new story: Ignition [Mitchell/Brooker]
On a slow train, with AO3 refusing to load. This will be of interest to a very small number of people, most of whom will have already encountered at least half of it on the anonmeme. Nevertheless! :)
Mitchell/Brooker, soft R, ~8500 words; a prequel to the Hot & Bothered series. Many thanks to puppethorse for beta and lolz.
Ignition
by Cal
"Oooh, yeah, paint that wall. Paint it, paint it every which way, show it who's boss. Ooooh, David, dip that brush, phwoar--"
"Shut up or fuck off," David said, without looking up from his neat brushstrokes. Then he made an annoyed noise, swiping at a rolling drip with the tip of his paintbrush. "Fuck! Why are you even here?"
"I was in the neighbourhood when you tweeted about needing moral support," Charlie said, neglecting to mention that the reason he'd been in this absurdly distant and unappealing neighbourhood was because he'd been working up the courage to suggest a Sunday pub lunch. Together. "So here I am! Okay, I can only offer amoral support, but that's practically the same thing."
"The only thing you seem to be doing," David said slowly, painting carefully along the edge of the skirting board, "is putting me off."
Charlie sniffed. "I think you'll find I'm providing music and gin," he said. He gestured at the room, a collection of lumps shrouded in dust sheets. "You're redecorating - you need music and gin."
"Well you're currently failing on both counts," David pointed out. "My glass has been empty for about ten minutes, and we appear to be listening to something composed mostly of machine noise."
"Firstly, you said no more gin until you'd finished that wall. You tied my hands - there's not much I can do about it. Secondly," and Charlie raised his voice indignantly, ignoring the part of his brain that wanted to contemplate David tying his hands, oh yeah, tying them tight, "Machine noise? Fuck off! Muse is not machine noise, you ignorant twat."
"Oh no, I see that now, this is really good," David said. "Whose muse, exactly? On second thoughts, don't tell me, and please also never show me any of their books or art."
"This is Supermassive Black Hole," Charlie said, "and it's making you paint better."
"Drink coffee, make stupid mistakes faster and with more energy," David murmured, and delicately dipped his paintbrush again. He was re-painting his front room almost exactly the same colour that it had been before. A sort of lovely Boiled Cabbage hue. Charlie wasn't sure how David would be able to tell where he'd touched up and where was still to do, but he seemed to have a system.
Heh. Touched up. "Ooh, David," Charlie drawled, taking another sip of gin and tonic, grinning as David's shoulders stiffened beneath his faded college polo shirt. "Touch up that wall, oh yeah, it's asking for it, touch it right up..."
***
"We should have taken a photo before we started."
Charlie boggled. It was going to look exactly the same. He knew better than to say that, though. "Isn't that more thingie's schtick? The housemate?"
"Yes," David said, drawing the word out thoughtfully as he dragged the paintbrush in a slow line along the edge of the coving. "But he's away, or he would have made sure to. He'll never forgive me for forgetting."
Charlie felt a flash of irritation. "Well it's not his flat, is it?"
"Noooo," David said, tracing the paintbrush back along the same path, then bit his lip, pushing the bristles delicately into a tricky corner. "For that matter, it's currently somewhat-minus-his-flat - he hasn't settled his half of the bills this month."
Charlie brightened. "That settles it," he said. "Throw him out."
David sent him a smirk over his shoulder. "That's a bit extreme, isn't it? Throw him out because he owes me fifty quid?"
"Ah, but it's the thin end of the wedge," Charlie assured him. "The tip of the iceberg. The first few straws on the camel. This week it's fifty quid, next week it's... fifteen hundred quid." He nodded for emphasis.
David gave him a shrewd look, dipping the end of his paintbrush back into the pearly beige emulsion. "What've you got against Robbie?"
"Nothing?"
"Hmm," David said, and it did stuff to Charlie when David pressed his lips together like that.
He looked around for something to distract himself with. "More gin?"
"I've not finished the wall."
"You've practically finished it," Charlie guessed. It looked finished to him.
David gave him a withering look, and carried on painting.
***
Charlie held the hot cup carefully by the rim, offering it to David handle-first. "Poor gin substitute?"
"Oh!" David said, eyes brightening in a way that made Charlie's mouth go dry. This had definitely been a good idea. Even if it did mean David was now grinning up at him from his position on the floor, at a perfect vantage point to observe the semi that Charlie had been doing a fairly thorough job of concealing until now.
Thankfully, or possibly depressingly, David's gaze didn't even flicker over Charlie's crotch. He had eyes only for the steaming cup of tea Charlie was holding out, reaching up for it without even finishing his stroke, laying his brush aside on a wad of paint-smeared newspaper to take it with both hands.
"Thank you," he said, and oh, so that was what David sounded like when he was utterly heartfelt. It was... arresting.
David's eyes closed as he took the first sip.
Tea porn, Charlie thought, unashamedly watching the wet parting of David's lips against the edge of the cup, the pink glimpse of his tongue. I'm making the world's first hot beverage-based pornography. He was never going to be able to look a cup of tea in the same way again.
He couldn't tear his gaze away, noting the precise positioning of David's hands: three fingers curled tightly around the thick handle, the fingers of the other hand curving to steady the body of the cup as he sipped. His fingertips were poised against the hot surface, despite Charlie having made sure it wasn't too hot to drink; cautiously taking what he wanted, though, that was David all over.
There was no reason Charlie should find it arousing, except that he found almost everything David did arousing, and the combination of proximity and gin was doing his head in. Fingers! Mouth! Tea! Charlie had often considered sucking those fingers, and now it was difficult not to imagine what it would feel like to be the recipient of that possessive grip. It was difficult not to conclude: completely bloody wonderful.
"Mm," David said, a crease appearing between his eyebrows, and really, nobody should look that gratified by a mouthful of hot milky tannins, it was unnatural. It was fucking brilliant, but that didn't make it natural.
"Shall I leave you two alone?" Charlie heard himself drawl. Whoops.
David's eyes opened with a dark gleaming flash of amusement before he pressed his lips together and said, "This is a very good cup of tea, thank you."
"Secret recipe, innit. Two sugars and a teaspoon of badger spunk, makes all the difference."
"You're horrible," David said, taking another sip, then setting the cup reverentially down on the dust sheet.
"If you spill it, I'm not making you another one," Charlie warned, and David threw him a small but dazzling smile as he picked up his paintbrush again.
"Don't worry," he said, in a soft reassuring voice that made something heat up in Charlie's chest. "I won't spill it."
"Right," Charlie said, and then watched with fascination as David, apparently quite deliberately, dipped his paintbrush into his cup of tea.
David stilled, then blinked. "...Oh," he said, after a moment, his face falling into a veritable masterwork of dejection. "Fuck." There was a pause, then he turned a beseeching look on Charlie, holding the dripping paintbrush over the cup. "Um."
Charlie snorted, then waved at him in exasperation. "What the hell did you do that for?"
David's expression turned hangdog. "I don't know," he said, adorable in his crestfallen bewilderment. He looked at the paint tin, the tea, the paintbrush, then back at Charlie. His eyes begged for forgiveness. "I aimed for the paint and missed?"
"No you didn't," Charlie countered. "I watched you do it." He was enjoying making David squirm perhaps more than was strictly noble. "You were looking straight at it."
"Brief hallucination?"
"Bodes well for the stepladder."
"Um, but, well," David said, tilting his head slightly, and wet his lips.
Charlie found the hopeful query in his eyes more devastating than it had any right to be. He tried to smirk knowingly, but it was a bit weak, so he overcompensated with volume. "You're about to ask me to make you another one, aren't you?" he demanded. "After ruining that one in all of three bloody seconds, you want me to get right back to slaving over a hot kettle - what a nerve."
David had the grace to look bashful. "I would be pathetically grateful," he said, and Jesus, that earnest voice was going to be Charlie's undoing some day.
"I don't know," Charlie said, pulling words out of the overheated ether. "Just how grateful are we talking, here? Pathetically grateful sounds like sexual favours for me - a couple of sloppy blow-jobs, maybe, what do you say?"
Shit. Now David's eyes had widened; had Charlie really just said that? That was definitely his grating ox-bellow of a voice, but - really?
"Probably not that grateful," David said.
"Bah," Charlie said, in his loudest and most obnoxious voice. "Disappointing."
"I could probably stretch to a hand-job and a reciprocal hot drink of your choice," David mused, and Charlie almost swallowed his tongue. David's eyebrows sauntered skywards into the world's least innocent-looking innocent look. "Would that suffice?"
"You're a stingy bastard," Charlie declared, "but it's not like I'm getting any better offers. Two sugars, right?"
Crashing on. David's Oxbridge vowels bunching around the phrase I could probably stretch to a hand-job could not be thought about too hard at this juncture.
"Just do exactly what you did before," David was saying, his eyebrows settling back to neutral as those fathomless dark eyes took on a faraway look. "Sugar, badger spunk, stir it widdershins - whatever arcane ritual you've devised to make it taste like that."
"Picky bastard, aren't we," Charlie sneered, ignoring the warm feeling that sprung up at the idea that he was innately brilliant at making tea - which just happened to be, if not the way to David's heart, then at least the way to his unguarded sex looks and soft appreciative noises.
He crushed that thought as fast as possible. Everything tastes better after gin, you numskull. You're not innately brilliant, you've just got him slightly drunk.
"Well, you know," David said, with a sly smile, "since I'm now actively prostituting myself for it, I might as well be exacting in my preferences."
Oh yeah, exact those preferences, phwoar. "Right," Charlie said quickly, and then, "thanks," as David handed back the ruined cup of tea, with its thin glossy film of Boiled Cabbage, slopping about as Charlie took it off him with slightly unsteady hands.
"If you make it one of the big mugs from the cupboard above the sink," David purred, "I'll definitely make it worth your while."
Charlie laughed and failed to think of anything else to say. Make it worth my while, he was thinking, swallowing as he headed to the kitchen. Fuck, you have no idea.
****
"Now this," David said, "this sounds like computer game music."
"This is Knights of Cydonia," Charlie said archly. He was holding the step-ladder steady with both hands, and David's statement had interrupted his contemplation of the back of David's thighs in their threadbare, paint-splattered decorating trousers.
Step-ladder sex, he'd been thinking. Probably a bad idea. Bore thinking about, though. David could stand halfway up, like this, but turned round, and Charlie could pretty much just stand there and suck him off, no kneeling or grovelling, hands grasping the metal rungs of the ladder and--
Yeah, no. On third thoughts, that sounded unwise on a scale of leg-breaking-for-fun.
"Are you telling me this has never been used in a computer game?" David asked.
Charlie tried to redirect his paltry remaining brain power. "I... I can't tell you that," he hazarded, "but if it was, it would be beyond awesome."
