiles and watches Neil's eyes widen. For someone who acts so sour so damned much of the time, Neil is incredibly fluent in speaking Brad. "Unless you do. Kinky."
"Fuck you, Brad."
"Not in the plan, but if you actually behave maybe we could arrange something." Brad perks up. "Which reminds me, Adam's probably on his way into the wings. I should go wish him luck." He makes a grab at Neil's crotch just a little too fast for Neil to actually get his legs shut, then raises an eyebrow and saunters out.
He waits until he's absolutely sure there's no way Neil will hear him even if the door itself isn't soundproof, and then he takes off running, catching Adam just as Sutan's brushing up the last of his makeup. Adam holds up a pair of fingers-kiss in sign language. "How'd it go?"
"Would you believe he's not freaked at all?"
Adam looks up at him and raises not just one eyebrow, but both. "At all?"
"Are you sure he doesn't have a leg on both sides of the fence instead of standing on one side with a foot hanging over the other?"
"Wow." Adam closes his eyes to let Sutan check his mascara. "News to me if he does, but damn." He opens his eyes again. "So now what?"
"I don't know." Brad leans against the makeup counter. "I left him in there." Adam snorts laughter, and Brad smiles. Even now, Adam's laughter is contagious. "I mean, sooner or later I have to go back, but Adam-I don't think he's going to freak. I don't know if he's gotten used to it because his social group has more fruits in it than a Christmas cake or if he's just really, really good at faking it, but I'm totally stonewalled."
"I'm out of ideas," Adam sighs. "I really don't want to toss him off the tour. Like, I really don't. He's fucking awesome when he's not-" Adam shrugs. "You know, you've been here."
"Acting like the last lay he got was nine months before he was born? I know." Brad stares at himself in the mirror and touches up one eye with a fingertip. "That's why I thought maybe teasing him a little would work. But a little didn't work. I'm not sure a lot would work."
"Maybe because he knows you're bluffing," Sutan points out. "Sooner or later you'll hit a limit and stop because he's not the one you're dating. Eyes to the ceiling, Adam."
"So now what?"
"Stop bluffing?" Sutan smudges Adam's liner. "If you really can't live with him being in a mood long enough for him to get out of it on his own."
Brad glances at Adam. This is one of those things they've never really discussed because they're both monogamous by nature, that's just the way it is, and bringing in someone on the side never came up. Now, with Neil cuffed three dressing rooms away, is probably the most awkward time possible to have that conversation, but the alternative looks to be letting Neil believe he's going to be left there all night and seeing if it scares him badly enough to spill-not exactly reliable and more likely to backfire.
Adam looks up at him and shrugs. Sutan whips out a brush twice the size of Adam's face and a container of setting powder and starts dusting it everywhere. Adam wrinkles his nose, and Brad giggles. Sutan finally lets Adam up, and Adam pulls Brad into his arms, kissing the corner of his mouth to avoid going onstage with half a lip's worth of glittery gloss.
"It's up to you," he says, and Brad nuzzles against him as best he can with a leather ringmaster's coat in his way.
"I love you." He smiles up. "Break a leg. I'll see what I can get out of him."
Adam smiles back. "Love you too. Don't let him kill you, would you?"
"He won't have the chance." Brad watches as Adam heads for the wings, waits for the near-deafening roar to echo back to him, and bites the corner of his lip. Behind him, Sutan is already laying out for touch-ups.
"Are you going through with it?" he asks, not challenging or snide, just asking. Brad looks at himself in the mirror and fixes the smudge his old nervous habit left.
"That's putting the cart a little before the horse, isn't it?" he queries back. "I think finding out if I have to go through with it comes first."
"Are you ready to do it if you have to?"
From far away, Brad hears the opening strains of "White Ice Lightning." The entire crowd is probably on its feet already. Adam so owes him for this.
"I guess finding that out is pre-first, honey." He stares at his own reflection in the mirror. Play-flirting with Neil, who tends to take it in good humour (and often returns as good as he gets), is way different from the real thing. "I don't honestly know."
--------------------
Neil rattles the handcuffs as soon as Brad sets foot back in the room. "Let me out."
"Mmm." Brad glances down casually at his fingernails. "I wasn't planning on that taking so long." And he's going to just totally leave it up in the air what "that" is. He plunks back down in Neil's lap. "And maybe I don't feel like letting you out yet."
"I hope you know this stopped being funny about fifteen minutes ago."
"I didn't know it was funny in the first place." Brad wiggles closer and gets as close to Neil's face as he dares. "Talking yet?"
"Fuck you."
Brad considers as fast as he thinks he can. Then he smiles brightly and hopes it covers the momentary pause. "Great idea!"
