Original -- Tipsy
Title: Tipsy
Part: III
Series: The Sam and Adrian Saga
Pairing: Adrian/Sam
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,798
Warnings: Sam being sexy, (legal) alcohol use, a tiny bit of language
Summary: In which Sam gets tipsy, and in which Adrian does not object.
Author's Note: Drunk!Sam is so lovable. This is only the beginning. XD ...and the two-person orgy line is, sadly, from a real conversation. XD
TIPSY
People never really asked about the pictures on Adrian Leyman’s desk. He’d been a little surprised at first. Sam appeared in all of them, and he looked drastically out of place among the lot of gangly Leymans in the big family photo, the highlights in his hair gray instead of red, his head coming to Adrian’s dad’s shoulder-a temple among towers. No one asked, though. Maybe they assumed Sam was the black sheep, or that he was adopted, or that he was Emily’s boyfriend, and that he and Adrian were simply the closest brothers-in-law in the history of the known universe. Maybe they thought the shot of them in Yosemite, which was not the picture that had turned out well but the one where Sam’s sunglasses had slid off, and he was trying to smile and scrabbling to catch them at the same time even as Adrian started laughing, was platonic-maybe they thought it looked like a buddy trip. Which wasn’t to say that Sam Tanner wasn’t also his best friend, but couldn’t they read the rest of it in the slant of his arm, in his splayed fingers on Sam’s shoulder, in Sam’s hand just barely reaching up to his? He could.
Maybe they could, too, and didn’t ask because they didn’t have to. Or maybe they suspected, and they didn’t ask because they didn’t want to know.
He brushed a bit of fuzz from the elegant edge of the cherry wood frame, slotted the fat manila folder of fresh tests into his backpack, zipped it, slung it over his shoulder, and wove his way through the maze of desks to the door. A pat to his pocket confirmed that he had his keys, permitting him to lock the door, flick the light-switches, sidle out into the hallway, and pull the door to behind him.
There were a few students loitering around the scuffed banks of lockers even now, conversing in lackadaisical murmurs, kicking at a soda can that had eluded the janitorial staff. He wondered if they were waiting for a sports game to begin, or if they just didn’t have anywhere better to go.
With the mail under one arm and his backpack dangling heavily from the other, he fought the apartment door, armed, inadequately it seemed, with just his key. The battle was tense for a few moments before he finally bested the beast, admitting himself into the foyer/living room that segued into the kitchenette. As always, everything looked precisely as they’d left it that morning, stealing a long, long kiss in the doorway before having to emerge into a world that wouldn’t look so kindly on such a thing as did the placid beige walls and the subtle glass coffee table. Sometimes Adrian felt like he was trespassing into someone else’s life, like he’d forced the door to some silent mausoleum-museum, some replica-Here’s where he threw the shirt he rejected that morning, just minutes before he stepped outside, onto the sidewalk where the gunman finally got him.
It made his spine tingle like a live wire some days until he looked intently for a few seconds at something that was uniquely Sam, and then his prickling nerves would settle.
Today was fine, though. Most days were.
The hour hand of the clock on the wall was flirting with the six. He set his bag down by the coffee table and tossed himself onto the off-white couch-gently, though, since it wasn’t the most durable of furnishings, and they’d had it a while-and languished there a little while, reveling in the simple peace and quiet.
He was still there, now with his red pen held between his teeth, attempting to parse some particularly poor handwriting further marred by graphite smears and eraser residue, holding the paper closer with one hand and rubbing at his itching contacts with the other, when the tumblers in the lock ground open to allow the door to admit Sam Tanner.
What a deeply, truly wonderful door.
“How was your day?” Adrian asked.
“Shitty,” Sam replied absently, moving into the kitchen, shedding his shoulder bag and coat as he went. They crumpled on the floor like supplicants in his wake. Adrian smiled a little. He sympathized. “Where’s the alcohol?”
“Where it always is,” Adrian answered. It invariably resided in the cupboard above the refrigerator, and Sam invariably inquired after it anyway, as if it migrated when he turned his back. What he was asking after was permission.