"I can't be certain," David said, reaching up to paint along the line of the ceiling, gripping the top of the step-ladder with one white-knuckled hand, "but I have a feeling that your vernacular use of the word 'awesome' bears little resemblance to mine."
Charlie, presented with a splendid view of David's arse, neglected to answer beyond a mumbled, "Etymology-obsessed git."
David shifted his weight onto his other leg and stretched up, going up on his toes, his shirt lifting above the small of his back, the step ladder giving an ominous metallic creak. From this angle Charlie could see the dimples at the base of David's spine, just above the paint-smudged waistband of David's trousers. They were about the size of his thumbprint.
Charlie adjusted his sweaty grip and held tight, licking his lips.
He definitely needed some more gin.
***
"More gin!" David said, with the air of someone summoning further servants with palm fronds. He was standing back and surveying his handiwork, chin tucked in with satisfaction.
Charlie sidled up and bowed. "One step ahead of you," he said, handing over a glass. Finally. That fucking wall!
David took a sip. "Mmm," he said, and quickly took another, eyes glinting. "Potent."
"Oh shit," Charlie said, taking a gulp of his own already-depleted drink and wincing, "there I go, mixing gin up with paint stripper again..."
David rolled his eyes. "Oh, please," he said. "As if you'd recognise paint stripper. Pained strippers, on the other hand..."
"They're very vigorous aspersions you're casting," Charlie said, feeling his grin widen against his will. Shit, maybe he shouldn't be drinking any more after all. "I'm probably very offended."
David smirked as he sipped again. "You're hiding it well."
I'm thinking about kissing you, Charlie thought, unable to resist watching David's lips pressing against the edge of the glass. "Years of practice."
David's eyes were tracking Charlie's gaze. "Umm... Yes," David said, after a moment. "I--I think I'll do the door frame, next."
Charlie blinked and looked into his own glass, swirled the translucent dregs in what he hoped was a thoughtful rather than flustered manner. "Door frame," he said. "Hmm. That'll require door-frame painting music, and I'm not sure--"
"Are you feeling alright?" David asked. "If you're, er, bored, or..."
Shit fucking shit! "Fine," Charlie said, making himself meet David's eyes. Don't make me leave. "Come on then, give me a job."
The doubt spread to David's eyes. "A job job? As in, entrust you with actual paint? I'm not sure that's technically... wise."
"Very offended," Charlie assured him. "Go on, give me a chance." Or make me go. Your choice; face it, David, it's always going to be your choice in the end.
David looked around the room, hunting for something Charlie couldn't immediately and irrevocably balls up. "I suppose you could... varnish the door? It needs another coat."
"Great," Charlie said quickly. "I'll varnish the fuck out of it."
"I, er," David said, his eyes wide, quite possibly only now realising that he'd given Charlie an excuse to stay at least another hour. Sucker. "Do you want to borrow some clothes?"
***
The varnish was a translucent whitish liquid that dripped with just enough viscosity to be immensely suggestive.
"This is like come," Charlie announced, dipping his paintbrush in the varnish then lifting it, letting it spill off the brush back into the tin. He was kneeling on a sheet by the door, wearing borrowed old clothes that smelled of David's bedroom, in which David had foolishly allowed him to get changed, thus furnishing him with contextual wank fodder for weeks to come. "Like a great big bucket of come."
David, kneeling next to him as he painted the wall by the base of the door frame, made an amused half-snort. "If yours smells like that, I don't want to know what you've been eating."
Charlie squinted at the side of the tin. "Natural," he said, with satisfaction. "Made in China. They probably line them up along the production line and have them wank straight into the tin. Your door's getting varnished with some Chinese guy's nocturnal emissions."
"To be fair, as it's clearly made in a factory, it's highly unlikely to be nocturnal. Also isn't the Dulux factory in Slough?"
"Fine! Diurnal emissions of some bloke in Slough," Charlie retorted, standing carefully - feeling the alcohol pulsing through his veins - and reaching up to start painting the door from the top, trying not to think about David now kneeling at his feet. "Better?"
"Not remotely," David said, but he was grinning at the wall, Charlie could tell from the side of his cheek bunching up. And that warm note in his voice: Charlie knew that warmth, cultivated it wherever possible, because it tended to emerge with a fiercely fond look in David's eyes.
He felt light-headed.
"I'm inhaling too many fumes," he announced, pausing in his painting. He'd made progress of approximately half a square foot. "We should open a window. Or maybe, you know, since our health is at risk, a trip to the pub might be in order?"
David glanced up, giving him a disparaging look. "It's water-based, and absolutely not. I'm not leaving this room until everything's finished and packed away, not after last time."
"You're arbitrarily imprisoning us until the whole room is done?" Charlie demanded. "Didn't you see how long it took you to finish that wall? It's impossible! We'll starve. We'll eat each other. We'll run out of gin."
"We'll call for take-away," David said, returning his attention to the wall, and Charlie imagined that, camping out in this landscape of unidentifiable grey-white hillocks, eating take-away straight from the carton and maybe leaning against each other a little.
"Oh. Well. I suppose that might make it more bearable," he said.
***
After he had finished varnishing the door, Charlie offered to start on the door frame with the gloss paint.
David actually laughed.
***
"I thought you'd painted this bit," Charlie said, sitting on the floor with a fresh G&T, frowning at a brownish patch beneath a wall-mounted bookshelf. "I could've sworn you did." He heaved a huge sigh, looking around at the still-mostly-unfinished room. "Fuck me, this is taking forever - I'm the one hallucinating now."
"I have painted that bit," David said, without looking up.
Charlie raised his eyebrows at him. "Oh, I get it. Now you've got what you wanted, now you've used and abused me for my tea-making prowess, the politeness gloves are off."
"Politeness gloves - or as some deem to call them, manners - are not something one takes on or off," David said. "They're either innate or--" Now he glanced at Charlie, giving him a brief scalding once-over. "--Absent," he continued, as if the word tasted amusing. "But the fact remains that you watched me paint it."
David's mistake, there, was that while Charlie had indeed watched him crane over and bite his lip in concentration as he ran the brush slowly over a bit of wall, the wall itself wasn't the part that had captured Charlie's attention.
Charlie shrugged. "You must have missed a bit then."
David's look darkened, which Charlie met with his most guileless expression. It probably looked like he'd swallowed a rusk and was trying not to react, but it did the trick: David groaned under his breath and came over, dropping down next to him to investigate. Shoulder to shoulder, they peered under the bookshelf.
David would be able to see better if Charlie moved back, getting out of the light. Charlie opted to remain where he was.
"Oh," David said, after a moment of close inspection. "Fuck."
"See," Charlie murmured, more for the pleasure of murmuring something close to David's ear than for any real conversational purpose.
David didn't seem to notice. He had eyes only for the mottled-looking stain.
"Damp," he said, ominously.
"Damp," Charlie repeated. He held his tongue, resisting for all of three seconds. It was some sort of personal record. Then--"Is that like dry rot?" he asked, tamping hard down on the urge to laugh as David stiffened next to him.
"No!"
"Isn't it? Are you sure? Only I thought..."
"My flat does not have dry rot," David snapped. He was practically vibrating with indignation. "That is a completely different thing - that's fungus, Charlie, which is something we most definitely do not have here. This is a very small patch of - of ex damp, which the surveyor said was caused by next door's boiler, and which hasn't been actually damp in several years."
"All right, keep your hair on," Charlie murmured. If he thought about this, pissing David off probably wasn't the best way to get into his good books. But the way to a man's heart, Charlie mused, is through the third and fourth rib. Clear as gin, that was. Clear as Bombay fucking Sapphire.
Fuck, he might possibly be on the way to actual drunkenness.
"It's not dry rot," David said again, then frowned at the offending patch. "I didn't think it would keep on showing through, though. Bloody hell. Maybe I should've got a man in after all."
Charlie felt affronted. "You've got a man in," he protested. "What am I, then - a glorified butler?"
David gave him a pitying smirk. "A useful man," David said. "You know. One with - what are they called? Those things some men have? That you're sadly lacking in? It's on the tip of my tongue..."
Balls? Charlie thought. Fuck, if Charlie had the balls to do what he wanted to do right now, David wouldn't know what hit him.
"Skills," David said triumphantly, and patted his arm in commiseration. "One of those men."
He stood up, and on impulse Charlie clambered up after him, grabbing David's arm and using it for leverage, enjoying the way David's expression turned from smug to startled.
"Well," Charlie drawled, "why didn't you then?"
He was still holding David's arm, feeling the heat of his body through his thin polo shirt. The desire to tug sharply, to pull David against him, jangled in his muscles; he kept still with difficulty, watching David's face.
"Why didn't I what?" David repeated, without pulling free, and for a moment there was something in his eyes that made Charlie think he might have a chance here after all.
"Get one of these skilled fucking men of yours in," Charlie said, pretending to be belligerent as a cover for leaning very slightly closer, squaring his shoulders, heart racing.
As Charlie said fucking men, David's eyes seemed to darken. Or maybe that was Charlie's imagination, because then David blinked, twisted away and laughed. "Oh, come on - why does anyone do DIY? Misplaced confidence in my own abilities, obviously."
Charlie's mouth was dry. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to try to stop them from doing any more mischief. "Arrogance, right."
David was rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, seeming not to hear him. "R-right," he said, but not in an agreeing-with-Charlie way; it was said in a let's-move-on way, efficient but for that tiny, glee-inducing tremor. "I suppose I'd better go over it again."
"I suppose you better had," Charlie mimicked. "I suppose I'd better go get the gin?"
"Now is definitely not the time for more gin," David said, and ducked behind a sheet-draped hummock of furniture.
Charlie realised he was grinning, and made a concerted effort to stop before David caught him.
***
They decided on two whole pizzas, because David had a sudden craving for ham and mushroom whereas Charlie felt strongly that, "I wouldn't eat something scattered with slices of Satan's bell-end if Dominoes paid me."
David smirked at him over his glossy pizza leaflet, creased where it had been folded in a drawer. "Satan's cock would be red, surely, not grey."
"A corpse's bell-end, then," Charlie shot back, and David just laughed. Charlie tried another track: "I thought you didn't want any more fungus in your flat."
That earned him a knowing glare, before David pursed his lips and resumed scratching out his order on a small notebook. "It's not dry rot."
"You hope," Charlie said. The mottled patch had reappeared despite another judicious coat of paint, at which point David had resolved to put the sofa in front of it.
"Did you want to stay for food?"
Charlie looked into David's expression of mild enquiry, and was lost. "Uh. Got nothing better to do, I s'pose," he said, hating his voice for the weakness he heard in it.
David smirked and said, "For your sake, I hope that's not true," and Charlie felt a lurch in his stomach, coming a little too close to admitting--what? That he had loads of things to do and that he'd blown them all off, preferring this, the opportunity to breathe in noxious chemicals and get his hand-eye coordination criticised by a speccy git with borderline OCD? Fuck, David, he wished it wasn't true either.