Neil yelps when Brad's hand goes straight down his jeans; the between-acts smoke break Brad caught him during isn't so far in the past, and Montana in November isn't the kindest place to be gloveless. He doesn't try to pull away, though, and Brad smirks. Neil glares. The effect is more than a little lost on Brad, partly because he still has his hand worked well under Neil's waistband (and someone really needs to do something about getting that boy some jeans that fit instead of being removable with a single good yank, Brad understands there's a time for skintight and a time for work jeans but really, this is bordering on ridiculous), partly just because he became immune to Neil's particular brand of glaring years ago. And so instead of shrinking away from the glare that's toasted ten thousand screaming fangirls, Brad just smirks.
"I have another one," he says, and holds up his other hand to wiggle the fingers. Neil manages to give the impression of baring his teeth without actually doing it.
"Two years of waterboarding wasn't enough to break the guys at Gitmo and you expect that to scare me?"
"Mmm . . . . maybe." And he's not going to get Neil to crack this easy, even when his lap is full of Brad in pants he damned near had to paint on, so he snakes his free hand lightning-fast up the back of Neil's shirt, pressing it against the bottom of Neil's neck and getting a shriek a little too low to be outright girly.
Neil also jerks forward to try and get away from the colder of the two hands against his bare skin, and that tells Brad all he needs to know.
He turns the hand in Neil's jeans, and grabs.
"You might want to know Adam gave me carte blanche on this one," he says, and has to hand it to Neil: most guys he knows would take the handjob instead of trying to buck him off again, even very halfheartedly so.
"I don't know what that's supposed to mean coming out of your demented brain, and I don't want to know."
"I think you do want to know," Brad answers, and swings a leg up to hook around Neil's waist. If Neil tips the chair now, they're both going over. "Let me translate it into English: we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but if you pick the hard way, you are so fucked, sweetheart. And I don't mean in the good way."
"There's nothing to talk about." Neil makes a kind of strangled noise in the back of his throat as Brad runs his thumb over Neil's head. "I didn't-will you get your hand out of my fucking jeans?"
"Nope," Brad answers cheerfully, and decides to see if Neil's sweet spot is the same as Adam's. It isn't, but it's close, and when Neil jerks forward Brad has to plant his foot fast at the back of the chair to keep it from tipping over. "You didn't what?"
Neil tries to go back to "fuck you," but he stutters on the second word and Brad grins.
"Now that we've established what I already knew, thank you, by the way, Captain Obvious," Brad tells him, "why don't you tell me what's going on?" And he strokes, one long slide until his fingers bump up against Neil's balls. Over their heads, Neil is digging his fingernails into his palm so hard Brad's wondering if he should be concerned Neil might cut himself.
"Or I could just-fuck-wait for you to finish," Neil bites out. "Not-shit-a whole lot of incentive there."
"Hm." Brad curls his fingers and feels Neil tense all over as he feigns thought. "You know, you're right." He drags his hand back up Neil's shaft, rubs his thumb over that spot again, and pulls his hand out of Neil's jeans. "Now, wanna talk?"
"Oh, fuck you," Neil says, and there's a confused note in his voice that suggests he doesn't know if he really wanted Brad to stop or keep going. Brad shifts further into Neil's lap, not exactly grinding against him but not really avoiding contact, either.
"Let's make a deal," Brad suggests. ""You tell me what your major malfunction is, and I'll take care of you."
"You're fucking insane."
Brad doesn't bother justifying Neil's comment with a response. Instead he leans closer, feeling the heat coming off Neil's skin and the damp cotton of his shirt where their stomachs are touching. The back rooms of this venue are underheated and Brad's actually a little chilly in his thin shirt and fake-leather pants, but Neil is sweating like he's caught a fever. Neil actually shivers. Brad raises an eyebrow.
"Fine," he says. "You don't want to talk. We can split the difference here. Don't do it again."
"You're not my boss." Neil leans his head back against the pipe. Brad can see dots of perspiration standing out on the length of his neck. If Neil were Adam, Brad would lick a stripe up the side and watch him go out of his mind. Instead he plants a hand on the wall on either side of Neil's head.
"No, my boyfriend is your boss," Brad agrees. "And he gets all the details later."
"Fuck off, Brad."
Brad swings his leg over Neil's knees and stands up. "Okay. See you later."
"Hey-!"
Brad saunters out of the room again, not without some pangs of conscience. He wouldn't want to be in Neil's shoes, especially in the unlikely but always possible scenario where something somewhere goes wrong and the building has to be evacuated.