Adrian didn’t often mind giving it to him. Generally it was like today-Friday night after a lengthy week of being foiled and frustrated. He suspected that Sam really only drank for two reasons: to blur the edge of his misanthropy, and, slightly paradoxically, to kill some brain cells, just to spite the people who wouldn’t let him use them in the first place. Adrian understood that feeling, so he had nothing against letting Sam indulge it every once in a while.
Also, it certainly didn’t hurt that Sam Tanner was the cutest drunk Adrian had ever seen.
Kid didn’t waste much time, either.
With the whiskey bottle in one hand and his glass in the other, Sam flopped down on the couch, narrowly missing sitting on Adrian’s feet, and poured.
Their drinking styles had always been rather indicative of their personalities on the whole. Adrian, who was a slightly lackadaisical social drinker, would do more swirling than sipping. On a bad night, he might go through three or four beers over the course of a party, and then he would rue his headache the next morning before moving right long.
Sam, however, drank like Sam did everything else. He drank like he wrote his editorials, like he had studied for tests back in the day and like he had practiced with his guitar in secluded parts of the campus until he knew for a fact that he could play it to satisfaction. He drank like he lived, and he drank like he fell in love-all at once, with a hundred and ten percent of everything there was to him. With all cylinders firing, with the whole of him in motion, come hell, high water, or absolute destruction.
Adrian was every bit as awed by it as he was terrified.
Sam filled and emptied three glasses in rapid succession, with almost mechanical precision. He leaned forward, set the glass firmly on the coffee table, then screwed the top back on the bottle and placed it alongside, adjusting it so that the label faced outward. He sat up straight again, and then he draped his torso over Adrian’s bent knees.
Adrian blinked.
“You’re very bony,” Sam announced, his tone falling somewhere in between pensive and bemused.
Adrian capped his pen, tossed it and Ryan Ferris’s test to the floor, and fluffed Sam’s hair with both hands.
“You’re just too sensitive,” he decided.
Sam looked back at him, donning his Mournful Solemnity face. It was always a trial and a half to figure out whether that face was meant in earnest or to be ironic. Sometimes, somehow, it was both at once.
“I think you need to eat more,” Sam said.
Adrian leaned forward and kissed the tip of his nose. “I think you need to drink less.”
Sam set his chin on one of Adrian’s maligned kneecaps and met his eyes serenely. “Or you need to drink more,” he responded. “Then we could have drunken orgies.”
“Not much of an orgy with two people,” Adrian noted.
Gravely Sam considered this advent. “Good point” was the verdict. He glanced up at Adrian and gave a little smile that spoke not just volumes but encyclopedia collections.
“What?” Adrian prompted, grinning, the curve of a delicate ear drawing his fingertips and his attention.
Sam merely smiled. He dropped a quick kiss on Adrian’s nearby palm, pushed off from a pair of bony knees, and sauntered off into the bedroom.
Before Adrian had time to wonder what he was going to throw at his lovely little drunk boy for dinner, Sam strolled back in, having abandoned his blue button-up shirt in favor of a white tee-shirt and jeans, and having also added a small detail in the form of a black fedora.
Adrian swallowed.
Setting two fingers on the brim, Sam tipped the hat forward, shadowing his face. He stretched out his other arm, angled his hand, closed his eyes, and commenced swinging his hips slowly.
Adrian’s hands started shaking, lightly at first, but harder as they went, not unlike the way they had when he’d first quit smoking, as if his fingers itched to be filled and wouldn’t take No for an answer.
It certainly didn’t help matters to dwell on the way that every time he had muttered about needing a cigarette, Sam had smothered him with a kiss.
Oh, Jesus, the feeling of nicotine beating through his veins, throbbing against the walls of every vessel. It was the only conceivable way that this moment could get better.
But that was the easy way out, and it was something he’d been willing to sacrifice for Sam.
It wasn’t as though there weren’t enough endorphins pummeling his brain as it was.
