that's money, honey (the confident man remix) kris/adam, pg-13
title: that's money, honey (the confident man remix)
author: moirariordan
fandom: american idol rpf
pairings/characters: kris allen/adam lambert
rating: pg13
word count: ~3762
summary: In retrospect, the smart thing to do would’ve been to slam the door in his face. A remix of That's Money, Honey by samanthahirr.
written for the Remix Redux challenge over at kmadness, thanks ever be to jerakeen for putting it all together, maerhys for coming up with it in the first place, samanthahirr for writing such a fantastic story, and akavertigo for pointing out where Kris was being a total tool and for helping me, you know, lessen that. Hey, it takes a village.
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
The first time Kris saw Adam, as in actually looked, the first thing he saw were his clothes, which isn’t a surprise, as Kris usually looks at a person’s clothes before he looks at anything else. Not for sartorial reasons - well, sometimes for sartorial reasons - but because you can learn all you need to know about a person, if you know how to look, how to read, how to assess.
Like a woman who pins her hair up in sloppy chignons that fall apart and buns that are too tight, who wears clothes that don’t fit quite properly and lipstick just a shade too bright. Her nails are painted garishly and she always wears the wrong kinds of shoes; she’ll respond to a kind word or compliment like a flower unfolding under the sun - if you say the right things, tell her what she wants to hear, you can unfold her wallet too, easy as a smile.
Or a man with perfectly laced shoes and stiffly starched ties, hair shellacked and gelled to an inch of its life, gloves and leather briefcase and glasses and a frown - he won’t have patience for charm or compliments. He responds only to plans, things with direction and purpose. This type of man respects you when you play hardball, this type of man is a little more dangerous than the rest.
But Adam, when Kris first looked, wore a black zipped jacket that fell to his knees and flipped open at the collar and pulled tight around his waist. He had three rings on his fingers - one blue, one green, and one silver metal vine that wrapped around his thumb, and they looked like cheap trinkets, costume jewelry he found at a farmer’s market. His boots looked like they’d been shined with oil and his hair brushed his collar in movie-perfect tousles. Kris distrusted him instantly.
“I need your help on a job,” he’d said. In retrospect, the smart thing to do would’ve been to slam the door in his face.
“I love this city,” Adam says, twisting his voice around the swizzle in his drink. He’s wearing Burberry, a long, dark blue peacoat with glinting, gold buttons. It’s the most English thing he could find, probably. “It’s so…quaint.”
“London is not quaint,” Kris replies. He looks down at his own drink, a whiskey sour that looks particularly dour next to Adam’s fruit-filled, crayon-colored…thing. “London is probably offended that you just called it quaint. It’s probably going to conquer and enslave you, now.”
“Funny, I’m usually the one who does the conquering,” Adam says, slinking a foot up Kris’s pant leg.
Kris shakes him off. “That could change,” he says lightly. Adam starts to grin. “And not in a way that’s fun for you.”
“Well, you’re uptight tonight,” Adam says, sitting back with a pout. The stretch of his legs looks really indecent, from this angle.
Kris doesn’t dignify that with a reaction. “I like London,” he says instead.
“You do?” Adam asks. He gets the look on his face he always gets when Kris gives him some piece of personal information, no matter how small. Like he’s a little desperately hungry for something, and his fingers twitch nervously. It never fails to send a foreboding shiver down Kris’s spine.
“Yes,” he says, and takes a sip of his drink. It burns on the way down.
“Everything’s so old here,” Adam says, wrinkling his nose.
“Said like a true American.”
Adam makes a face at him. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he protests. “It’s like, everything has history, here. I mean, think about how many people have probably sat at this table, having drinks. Thousands, probably.”
Kris is willing to bet that not many of them were here for quite the same reason as they are. “That’s what I like about it.”
“You like history?” Adam asks.
“I like things that have permanence.” Kris answers, just as casual as the question was, but it takes him every ounce of willpower he has not to tense up.
“Kind of ironic, don’t you think?” Adam smiles at him, triumphant. Like he knows what Kris is thinking right now and doesn’t give a shit.
“Maybe not,” Kris snaps, feeling vicious. “There are much more permanent things than people.”
Kris watches it hit home on Adam’s face, watches him sit back and take a long gulp, much more subdued than before. There’s something uncomfortable shifting around in Kris’s chest, like he’s swallowed one of the huge pineapple chunks in Adam’s drink whole.
They don’t speak again until after they leave, stepping out onto the street, Adam a little shakily, Kris holding his arm right below the elbow to steady him. Adam has a gliding sort of walk that is a little unearthly, like he’s just swaying in the direction that Kris pulls him, like he doesn’t even have to put any effort into following, like his body just does it for him.
“You don’t fool me at all,” he mumbles. His hand is resting on the back of Kris’s neck, it feels big and heavy and warm. “You act like you don’t care about anything but you do. I can tell.”
“You can’t tell anything right now,” Kris replies stoically.
Adam just smirks, pulling away suddenly. Kris stumbles a bit in surprise, which makes Adam’s smirk twist into something a little more devious. “Shows what you know,” he says, and two-steps his way down into the Underground station.