"Meat Feast," he said instead, and then, when David wrinkled his nose, added, "and if you're paying, make it a stuffed crust with extra cheese."
"Oh, I'm paying, am I?" David asked, and then laughed, interrupting himself. "Well of course I'm paying! Obviously - a couple of pizzas is a small price to pay for this wealth of manual labour I've been gifted with, that much should be clear to even the most tight-fisted of bastards. What with all the help you've been."
"I've helped," Charlie said, grinning. The back-and-forth, that was better, he knew where he was with that. "Without me, you'd have fallen off that step-ladder and broken a leg, staggered around in pain, brained yourself on the hoover, face-planted into the paint pot and suffocated. Violently. And you'd have done it all in slow motion because without me," he finished triumphantly, "there would've been a distinct lack of motivational music."
"Good grief," David said, and reached for his phone. "Now you've finished fantasising about my embarrassing untimely demise, did you want any side dishes?"
"Wedges," Charlie said, and then, "What's wrong with wedges?!" when David shook his head.
"They taste like someone defrosted something that shouldn't have been frosted in the first place, then rolled it in breadcrumbs and charged you four quid to have it microwaved."
"I never knew you were so picky about what you put in your mouth."
"I'm not initially picky, but most primates have the ability to learn over time when something tastes like crap," David retorted, his tone of voice implying that Charlie might not fit into the category of most primates.
The urge to reply with a blowjob reference would have been possible to resist if he were sober, he was sure of it.
"Guessing you're not much of a swallower, then?" he said, and threw in an accompanying mime for good measure.
And David should be taken aback by that, should throw him a disgusted look and go back to dialling the number, but instead he gave Charlie a smirk and said, "Wouldn't you like to know."
White noise rushed in Charlie's ears for a moment, before he made himself brazen it out: "If you're offering..."
He tried to leer as if his heart wasn't suddenly trying to jump out his throat.
"I'm not offering," David said, jabbing a number into his phone, then lifted it to his ear and gave Charlie a pointed look. "I'm ordering pizza."
Charlie swallowed as his brain ran rapid-fire analysis on all possible permutations of those two phrases. I'm not offering AND I'm ordering pizza. I'm not offering BECAUSE I'm ordering pizza. I'm not offering because RIGHT NOW I'm ordering pizza BUT LATER I will be offering, Charlie, to suck you off, to take your cock in my mouth and demonstrate that being a detail-fiend extends to all aspects of my personality...
"Hello there," David said, in his brightly nasal phone voice, and Charlie realised with a jolt that he'd been staring at David's lips, watching for David to wet them whilst he waited to be answered. David wet his lips whenever he was mentally rehearsing, Charlie had noticed, and--there it was, the tip of his tongue, that brisk flash before he spoke. "I'd like to order two pizzas."
"And a bottle of gin," Charlie prompted, mostly just so he was saying something rather than standing here gawping like a the bastard offspring of a dullard and a labrador.
David frowned and turned half-away, as if not seeing Charlie would block out the noise of him. "Ham and pineapple," David said, "and a meat feast with extra cheese. Medium, thanks. Stuffed crust." There was a pause. "Oh, can't I? Okay then, large."
"Yesss," Charlie said, under his breath, and David rolled his eyes at him.
You win, David mouthed.
Charlie grinned because one, yes, he had won, and two, ha, he needed to look at David's mouth if David was going to be mouthing things at him, didn't he?
"Great, thanks," David was saying into the phone, nodding. "Half an hour, okay. Yes, go ahead - yes, that's right, ending six-nine-four-four. March twenty-twelve. On the back... er, two-one-nine, let me just check that," he said, and flapped his hand at Charlie again, gesturing for him to pass over a black wallet that was lying on a pile of dust sheets.
Charlie picked it up, finding there was something oddly intimate about holding it. It was made of soft, creased leather with cracked patches and shiny bulges. He held the wallet out, and David flipped it open with his free hand, tugging out a debit card and squinting at it. "Yes, two-one-nine. Okay. Thanks," David finished, and gave Charlie a thumbs up.
Charlie took the opportunity to rifle through David's wallet in search of embarrassing ID. Debit, Credit, Boots, Costa. David Mitchell, David Mitchell, David Mitchell, in small neat robotic print. No middle name? No driving license, obviously. Coin pocket mostly empty, the fastening worn threadbare on one side. A twenty in the main pocket, along with three train tickets and a side of first class stamps. No photos, of David or anyone else.
"If you've quite finished?" David broke into his train of thought, and Charlie looked up to see he'd finished on the phone and was watching Charlie with a defensive look.
Charlie folded his wallet back up and pretended to pocket it, then handed it back as David started to protest. "Don't worry, I'm not going to steal your identity."
"Well, good," David said, stacking the phone and wallet neatly together in his fingers, lining them up so the edges matched. "That would be at best inconvenient and at worst a jail sentence for both of us."
"Hold on, why would you get a jail sentence?"
"Well, obviously you'd commit crimes under my name," David said. "There's no point in stealing an identity if you're just going to sit at home watching box sets and eating toast, is there?"
Charlie grinned. "Is that what you think I do with my life?" he demanded. "Watch box sets and eat toast?"
David ignored him. "And the police would arrest me for these crimes, to begin with - understandably, given the evidence available to them - until I got a chance to hire a fuck-off lawyer and put it all right. Which is why," he concluded, over Charlie's squeak of indignation, "it would be better off for everyone if you tried not to embark on a life of crime and I tried to keep my wallet where I can see it."
"Fine," Charlie said, with a sniff. "You'd better keep me in pizza and gin then, make sure I don't go off the rails."
"I'll bear that in mind," David murmured, a flicker of amusement around his eyes. "Speaking of," David added, stuffing his wallet into one pocket, his phone into the other. "I was going to refresh our tonic stocks, wasn't I? Would you mind holding the fort?"
He patted Charlie on the arm as he said it, which was just--okay. Look. Yes. From anyone else, that could be a completely casual gesture between never-going-to-sleep-together friends, but from what Charlie knew of David it was something akin to hiring a skywriter to scribble out I like you in bright pink curlicues across the toxic London skyline.
Charlie prevented himself from reaching up and trapping David's hand against his arm, just. "Sure," he said instead. Then added, inspired, "Do you want some money?"
"I'll probably manage," David said. "Try not to break anything?"
"I'll do my best."
"What a terrifying thought."
***
Charlie sat on the floor while David went to the corner shop for more tonic. He poked at David's laptop, hoping for porn, but either David was squeaky clean (highly unlikely) or he was better at burying directories than Charlie was at hunting them out (more plausible).
Just as David got back and started fixing them fresh drinks, the buzzer sounded.
"Could you get it? I'm elbow deep in ice cubes," David called, from the kitchen, and Charlie, who hadn't been bothering with ice cubes up til now, heaved a sigh he didn't mean and hurried to the door.
The smell of hot butter and garlic, emanating from the boxes the man handed over, reminded Charlie that he had consumed nothing but gin, tonic and a Snickers bar since 11 o'clock this morning. And it was now dusk. No wonder he was in such a state--his stomach was probably gnawing on itself.
"I'm starving," he announced, pushing back into David's living room and letting the door swing closed behind him.
"Don't let the door sh--" David called, kneeling on the floor wrapping a paintbrush in cling-film.
The door slammed.
"--ut," David finished. "Oh fuck."
The door handle was lying on a folded-up dust sheet, safely to one side.
Charlie swivelled his gaze between the door and the rest of the room, looking for a place to put his pizza burden.
"Fuck," David said again.
Charlie gave up and put the pizza boxes on the floor, then picked up the can of varnish instead. He read from the side, trying to sound authoritative: "It's says it'll be dry in thirty minutes, anyway. That's practically now."
"That's touch-dry," David said. He'd mastered sounding authoritative and had moved on to sounding resigned. "It won't be properly dry for hours."
"I only want to touch it," Charlie said, eyeing the door. "Okay, touch it quite firmly, but still..."
"You can't, it'll ruin it," David said, and then his eyes widened. "Unless..."
Charlie felt his own eyes narrowing. David was watching him closely, as if he might be about to say something important. "What?"
"What? Um," David said, and shook his head, then rubbed his lower lip with the edge of his finger. "Nothing. Just - well, I hope I'm not doing the wrong thing by mentioning it - but aren't you claustrophobic?"
"Oh," Charlie said, feeling bizarrely touched. How had David known that? Surely it wasn't memorable enough to be common knowledge. "Well, yes, but this is hardly--"
"Oh good, good," David said.
"--a confined space, and." It occurred to him that David might have been worried about something else, and his voice hardened into a sneer. "I'm not going to flip out and destroy things, don't worry. Your precious paintwork is in no danger."
"Er, no," David said. "Just checking I shouldn't be phoning for the fire brigade to come and break windows, or, um, anything else."
"I can probably cope with literally waiting for paint to dry," Charlie said, with over-emphasis to suggest how ridiculous it would be if he couldn't, and then he smirked, momentum carrying him on: "I've watched enough That Mitchell & Webb Look."
"Fuck you," David said, sharper than Charlie had expected.
Well, Charlie was pretty drunk. He looked around for somewhere to sit, trying not to panic. Who could have known that David would be sensitive about his eponymous show? Bugger, bugger, bugger. "Sorry," he said.
David looked like he wanted to roll his eyes. "Well, anyway," he said. "I'm afraid I now can't offer you normal hospitality like cutlery or chairs, but as luck would have it we have been trapped in a room with this lovely ample floorspace." He gave him a grandiose gesture, a salesman smile. Charlie wanted to faint with relief. "And," David said brightly, waving like a magician's assistant at a carrier bag by the dust-sheet-covered sofa, "if it all gets too much, we've got our own body weight in gin and tonic to fall back on, just in case."
"Sounds like my perfect night in," Charlie said, hardly bothering to make it sarcastic.
David gave him a sideways look. Then he handed Charlie a drink in exchange for a pizza box, set his own glass down, and lowered himself carefully to the floor.
Charlie sat down next to him, leaving a polite margin of space between them. They leant against the white mound of sofa, eating with their hands from corrugated cardboard.
"Oh, that's good," Charlie said, after his first bite, and David made a noise of agreement. It was just what Charlie needed: exactly the right amount of chewy and greasy. Also - and here Charlie couldn't believe his luck - it turned out that David was very particular about sucking each of his fingertips between slices.
They ate in greedy almost-silence, with bursts of appreciative commentary, until Charlie levered up his forth piece - a particularly large one - and started working on it with gusto.
David laughed, covering his mouth with his hand.
Charlie chewed hard, swallowed, then gave him an injured look. "What?"
"Enjoying your ill-gotten gains?"