Sam Tanner, as Adrian had discovered during his junior year of college, in a close room steeped in sweat, wreathed in smoke, and bathed in a darkness broken only by one of those plastic disco balls with the colored lights, was an amazing dancer. There were whispers of it in his walk, in the way that all the disparate pieces of him informed each other to move together and give the illusion of a single, unbroken unit. Seeing him there, though, with the colors flashing on his face (red, blue, yellow, pink, green, and back to red), with vagrant hairs trapped in the faintly glimmering sweat on his forehead, with his eyes softly shut and his whole quiet world in motion, with a tranquil satisfaction softening his flushed features that made the darkness revolve around him-seeing him there, Adrian’s knees felt insubstantial. He didn’t know whether, without them, he would drop to the floor or float away into the amorphous black that clung to the corners of the room, no longer tethered to this facet of reality, and it was hard to focus on the question. It was hard to focus on much of anything other than Sam. The lights ought to have played on everyone equally, but they favored the young Mr. Tanner, skimming the line of his jaw and darting around his eyelashes. Adrian envied the way they merged with the contained fluidity that rode beneath that boy’s skin. It wasn’t the resonant bass beat of the music that set Adrian’s heart to pounding in time but Sam’s adherence to it. His hands shook.
Back-or, rather, forward-in a bright room with a deep twilight settling beyond the broad windowpane, Adrian clenched his unsteady hands and smiled. He’d learned something back in that other room, in that other moment, and the durability of its truth was comforting.
Sam Tanner didn’t dance for the people around him. He didn’t dance for attention or admiration. He didn’t care if anyone saw, let alone liked what they were seeing. He danced for life, and the world, and himself. That probably explained why he was so good.
Speaking of Sam, he was sashaying around the far side of the table, blind now, his arms raised loosely above his head, hips and shoulders moving in complement rather than unison, spine twisting like a thing alive.
Insistently Adrian’s blood probed his cheeks, his chest, his fingertips, pushing him to stand, to move, to submit to the silent music radiating outward from Sam Tanner’s every muscle.
Fortunately, he knew that shattered glass and broken bones were much more likely to result from such an endeavor than a transcendent metaphysical experience, and he managed to content himself with reveling in it from the safety of the couch.
Sam undulated away towards the window, turned a few times with the last of the sunlight winking behind him, and then wandered back to the couch, at which point he plucked the hat from his head, dropped it onto Adrian’s, and sat down.
“Hi,” he said.
Adrian mussed up his hair all over again. “Hello, stranger,” he returned.
It was just a pity that Sam only danced when he was drunk. That the blurring of the alcohol was a prerequisite for him to let himself go. To let himself be. That he did care, the rest of the time, who was watching and what they thought of it and of him.
Sam’s eyes were shining, backlit by the pulsating glow of quiet contentment. Adrian disheveled his hair a little more.
“You should drink some water,” he suggested. “You’re gonna feel it tomorrow if you don’t.”
Sam straightened, scooted over, folded his arms on the edge of the couch, and laid his head on Adrian’s chest. “I don’t wanna.”
Adrian tsked even as he commenced stroking the expanses of the licorice hair spilling over his ribs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Sam, his fingers careful and deliberate and terribly warm, was smoothing out the wrinkles on Adrian’s shirt. Adrian wished he’d thought to ditch the thing in advance.
“Won’t,” Sam promised.
Sam Tanner kept his promises.
He did have trouble keeping his hands to himself, but Adrian viewed that as more of an attribute than anything else.
“What do you want for dinner?” he asked.
Sam lifted his head, found Adrian’s free hand where it rested at his side, picked it up, and pulled it towards him, the better to begin nipping gently at Adrian’s knuckles. “You,” he mumbled around them.
Adrian grinned. “Cannibal.”
Sam gnawed a little more intently, blinking wide, innocent eyes at his appetizer.
Adrian pushed Sam’s hair off of his forehead only to be quite unsurprised when it slipped back into place. “You’re drunk,” he noted.
Sam scowled around the fingers he was in the process of chewing on. “Tipsy,” he corrected.
Adrian conceded the point; he’d seen much worse.
His fingers were starting to hurt.
“I’m bony, remember?” He attempted to extricate his fingers. Sam yielded them, blanketed in teeth marks as they were, at last. “I wouldn’t be very nutritious.”