Kris was taught everything he knows by a man named Frank Hughes, or at least that’s the name he used when Kris knew him. They met in Berlin, Germany, three weeks after Kris went AWOL. Kris thought it was a coincidence, at first. Now he knows - nothing is a coincidence.
“Hey, soldier,” he’d said in heavily accented English, tipping a glass of whiskey down the bar at Kris, smiling a smile like he had a thousand secrets. Kris still remembers how he’d looked windblown and ruffled, his boots untied and his shirt cuffs worn and frayed, like a vagrant. “You look lost.”
“I’m not,” Kris had replied, shortly. He’d been always on the defensive back then, looking over his shoulder constantly, skittering from place to place like George W. Bush himself was on his tail. He got into fights all the time for no good reasons, full of raw, angry energy, sticking out like the sore thumb he was wherever he went.
“You look it.”
Kris had muttered something rather unpleasant in German, and Frank had just laughed. The sound itself had been jarring; Kris hadn’t heard anyone actually laugh in so long.
“Have another drink,” Frank said, “on me.” He’d motioned to the bartender to refill Kris’s tumbler, and the rest was just inevitable.
“We could so take over the world,” Adam says, eyes glossy and rolling around in his head. He looks drunk. “We’d do it in like, two days. Like, not even that. A couple hours of planning and - oh my god, sushi! Let’s go get sushi. Expensive sushi.”
“No sushi,” Kris says sternly. “Packing.”
“Packing is boring,” Adam declares. “Let’s have sex instead.”
Kris pushes him away irritably, ducking roving hands in favor of rolling clothes into his suitcase. “We’ve got a ferry to catch in two hours,” he says pointedly. “We cannot miss it, Adam. We cannot stay in England.”
Adam makes a ‘yap, yap, yap’ motion with one hand and collapses on the bed, stretching his legs out decadently.
“Two hours,” Kris needles. “I’ll be on the ferry. I don’t know about you.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t just drive,” Adam whines.
“You want to drive across the English Channel,” Kris says flatly.
Adam glares. “There are plenty of places we could drive to,” he says. “You’re really going to just leave your new car? I thought you loved it.”
Kris drifts off momentarily, lost in a sense memory of leather beneath his hands and Adam’s breath, hot on his neck. “I do,” he says, almost involuntarily. The honesty burns and his movements turn brisk and snappish, but Adam just smiles softly. “It’s too flashy.”
“You like flashy,” Adam accuses.
Kris keeps packing, doesn’t deny it. “Remember how I said that it’s amazing that you’re not in jail?” he asks. “This is one of those things that makes me amazed.”
“We’re not going to jail,” Adam crows, “because we are awesome.”
“Not awesome enough to keep the expensive red convertible that we drove away from the scene of a crime in,” Kris replies.
“Whatever,” Adam says shortly, reaching out with one hand and snagging Kris’s hip. Kris puts up a perfunctory sort of fight before letting himself be pulled, rolled down into the space between the headboard and Adam’s torso. “I think you want to be wooed. That’s why you keep putting up such a fuss.”
“I don’t fuss,” Kris says indignantly. Adam shoots him an indulgent look.
“You do.”
Adam leans down for a kiss and Kris dodges him, only succeeding in getting Adam’s mouth latched to his neck instead. “Two hours,” he says again, feeling the need to reiterate. Again.
“Baby,” Adam croons, “relax. We have plenty of time.”
“We do not,” Kris protests, rather weakly. “Goddamn it. Adam.”
Adam looks up and smiles innocently. “Yes?”
“You can’t always win arguments like this,” Kris points out.
Adam laughs. “Yes, I fucking can,” he says challengingly, and sneaks his hands up beneath Kris’s shirt. His hands are cold against Kris’s skin. Kris shudders violently.
Adam smells like Eau Sauvage and espresso and hair spray, and his shirt, half-buttoned, falls over one shoulder. With his gravity-challenged hair and intense, beguiling grin, he looks like he’s just stepped off the cover of a dime-store romance novel; it’s really very ridiculous.
“I win,” he says pointedly, biting Kris’s collarbone in victory. Kris reaches out blindly to smack him and Adam dodges easily, laughing.
They miss the ferry.
The worst fight he and Frank ever had was over a Turkish girl Kris met in Morocco, a waitress with dark brown eyes named Ayla. She used to come up to Kris’s hotel room after her shifts in the restaurant across the way, and they’d drink beer and make love for hours, and Kris could pretend he was a different kind of person for a while.
“Scheisskopf,” hissed Frank, when he finally showed his face again, fresh from one of his mysterious absences that he had neither the inclination nor the emotional perception to see bothered Kris immensely. “This girl, you don’t even know her. You can’t trust her. Kissing with your eyes closed, what is wrong with you?”
“I trust her more than you,” Kris accused, feeling wild, on the edge, like he was about to fly apart. “You and your fucking secrets. I don’t even know your real name. Your accent changes every two hours, you disappear all the time, why should I trust you?”