Then again, he's only going the length of a hallway, and he's not the one who made Cam almost cry last week.
There's something special about seeing Adam perform from backstage. Brad's been to all three of his tours multiple times, seen him in Wicked and watched him jam on a bare-bones bar stage, and once near the very start of their relationship the first time around he hitched a ride up to Lake Tahoe to see Adam in that shitty little stripper show and offer him a little moral support and a good lay, and the rush from sitting or standing in the audience is nothing to the electric tingle up his spine when Adam steps offstage and wipes his face and pulls Brad into a tight, almost searing embrace before darting off to fix his makeup or change his clothes.
Tonight Brad doesn't have the luxury of waiting for Adam to have a costume change, but he can still listen and watch the audience watching, and that's always amazing-looking at the thousands of people who finally appreciate the special gift his shining star has to offer. Sometimes he thinks about listening to Adam practice in a one-room apartment with cardboard taped in the corner of the window to cover the bullet hole and the angry little grandmother next door beating on the wall and screaming in a heavy Polish accent for them to quiet their godless yelling down, and then looks out at a packed-full arena easily fifty times the size of that apartment and has to try not to cry.
Adam brings his current number to an end and reaches for his water bottle. He's not really even glancing into the wings, but his peripheral vision is good, and when he sees Brad's beaten-up Chuck Taylors he looks up over the lip of his water bottle to smile. Brad flashes him a thumbs-up and an I-love-you sign, and Adam turns back to the audience.
Brad just watches, listens to Adam work through some of the stuff from the second album while he struts across the stage. Brad doesn't know exactly what he's going to do yet, but getting away from Neil for just a few minutes and letting him stew is enough to give Brad a game plan.
Neil is sitting with his head back against the pipe, eyes closed, when Brad cracks the door carefully and peeps in. He looks like he's sleeping, Brad thinks, but a second glance suggests he's not-certainly not all of him, even the ridiculously oversized carpenter's jeans he's in can't hide everything-and when Brad plunks back down in his lap his eyes open immediately and rattles the handcuff chain.
"Let me go."
"Tell you what," Brad suggests. "You tell me what's gotten into you, and I will."
"No."
Brad wiggles and grins as Neil visibly bites back some kind of sound. "Have it your way." He pauses long enough to let Neil think he's letting up, then darts his head forward and bites Neil's neck at the corner of his jaw. This time Neil can't hold back the sound, and Brad smiles against his neck. Neil groans.
"You're a real fuck, Bradley."
"Oooh, Bradley," Brad giggles. "Now I'm in trouble." He runs his fingers down the exposed undersides of Neil's outstretched arms. "Give up yet?"
"Fuck you."
"No, that's Adam's job," Brad answers. "When he's not doing indecent things to that little whip they gave him this time around." He lifts his head enough to speak directly into Neil's ear. "Give up yet?"
Brad doesn't have to ask to know Neil would deny under torture that he just made that noise. "He broke my fucking 3DS, okay? I just got the damned thing and he fucking totalled it with one of those adapters that's supposed to let you play homebrew games. It wiped the memory and now it won't play anything."
"And Cam?" Brad strokes Neil's back.
"Told me it was my fault for letting him borrow it."
"So you screamed at her?"
"If somebody told you it was your fault that somebody fried your brand-new $300 shirt, Brad-"
"I wouldn't let someone borrow a brand-new $300 shirt even if I owned one." Brad frowns against Neil's neck. "But I get your point."
"Great. Now will you let me the fuck up?" Neil isn't exactly hyperventilating, but Brad can tell he's trying to keep his composure.
"Mm . . . not quite." Brad slides off his lap, and this time Neil doesn't bother trying to hide the whine out of his mouth. Brad sits in front of him and smiles up before reaching for Neil's fly and into the top of his shoe at the same time, God bless whoever invented hightops. "But I did promise you a deal, and I'm good for my promises."
The tearing foil is loud in the nearly-silent room, and as Brad stuffs the empty condom wrapper into his other sneaker he thinks absently that it's strange to hear only the faintest strains of the heavy backbeat of Tommy's bass turned up to the max. The soundproofing in this building must be great.
Neil actually whimpers when Brad pushes his jeans and T-shirt out of the way and bends over his cock, gleefully slurping about half of it down at once before sliding a hand under the edge of Neil's shirt to stroke the skin there and ground him before he does something really silly like trying to pull the handcuffs apart around a ten-inch pipe. Neil makes an impatient noise and tries to shift his hips. Brad wishes he had a camera to catch the look on Neil's face when the chair slides. Instead he just pulls off with an audible pop and grabs the sides of the seat.