"Ill-gotten?" Charlie said, and took another bite. "I think you'll find you mean hard-earned. And possibly--" he cast his gaze over David's pizza, judging the remaining slices "--I've got a right to some of yours as well, come to think of it."
David curved a jealous hand over the edge of his box. "Nice try. Have you not eaten lunch, or something?"
Charlie shrugged and took a slurp of his drink. "Forgot," he said, against the rim of his glass.
David set his pizza box down, on the furthest side from Charlie - which had to be deliberate, the stingy bastard. "Wait a minute," David was saying, his eyes narrowing, and Charlie felt a low burr of warning in his stomach, and tried to pay attention. "I thought you were going for a pub lunch with someone. Wasn't that why you're in North London at all?"
Fuck. Charlie took another sip to give himself time, then carefully set his own pizza aside as an excuse for not meeting David's eyes. What the fuck now? Did he invent a lunch companion who'd conveniently cancelled, or did he admit that he'd been hoping David would be that person? It sounded desperate now he was contemplating saying it out loud.
"They cancelled," he said, glancing back at him and swallowing another cooling mouthful of gin.
David was frowning now, as if taken aback. Eyes reservedly inquisitive, but with an extra keenness; he'd slipped into interrogative gameshow mode.
Charlie felt an overpowering urge to elaborate. "Last minute," he said. "Obviously I was underground. Didn't get the message until I got off at Kilburn. At which point I saw your plaintive tweeting," he said, heaping on the scorn in the hope of distracting him, "and figured since I was already here, why not?"
David was silent for a moment, then leaned towards him slightly, cocking his head. "Why weren't you on the Jubilee line?"
"What?" Charlie said, mentally cursing all those bastard panel shows that had cultivated David's ability and drive to pick holes in hastily-constructed bullshit.
"Well," David said, "from Clapham I'd have thought you'd go via Victoria, switching onto the Jubilee from Green Park - but the Jubilee is above ground by Finchley Road, which I suppose you might not have noticed if you'd been on the Overground the whole time. Media whore like you, though, I don't believe you don't check your phone whenever you return to daylight and signal - especially if you're planning on meeting someone. But you said you didn't see the message until you got out."
"Well, I didn't! I was reading the paper," Charlie said. He felt warm all over, especially around the face. "Completely engrossed. I left it on the train." He realised he was protesting too much; David's eyes were sparkling now, his attention locked-on and closing in, and Charlie felt like someone was going to hit a buzzer any minute and flash the word LIE up above his head in neon purple.
"Which paper?"
Fuck knows! "The Metro? Look, why the inquisition all of a sudden, can't a--"
"If you were reading The Metro," David cut in, "why weren't you a frothing mess of man-shaped bile when you got to my place?"
Charlie decided it was time to go on the offensive. "Pleased to see you," he said. "Cheered me right up." He smiled, daring him to disagree.
David's scepticism seemed, if anything, to increase. "Let me get this straight," he said, and oh God, that was his summarising voice. Charlie was doomed. "You travel the fifty-two minutes to Kilburn, thinking you're going to have a lazy Sunday lunch with a friend. You're so absorbed in The Metro that you don't check your phone for the good quarter of an hour that you're above ground before arriving, so you only realise you've been cancelled upon when you exit the station. At which point, instead of turning around and heading back, you hang around in the street checking Twitter until I pop up."
"That's about the sum of it, yeah," Charlie said, with a defeatist smirk, trying to look unruffled.
"That's very odd," David said, tilting his head as if to mull it over - and just like that Charlie remembered something he'd said, something that felt a lot like David giving his game away.
He watched David's face as he said, "Hold on - how do you know how long it takes?"
A momentary flicker. "Common knowledge."
"Is it?" Charlie asked, suddenly doubtful and enjoying it. "So if I ask the man on the street how long it takes to get to Clapham from here, he'd shrug and say fifty-two minutes?"
"He'd probably put it in hours," David allowed. "That's probably how a normal person would put it. And round up or down. And..." His eyes cut sideways. "He probably wouldn't account for the time taken to walk to the station from your place."
"But you would."
"Er. Yes."
"Glad I'm talking to you instead of a normal person, then," Charlie said. He sounded inane and he didn't care, because he was leaning in slightly and David wasn't leaning away.
"Oh, really?" David asked, barely more than a whisper.
David's mouth was in focus; nothing else was. "Much more accurate travel data," Charlie told it, beginning to tilt his head. He was giving in to the magnetism of the moment, spun into slow-motion by apprehension and anticipation and too much gin. David still wasn't leaning away, and fuck, any second now this was going to be impossible to take back.
...Yes. There.
That was the second, making it undeniable. There was no good reason for the mouths of platonically-minded people to hover this damn close to each other - which meant that David couldn't be doing this by accident, not with a brain that size. Almost sighing with relief, Charlie closed his eyes and went for it, kissed hi--
"Charlie," David said, microseconds before their lips could touch, "is this one of those things where people get trapped in a confined space and start making really, really bad decisions?"
No, Charlie should have said, and snogged him masterfully; the moment he didn't do that, he knew he'd blown it.
He hesitated, eyes creeping back open, dreading David's expression.
David's eyes met his, far too sober. 'Help me,' David's eyes seemed to say. 'Shit. Fuck!'
Ears burning, Charlie leaned back until he was at a polite distance again, feeling like the sort of miserable drunk whom the floor wouldn't even deign to open up beneath and swallow whole.
"Look," he said.
David winced, making Charlie feel approximately ten times worse.
Charlie sighed and went for the obvious excuse. "Sorry," he said, "the fact is, I'm pretty pissed--"
Something else flashed across David's face. For a moment it looked like he was braced, not against the sheer embarrassment of this moment, but in resignation.
Charlie felt a spark of hope skitter across the gloomy landscape of his convictions, and couldn't help but lumber after it. "--Which is the only reason I'm daring to bother you like this," he croaked. "Misinterpreted the signals, which you - ah - obviously weren't giving." Feel free to stop me any time, Mitchell. Any time. "Clearly a massive drunken mistake on my part," he continued. "Rest assured it won't happen again."
"Right," David said. He didn't appear to have heard a word Charlie had been saying. He was nodding and pressing his lips together in a way that he probably thought looked decisive. "Right."
"Because," Charlie said desperately, shrugging and gesturing between them, "I mean - us - that makes no sense at all! It's more ridiculous than a gibbon in full make-up and expensive high heels, and--" He broke off and looked down, at where David's hand had shot out and closed around his wrist.
"Wait," David was saying, "what? Us, hold on, is this--? Do you mean," he started again, lowering his voice and gripping Charlie's wrist hard, "even without all the gin and the claustrophobia, you'd--"
"Of course I bloody would! David," Charlie said, waving at the darkened window, "the sun was shining out there, and I've been cooped up in here all day helping you re-decorate, an improbably dreary activity that only the middle class would manage to convince itself is in any way rewarding! What on earth do you think possessed me if not--Oh," he mumbled, breaking off, as David lurched forwards and kissed him.
The velocity pitched him back against the side of the sofa.
Oh I see, Charlie thought, opening his mouth but trying not to shove his tongue straight in, trying to be a gentleman about it--a gentleman nevertheless engaging in some ungainly pawing and snogging on a floor against a sofa. Well this is pretty bloody brilliant turn-up for the books. But I wonder if--I mean what if he--?
David opened his mouth and stuck his tongue in, and Charlie's thoughts popped one-by-one like soft bubblegum balloons. Oh, he was reduced to thinking. Oh, fuck, hello...
He kissed back, urgency ratcheting up as it began to sink in that they were doing this, they were actually fucking doing this. Not quite fucking, yet, but making noises that were sure to lead to fucking in good time. Just as soon as the wood polish dries and we can get that damned door open, Charlie thought, making a little noise of eagerness into David's mouth.
David made an answering noise, and Charlie's cock swelled in answer to that.
"Mmm," Charlie hummed, sucking David's tongue and hearing him squeak, low and heartfelt. A sort of kiss-me-harder noise, Charlie thought, complying with a grin.
Or maybe we could do it on the sofa.
Oh, there were a hundred things he'd like to do to David on this sofa. Where to even start? A hand-job, good and fast, watching David arch beneath him, squirming against the dust sheet? Or he could suck him off; his dick pulsed at the idea of taking David's cock in his mouth, and he hadn't even touched it yet, Jesus. But it would be so good, getting it in his mouth, tasting him and sucking on him and showing that he could put his tongue to some good use occasionally. Say, twice a day. Fourteen blow-jobs a week: sounded like Charlie's idea of heaven.
And he hadn't even started contemplating the fucking itself.
Charlie realised he was panting and pawing at the beautifully warm skin beneath David's worn polo shirt, trying to work his fingers down under David's waistband. Fuck, he wanted him so much, and the skin down there felt soft, unexplored.
Except, wait a minute; wait a goddamned minute here. David's hands were by his sides. David wasn't helping. Sure, David was breathing shallowly and kissing him back, but he wasn't urging him onwards, not even a little bit. And David's spine was... tense. David's back wasn't arching, wasn't helpfully paving the way for Charlie's fingers to slide down under his waistband. Quite the opposite.
Now concentrating on every nuance of their body language, Charlie swept his hands slowly up David's back to cup his shoulder blades - as if that had been his intended path all along. He felt David sag with relief, even as he clutched at Charlie's waist at last, opening his mouth again and making another of those soft kiss-me-harder noises.
Bugger, Charlie thought, realising. Bugger. He was being cordially invited to kiss David harder, and nothing else.
Charlie's cock stiffened even more, perversely excited by the idea that David wasn't planning to touch it. David was ignoring it, even as he shifted closer with a happy sigh. Even as his tongue moved in soft velvet strokes against Charlie's lips, brushing them, delving between them, rubbing up against Charlie's tongue in a cruel facsimile of raw lust.
Fuck.
Charlie heard himself make a plaintive noise, then regretted it when David started to pull back.
"No, I--" Charlie said quickly, spreading his hands around the back of David's head, coaxing him back in.
David came readily, lips parted, eyes closed, seeking Charlie's mouth with a soft sigh.
And God, Charlie thought, kissing him back with a sense of keen wonder, he should be happy with what he'd got. After all this time, given the broad spectrum of their varied neuroses - how fucking selfish was he not to appreciate just this?
So he told his aching cock to pipe down, resigned himself to not getting his hands on the rest of David's body any time soon, and leaned into it. He could definitely appreciate this. Just kissing, but that was fine. Kissing was good. Kissing was great.
And come on, said a tiny voice in the back of his head: don't forget David is a man. He won't be able to resist his own dick's almighty powers of persuasion any more than the rest of us can.
Before you know it, you'll be fucking, just see if you aren't, Charlie told himself, sinking his fingers into David's hair and gently messing it up.