Frank had the balls to actually look hurt, though Kris still isn’t sure if it was genuine or not. He could never be sure, with Frank.
At any rate, it was with a sheepish, angry, chastened air that Kris boarded a cruise line to New York with Frank the next week, after Ayla, sweet, brown-eyed Ayla, disappeared with the contents of Kris’s safe.
“It’s okay,” Frank murmured in French, patting Kris’s back in their tiny cabin. “I know, I know, my friend. You’ll get it, eventually. You’ll get it.”
They spend most of their time traveling, going from town to town without any real sense of purpose or direction. Kris isn’t paranoid about Blaisdale, or his men, exactly, he knows they got away clean, but. But.
“You’re so restless,” Adam observes one afternoon, idly munching on small chunks of white cheese from the dining car, his feet propped up on Kris’s lap. It’s cold today, raining, and Adam has on a three piece suit, complete with a dark brown umbrella, trench coat and woolen gloves. “Are you always like this after a job?”
“No,” Kris says vaguely. He’s been distracted and itchy all day, a deep sense of foreboding settling over him like a heavy, wet blanket.
Adam hums under his breath, sliding closer on the bench so that he’s almost in Kris’s lap, leaning in to feed him a block of cheese. It tastes sharp, unfamiliar.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Adam says. “Somewhere familiar. Do you have an actual house, or do you just live out of hotels?”
Kris gives him a look.
“Oookay, Howard Hughes,” Adam says, smirking, reaching out to adjust Kris’s tie. “We’ll go to my house, then. It’s huge. Expensive. Permanent. You’ll love it.”
Kris takes a moment to contemplate what a house owned by Adam might look like. “You want to take me to your house?” he asks skeptically.
Adam shrugs. “Why not?”
Kris can think of a million reasons why not, but none of them apparently occur to Adam.
Adam smiles, slow like molasses. “I have a pool,” he says. “Two pools, actually. And two Jacuzzis. And a huge fountain thing in the front. With tiny, little Cupids.”
“Cupids,” Kris says.
“Well, I think they look like Cupids,” Adam replies haughtily.
There’s a suitcase of stuff sitting in a storage locker at JFK - a pair of Barton Perreira sunglasses, a dark brown leather riding jacket, a white gold money clip, a small, red-tinted wooden ring, and a .45 semi-automatic that Adam lifted off a security guard in Orlando. Kris will add to the stash every once in a while - a pair of calfskin studded lace up shoes, a plaid bow tie Adam insists he will come around to liking one day, an heiress’s iPod with a tiny row of diamonds set along the edges, and a brown cashmere scarf with orange stitching.
The rest of it Kris refuses, or gives back, or leaves behind. Because it’s not like Adam minds. Because it’s not like Adam doesn’t have twelve new gifts to replace each one Kris doesn’t keep. Because it’s not like Kris needs all this shit, anyway. Because.
It doesn’t stop Kris from keeping the storage locker, though, or from adding to it every time he’s in New York. He shouldn’t, because Adam notices, and he doesn’t need any more encouragement than he already gets, but. But some things, Kris just wants to keep.
Adam’s “house,” which is not a house, in any sense of the word, but really kind of a huge museum, or maybe a monument, is in Madrid. His fountain does not look like tiny, little Cupids.
“You could fit a hockey rink in here,” Kris says, stepping one cautious foot into a wide, gaping sea of marble and glass. “Jesus Christ, this is such a security risk.”
Adam scoffs. “What security risk. Nobody knows about this place.”
“That you know of.”
Adam shrugs out of his overcoat, tosses his fedora onto the head of the terracotta soldier standing guard by the front door and levels Kris with a hard look. “Nobody knows about this place,” he repeats.
Kris raises an eyebrow and looks away, silently conceding the point. “Half of your walls are made of glass,” he points out.
Adam laughs. The sound echoes. “Baby, if anyone gets close enough to shoot at me in this house, I deserve to get killed.”
Kris is silent, craning his neck upwards, a bit dazzled, lightheaded. The entire monstrosity is like an Escher painting, with gigantic planes of concrete marble interrupted by incongruent sections of wood or glass or steel. The foyer reminds Kris of the Art Institute in Chicago, with the long, wide open nothingness that narrows into a winding staircase, only it’s all open, because part of the second story’s floor is made of glass, and there really are two separate, gigantic pools, and Kris can seem them both from where he’s standing.
“It’s…nice,” he says to Adam, who is leaning against the wall nonchalantly, awaiting Kris’s judgment. He laughs again.
“I knew you’d like it,” he says, and bounces over to grab Kris’s hand. “Wait until you see the rest.”
It’s stupid. A lot of things about this are stupid. Adam is stupid. He’s overconfident, and impulsive, and far too reckless about his safety, and impatient, and trusts too easily. Sometimes Kris is amazed he’s still alive, let alone jail.
Frank’s probably turning over in his grave. Kris’s mother definitely is. There’s nothing about this that makes practical sense, and every time Kris spends more than a minute thinking about the situation logically, he starts to feel the creeping dread, the bone-hard certainty that this is going to go very badly for both of them.