"Simmer down, sugarbun. All good things come to those who wait and so on and so forth." And he leans forward again, licking a single long stripe up the underside of Neil's hardon before settling into a comfortable rhythm.
Neil is trying and trying hard not to give Brad the satisfaction of hearing the effect he's having, but every few seconds a quiet whine or whimper gets past his lips anyway, and Brad sets out to find the spot he rubbed earlier from the safety of Neil's lap, the one that makes every guy Brad's ever gone down on see white. They all seem to have one, it's just finding it that's the trouble. Neil jerks suddenly forward, and Brad pulls back before he can start coughing. Reports of Adam's size (mostly under-exaggerated, interestingly enough, Brad thinks idly) aside, there's only so much dick anyone with a gag reflex can handle no matter how much practice they get, and what just went into Brad's mouth is never going to fit. Instead he reaches up with his free hand to play with what's left, focusing on the top half and letting his hand and Neil's overworked state of mind do the rest.
Neil swears when he comes, or at least, Brad thinks he does. He's pretty sure it started out as another "fuck," but somewhere along the way it got stretched out and a few syllables got added until it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original word. Brad pulls off as soon as he feels Neil tense up and looks up to make sure his job is done; Neil's wearing a condom and maybe it's all just a mind game, but Brad still feels like there are just some things that belong to only Adam.
Brad rests his head on Neil's knee as he pulls off the condom (and that's not going in his shoe for safekeeping, thanks, there has to be a bathroom he can flush it in somewhere in this room). Neil is trying to pretend his breathing is normal. Brad strokes his other knee. Somewhere under the heavy denim is a deep bruise from a slam into a ladder at the last venue, but if Brad's hitting it Neil isn't saying.
"You okay, sugarbun?"
At first he thinks Neil's going to ignore him. Then, reluctantly: "Yeah." Brad turns his attention back to Neil's leg.
"I'll talk to Tommy," he promises, and then he stands up. "No more screaming at people. Even if they did have a lapse in judgement. If you really can't manage to be civil Lane and Adam are always around."
Neil is silent. Brad holds up the handcuff key, tied for safekeeping on a string around his neck. "Neil . . . "
"Okay, okay, fine," Neil says. Brad decides not to tell him just how very much he sounds like a moody teenager. "Okay. I won't."
Brad untangles the string from the chain he's hung one of Adam's rings on. There's a click, and then Neil is rubbing one wrist with the other hand and zipping his fly. Brad cocks his head toward the sound of the bass. It's the only thing he can hear, but he's known the backbeats to most of Adam's songs ever since they were written. Brad smiles.
"Think we're just in time for troupe introductions, sugarbun," he says. "You coming?"
"Maybe."
"I'll see you in the wings, then," Brad chirps, and out he goes.
It occurs to him as he does that he really should have rescued Taylor's handcuffs from Neil before he left, but that's a worry for after the show.
Right now, he really just wants to catch the last couple of songs.
Author: Ninalyn/technicolornina
Fandom: Adam Lambert
Pairing/Characters: Adam/Brad, Brad/Neil, Sutan, Tommy (nominally), Cam (even more nominally)
Word Count: 4008
Spoilers: Nope, it's futurefic/AU.
Story Rating: Hovering directly between R and NC-17.
Story Summary: Adam is really sick and tired of Neil being even more of a bitch than usual. Brad decides to get to the bottom of things.
Disclaimer: Tweet this to the people whose fictitious avatars are involved and I will so disown/cut/block you so damned fast. If you are one of the people whose fictitious avatars are involved, it's all in fun and I don't think anybody believes a word of it (including me), so don't hate me, please?
Notes: Written for this prompt. Didn't turn out quite as intended く＿く I hope it pleases anyway.
Feedback: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: For the original nonny mouse requester. ♥
There's a place downtown
Where the freaks all come around
It's a hole in the wall
It's a dirty free for all
And they turn me on
When they take it off
When they take it off
Everybody take it off
--"Take It Off," Kesha
"Dammit Brad-" Neil winces where his shoulder slammed into an exposed heating pipe when Brad cuffed him. Brad almost wants to be sympathetic, but he doesn't have the time for that. The kind of strength he has, apparently disproportionate to his size and build, is one of his greatest secret weapons, and while he and Neil have messed around before-once upon a time, they entertained an entire crowd at Burning Man with what looked like an incredibly lopsided wrestling match until Brad kicked Neil's ass-it's the first time Brad's used it in a way that isn't play. If he loses his concentration now for even a moment he might as well consider his own ass well and truly kicked, and to give himself the upper hand-because Neil cuffed is not Neil disarmed, not by a long shot-he shoves Neil down into a convenient chair, arms up over his head where the handcuffs catch on the connecting pipe, and plunks down in Neil's lap.