Enjoy this innocent fun while it lasts.
***
END.
For how wrong Charlie is, see Part 1: Inspiration.
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Mitchell/Brooker, soft R, ~8500 words; a prequel to the Hot & Bothered series. Many thanks to puppethorse for beta and lolz.
Ignition
by Cal
"Oooh, yeah, paint that wall. Paint it, paint it every which way, show it who's boss. Ooooh, David, dip that brush, phwoar--"
"Shut up or fuck off," David said, without looking up from his neat brushstrokes. Then he made an annoyed noise, swiping at a rolling drip with the tip of his paintbrush. "Fuck! Why are you even here?"
"I was in the neighbourhood when you tweeted about needing moral support," Charlie said, neglecting to mention that the reason he'd been in this absurdly distant and unappealing neighbourhood was because he'd been working up the courage to suggest a Sunday pub lunch. Together. "So here I am! Okay, I can only offer amoral support, but that's practically the same thing."
"The only thing you seem to be doing," David said slowly, painting carefully along the edge of the skirting board, "is putting me off."
Charlie sniffed. "I think you'll find I'm providing music and gin," he said. He gestured at the room, a collection of lumps shrouded in dust sheets. "You're redecorating - you need music and gin."
"Well you're currently failing on both counts," David pointed out. "My glass has been empty for about ten minutes, and we appear to be listening to something composed mostly of machine noise."
"Firstly, you said no more gin until you'd finished that wall. You tied my hands - there's not much I can do about it. Secondly," and Charlie raised his voice indignantly, ignoring the part of his brain that wanted to contemplate David tying his hands, oh yeah, tying them tight, "Machine noise? Fuck off! Muse is not machine noise, you ignorant twat."
"Oh no, I see that now, this is really good," David said. "Whose muse, exactly? On second thoughts, don't tell me, and please also never show me any of their books or art."
"This is Supermassive Black Hole," Charlie said, "and it's making you paint better."
"Drink coffee, make stupid mistakes faster and with more energy," David murmured, and delicately dipped his paintbrush again. He was re-painting his front room almost exactly the same colour that it had been before. A sort of lovely Boiled Cabbage hue. Charlie wasn't sure how David would be able to tell where he'd touched up and where was still to do, but he seemed to have a system.
Heh. Touched up. "Ooh, David," Charlie drawled, taking another sip of gin and tonic, grinning as David's shoulders stiffened beneath his faded college polo shirt. "Touch up that wall, oh yeah, it's asking for it, touch it right up..."
***
"We should have taken a photo before we started."
Charlie boggled. It was going to look exactly the same. He knew better than to say that, though. "Isn't that more thingie's schtick? The housemate?"
"Yes," David said, drawing the word out thoughtfully as he dragged the paintbrush in a slow line along the edge of the coving. "But he's away, or he would have made sure to. He'll never forgive me for forgetting."
Charlie felt a flash of irritation. "Well it's not his flat, is it?"
"Noooo," David said, tracing the paintbrush back along the same path, then bit his lip, pushing the bristles delicately into a tricky corner. "For that matter, it's currently somewhat-minus-his-flat - he hasn't settled his half of the bills this month."
Charlie brightened. "That settles it," he said. "Throw him out."
David sent him a smirk over his shoulder. "That's a bit extreme, isn't it? Throw him out because he owes me fifty quid?"
"Ah, but it's the thin end of the wedge," Charlie assured him. "The tip of the iceberg. The first few straws on the camel. This week it's fifty quid, next week it's... fifteen hundred quid." He nodded for emphasis.
David gave him a shrewd look, dipping the end of his paintbrush back into the pearly beige emulsion. "What've you got against Robbie?"
"Nothing?"
"Hmm," David said, and it did stuff to Charlie when David pressed his lips together like that.
He looked around for something to distract himself with. "More gin?"
"I've not finished the wall."
"You've practically finished it," Charlie guessed. It looked finished to him.
David gave him a withering look, and carried on painting.
***
Charlie held the hot cup carefully by the rim, offering it to David handle-first. "Poor gin substitute?"
"Oh!" David said, eyes brightening in a way that made Charlie's mouth go dry. This had definitely been a good idea. Even if it did mean David was now grinning up at him from his position on the floor, at a perfect vantage point to observe the semi that Charlie had been doing a fairly thorough job of concealing until now.
Thankfully, or possibly depressingly, David's gaze didn't even flicker over Charlie's crotch. He had eyes only for the steaming cup of tea Charlie was holding out, reaching up for it without even finishing his stroke, laying his brush aside on a wad of paint-smeared newspaper to take it with both hands.
"Thank you," he said, and oh, so that was what David sounded like when he was utterly heartfelt. It was... arresting.
David's eyes closed as he took the first sip.
Tea porn, Charlie thought, unashamedly watching the wet parting of David's lips against the edge of the cup, the pink glimpse of his tongue. I'm making the world's first hot beverage-based pornography. He was never going to be able to look a cup of tea in the same way again.
He couldn't tear his gaze away, noting the precise positioning of David's hands: three fingers curled tightly around the thick handle, the fingers of the other hand curving to steady the body of the cup as he sipped. His fingertips were poised against the hot surface, despite Charlie having made sure it wasn't too hot to drink; cautiously taking what he wanted, though, that was David all over.
There was no reason Charlie should find it arousing, except that he found almost everything David did arousing, and the combination of proximity and gin was doing his head in. Fingers! Mouth! Tea! Charlie had often considered sucking those fingers, and now it was difficult not to imagine what it would feel like to be the recipient of that possessive grip. It was difficult not to conclude: completely bloody wonderful.
"Mm," David said, a crease appearing between his eyebrows, and really, nobody should look that gratified by a mouthful of hot milky tannins, it was unnatural. It was fucking brilliant, but that didn't make it natural.
"Shall I leave you two alone?" Charlie heard himself drawl. Whoops.
David's eyes opened with a dark gleaming flash of amusement before he pressed his lips together and said, "This is a very good cup of tea, thank you."
"Secret recipe, innit. Two sugars and a teaspoon of badger spunk, makes all the difference."
"You're horrible," David said, taking another sip, then setting the cup reverentially down on the dust sheet.
"If you spill it, I'm not making you another one," Charlie warned, and David threw him a small but dazzling smile as he picked up his paintbrush again.
"Don't worry," he said, in a soft reassuring voice that made something heat up in Charlie's chest. "I won't spill it."
"Right," Charlie said, and then watched with fascination as David, apparently quite deliberately, dipped his paintbrush into his cup of tea.
David stilled, then blinked. "...Oh," he said, after a moment, his face falling into a veritable masterwork of dejection. "Fuck." There was a pause, then he turned a beseeching look on Charlie, holding the dripping paintbrush over the cup. "Um."
Charlie snorted, then waved at him in exasperation. "What the hell did you do that for?"
David's expression turned hangdog. "I don't know," he said, adorable in his crestfallen bewilderment. He looked at the paint tin, the tea, the paintbrush, then back at Charlie. His eyes begged for forgiveness. "I aimed for the paint and missed?"
"No you didn't," Charlie countered. "I watched you do it." He was enjoying making David squirm perhaps more than was strictly noble. "You were looking straight at it."
"Brief hallucination?"
"Bodes well for the stepladder."
"Um, but, well," David said, tilting his head slightly, and wet his lips.
Charlie found the hopeful query in his eyes more devastating than it had any right to be. He tried to smirk knowingly, but it was a bit weak, so he overcompensated with volume. "You're about to ask me to make you another one, aren't you?" he demanded. "After ruining that one in all of three bloody seconds, you want me to get right back to slaving over a hot kettle - what a nerve."
David had the grace to look bashful. "I would be pathetically grateful," he said, and Jesus, that earnest voice was going to be Charlie's undoing some day.
"I don't know," Charlie said, pulling words out of the overheated ether. "Just how grateful are we talking, here? Pathetically grateful sounds like sexual favours for me - a couple of sloppy blow-jobs, maybe, what do you say?"
Shit. Now David's eyes had widened; had Charlie really just said that? That was definitely his grating ox-bellow of a voice, but - really?
"Probably not that grateful," David said.
"Bah," Charlie said, in his loudest and most obnoxious voice. "Disappointing."
"I could probably stretch to a hand-job and a reciprocal hot drink of your choice," David mused, and Charlie almost swallowed his tongue. David's eyebrows sauntered skywards into the world's least innocent-looking innocent look. "Would that suffice?"
"You're a stingy bastard," Charlie declared, "but it's not like I'm getting any better offers. Two sugars, right?"
Crashing on. David's Oxbridge vowels bunching around the phrase I could probably stretch to a hand-job could not be thought about too hard at this juncture.
"Just do exactly what you did before," David was saying, his eyebrows settling back to neutral as those fathomless dark eyes took on a faraway look. "Sugar, badger spunk, stir it widdershins - whatever arcane ritual you've devised to make it taste like that."
"Picky bastard, aren't we," Charlie sneered, ignoring the warm feeling that sprung up at the idea that he was innately brilliant at making tea - which just happened to be, if not the way to David's heart, then at least the way to his unguarded sex looks and soft appreciative noises.
He crushed that thought as fast as possible. Everything tastes better after gin, you numskull. You're not innately brilliant, you've just got him slightly drunk.
"Well, you know," David said, with a sly smile, "since I'm now actively prostituting myself for it, I might as well be exacting in my preferences."
Oh yeah, exact those preferences, phwoar. "Right," Charlie said quickly, and then, "thanks," as David handed back the ruined cup of tea, with its thin glossy film of Boiled Cabbage, slopping about as Charlie took it off him with slightly unsteady hands.
"If you make it one of the big mugs from the cupboard above the sink," David purred, "I'll definitely make it worth your while."
Charlie laughed and failed to think of anything else to say. Make it worth my while, he was thinking, swallowing as he headed to the kitchen. Fuck, you have no idea.
****
"Now this," David said, "this sounds like computer game music."
"This is Knights of Cydonia," Charlie said archly. He was holding the step-ladder steady with both hands, and David's statement had interrupted his contemplation of the back of David's thighs in their threadbare, paint-splattered decorating trousers.
Step-ladder sex, he'd been thinking. Probably a bad idea. Bore thinking about, though. David could stand halfway up, like this, but turned round, and Charlie could pretty much just stand there and suck him off, no kneeling or grovelling, hands grasping the metal rungs of the ladder and--
Yeah, no. On third thoughts, that sounded unwise on a scale of leg-breaking-for-fun.
"Are you telling me this has never been used in a computer game?" David asked.
Charlie tried to redirect his paltry remaining brain power. "I... I can't tell you that," he hazarded, "but if it was, it would be beyond awesome."
"I can't be certain," David said, reaching up to paint along the line of the ceiling, gripping the top of the step-ladder with one white-knuckled hand, "but I have a feeling that your vernacular use of the word 'awesome' bears little resemblance to mine."