The stupidest part is that he doesn’t give a fuck.
There are windows everywhere, in Adam’s house. And lights - huge lights, ridiculously big, really - and no dark corners, anywhere. There are no curtains or dimming switches, not in this house.
Adam likes to make love all over the place, in all the lit up corners of his huge, lit up house - the island in the kitchen, the slated wood floors around the indoor pool, on the glass floors of the upper living room, the thick red rug in the master bathroom. He’ll pounce out of nowhere, surprising Kris in the middle of grilling tuna for dinner on the back porch, or flipping through the huge books of maps that Adam keeps in the den, or lying halfway between awake and asleep on the fainting couch in the sunroom. Where Kris is bent into laziness by the Spanish sun and idleness, vibrating at zero, Adam is at a hundred, constantly in motion.
But the bedroom is Adam’s favorite. It is more Adam than any other place in the house, it couldn’t be anyone’s bedroom but Adam’s, really, with its grand, soft wooden floors and the wall to wall windows and the bookshelves crammed to bursting with gadgets and knickknacks, museum brochures and broken pieces of art.
“This is the bedroom I’ve wanted since I was ten,” Adam had breathed, that first day. He’d undressed Kris piece by piece, too slow for Kris. It was the middle of the day, and the sun shined in through the windows directly on the bed, and Kris felt like the centerpiece of some giant exhibit. Man Dying, or maybe, rather, Con Man Dying.
“I knew I wanted you the first moment I saw you,” Adam will say, or, “you’re so beautiful like this,” or a million other things that he feels and then says, like he can’t even contain them, like it’s what you’re supposed to do, like it’s easy. He talks in Spanish sometimes, which Kris doesn’t speak and so it all sounds dirty and romantic and ridiculous, or French, which Kris does speak and thus can correct his pronunciation.
He says lots of things, really, in lots of different ways, but the most important ones he says in English, very clearly, with nothing but confidence. Like, “I knew you’d like it here,” and “it’s okay, I understand.”
And, maybe most importantly, “it was never about the money.”
Laid up in light, Kris really can’t help but listen.
If there’s one thing Kris is good at, it’s planning. This is what comes naturally to him. Not the tricks or the running or even the fighting, but the facts.
Like: Adam has to go to Los Angeles to meet up with a buyer, something he’s had on the books for a year. Meaning: Kris has three weeks to himself in the Madrid house.
Conclusion: This is an opportunity.
It only takes him a week to actually accomplish what he wants to accomplish, so he’s rather at a loss, a feeling he isn’t unused to but that makes him uncomfortable nonetheless. Adam’s house is nothing without Adam, just a giant, empty museum. The marble is cold, the glass, impersonal. Everything, from the hectic collection of stolen artifacts and priceless art stashed in every corner to the stupid, minimalist furniture, is just awkward and silly without Adam there to put it all in context. Kris himself feels out of context, even. Outdated, overblown, unbalanced. That feeling he is unused to.
He spends a lot of time sleeping.
The day Adam’s due back, Kris spends his morning in the Jacuzzi with the water turned up as high as is safely possible, then showers in the garden and dries off while eating torrijas and drinking coffee on the porch. He dresses in one of Adam’s thin, cotton t-shirts and a linen trenchcoat, Outlier dungarees and ankle boots, and drives to the aeropuerto in the fruit of his efforts these past three weeks - his newly reclaimed, cherry red Fiorano 599.
Adam’s face lights up when he sees it.
“I thought you left it in London!” he exclaims, tracing the slick lines with one hand. His fingernails are painted black, Kris notes with silent amusement. There’s also a streak of blue in his hair.
“Temporarily,” Kris says. “You didn’t think I was just going to leave it there?”
There’s a flash of something that flits across Adam’s face that confirms, yes, Adam did suspect that Kris would just leave it there.
Kris leans against the driver’s side casually, well aware of the picture he makes, satisfied how Adam’s laser focus goes straight to his hands, hooked in his belt, the line of his thighs, the spot where his shirt gapes open and reveals his neck. “This is a Ferrari,” he says dryly. “I wasn’t going to just leave it there.”
Adam’s grin is already blinding. “Baby,” he says, “honey, sweetheart, darling, sugarplum - “
“Shut up,” Kris says crisply.
“Mi amor, mon chaton, love of my life,” Adam continues grandly, “you are the best.”
Kris angles away from Adam’s effusive hug, laughing in spite of himself. “Damn it, Adam, you’re making a scene.”
“I don’t care,” Adam says, muffled into Kris’s shoulder. “Oh my God, you went and got your car, and you’re totally wearing my cologne too, you shit - “
“You did leave it out,” Kris points out.
“Is this my shirt?” Adam asks in awe. “Fuck. Fuck, we need to go home right now. Like right the fuck now.”
“Home?” Kris asks incredulously, turning his head and brushing his mouth against the inside of Adam’s jaw, feeling him shiver. “Adam, what do you think I brought the car here for?”