"We need to have a talk, sugarbun. Adam told me-"
"Fuck Adam." Up close Brad can tell Neil is just a little nervous, but a little isn't enough. Brad smirks.
"Well and often and every way I can," he says, and before Neil can butt in with a "TMI, man" Brad puts a finger on his lips. "But we're not talking about Adam, sugarbun, we're talking about you." And he leans as far into Neil's personal space as he can, elbows on Neil's shoulders, face to face, almost in kissing distance. "Now let's have a little chat about you and Tommy in the hallway yesterday, shall we? What was up with pushing him so hard he almost fell down?"
Neil glowers. Brad just stares back. It's a hotel night-or, well, for half the cast it's a stay-at-home night, but it's nominally a hotel night-and there's another show in this venue tomorrow. Brad can pace himself to stay here all night, if he has to. Finally he wriggles closer, determined to get something more than a glower out of Neil.
What he gets is a sudden hitch of the hips, and then he's sitting on the floor, pouting up.
"You really shouldn't have done that, Neil." Brad pulls himself to his feet, brushing down his top-recycled from a Halloween costume, but it's green and translucent and totally appropriate for a concert where most of the audience is completely saturated in glitter-and taking note without saying a word when Neil's eyes track the places his fingers catch in the fabric. "Adam told me he wants to know what's going on, no matter what it takes." He pauses just long enough to let that idea sink in. "Adam's part of this show is an hour and a half long. Nobody's going to be in here. And these rooms are soundproofed. You can talk to me now, or I can make use of every single second of that hour and a half and I promise you, Neil, you so do not want me to do that." He flicks a glance up to the cuffs, then smiles and watches Neil's eyes widen. For someone who acts so sour so damned much of the time, Neil is incredibly fluent in speaking Brad. "Unless you do. Kinky."
"Fuck you, Brad."
"Not in the plan, but if you actually behave maybe we could arrange something." Brad perks up. "Which reminds me, Adam's probably on his way into the wings. I should go wish him luck." He makes a grab at Neil's crotch just a little too fast for Neil to actually get his legs shut, then raises an eyebrow and saunters out.
He waits until he's absolutely sure there's no way Neil will hear him even if the door itself isn't soundproof, and then he takes off running, catching Adam just as Sutan's brushing up the last of his makeup. Adam holds up a pair of fingers-kiss in sign language. "How'd it go?"
"Would you believe he's not freaked at all?"
Adam looks up at him and raises not just one eyebrow, but both. "At all?"
"Are you sure he doesn't have a leg on both sides of the fence instead of standing on one side with a foot hanging over the other?"
"Wow." Adam closes his eyes to let Sutan check his mascara. "News to me if he does, but damn." He opens his eyes again. "So now what?"
"I don't know." Brad leans against the makeup counter. "I left him in there." Adam snorts laughter, and Brad smiles. Even now, Adam's laughter is contagious. "I mean, sooner or later I have to go back, but Adam-I don't think he's going to freak. I don't know if he's gotten used to it because his social group has more fruits in it than a Christmas cake or if he's just really, really good at faking it, but I'm totally stonewalled."
"I'm out of ideas," Adam sighs. "I really don't want to toss him off the tour. Like, I really don't. He's fucking awesome when he's not-" Adam shrugs. "You know, you've been here."
"Acting like the last lay he got was nine months before he was born? I know." Brad stares at himself in the mirror and touches up one eye with a fingertip. "That's why I thought maybe teasing him a little would work. But a little didn't work. I'm not sure a lot would work."
"Maybe because he knows you're bluffing," Sutan points out. "Sooner or later you'll hit a limit and stop because he's not the one you're dating. Eyes to the ceiling, Adam."
"So now what?"
"Stop bluffing?" Sutan smudges Adam's liner. "If you really can't live with him being in a mood long enough for him to get out of it on his own."
Brad glances at Adam. This is one of those things they've never really discussed because they're both monogamous by nature, that's just the way it is, and bringing in someone on the side never came up. Now, with Neil cuffed three dressing rooms away, is probably the most awkward time possible to have that conversation, but the alternative looks to be letting Neil believe he's going to be left there all night and seeing if it scares him badly enough to spill-not exactly reliable and more likely to backfire.
Adam looks up at him and shrugs. Sutan whips out a brush twice the size of Adam's face and a container of setting powder and starts dusting it everywhere. Adam wrinkles his nose, and Brad giggles. Sutan finally lets Adam up, and Adam pulls Brad into his arms, kissing the corner of his mouth to avoid going onstage with half a lip's worth of glittery gloss.