Charlie, presented with a splendid view of David's arse, neglected to answer beyond a mumbled, "Etymology-obsessed git."
David shifted his weight onto his other leg and stretched up, going up on his toes, his shirt lifting above the small of his back, the step ladder giving an ominous metallic creak. From this angle Charlie could see the dimples at the base of David's spine, just above the paint-smudged waistband of David's trousers. They were about the size of his thumbprint.
Charlie adjusted his sweaty grip and held tight, licking his lips.
He definitely needed some more gin.
***
"More gin!" David said, with the air of someone summoning further servants with palm fronds. He was standing back and surveying his handiwork, chin tucked in with satisfaction.
Charlie sidled up and bowed. "One step ahead of you," he said, handing over a glass. Finally. That fucking wall!
David took a sip. "Mmm," he said, and quickly took another, eyes glinting. "Potent."
"Oh shit," Charlie said, taking a gulp of his own already-depleted drink and wincing, "there I go, mixing gin up with paint stripper again..."
David rolled his eyes. "Oh, please," he said. "As if you'd recognise paint stripper. Pained strippers, on the other hand..."
"They're very vigorous aspersions you're casting," Charlie said, feeling his grin widen against his will. Shit, maybe he shouldn't be drinking any more after all. "I'm probably very offended."
David smirked as he sipped again. "You're hiding it well."
I'm thinking about kissing you, Charlie thought, unable to resist watching David's lips pressing against the edge of the glass. "Years of practice."
David's eyes were tracking Charlie's gaze. "Umm... Yes," David said, after a moment. "I--I think I'll do the door frame, next."
Charlie blinked and looked into his own glass, swirled the translucent dregs in what he hoped was a thoughtful rather than flustered manner. "Door frame," he said. "Hmm. That'll require door-frame painting music, and I'm not sure--"
"Are you feeling alright?" David asked. "If you're, er, bored, or..."
Shit fucking shit! "Fine," Charlie said, making himself meet David's eyes. Don't make me leave. "Come on then, give me a job."
The doubt spread to David's eyes. "A job job? As in, entrust you with actual paint? I'm not sure that's technically... wise."
"Very offended," Charlie assured him. "Go on, give me a chance." Or make me go. Your choice; face it, David, it's always going to be your choice in the end.
David looked around the room, hunting for something Charlie couldn't immediately and irrevocably balls up. "I suppose you could... varnish the door? It needs another coat."
"Great," Charlie said quickly. "I'll varnish the fuck out of it."
"I, er," David said, his eyes wide, quite possibly only now realising that he'd given Charlie an excuse to stay at least another hour. Sucker. "Do you want to borrow some clothes?"
***
The varnish was a translucent whitish liquid that dripped with just enough viscosity to be immensely suggestive.
"This is like come," Charlie announced, dipping his paintbrush in the varnish then lifting it, letting it spill off the brush back into the tin. He was kneeling on a sheet by the door, wearing borrowed old clothes that smelled of David's bedroom, in which David had foolishly allowed him to get changed, thus furnishing him with contextual wank fodder for weeks to come. "Like a great big bucket of come."
David, kneeling next to him as he painted the wall by the base of the door frame, made an amused half-snort. "If yours smells like that, I don't want to know what you've been eating."
Charlie squinted at the side of the tin. "Natural," he said, with satisfaction. "Made in China. They probably line them up along the production line and have them wank straight into the tin. Your door's getting varnished with some Chinese guy's nocturnal emissions."
"To be fair, as it's clearly made in a factory, it's highly unlikely to be nocturnal. Also isn't the Dulux factory in Slough?"
"Fine! Diurnal emissions of some bloke in Slough," Charlie retorted, standing carefully - feeling the alcohol pulsing through his veins - and reaching up to start painting the door from the top, trying not to think about David now kneeling at his feet. "Better?"
"Not remotely," David said, but he was grinning at the wall, Charlie could tell from the side of his cheek bunching up. And that warm note in his voice: Charlie knew that warmth, cultivated it wherever possible, because it tended to emerge with a fiercely fond look in David's eyes.
He felt light-headed.
"I'm inhaling too many fumes," he announced, pausing in his painting. He'd made progress of approximately half a square foot. "We should open a window. Or maybe, you know, since our health is at risk, a trip to the pub might be in order?"
David glanced up, giving him a disparaging look. "It's water-based, and absolutely not. I'm not leaving this room until everything's finished and packed away, not after last time."
"You're arbitrarily imprisoning us until the whole room is done?" Charlie demanded. "Didn't you see how long it took you to finish that wall? It's impossible! We'll starve. We'll eat each other. We'll run out of gin."
"We'll call for take-away," David said, returning his attention to the wall, and Charlie imagined that, camping out in this landscape of unidentifiable grey-white hillocks, eating take-away straight from the carton and maybe leaning against each other a little.
"Oh. Well. I suppose that might make it more bearable," he said.
***
After he had finished varnishing the door, Charlie offered to start on the door frame with the gloss paint.
David actually laughed.
***
"I thought you'd painted this bit," Charlie said, sitting on the floor with a fresh G&T, frowning at a brownish patch beneath a wall-mounted bookshelf. "I could've sworn you did." He heaved a huge sigh, looking around at the still-mostly-unfinished room. "Fuck me, this is taking forever - I'm the one hallucinating now."
"I have painted that bit," David said, without looking up.
Charlie raised his eyebrows at him. "Oh, I get it. Now you've got what you wanted, now you've used and abused me for my tea-making prowess, the politeness gloves are off."
"Politeness gloves - or as some deem to call them, manners - are not something one takes on or off," David said. "They're either innate or--" Now he glanced at Charlie, giving him a brief scalding once-over. "--Absent," he continued, as if the word tasted amusing. "But the fact remains that you watched me paint it."
David's mistake, there, was that while Charlie had indeed watched him crane over and bite his lip in concentration as he ran the brush slowly over a bit of wall, the wall itself wasn't the part that had captured Charlie's attention.
Charlie shrugged. "You must have missed a bit then."
David's look darkened, which Charlie met with his most guileless expression. It probably looked like he'd swallowed a rusk and was trying not to react, but it did the trick: David groaned under his breath and came over, dropping down next to him to investigate. Shoulder to shoulder, they peered under the bookshelf.
David would be able to see better if Charlie moved back, getting out of the light. Charlie opted to remain where he was.
"Oh," David said, after a moment of close inspection. "Fuck."
"See," Charlie murmured, more for the pleasure of murmuring something close to David's ear than for any real conversational purpose.
David didn't seem to notice. He had eyes only for the mottled-looking stain.
"Damp," he said, ominously.
"Damp," Charlie repeated. He held his tongue, resisting for all of three seconds. It was some sort of personal record. Then--"Is that like dry rot?" he asked, tamping hard down on the urge to laugh as David stiffened next to him.
"No!"
"Isn't it? Are you sure? Only I thought..."
"My flat does not have dry rot," David snapped. He was practically vibrating with indignation. "That is a completely different thing - that's fungus, Charlie, which is something we most definitely do not have here. This is a very small patch of - of ex damp, which the surveyor said was caused by next door's boiler, and which hasn't been actually damp in several years."
"All right, keep your hair on," Charlie murmured. If he thought about this, pissing David off probably wasn't the best way to get into his good books. But the way to a man's heart, Charlie mused, is through the third and fourth rib. Clear as gin, that was. Clear as Bombay fucking Sapphire.
Fuck, he might possibly be on the way to actual drunkenness.
"It's not dry rot," David said again, then frowned at the offending patch. "I didn't think it would keep on showing through, though. Bloody hell. Maybe I should've got a man in after all."
Charlie felt affronted. "You've got a man in," he protested. "What am I, then - a glorified butler?"
David gave him a pitying smirk. "A useful man," David said. "You know. One with - what are they called? Those things some men have? That you're sadly lacking in? It's on the tip of my tongue..."
Balls? Charlie thought. Fuck, if Charlie had the balls to do what he wanted to do right now, David wouldn't know what hit him.
"Skills," David said triumphantly, and patted his arm in commiseration. "One of those men."
He stood up, and on impulse Charlie clambered up after him, grabbing David's arm and using it for leverage, enjoying the way David's expression turned from smug to startled.
"Well," Charlie drawled, "why didn't you then?"
He was still holding David's arm, feeling the heat of his body through his thin polo shirt. The desire to tug sharply, to pull David against him, jangled in his muscles; he kept still with difficulty, watching David's face.
"Why didn't I what?" David repeated, without pulling free, and for a moment there was something in his eyes that made Charlie think he might have a chance here after all.
"Get one of these skilled fucking men of yours in," Charlie said, pretending to be belligerent as a cover for leaning very slightly closer, squaring his shoulders, heart racing.
As Charlie said fucking men, David's eyes seemed to darken. Or maybe that was Charlie's imagination, because then David blinked, twisted away and laughed. "Oh, come on - why does anyone do DIY? Misplaced confidence in my own abilities, obviously."
Charlie's mouth was dry. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to try to stop them from doing any more mischief. "Arrogance, right."
David was rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, seeming not to hear him. "R-right," he said, but not in an agreeing-with-Charlie way; it was said in a let's-move-on way, efficient but for that tiny, glee-inducing tremor. "I suppose I'd better go over it again."
"I suppose you better had," Charlie mimicked. "I suppose I'd better go get the gin?"
"Now is definitely not the time for more gin," David said, and ducked behind a sheet-draped hummock of furniture.
Charlie realised he was grinning, and made a concerted effort to stop before David caught him.
***
They decided on two whole pizzas, because David had a sudden craving for ham and mushroom whereas Charlie felt strongly that, "I wouldn't eat something scattered with slices of Satan's bell-end if Dominoes paid me."
David smirked at him over his glossy pizza leaflet, creased where it had been folded in a drawer. "Satan's cock would be red, surely, not grey."
"A corpse's bell-end, then," Charlie shot back, and David just laughed. Charlie tried another track: "I thought you didn't want any more fungus in your flat."
That earned him a knowing glare, before David pursed his lips and resumed scratching out his order on a small notebook. "It's not dry rot."
"You hope," Charlie said. The mottled patch had reappeared despite another judicious coat of paint, at which point David had resolved to put the sofa in front of it.
"Did you want to stay for food?"
Charlie looked into David's expression of mild enquiry, and was lost. "Uh. Got nothing better to do, I s'pose," he said, hating his voice for the weakness he heard in it.
David smirked and said, "For your sake, I hope that's not true," and Charlie felt a lurch in his stomach, coming a little too close to admitting--what? That he had loads of things to do and that he'd blown them all off, preferring this, the opportunity to breathe in noxious chemicals and get his hand-eye coordination criticised by a speccy git with borderline OCD? Fuck, David, he wished it wasn't true either.