Adam squeezes just a little tighter, shoulders quivering slightly. Kris thinks, yes, okay, smiles, squeezes back.
author: moirariordan
fandom: american idol rpf
pairings/characters: kris allen/adam lambert
rating: pg13
word count: ~3762
summary: In retrospect, the smart thing to do would’ve been to slam the door in his face. A remix of That's Money, Honey by samanthahirr.
written for the Remix Redux challenge over at kmadness, thanks ever be to jerakeen for putting it all together, maerhys for coming up with it in the first place, samanthahirr for writing such a fantastic story, and akavertigo for pointing out where Kris was being a total tool and for helping me, you know, lessen that. Hey, it takes a village.
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
The first time Kris saw Adam, as in actually looked, the first thing he saw were his clothes, which isn’t a surprise, as Kris usually looks at a person’s clothes before he looks at anything else. Not for sartorial reasons - well, sometimes for sartorial reasons - but because you can learn all you need to know about a person, if you know how to look, how to read, how to assess.
Like a woman who pins her hair up in sloppy chignons that fall apart and buns that are too tight, who wears clothes that don’t fit quite properly and lipstick just a shade too bright. Her nails are painted garishly and she always wears the wrong kinds of shoes; she’ll respond to a kind word or compliment like a flower unfolding under the sun - if you say the right things, tell her what she wants to hear, you can unfold her wallet too, easy as a smile.
Or a man with perfectly laced shoes and stiffly starched ties, hair shellacked and gelled to an inch of its life, gloves and leather briefcase and glasses and a frown - he won’t have patience for charm or compliments. He responds only to plans, things with direction and purpose. This type of man respects you when you play hardball, this type of man is a little more dangerous than the rest.
But Adam, when Kris first looked, wore a black zipped jacket that fell to his knees and flipped open at the collar and pulled tight around his waist. He had three rings on his fingers - one blue, one green, and one silver metal vine that wrapped around his thumb, and they looked like cheap trinkets, costume jewelry he found at a farmer’s market. His boots looked like they’d been shined with oil and his hair brushed his collar in movie-perfect tousles. Kris distrusted him instantly.
“I need your help on a job,” he’d said. In retrospect, the smart thing to do would’ve been to slam the door in his face.
“I love this city,” Adam says, twisting his voice around the swizzle in his drink. He’s wearing Burberry, a long, dark blue peacoat with glinting, gold buttons. It’s the most English thing he could find, probably. “It’s so…quaint.”
“London is not quaint,” Kris replies. He looks down at his own drink, a whiskey sour that looks particularly dour next to Adam’s fruit-filled, crayon-colored…thing. “London is probably offended that you just called it quaint. It’s probably going to conquer and enslave you, now.”
“Funny, I’m usually the one who does the conquering,” Adam says, slinking a foot up Kris’s pant leg.
Kris shakes him off. “That could change,” he says lightly. Adam starts to grin. “And not in a way that’s fun for you.”
“Well, you’re uptight tonight,” Adam says, sitting back with a pout. The stretch of his legs looks really indecent, from this angle.
Kris doesn’t dignify that with a reaction. “I like London,” he says instead.
“You do?” Adam asks. He gets the look on his face he always gets when Kris gives him some piece of personal information, no matter how small. Like he’s a little desperately hungry for something, and his fingers twitch nervously. It never fails to send a foreboding shiver down Kris’s spine.
“Yes,” he says, and takes a sip of his drink. It burns on the way down.
“Everything’s so old here,” Adam says, wrinkling his nose.
“Said like a true American.”
Adam makes a face at him. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he protests. “It’s like, everything has history, here. I mean, think about how many people have probably sat at this table, having drinks. Thousands, probably.”
Kris is willing to bet that not many of them were here for quite the same reason as they are. “That’s what I like about it.”
“You like history?” Adam asks.
“I like things that have permanence.” Kris answers, just as casual as the question was, but it takes him every ounce of willpower he has not to tense up.
“Kind of ironic, don’t you think?” Adam smiles at him, triumphant. Like he knows what Kris is thinking right now and doesn’t give a shit.
“Maybe not,” Kris snaps, feeling vicious. “There are much more permanent things than people.”
Kris watches it hit home on Adam’s face, watches him sit back and take a long gulp, much more subdued than before. There’s something uncomfortable shifting around in Kris’s chest, like he’s swallowed one of the huge pineapple chunks in Adam’s drink whole.
They don’t speak again until after they leave, stepping out onto the street, Adam a little shakily, Kris holding his arm right below the elbow to steady him. Adam has a gliding sort of walk that is a little unearthly, like he’s just swaying in the direction that Kris pulls him, like he doesn’t even have to put any effort into following, like his body just does it for him.
“You don’t fool me at all,” he mumbles. His hand is resting on the back of Kris’s neck, it feels big and heavy and warm. “You act like you don’t care about anything but you do. I can tell.”
“You can’t tell anything right now,” Kris replies stoically.
Adam just smirks, pulling away suddenly. Kris stumbles a bit in surprise, which makes Adam’s smirk twist into something a little more devious. “Shows what you know,” he says, and two-steps his way down into the Underground station.