"It's up to you," he says, and Brad nuzzles against him as best he can with a leather ringmaster's coat in his way.
"I love you." He smiles up. "Break a leg. I'll see what I can get out of him."
Adam smiles back. "Love you too. Don't let him kill you, would you?"
"He won't have the chance." Brad watches as Adam heads for the wings, waits for the near-deafening roar to echo back to him, and bites the corner of his lip. Behind him, Sutan is already laying out for touch-ups.
"Are you going through with it?" he asks, not challenging or snide, just asking. Brad looks at himself in the mirror and fixes the smudge his old nervous habit left.
"That's putting the cart a little before the horse, isn't it?" he queries back. "I think finding out if I have to go through with it comes first."
"Are you ready to do it if you have to?"
From far away, Brad hears the opening strains of "White Ice Lightning." The entire crowd is probably on its feet already. Adam so owes him for this.
"I guess finding that out is pre-first, honey." He stares at his own reflection in the mirror. Play-flirting with Neil, who tends to take it in good humour (and often returns as good as he gets), is way different from the real thing. "I don't honestly know."
--------------------
Neil rattles the handcuffs as soon as Brad sets foot back in the room. "Let me out."
"Mmm." Brad glances down casually at his fingernails. "I wasn't planning on that taking so long." And he's going to just totally leave it up in the air what "that" is. He plunks back down in Neil's lap. "And maybe I don't feel like letting you out yet."
"I hope you know this stopped being funny about fifteen minutes ago."
"I didn't know it was funny in the first place." Brad wiggles closer and gets as close to Neil's face as he dares. "Talking yet?"
"Fuck you."
Brad considers as fast as he thinks he can. Then he smiles brightly and hopes it covers the momentary pause. "Great idea!"
Neil yelps when Brad's hand goes straight down his jeans; the between-acts smoke break Brad caught him during isn't so far in the past, and Montana in November isn't the kindest place to be gloveless. He doesn't try to pull away, though, and Brad smirks. Neil glares. The effect is more than a little lost on Brad, partly because he still has his hand worked well under Neil's waistband (and someone really needs to do something about getting that boy some jeans that fit instead of being removable with a single good yank, Brad understands there's a time for skintight and a time for work jeans but really, this is bordering on ridiculous), partly just because he became immune to Neil's particular brand of glaring years ago. And so instead of shrinking away from the glare that's toasted ten thousand screaming fangirls, Brad just smirks.
"I have another one," he says, and holds up his other hand to wiggle the fingers. Neil manages to give the impression of baring his teeth without actually doing it.
"Two years of waterboarding wasn't enough to break the guys at Gitmo and you expect that to scare me?"
"Mmm . . . . maybe." And he's not going to get Neil to crack this easy, even when his lap is full of Brad in pants he damned near had to paint on, so he snakes his free hand lightning-fast up the back of Neil's shirt, pressing it against the bottom of Neil's neck and getting a shriek a little too low to be outright girly.
Neil also jerks forward to try and get away from the colder of the two hands against his bare skin, and that tells Brad all he needs to know.
He turns the hand in Neil's jeans, and grabs.
"You might want to know Adam gave me carte blanche on this one," he says, and has to hand it to Neil: most guys he knows would take the handjob instead of trying to buck him off again, even very halfheartedly so.
"I don't know what that's supposed to mean coming out of your demented brain, and I don't want to know."
"I think you do want to know," Brad answers, and swings a leg up to hook around Neil's waist. If Neil tips the chair now, they're both going over. "Let me translate it into English: we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but if you pick the hard way, you are so fucked, sweetheart. And I don't mean in the good way."
"There's nothing to talk about." Neil makes a kind of strangled noise in the back of his throat as Brad runs his thumb over Neil's head. "I didn't-will you get your hand out of my fucking jeans?"
"Nope," Brad answers cheerfully, and decides to see if Neil's sweet spot is the same as Adam's. It isn't, but it's close, and when Neil jerks forward Brad has to plant his foot fast at the back of the chair to keep it from tipping over. "You didn't what?"
Neil tries to go back to "fuck you," but he stutters on the second word and Brad grins.
"Now that we've established what I already knew, thank you, by the way, Captain Obvious," Brad tells him, "why don't you tell me what's going on?" And he strokes, one long slide until his fingers bump up against Neil's balls. Over their heads, Neil is digging his fingernails into his palm so hard Brad's wondering if he should be concerned Neil might cut himself.
"Or I could just-fuck-wait for you to finish," Neil bites out. "Not-shit-a whole lot of incentive there."