"Meat Feast," he said instead, and then, when David wrinkled his nose, added, "and if you're paying, make it a stuffed crust with extra cheese."
"Oh, I'm paying, am I?" David asked, and then laughed, interrupting himself. "Well of course I'm paying! Obviously - a couple of pizzas is a small price to pay for this wealth of manual labour I've been gifted with, that much should be clear to even the most tight-fisted of bastards. What with all the help you've been."
"I've helped," Charlie said, grinning. The back-and-forth, that was better, he knew where he was with that. "Without me, you'd have fallen off that step-ladder and broken a leg, staggered around in pain, brained yourself on the hoover, face-planted into the paint pot and suffocated. Violently. And you'd have done it all in slow motion because without me," he finished triumphantly, "there would've been a distinct lack of motivational music."
"Good grief," David said, and reached for his phone. "Now you've finished fantasising about my embarrassing untimely demise, did you want any side dishes?"
"Wedges," Charlie said, and then, "What's wrong with wedges?!" when David shook his head.
"They taste like someone defrosted something that shouldn't have been frosted in the first place, then rolled it in breadcrumbs and charged you four quid to have it microwaved."
"I never knew you were so picky about what you put in your mouth."
"I'm not initially picky, but most primates have the ability to learn over time when something tastes like crap," David retorted, his tone of voice implying that Charlie might not fit into the category of most primates.
The urge to reply with a blowjob reference would have been possible to resist if he were sober, he was sure of it.
"Guessing you're not much of a swallower, then?" he said, and threw in an accompanying mime for good measure.
And David should be taken aback by that, should throw him a disgusted look and go back to dialling the number, but instead he gave Charlie a smirk and said, "Wouldn't you like to know."
White noise rushed in Charlie's ears for a moment, before he made himself brazen it out: "If you're offering..."
He tried to leer as if his heart wasn't suddenly trying to jump out his throat.
"I'm not offering," David said, jabbing a number into his phone, then lifted it to his ear and gave Charlie a pointed look. "I'm ordering pizza."
Charlie swallowed as his brain ran rapid-fire analysis on all possible permutations of those two phrases. I'm not offering AND I'm ordering pizza. I'm not offering BECAUSE I'm ordering pizza. I'm not offering because RIGHT NOW I'm ordering pizza BUT LATER I will be offering, Charlie, to suck you off, to take your cock in my mouth and demonstrate that being a detail-fiend extends to all aspects of my personality...
"Hello there," David said, in his brightly nasal phone voice, and Charlie realised with a jolt that he'd been staring at David's lips, watching for David to wet them whilst he waited to be answered. David wet his lips whenever he was mentally rehearsing, Charlie had noticed, and--there it was, the tip of his tongue, that brisk flash before he spoke. "I'd like to order two pizzas."
"And a bottle of gin," Charlie prompted, mostly just so he was saying something rather than standing here gawping like a the bastard offspring of a dullard and a labrador.
David frowned and turned half-away, as if not seeing Charlie would block out the noise of him. "Ham and pineapple," David said, "and a meat feast with extra cheese. Medium, thanks. Stuffed crust." There was a pause. "Oh, can't I? Okay then, large."
"Yesss," Charlie said, under his breath, and David rolled his eyes at him.
You win, David mouthed.
Charlie grinned because one, yes, he had won, and two, ha, he needed to look at David's mouth if David was going to be mouthing things at him, didn't he?
"Great, thanks," David was saying into the phone, nodding. "Half an hour, okay. Yes, go ahead - yes, that's right, ending six-nine-four-four. March twenty-twelve. On the back... er, two-one-nine, let me just check that," he said, and flapped his hand at Charlie again, gesturing for him to pass over a black wallet that was lying on a pile of dust sheets.
Charlie picked it up, finding there was something oddly intimate about holding it. It was made of soft, creased leather with cracked patches and shiny bulges. He held the wallet out, and David flipped it open with his free hand, tugging out a debit card and squinting at it. "Yes, two-one-nine. Okay. Thanks," David finished, and gave Charlie a thumbs up.
Charlie took the opportunity to rifle through David's wallet in search of embarrassing ID. Debit, Credit, Boots, Costa. David Mitchell, David Mitchell, David Mitchell, in small neat robotic print. No middle name? No driving license, obviously. Coin pocket mostly empty, the fastening worn threadbare on one side. A twenty in the main pocket, along with three train tickets and a side of first class stamps. No photos, of David or anyone else.
"If you've quite finished?" David broke into his train of thought, and Charlie looked up to see he'd finished on the phone and was watching Charlie with a defensive look.
Charlie folded his wallet back up and pretended to pocket it, then handed it back as David started to protest. "Don't worry, I'm not going to steal your identity."
"Well, good," David said, stacking the phone and wallet neatly together in his fingers, lining them up so the edges matched. "That would be at best inconvenient and at worst a jail sentence for both of us."
"Hold on, why would you get a jail sentence?"
"Well, obviously you'd commit crimes under my name," David said. "There's no point in stealing an identity if you're just going to sit at home watching box sets and eating toast, is there?"
Charlie grinned. "Is that what you think I do with my life?" he demanded. "Watch box sets and eat toast?"
David ignored him. "And the police would arrest me for these crimes, to begin with - understandably, given the evidence available to them - until I got a chance to hire a fuck-off lawyer and put it all right. Which is why," he concluded, over Charlie's squeak of indignation, "it would be better off for everyone if you tried not to embark on a life of crime and I tried to keep my wallet where I can see it."
"Fine," Charlie said, with a sniff. "You'd better keep me in pizza and gin then, make sure I don't go off the rails."
"I'll bear that in mind," David murmured, a flicker of amusement around his eyes. "Speaking of," David added, stuffing his wallet into one pocket, his phone into the other. "I was going to refresh our tonic stocks, wasn't I? Would you mind holding the fort?"
He patted Charlie on the arm as he said it, which was just--okay. Look. Yes. From anyone else, that could be a completely casual gesture between never-going-to-sleep-together friends, but from what Charlie knew of David it was something akin to hiring a skywriter to scribble out I like you in bright pink curlicues across the toxic London skyline.
Charlie prevented himself from reaching up and trapping David's hand against his arm, just. "Sure," he said instead. Then added, inspired, "Do you want some money?"
"I'll probably manage," David said. "Try not to break anything?"
"I'll do my best."
"What a terrifying thought."
***
Charlie sat on the floor while David went to the corner shop for more tonic. He poked at David's laptop, hoping for porn, but either David was squeaky clean (highly unlikely) or he was better at burying directories than Charlie was at hunting them out (more plausible).
Just as David got back and started fixing them fresh drinks, the buzzer sounded.
"Could you get it? I'm elbow deep in ice cubes," David called, from the kitchen, and Charlie, who hadn't been bothering with ice cubes up til now, heaved a sigh he didn't mean and hurried to the door.
The smell of hot butter and garlic, emanating from the boxes the man handed over, reminded Charlie that he had consumed nothing but gin, tonic and a Snickers bar since 11 o'clock this morning. And it was now dusk. No wonder he was in such a state--his stomach was probably gnawing on itself.
"I'm starving," he announced, pushing back into David's living room and letting the door swing closed behind him.
"Don't let the door sh--" David called, kneeling on the floor wrapping a paintbrush in cling-film.
The door slammed.
"--ut," David finished. "Oh fuck."
The door handle was lying on a folded-up dust sheet, safely to one side.
Charlie swivelled his gaze between the door and the rest of the room, looking for a place to put his pizza burden.
"Fuck," David said again.
Charlie gave up and put the pizza boxes on the floor, then picked up the can of varnish instead. He read from the side, trying to sound authoritative: "It's says it'll be dry in thirty minutes, anyway. That's practically now."
"That's touch-dry," David said. He'd mastered sounding authoritative and had moved on to sounding resigned. "It won't be properly dry for hours."
"I only want to touch it," Charlie said, eyeing the door. "Okay, touch it quite firmly, but still..."
"You can't, it'll ruin it," David said, and then his eyes widened. "Unless..."
Charlie felt his own eyes narrowing. David was watching him closely, as if he might be about to say something important. "What?"
"What? Um," David said, and shook his head, then rubbed his lower lip with the edge of his finger. "Nothing. Just - well, I hope I'm not doing the wrong thing by mentioning it - but aren't you claustrophobic?"
"Oh," Charlie said, feeling bizarrely touched. How had David known that? Surely it wasn't memorable enough to be common knowledge. "Well, yes, but this is hardly--"
"Oh good, good," David said.
"--a confined space, and." It occurred to him that David might have been worried about something else, and his voice hardened into a sneer. "I'm not going to flip out and destroy things, don't worry. Your precious paintwork is in no danger."
"Er, no," David said. "Just checking I shouldn't be phoning for the fire brigade to come and break windows, or, um, anything else."
"I can probably cope with literally waiting for paint to dry," Charlie said, with over-emphasis to suggest how ridiculous it would be if he couldn't, and then he smirked, momentum carrying him on: "I've watched enough That Mitchell & Webb Look."
"Fuck you," David said, sharper than Charlie had expected.
Well, Charlie was pretty drunk. He looked around for somewhere to sit, trying not to panic. Who could have known that David would be sensitive about his eponymous show? Bugger, bugger, bugger. "Sorry," he said.
David looked like he wanted to roll his eyes. "Well, anyway," he said. "I'm afraid I now can't offer you normal hospitality like cutlery or chairs, but as luck would have it we have been trapped in a room with this lovely ample floorspace." He gave him a grandiose gesture, a salesman smile. Charlie wanted to faint with relief. "And," David said brightly, waving like a magician's assistant at a carrier bag by the dust-sheet-covered sofa, "if it all gets too much, we've got our own body weight in gin and tonic to fall back on, just in case."
"Sounds like my perfect night in," Charlie said, hardly bothering to make it sarcastic.
David gave him a sideways look. Then he handed Charlie a drink in exchange for a pizza box, set his own glass down, and lowered himself carefully to the floor.
Charlie sat down next to him, leaving a polite margin of space between them. They leant against the white mound of sofa, eating with their hands from corrugated cardboard.
"Oh, that's good," Charlie said, after his first bite, and David made a noise of agreement. It was just what Charlie needed: exactly the right amount of chewy and greasy. Also - and here Charlie couldn't believe his luck - it turned out that David was very particular about sucking each of his fingertips between slices.
They ate in greedy almost-silence, with bursts of appreciative commentary, until Charlie levered up his forth piece - a particularly large one - and started working on it with gusto.
David laughed, covering his mouth with his hand.
Charlie chewed hard, swallowed, then gave him an injured look. "What?"
"Enjoying your ill-gotten gains?"