Kris was taught everything he knows by a man named Frank Hughes, or at least that’s the name he used when Kris knew him. They met in Berlin, Germany, three weeks after Kris went AWOL. Kris thought it was a coincidence, at first. Now he knows - nothing is a coincidence.
“Hey, soldier,” he’d said in heavily accented English, tipping a glass of whiskey down the bar at Kris, smiling a smile like he had a thousand secrets. Kris still remembers how he’d looked windblown and ruffled, his boots untied and his shirt cuffs worn and frayed, like a vagrant. “You look lost.”
“I’m not,” Kris had replied, shortly. He’d been always on the defensive back then, looking over his shoulder constantly, skittering from place to place like George W. Bush himself was on his tail. He got into fights all the time for no good reasons, full of raw, angry energy, sticking out like the sore thumb he was wherever he went.
“You look it.”
Kris had muttered something rather unpleasant in German, and Frank had just laughed. The sound itself had been jarring; Kris hadn’t heard anyone actually laugh in so long.
“Have another drink,” Frank said, “on me.” He’d motioned to the bartender to refill Kris’s tumbler, and the rest was just inevitable.
“We could so take over the world,” Adam says, eyes glossy and rolling around in his head. He looks drunk. “We’d do it in like, two days. Like, not even that. A couple hours of planning and - oh my god, sushi! Let’s go get sushi. Expensive sushi.”
“No sushi,” Kris says sternly. “Packing.”
“Packing is boring,” Adam declares. “Let’s have sex instead.”
Kris pushes him away irritably, ducking roving hands in favor of rolling clothes into his suitcase. “We’ve got a ferry to catch in two hours,” he says pointedly. “We cannot miss it, Adam. We cannot stay in England.”
Adam makes a ‘yap, yap, yap’ motion with one hand and collapses on the bed, stretching his legs out decadently.
“Two hours,” Kris needles. “I’ll be on the ferry. I don’t know about you.”
“I don’t understand why we can’t just drive,” Adam whines.
“You want to drive across the English Channel,” Kris says flatly.
Adam glares. “There are plenty of places we could drive to,” he says. “You’re really going to just leave your new car? I thought you loved it.”
Kris drifts off momentarily, lost in a sense memory of leather beneath his hands and Adam’s breath, hot on his neck. “I do,” he says, almost involuntarily. The honesty burns and his movements turn brisk and snappish, but Adam just smiles softly. “It’s too flashy.”
“You like flashy,” Adam accuses.
Kris keeps packing, doesn’t deny it. “Remember how I said that it’s amazing that you’re not in jail?” he asks. “This is one of those things that makes me amazed.”
“We’re not going to jail,” Adam crows, “because we are awesome.”
“Not awesome enough to keep the expensive red convertible that we drove away from the scene of a crime in,” Kris replies.
“Whatever,” Adam says shortly, reaching out with one hand and snagging Kris’s hip. Kris puts up a perfunctory sort of fight before letting himself be pulled, rolled down into the space between the headboard and Adam’s torso. “I think you want to be wooed. That’s why you keep putting up such a fuss.”
“I don’t fuss,” Kris says indignantly. Adam shoots him an indulgent look.
“You do.”
Adam leans down for a kiss and Kris dodges him, only succeeding in getting Adam’s mouth latched to his neck instead. “Two hours,” he says again, feeling the need to reiterate. Again.
“Baby,” Adam croons, “relax. We have plenty of time.”
“We do not,” Kris protests, rather weakly. “Goddamn it. Adam.”
Adam looks up and smiles innocently. “Yes?”
“You can’t always win arguments like this,” Kris points out.
Adam laughs. “Yes, I fucking can,” he says challengingly, and sneaks his hands up beneath Kris’s shirt. His hands are cold against Kris’s skin. Kris shudders violently.
Adam smells like Eau Sauvage and espresso and hair spray, and his shirt, half-buttoned, falls over one shoulder. With his gravity-challenged hair and intense, beguiling grin, he looks like he’s just stepped off the cover of a dime-store romance novel; it’s really very ridiculous.
“I win,” he says pointedly, biting Kris’s collarbone in victory. Kris reaches out blindly to smack him and Adam dodges easily, laughing.
They miss the ferry.
The worst fight he and Frank ever had was over a Turkish girl Kris met in Morocco, a waitress with dark brown eyes named Ayla. She used to come up to Kris’s hotel room after her shifts in the restaurant across the way, and they’d drink beer and make love for hours, and Kris could pretend he was a different kind of person for a while.
“Scheisskopf,” hissed Frank, when he finally showed his face again, fresh from one of his mysterious absences that he had neither the inclination nor the emotional perception to see bothered Kris immensely. “This girl, you don’t even know her. You can’t trust her. Kissing with your eyes closed, what is wrong with you?”
“I trust her more than you,” Kris accused, feeling wild, on the edge, like he was about to fly apart. “You and your fucking secrets. I don’t even know your real name. Your accent changes every two hours, you disappear all the time, why should I trust you?”