Sam shrugged, then climbed up onto the couch and arranged the length of his body over Adrian’s, the couch bearing a bit of his weight. He was heavy, but in the best way possible, and his hair tickled Adrian’s neck, faintly redolent of that soft, vaguely floral shampoo of his. Adrian ran his fingers through it again. It was irresistible-thick, cool, silken, a balm for the fingertips. Sam let his eyes fall closed, releasing a breath as a low sigh.
“You make a nice pillow,” he decided.
“Thank you,” Adrian replied.
“…for a bony guy.”
“Well, aren’t we charming.”
Sam giggled and reneged. “No,” he murmured, smiling, looking up at his fedora-clad cushion through half-closed eyes, “I love your bones.”
Adrian found himself getting that heart-melting feeling he did every time Sam unexpectedly said something sappy. He was powerless to do much more than gaze at the pale, rounded face hovering just inches from his, all the usual cynicism tucked away behind the guileless, graceful calm that a hearty blood alcohol content inspired.
The corners of Sam’s lips twitched upward a bit more, and ivory glinted, betraying a fragment of a grin. “Know what I love even more?” he asked.
Adrian could guess. He raised his eyebrows, inviting the inevitable.
Obligingly, Sam crawled, leaned, and maneuvered his way forward until he could touch his curving lips to Adrian’s ear.
“I,” he whispered, “love… your mom.”
Having seen that coming from about a mile and a half away, Adrian snatched Sam’s tee shirt by the shoulders and kissed upward along his jaw hungrily before his victim could escape. “I love your face,” he retorted.
Sam writhed emphatically, exploding not into the laugh he employed around people who wanted to be humored, not into the laugh for superiors, not the laugh for puns and not the one for sarcasm, but directly into the laugh for Adrian-the one that was bright and bell-like and genuine, the one suffused with a glee so formidable as to verge on hysteria. The beautiful one.
Adrian managed to slide out from under Sam and get to the floor without shattering either the table or any crucial part of his skeletal structure. “I’m going to go see about food,” he informed the dark-haired boy looking absently up at him with a very small, very quiet, very real smile. “You can lie here and be drunk.”
“Tipsy,” Sam noted.
“Lie here and be tipsy,” Adrian agreed.
[II: Saturday Noon] [IV: Wonders]
Part: III
Series: The Sam and Adrian Saga
Pairing: Adrian/Sam
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,798
Warnings: Sam being sexy, (legal) alcohol use, a tiny bit of language
Summary: In which Sam gets tipsy, and in which Adrian does not object.
Author's Note: Drunk!Sam is so lovable. This is only the beginning. XD ...and the two-person orgy line is, sadly, from a real conversation. XD
TIPSY
People never really asked about the pictures on Adrian Leyman’s desk. He’d been a little surprised at first. Sam appeared in all of them, and he looked drastically out of place among the lot of gangly Leymans in the big family photo, the highlights in his hair gray instead of red, his head coming to Adrian’s dad’s shoulder-a temple among towers. No one asked, though. Maybe they assumed Sam was the black sheep, or that he was adopted, or that he was Emily’s boyfriend, and that he and Adrian were simply the closest brothers-in-law in the history of the known universe. Maybe they thought the shot of them in Yosemite, which was not the picture that had turned out well but the one where Sam’s sunglasses had slid off, and he was trying to smile and scrabbling to catch them at the same time even as Adrian started laughing, was platonic-maybe they thought it looked like a buddy trip. Which wasn’t to say that Sam Tanner wasn’t also his best friend, but couldn’t they read the rest of it in the slant of his arm, in his splayed fingers on Sam’s shoulder, in Sam’s hand just barely reaching up to his? He could.
Maybe they could, too, and didn’t ask because they didn’t have to. Or maybe they suspected, and they didn’t ask because they didn’t want to know.
He brushed a bit of fuzz from the elegant edge of the cherry wood frame, slotted the fat manila folder of fresh tests into his backpack, zipped it, slung it over his shoulder, and wove his way through the maze of desks to the door. A pat to his pocket confirmed that he had his keys, permitting him to lock the door, flick the light-switches, sidle out into the hallway, and pull the door to behind him.
There were a few students loitering around the scuffed banks of lockers even now, conversing in lackadaisical murmurs, kicking at a soda can that had eluded the janitorial staff. He wondered if they were waiting for a sports game to begin, or if they just didn’t have anywhere better to go.