"Ill-gotten?" Charlie said, and took another bite. "I think you'll find you mean hard-earned. And possibly--" he cast his gaze over David's pizza, judging the remaining slices "--I've got a right to some of yours as well, come to think of it."
David curved a jealous hand over the edge of his box. "Nice try. Have you not eaten lunch, or something?"
Charlie shrugged and took a slurp of his drink. "Forgot," he said, against the rim of his glass.
David set his pizza box down, on the furthest side from Charlie - which had to be deliberate, the stingy bastard. "Wait a minute," David was saying, his eyes narrowing, and Charlie felt a low burr of warning in his stomach, and tried to pay attention. "I thought you were going for a pub lunch with someone. Wasn't that why you're in North London at all?"
Fuck. Charlie took another sip to give himself time, then carefully set his own pizza aside as an excuse for not meeting David's eyes. What the fuck now? Did he invent a lunch companion who'd conveniently cancelled, or did he admit that he'd been hoping David would be that person? It sounded desperate now he was contemplating saying it out loud.
"They cancelled," he said, glancing back at him and swallowing another cooling mouthful of gin.
David was frowning now, as if taken aback. Eyes reservedly inquisitive, but with an extra keenness; he'd slipped into interrogative gameshow mode.
Charlie felt an overpowering urge to elaborate. "Last minute," he said. "Obviously I was underground. Didn't get the message until I got off at Kilburn. At which point I saw your plaintive tweeting," he said, heaping on the scorn in the hope of distracting him, "and figured since I was already here, why not?"
David was silent for a moment, then leaned towards him slightly, cocking his head. "Why weren't you on the Jubilee line?"
"What?" Charlie said, mentally cursing all those bastard panel shows that had cultivated David's ability and drive to pick holes in hastily-constructed bullshit.
"Well," David said, "from Clapham I'd have thought you'd go via Victoria, switching onto the Jubilee from Green Park - but the Jubilee is above ground by Finchley Road, which I suppose you might not have noticed if you'd been on the Overground the whole time. Media whore like you, though, I don't believe you don't check your phone whenever you return to daylight and signal - especially if you're planning on meeting someone. But you said you didn't see the message until you got out."
"Well, I didn't! I was reading the paper," Charlie said. He felt warm all over, especially around the face. "Completely engrossed. I left it on the train." He realised he was protesting too much; David's eyes were sparkling now, his attention locked-on and closing in, and Charlie felt like someone was going to hit a buzzer any minute and flash the word LIE up above his head in neon purple.
"Which paper?"
Fuck knows! "The Metro? Look, why the inquisition all of a sudden, can't a--"
"If you were reading The Metro," David cut in, "why weren't you a frothing mess of man-shaped bile when you got to my place?"
Charlie decided it was time to go on the offensive. "Pleased to see you," he said. "Cheered me right up." He smiled, daring him to disagree.
David's scepticism seemed, if anything, to increase. "Let me get this straight," he said, and oh God, that was his summarising voice. Charlie was doomed. "You travel the fifty-two minutes to Kilburn, thinking you're going to have a lazy Sunday lunch with a friend. You're so absorbed in The Metro that you don't check your phone for the good quarter of an hour that you're above ground before arriving, so you only realise you've been cancelled upon when you exit the station. At which point, instead of turning around and heading back, you hang around in the street checking Twitter until I pop up."
"That's about the sum of it, yeah," Charlie said, with a defeatist smirk, trying to look unruffled.
"That's very odd," David said, tilting his head as if to mull it over - and just like that Charlie remembered something he'd said, something that felt a lot like David giving his game away.
He watched David's face as he said, "Hold on - how do you know how long it takes?"
A momentary flicker. "Common knowledge."
"Is it?" Charlie asked, suddenly doubtful and enjoying it. "So if I ask the man on the street how long it takes to get to Clapham from here, he'd shrug and say fifty-two minutes?"
"He'd probably put it in hours," David allowed. "That's probably how a normal person would put it. And round up or down. And..." His eyes cut sideways. "He probably wouldn't account for the time taken to walk to the station from your place."
"But you would."
"Er. Yes."
"Glad I'm talking to you instead of a normal person, then," Charlie said. He sounded inane and he didn't care, because he was leaning in slightly and David wasn't leaning away.
"Oh, really?" David asked, barely more than a whisper.
David's mouth was in focus; nothing else was. "Much more accurate travel data," Charlie told it, beginning to tilt his head. He was giving in to the magnetism of the moment, spun into slow-motion by apprehension and anticipation and too much gin. David still wasn't leaning away, and fuck, any second now this was going to be impossible to take back.
...Yes. There.
That was the second, making it undeniable. There was no good reason for the mouths of platonically-minded people to hover this damn close to each other - which meant that David couldn't be doing this by accident, not with a brain that size. Almost sighing with relief, Charlie closed his eyes and went for it, kissed hi--
"Charlie," David said, microseconds before their lips could touch, "is this one of those things where people get trapped in a confined space and start making really, really bad decisions?"
No, Charlie should have said, and snogged him masterfully; the moment he didn't do that, he knew he'd blown it.
He hesitated, eyes creeping back open, dreading David's expression.
David's eyes met his, far too sober. 'Help me,' David's eyes seemed to say. 'Shit. Fuck!'
Ears burning, Charlie leaned back until he was at a polite distance again, feeling like the sort of miserable drunk whom the floor wouldn't even deign to open up beneath and swallow whole.
"Look," he said.
David winced, making Charlie feel approximately ten times worse.
Charlie sighed and went for the obvious excuse. "Sorry," he said, "the fact is, I'm pretty pissed--"
Something else flashed across David's face. For a moment it looked like he was braced, not against the sheer embarrassment of this moment, but in resignation.
Charlie felt a spark of hope skitter across the gloomy landscape of his convictions, and couldn't help but lumber after it. "--Which is the only reason I'm daring to bother you like this," he croaked. "Misinterpreted the signals, which you - ah - obviously weren't giving." Feel free to stop me any time, Mitchell. Any time. "Clearly a massive drunken mistake on my part," he continued. "Rest assured it won't happen again."
"Right," David said. He didn't appear to have heard a word Charlie had been saying. He was nodding and pressing his lips together in a way that he probably thought looked decisive. "Right."
"Because," Charlie said desperately, shrugging and gesturing between them, "I mean - us - that makes no sense at all! It's more ridiculous than a gibbon in full make-up and expensive high heels, and--" He broke off and looked down, at where David's hand had shot out and closed around his wrist.
"Wait," David was saying, "what? Us, hold on, is this--? Do you mean," he started again, lowering his voice and gripping Charlie's wrist hard, "even without all the gin and the claustrophobia, you'd--"
"Of course I bloody would! David," Charlie said, waving at the darkened window, "the sun was shining out there, and I've been cooped up in here all day helping you re-decorate, an improbably dreary activity that only the middle class would manage to convince itself is in any way rewarding! What on earth do you think possessed me if not--Oh," he mumbled, breaking off, as David lurched forwards and kissed him.
The velocity pitched him back against the side of the sofa.
Oh I see, Charlie thought, opening his mouth but trying not to shove his tongue straight in, trying to be a gentleman about it--a gentleman nevertheless engaging in some ungainly pawing and snogging on a floor against a sofa. Well this is pretty bloody brilliant turn-up for the books. But I wonder if--I mean what if he--?
David opened his mouth and stuck his tongue in, and Charlie's thoughts popped one-by-one like soft bubblegum balloons. Oh, he was reduced to thinking. Oh, fuck, hello...
He kissed back, urgency ratcheting up as it began to sink in that they were doing this, they were actually fucking doing this. Not quite fucking, yet, but making noises that were sure to lead to fucking in good time. Just as soon as the wood polish dries and we can get that damned door open, Charlie thought, making a little noise of eagerness into David's mouth.
David made an answering noise, and Charlie's cock swelled in answer to that.
"Mmm," Charlie hummed, sucking David's tongue and hearing him squeak, low and heartfelt. A sort of kiss-me-harder noise, Charlie thought, complying with a grin.
Or maybe we could do it on the sofa.
Oh, there were a hundred things he'd like to do to David on this sofa. Where to even start? A hand-job, good and fast, watching David arch beneath him, squirming against the dust sheet? Or he could suck him off; his dick pulsed at the idea of taking David's cock in his mouth, and he hadn't even touched it yet, Jesus. But it would be so good, getting it in his mouth, tasting him and sucking on him and showing that he could put his tongue to some good use occasionally. Say, twice a day. Fourteen blow-jobs a week: sounded like Charlie's idea of heaven.
And he hadn't even started contemplating the fucking itself.
Charlie realised he was panting and pawing at the beautifully warm skin beneath David's worn polo shirt, trying to work his fingers down under David's waistband. Fuck, he wanted him so much, and the skin down there felt soft, unexplored.
Except, wait a minute; wait a goddamned minute here. David's hands were by his sides. David wasn't helping. Sure, David was breathing shallowly and kissing him back, but he wasn't urging him onwards, not even a little bit. And David's spine was... tense. David's back wasn't arching, wasn't helpfully paving the way for Charlie's fingers to slide down under his waistband. Quite the opposite.
Now concentrating on every nuance of their body language, Charlie swept his hands slowly up David's back to cup his shoulder blades - as if that had been his intended path all along. He felt David sag with relief, even as he clutched at Charlie's waist at last, opening his mouth again and making another of those soft kiss-me-harder noises.
Bugger, Charlie thought, realising. Bugger. He was being cordially invited to kiss David harder, and nothing else.
Charlie's cock stiffened even more, perversely excited by the idea that David wasn't planning to touch it. David was ignoring it, even as he shifted closer with a happy sigh. Even as his tongue moved in soft velvet strokes against Charlie's lips, brushing them, delving between them, rubbing up against Charlie's tongue in a cruel facsimile of raw lust.
Fuck.
Charlie heard himself make a plaintive noise, then regretted it when David started to pull back.
"No, I--" Charlie said quickly, spreading his hands around the back of David's head, coaxing him back in.
David came readily, lips parted, eyes closed, seeking Charlie's mouth with a soft sigh.
And God, Charlie thought, kissing him back with a sense of keen wonder, he should be happy with what he'd got. After all this time, given the broad spectrum of their varied neuroses - how fucking selfish was he not to appreciate just this?
So he told his aching cock to pipe down, resigned himself to not getting his hands on the rest of David's body any time soon, and leaned into it. He could definitely appreciate this. Just kissing, but that was fine. Kissing was good. Kissing was great.
And come on, said a tiny voice in the back of his head: don't forget David is a man. He won't be able to resist his own dick's almighty powers of persuasion any more than the rest of us can.
Before you know it, you'll be fucking, just see if you aren't, Charlie told himself, sinking his fingers into David's hair and gently messing it up.
Enjoy this innocent fun while it lasts.
***
END.
For how wrong Charlie is, see Part 1: Inspiration.
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