Frank had the balls to actually look hurt, though Kris still isn’t sure if it was genuine or not. He could never be sure, with Frank.
At any rate, it was with a sheepish, angry, chastened air that Kris boarded a cruise line to New York with Frank the next week, after Ayla, sweet, brown-eyed Ayla, disappeared with the contents of Kris’s safe.
“It’s okay,” Frank murmured in French, patting Kris’s back in their tiny cabin. “I know, I know, my friend. You’ll get it, eventually. You’ll get it.”
They spend most of their time traveling, going from town to town without any real sense of purpose or direction. Kris isn’t paranoid about Blaisdale, or his men, exactly, he knows they got away clean, but. But.
“You’re so restless,” Adam observes one afternoon, idly munching on small chunks of white cheese from the dining car, his feet propped up on Kris’s lap. It’s cold today, raining, and Adam has on a three piece suit, complete with a dark brown umbrella, trench coat and woolen gloves. “Are you always like this after a job?”
“No,” Kris says vaguely. He’s been distracted and itchy all day, a deep sense of foreboding settling over him like a heavy, wet blanket.
Adam hums under his breath, sliding closer on the bench so that he’s almost in Kris’s lap, leaning in to feed him a block of cheese. It tastes sharp, unfamiliar.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Adam says. “Somewhere familiar. Do you have an actual house, or do you just live out of hotels?”
Kris gives him a look.
“Oookay, Howard Hughes,” Adam says, smirking, reaching out to adjust Kris’s tie. “We’ll go to my house, then. It’s huge. Expensive. Permanent. You’ll love it.”
Kris takes a moment to contemplate what a house owned by Adam might look like. “You want to take me to your house?” he asks skeptically.
Adam shrugs. “Why not?”
Kris can think of a million reasons why not, but none of them apparently occur to Adam.
Adam smiles, slow like molasses. “I have a pool,” he says. “Two pools, actually. And two Jacuzzis. And a huge fountain thing in the front. With tiny, little Cupids.”
“Cupids,” Kris says.
“Well, I think they look like Cupids,” Adam replies haughtily.
There’s a suitcase of stuff sitting in a storage locker at JFK - a pair of Barton Perreira sunglasses, a dark brown leather riding jacket, a white gold money clip, a small, red-tinted wooden ring, and a .45 semi-automatic that Adam lifted off a security guard in Orlando. Kris will add to the stash every once in a while - a pair of calfskin studded lace up shoes, a plaid bow tie Adam insists he will come around to liking one day, an heiress’s iPod with a tiny row of diamonds set along the edges, and a brown cashmere scarf with orange stitching.
The rest of it Kris refuses, or gives back, or leaves behind. Because it’s not like Adam minds. Because it’s not like Adam doesn’t have twelve new gifts to replace each one Kris doesn’t keep. Because it’s not like Kris needs all this shit, anyway. Because.
It doesn’t stop Kris from keeping the storage locker, though, or from adding to it every time he’s in New York. He shouldn’t, because Adam notices, and he doesn’t need any more encouragement than he already gets, but. But some things, Kris just wants to keep.
Adam’s “house,” which is not a house, in any sense of the word, but really kind of a huge museum, or maybe a monument, is in Madrid. His fountain does not look like tiny, little Cupids.
“You could fit a hockey rink in here,” Kris says, stepping one cautious foot into a wide, gaping sea of marble and glass. “Jesus Christ, this is such a security risk.”
Adam scoffs. “What security risk. Nobody knows about this place.”
“That you know of.”
Adam shrugs out of his overcoat, tosses his fedora onto the head of the terracotta soldier standing guard by the front door and levels Kris with a hard look. “Nobody knows about this place,” he repeats.
Kris raises an eyebrow and looks away, silently conceding the point. “Half of your walls are made of glass,” he points out.
Adam laughs. The sound echoes. “Baby, if anyone gets close enough to shoot at me in this house, I deserve to get killed.”
Kris is silent, craning his neck upwards, a bit dazzled, lightheaded. The entire monstrosity is like an Escher painting, with gigantic planes of concrete marble interrupted by incongruent sections of wood or glass or steel. The foyer reminds Kris of the Art Institute in Chicago, with the long, wide open nothingness that narrows into a winding staircase, only it’s all open, because part of the second story’s floor is made of glass, and there really are two separate, gigantic pools, and Kris can seem them both from where he’s standing.
“It’s…nice,” he says to Adam, who is leaning against the wall nonchalantly, awaiting Kris’s judgment. He laughs again.
“I knew you’d like it,” he says, and bounces over to grab Kris’s hand. “Wait until you see the rest.”
It’s stupid. A lot of things about this are stupid. Adam is stupid. He’s overconfident, and impulsive, and far too reckless about his safety, and impatient, and trusts too easily. Sometimes Kris is amazed he’s still alive, let alone jail.
Frank’s probably turning over in his grave. Kris’s mother definitely is. There’s nothing about this that makes practical sense, and every time Kris spends more than a minute thinking about the situation logically, he starts to feel the creeping dread, the bone-hard certainty that this is going to go very badly for both of them.