With the mail under one arm and his backpack dangling heavily from the other, he fought the apartment door, armed, inadequately it seemed, with just his key. The battle was tense for a few moments before he finally bested the beast, admitting himself into the foyer/living room that segued into the kitchenette. As always, everything looked precisely as they’d left it that morning, stealing a long, long kiss in the doorway before having to emerge into a world that wouldn’t look so kindly on such a thing as did the placid beige walls and the subtle glass coffee table. Sometimes Adrian felt like he was trespassing into someone else’s life, like he’d forced the door to some silent mausoleum-museum, some replica-Here’s where he threw the shirt he rejected that morning, just minutes before he stepped outside, onto the sidewalk where the gunman finally got him.
It made his spine tingle like a live wire some days until he looked intently for a few seconds at something that was uniquely Sam, and then his prickling nerves would settle.
Today was fine, though. Most days were.
The hour hand of the clock on the wall was flirting with the six. He set his bag down by the coffee table and tossed himself onto the off-white couch-gently, though, since it wasn’t the most durable of furnishings, and they’d had it a while-and languished there a little while, reveling in the simple peace and quiet.
He was still there, now with his red pen held between his teeth, attempting to parse some particularly poor handwriting further marred by graphite smears and eraser residue, holding the paper closer with one hand and rubbing at his itching contacts with the other, when the tumblers in the lock ground open to allow the door to admit Sam Tanner.
What a deeply, truly wonderful door.
“How was your day?” Adrian asked.
“Shitty,” Sam replied absently, moving into the kitchen, shedding his shoulder bag and coat as he went. They crumpled on the floor like supplicants in his wake. Adrian smiled a little. He sympathized. “Where’s the alcohol?”
“Where it always is,” Adrian answered. It invariably resided in the cupboard above the refrigerator, and Sam invariably inquired after it anyway, as if it migrated when he turned his back. What he was asking after was permission.
Adrian didn’t often mind giving it to him. Generally it was like today-Friday night after a lengthy week of being foiled and frustrated. He suspected that Sam really only drank for two reasons: to blur the edge of his misanthropy, and, slightly paradoxically, to kill some brain cells, just to spite the people who wouldn’t let him use them in the first place. Adrian understood that feeling, so he had nothing against letting Sam indulge it every once in a while.
Also, it certainly didn’t hurt that Sam Tanner was the cutest drunk Adrian had ever seen.
Kid didn’t waste much time, either.
With the whiskey bottle in one hand and his glass in the other, Sam flopped down on the couch, narrowly missing sitting on Adrian’s feet, and poured.
Their drinking styles had always been rather indicative of their personalities on the whole. Adrian, who was a slightly lackadaisical social drinker, would do more swirling than sipping. On a bad night, he might go through three or four beers over the course of a party, and then he would rue his headache the next morning before moving right long.
Sam, however, drank like Sam did everything else. He drank like he wrote his editorials, like he had studied for tests back in the day and like he had practiced with his guitar in secluded parts of the campus until he knew for a fact that he could play it to satisfaction. He drank like he lived, and he drank like he fell in love-all at once, with a hundred and ten percent of everything there was to him. With all cylinders firing, with the whole of him in motion, come hell, high water, or absolute destruction.
Adrian was every bit as awed by it as he was terrified.
Sam filled and emptied three glasses in rapid succession, with almost mechanical precision. He leaned forward, set the glass firmly on the coffee table, then screwed the top back on the bottle and placed it alongside, adjusting it so that the label faced outward. He sat up straight again, and then he draped his torso over Adrian’s bent knees.
Adrian blinked.
“You’re very bony,” Sam announced, his tone falling somewhere in between pensive and bemused.
Adrian capped his pen, tossed it and Ryan Ferris’s test to the floor, and fluffed Sam’s hair with both hands.
“You’re just too sensitive,” he decided.
Sam looked back at him, donning his Mournful Solemnity face. It was always a trial and a half to figure out whether that face was meant in earnest or to be ironic. Sometimes, somehow, it was both at once.
“I think you need to eat more,” Sam said.