"Hm." Brad curls his fingers and feels Neil tense all over as he feigns thought. "You know, you're right." He drags his hand back up Neil's shaft, rubs his thumb over that spot again, and pulls his hand out of Neil's jeans. "Now, wanna talk?"
"Oh, fuck you," Neil says, and there's a confused note in his voice that suggests he doesn't know if he really wanted Brad to stop or keep going. Brad shifts further into Neil's lap, not exactly grinding against him but not really avoiding contact, either.
"Let's make a deal," Brad suggests. ""You tell me what your major malfunction is, and I'll take care of you."
"You're fucking insane."
Brad doesn't bother justifying Neil's comment with a response. Instead he leans closer, feeling the heat coming off Neil's skin and the damp cotton of his shirt where their stomachs are touching. The back rooms of this venue are underheated and Brad's actually a little chilly in his thin shirt and fake-leather pants, but Neil is sweating like he's caught a fever. Neil actually shivers. Brad raises an eyebrow.
"Fine," he says. "You don't want to talk. We can split the difference here. Don't do it again."
"You're not my boss." Neil leans his head back against the pipe. Brad can see dots of perspiration standing out on the length of his neck. If Neil were Adam, Brad would lick a stripe up the side and watch him go out of his mind. Instead he plants a hand on the wall on either side of Neil's head.
"No, my boyfriend is your boss," Brad agrees. "And he gets all the details later."
"Fuck off, Brad."
Brad swings his leg over Neil's knees and stands up. "Okay. See you later."
"Hey-!"
Brad saunters out of the room again, not without some pangs of conscience. He wouldn't want to be in Neil's shoes, especially in the unlikely but always possible scenario where something somewhere goes wrong and the building has to be evacuated.
Then again, he's only going the length of a hallway, and he's not the one who made Cam almost cry last week.
There's something special about seeing Adam perform from backstage. Brad's been to all three of his tours multiple times, seen him in Wicked and watched him jam on a bare-bones bar stage, and once near the very start of their relationship the first time around he hitched a ride up to Lake Tahoe to see Adam in that shitty little stripper show and offer him a little moral support and a good lay, and the rush from sitting or standing in the audience is nothing to the electric tingle up his spine when Adam steps offstage and wipes his face and pulls Brad into a tight, almost searing embrace before darting off to fix his makeup or change his clothes.
Tonight Brad doesn't have the luxury of waiting for Adam to have a costume change, but he can still listen and watch the audience watching, and that's always amazing-looking at the thousands of people who finally appreciate the special gift his shining star has to offer. Sometimes he thinks about listening to Adam practice in a one-room apartment with cardboard taped in the corner of the window to cover the bullet hole and the angry little grandmother next door beating on the wall and screaming in a heavy Polish accent for them to quiet their godless yelling down, and then looks out at a packed-full arena easily fifty times the size of that apartment and has to try not to cry.
Adam brings his current number to an end and reaches for his water bottle. He's not really even glancing into the wings, but his peripheral vision is good, and when he sees Brad's beaten-up Chuck Taylors he looks up over the lip of his water bottle to smile. Brad flashes him a thumbs-up and an I-love-you sign, and Adam turns back to the audience.
Brad just watches, listens to Adam work through some of the stuff from the second album while he struts across the stage. Brad doesn't know exactly what he's going to do yet, but getting away from Neil for just a few minutes and letting him stew is enough to give Brad a game plan.
Neil is sitting with his head back against the pipe, eyes closed, when Brad cracks the door carefully and peeps in. He looks like he's sleeping, Brad thinks, but a second glance suggests he's not-certainly not all of him, even the ridiculously oversized carpenter's jeans he's in can't hide everything-and when Brad plunks back down in his lap his eyes open immediately and rattles the handcuff chain.
"Let me go."
"Tell you what," Brad suggests. "You tell me what's gotten into you, and I will."
"No."
Brad wiggles and grins as Neil visibly bites back some kind of sound. "Have it your way." He pauses long enough to let Neil think he's letting up, then darts his head forward and bites Neil's neck at the corner of his jaw. This time Neil can't hold back the sound, and Brad smiles against his neck. Neil groans.
"You're a real fuck, Bradley."
"Oooh, Bradley," Brad giggles. "Now I'm in trouble." He runs his fingers down the exposed undersides of Neil's outstretched arms. "Give up yet?"
"Fuck you."
"No, that's Adam's job," Brad answers. "When he's not doing indecent things to that little whip they gave him this time around." He lifts his head enough to speak directly into Neil's ear. "Give up yet?"