The stupidest part is that he doesn’t give a fuck.
There are windows everywhere, in Adam’s house. And lights - huge lights, ridiculously big, really - and no dark corners, anywhere. There are no curtains or dimming switches, not in this house.
Adam likes to make love all over the place, in all the lit up corners of his huge, lit up house - the island in the kitchen, the slated wood floors around the indoor pool, on the glass floors of the upper living room, the thick red rug in the master bathroom. He’ll pounce out of nowhere, surprising Kris in the middle of grilling tuna for dinner on the back porch, or flipping through the huge books of maps that Adam keeps in the den, or lying halfway between awake and asleep on the fainting couch in the sunroom. Where Kris is bent into laziness by the Spanish sun and idleness, vibrating at zero, Adam is at a hundred, constantly in motion.
But the bedroom is Adam’s favorite. It is more Adam than any other place in the house, it couldn’t be anyone’s bedroom but Adam’s, really, with its grand, soft wooden floors and the wall to wall windows and the bookshelves crammed to bursting with gadgets and knickknacks, museum brochures and broken pieces of art.
“This is the bedroom I’ve wanted since I was ten,” Adam had breathed, that first day. He’d undressed Kris piece by piece, too slow for Kris. It was the middle of the day, and the sun shined in through the windows directly on the bed, and Kris felt like the centerpiece of some giant exhibit. Man Dying, or maybe, rather, Con Man Dying.
“I knew I wanted you the first moment I saw you,” Adam will say, or, “you’re so beautiful like this,” or a million other things that he feels and then says, like he can’t even contain them, like it’s what you’re supposed to do, like it’s easy. He talks in Spanish sometimes, which Kris doesn’t speak and so it all sounds dirty and romantic and ridiculous, or French, which Kris does speak and thus can correct his pronunciation.
He says lots of things, really, in lots of different ways, but the most important ones he says in English, very clearly, with nothing but confidence. Like, “I knew you’d like it here,” and “it’s okay, I understand.”
And, maybe most importantly, “it was never about the money.”
Laid up in light, Kris really can’t help but listen.
If there’s one thing Kris is good at, it’s planning. This is what comes naturally to him. Not the tricks or the running or even the fighting, but the facts.
Like: Adam has to go to Los Angeles to meet up with a buyer, something he’s had on the books for a year. Meaning: Kris has three weeks to himself in the Madrid house.
Conclusion: This is an opportunity.
It only takes him a week to actually accomplish what he wants to accomplish, so he’s rather at a loss, a feeling he isn’t unused to but that makes him uncomfortable nonetheless. Adam’s house is nothing without Adam, just a giant, empty museum. The marble is cold, the glass, impersonal. Everything, from the hectic collection of stolen artifacts and priceless art stashed in every corner to the stupid, minimalist furniture, is just awkward and silly without Adam there to put it all in context. Kris himself feels out of context, even. Outdated, overblown, unbalanced. That feeling he is unused to.
He spends a lot of time sleeping.
The day Adam’s due back, Kris spends his morning in the Jacuzzi with the water turned up as high as is safely possible, then showers in the garden and dries off while eating torrijas and drinking coffee on the porch. He dresses in one of Adam’s thin, cotton t-shirts and a linen trenchcoat, Outlier dungarees and ankle boots, and drives to the aeropuerto in the fruit of his efforts these past three weeks - his newly reclaimed, cherry red Fiorano 599.
Adam’s face lights up when he sees it.
“I thought you left it in London!” he exclaims, tracing the slick lines with one hand. His fingernails are painted black, Kris notes with silent amusement. There’s also a streak of blue in his hair.
“Temporarily,” Kris says. “You didn’t think I was just going to leave it there?”
There’s a flash of something that flits across Adam’s face that confirms, yes, Adam did suspect that Kris would just leave it there.
Kris leans against the driver’s side casually, well aware of the picture he makes, satisfied how Adam’s laser focus goes straight to his hands, hooked in his belt, the line of his thighs, the spot where his shirt gapes open and reveals his neck. “This is a Ferrari,” he says dryly. “I wasn’t going to just leave it there.”
Adam’s grin is already blinding. “Baby,” he says, “honey, sweetheart, darling, sugarplum - “
“Shut up,” Kris says crisply.
“Mi amor, mon chaton, love of my life,” Adam continues grandly, “you are the best.”
Kris angles away from Adam’s effusive hug, laughing in spite of himself. “Damn it, Adam, you’re making a scene.”
“I don’t care,” Adam says, muffled into Kris’s shoulder. “Oh my God, you went and got your car, and you’re totally wearing my cologne too, you shit - “
“You did leave it out,” Kris points out.
“Is this my shirt?” Adam asks in awe. “Fuck. Fuck, we need to go home right now. Like right the fuck now.”
“Home?” Kris asks incredulously, turning his head and brushing his mouth against the inside of Adam’s jaw, feeling him shiver. “Adam, what do you think I brought the car here for?”
Adam squeezes just a little tighter, shoulders quivering slightly. Kris thinks, yes, okay, smiles, squeezes back.