Adrian leaned forward and kissed the tip of his nose. “I think you need to drink less.”
Sam set his chin on one of Adrian’s maligned kneecaps and met his eyes serenely. “Or you need to drink more,” he responded. “Then we could have drunken orgies.”
“Not much of an orgy with two people,” Adrian noted.
Gravely Sam considered this advent. “Good point” was the verdict. He glanced up at Adrian and gave a little smile that spoke not just volumes but encyclopedia collections.
“What?” Adrian prompted, grinning, the curve of a delicate ear drawing his fingertips and his attention.
Sam merely smiled. He dropped a quick kiss on Adrian’s nearby palm, pushed off from a pair of bony knees, and sauntered off into the bedroom.
Before Adrian had time to wonder what he was going to throw at his lovely little drunk boy for dinner, Sam strolled back in, having abandoned his blue button-up shirt in favor of a white tee-shirt and jeans, and having also added a small detail in the form of a black fedora.
Adrian swallowed.
Setting two fingers on the brim, Sam tipped the hat forward, shadowing his face. He stretched out his other arm, angled his hand, closed his eyes, and commenced swinging his hips slowly.
Adrian’s hands started shaking, lightly at first, but harder as they went, not unlike the way they had when he’d first quit smoking, as if his fingers itched to be filled and wouldn’t take No for an answer.
It certainly didn’t help matters to dwell on the way that every time he had muttered about needing a cigarette, Sam had smothered him with a kiss.
Oh, Jesus, the feeling of nicotine beating through his veins, throbbing against the walls of every vessel. It was the only conceivable way that this moment could get better.
But that was the easy way out, and it was something he’d been willing to sacrifice for Sam.
It wasn’t as though there weren’t enough endorphins pummeling his brain as it was.
Sam Tanner, as Adrian had discovered during his junior year of college, in a close room steeped in sweat, wreathed in smoke, and bathed in a darkness broken only by one of those plastic disco balls with the colored lights, was an amazing dancer. There were whispers of it in his walk, in the way that all the disparate pieces of him informed each other to move together and give the illusion of a single, unbroken unit. Seeing him there, though, with the colors flashing on his face (red, blue, yellow, pink, green, and back to red), with vagrant hairs trapped in the faintly glimmering sweat on his forehead, with his eyes softly shut and his whole quiet world in motion, with a tranquil satisfaction softening his flushed features that made the darkness revolve around him-seeing him there, Adrian’s knees felt insubstantial. He didn’t know whether, without them, he would drop to the floor or float away into the amorphous black that clung to the corners of the room, no longer tethered to this facet of reality, and it was hard to focus on the question. It was hard to focus on much of anything other than Sam. The lights ought to have played on everyone equally, but they favored the young Mr. Tanner, skimming the line of his jaw and darting around his eyelashes. Adrian envied the way they merged with the contained fluidity that rode beneath that boy’s skin. It wasn’t the resonant bass beat of the music that set Adrian’s heart to pounding in time but Sam’s adherence to it. His hands shook.
Back-or, rather, forward-in a bright room with a deep twilight settling beyond the broad windowpane, Adrian clenched his unsteady hands and smiled. He’d learned something back in that other room, in that other moment, and the durability of its truth was comforting.
Sam Tanner didn’t dance for the people around him. He didn’t dance for attention or admiration. He didn’t care if anyone saw, let alone liked what they were seeing. He danced for life, and the world, and himself. That probably explained why he was so good.
Speaking of Sam, he was sashaying around the far side of the table, blind now, his arms raised loosely above his head, hips and shoulders moving in complement rather than unison, spine twisting like a thing alive.
Insistently Adrian’s blood probed his cheeks, his chest, his fingertips, pushing him to stand, to move, to submit to the silent music radiating outward from Sam Tanner’s every muscle.
Fortunately, he knew that shattered glass and broken bones were much more likely to result from such an endeavor than a transcendent metaphysical experience, and he managed to content himself with reveling in it from the safety of the couch.
Sam undulated away towards the window, turned a few times with the last of the sunlight winking behind him, and then wandered back to the couch, at which point he plucked the hat from his head, dropped it onto Adrian’s, and sat down.
“Hi,” he said.