Brad doesn't have to ask to know Neil would deny under torture that he just made that noise. "He broke my fucking 3DS, okay? I just got the damned thing and he fucking totalled it with one of those adapters that's supposed to let you play homebrew games. It wiped the memory and now it won't play anything."
"And Cam?" Brad strokes Neil's back.
"Told me it was my fault for letting him borrow it."
"So you screamed at her?"
"If somebody told you it was your fault that somebody fried your brand-new $300 shirt, Brad-"
"I wouldn't let someone borrow a brand-new $300 shirt even if I owned one." Brad frowns against Neil's neck. "But I get your point."
"Great. Now will you let me the fuck up?" Neil isn't exactly hyperventilating, but Brad can tell he's trying to keep his composure.
"Mm . . . not quite." Brad slides off his lap, and this time Neil doesn't bother trying to hide the whine out of his mouth. Brad sits in front of him and smiles up before reaching for Neil's fly and into the top of his shoe at the same time, God bless whoever invented hightops. "But I did promise you a deal, and I'm good for my promises."
The tearing foil is loud in the nearly-silent room, and as Brad stuffs the empty condom wrapper into his other sneaker he thinks absently that it's strange to hear only the faintest strains of the heavy backbeat of Tommy's bass turned up to the max. The soundproofing in this building must be great.
Neil actually whimpers when Brad pushes his jeans and T-shirt out of the way and bends over his cock, gleefully slurping about half of it down at once before sliding a hand under the edge of Neil's shirt to stroke the skin there and ground him before he does something really silly like trying to pull the handcuffs apart around a ten-inch pipe. Neil makes an impatient noise and tries to shift his hips. Brad wishes he had a camera to catch the look on Neil's face when the chair slides. Instead he just pulls off with an audible pop and grabs the sides of the seat.
"Simmer down, sugarbun. All good things come to those who wait and so on and so forth." And he leans forward again, licking a single long stripe up the underside of Neil's hardon before settling into a comfortable rhythm.
Neil is trying and trying hard not to give Brad the satisfaction of hearing the effect he's having, but every few seconds a quiet whine or whimper gets past his lips anyway, and Brad sets out to find the spot he rubbed earlier from the safety of Neil's lap, the one that makes every guy Brad's ever gone down on see white. They all seem to have one, it's just finding it that's the trouble. Neil jerks suddenly forward, and Brad pulls back before he can start coughing. Reports of Adam's size (mostly under-exaggerated, interestingly enough, Brad thinks idly) aside, there's only so much dick anyone with a gag reflex can handle no matter how much practice they get, and what just went into Brad's mouth is never going to fit. Instead he reaches up with his free hand to play with what's left, focusing on the top half and letting his hand and Neil's overworked state of mind do the rest.
Neil swears when he comes, or at least, Brad thinks he does. He's pretty sure it started out as another "fuck," but somewhere along the way it got stretched out and a few syllables got added until it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original word. Brad pulls off as soon as he feels Neil tense up and looks up to make sure his job is done; Neil's wearing a condom and maybe it's all just a mind game, but Brad still feels like there are just some things that belong to only Adam.
Brad rests his head on Neil's knee as he pulls off the condom (and that's not going in his shoe for safekeeping, thanks, there has to be a bathroom he can flush it in somewhere in this room). Neil is trying to pretend his breathing is normal. Brad strokes his other knee. Somewhere under the heavy denim is a deep bruise from a slam into a ladder at the last venue, but if Brad's hitting it Neil isn't saying.
"You okay, sugarbun?"
At first he thinks Neil's going to ignore him. Then, reluctantly: "Yeah." Brad turns his attention back to Neil's leg.
"I'll talk to Tommy," he promises, and then he stands up. "No more screaming at people. Even if they did have a lapse in judgement. If you really can't manage to be civil Lane and Adam are always around."
Neil is silent. Brad holds up the handcuff key, tied for safekeeping on a string around his neck. "Neil . . . "
"Okay, okay, fine," Neil says. Brad decides not to tell him just how very much he sounds like a moody teenager. "Okay. I won't."
Brad untangles the string from the chain he's hung one of Adam's rings on. There's a click, and then Neil is rubbing one wrist with the other hand and zipping his fly. Brad cocks his head toward the sound of the bass. It's the only thing he can hear, but he's known the backbeats to most of Adam's songs ever since they were written. Brad smiles.
"Think we're just in time for troupe introductions, sugarbun," he says. "You coming?"
"Maybe."
"I'll see you in the wings, then," Brad chirps, and out he goes.
It occurs to him as he does that he really should have rescued Taylor's handcuffs from Neil before he left, but that's a worry for after the show.
Right now, he really just wants to catch the last couple of songs.