Adrian mussed up his hair all over again. “Hello, stranger,” he returned.
It was just a pity that Sam only danced when he was drunk. That the blurring of the alcohol was a prerequisite for him to let himself go. To let himself be. That he did care, the rest of the time, who was watching and what they thought of it and of him.
Sam’s eyes were shining, backlit by the pulsating glow of quiet contentment. Adrian disheveled his hair a little more.
“You should drink some water,” he suggested. “You’re gonna feel it tomorrow if you don’t.”
Sam straightened, scooted over, folded his arms on the edge of the couch, and laid his head on Adrian’s chest. “I don’t wanna.”
Adrian tsked even as he commenced stroking the expanses of the licorice hair spilling over his ribs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Sam, his fingers careful and deliberate and terribly warm, was smoothing out the wrinkles on Adrian’s shirt. Adrian wished he’d thought to ditch the thing in advance.
“Won’t,” Sam promised.
Sam Tanner kept his promises.
He did have trouble keeping his hands to himself, but Adrian viewed that as more of an attribute than anything else.
“What do you want for dinner?” he asked.
Sam lifted his head, found Adrian’s free hand where it rested at his side, picked it up, and pulled it towards him, the better to begin nipping gently at Adrian’s knuckles. “You,” he mumbled around them.
Adrian grinned. “Cannibal.”
Sam gnawed a little more intently, blinking wide, innocent eyes at his appetizer.
Adrian pushed Sam’s hair off of his forehead only to be quite unsurprised when it slipped back into place. “You’re drunk,” he noted.
Sam scowled around the fingers he was in the process of chewing on. “Tipsy,” he corrected.
Adrian conceded the point; he’d seen much worse.
His fingers were starting to hurt.
“I’m bony, remember?” He attempted to extricate his fingers. Sam yielded them, blanketed in teeth marks as they were, at last. “I wouldn’t be very nutritious.”
Sam shrugged, then climbed up onto the couch and arranged the length of his body over Adrian’s, the couch bearing a bit of his weight. He was heavy, but in the best way possible, and his hair tickled Adrian’s neck, faintly redolent of that soft, vaguely floral shampoo of his. Adrian ran his fingers through it again. It was irresistible-thick, cool, silken, a balm for the fingertips. Sam let his eyes fall closed, releasing a breath as a low sigh.
“You make a nice pillow,” he decided.
“Thank you,” Adrian replied.
“…for a bony guy.”
“Well, aren’t we charming.”
Sam giggled and reneged. “No,” he murmured, smiling, looking up at his fedora-clad cushion through half-closed eyes, “I love your bones.”
Adrian found himself getting that heart-melting feeling he did every time Sam unexpectedly said something sappy. He was powerless to do much more than gaze at the pale, rounded face hovering just inches from his, all the usual cynicism tucked away behind the guileless, graceful calm that a hearty blood alcohol content inspired.
The corners of Sam’s lips twitched upward a bit more, and ivory glinted, betraying a fragment of a grin. “Know what I love even more?” he asked.
Adrian could guess. He raised his eyebrows, inviting the inevitable.
Obligingly, Sam crawled, leaned, and maneuvered his way forward until he could touch his curving lips to Adrian’s ear.
“I,” he whispered, “love… your mom.”
Having seen that coming from about a mile and a half away, Adrian snatched Sam’s tee shirt by the shoulders and kissed upward along his jaw hungrily before his victim could escape. “I love your face,” he retorted.
Sam writhed emphatically, exploding not into the laugh he employed around people who wanted to be humored, not into the laugh for superiors, not the laugh for puns and not the one for sarcasm, but directly into the laugh for Adrian-the one that was bright and bell-like and genuine, the one suffused with a glee so formidable as to verge on hysteria. The beautiful one.
Adrian managed to slide out from under Sam and get to the floor without shattering either the table or any crucial part of his skeletal structure. “I’m going to go see about food,” he informed the dark-haired boy looking absently up at him with a very small, very quiet, very real smile. “You can lie here and be drunk.”
“Tipsy,” Sam noted.
“Lie here and be tipsy,” Adrian agreed.
[II: Saturday Noon] [IV: Wonders]