fic: Never find nobody [american idol]
this is only related to the kris story in that it's about being confused when you least anticipate it. thanks to disarm_d and jae_w for saying MORE.
+
Never find nobody
Adam/Kris, Adam/Brad
They know better.
Explicit, though probably not in the way that's expected. ~3,000 words.
It's not quiet in Adam's apartment, but it sounds wrong. There's no controlled hum of central air, just the steady whir of the ceiling fan. He stares up at the dusty blades, fuzzy like they've grown moss. The windows are all open but it still smells stale. He should hire a cleaning service so whenever it is he gets a few days off the place still feels like his and not his grandmother's guest room.
That's a sudden and unpredicted option: paying someone to keep an empty house clean. Maybe he can pay someone to tell him how to relax when he has a night to himself for the first and probably last time in months.
He's lying dead center in the middle of the mattress, arms hanging off each side at the wrist. In the hotel he'd been in a huge suite, with a gigantic bed he almost never got to sleep in, but at the mansion they'd all had doubles and every morning he'd wake up to find all the sheets kicked to the floor.
"You got something against that comforter?" Kris asked, right at the beginning, and when Adam said, "Yeah, it's lime green," Kris had held his stomach and laughed and said, "Fair enough."
His phone buzzes, dancing across the nightstand, and he rolls onto his side to reach it.
can't sleep to save my life. hope you're having better luck.
For days, weeks even, he and Kris have talked about having a day off, a night off, any stretch of time that'd give them a chance to grab a little sleep. The idea of actually getting caught up was more elusive, more make-believe than the idea of winning.
He folds the pillow in half and types back with one thumb.
no such luck.
The phone rings in his hand twenty seconds later, and he smiles into the pillow as he answers. "It's impossible to fall asleep when you're talking," he says.
Kris laughs, low and hoarse. "Not true, you fell asleep in the middle of that story about Germany and kept talking half the night."
"I just had my eyes closed. I was totally awake."
"You were snoring between sentences."
Adam lays back, shoving the sheet off his legs. A siren cries sharply on Kris' end. "Where are you?"
"Balcony. I can't tell if there are more ambulances than usual or if it just seems that way 'cause I've been out here a while."
Adam dated a guy for a month or two who worked nights in the ER at Cedars. "It's always busy there on the weekend," he says.
Kris says, "Is it the weekend?" and Adam giggles. "No, for real, man, I have just about no idea whatsoever what day it is any more."
"It's Saturday," Adam says, but the more he thinks about it the less sure he is. "It's Saturday," he says again. "I think."
"Saturday night or Saturday morning?"
"Night. Wait, what does that -- it's night now. Do you mean is tomorrow Sunday?"
"Yeah," Kris says, and it's almost a sigh.
"I don't honestly know," Adam admits. He closes his eyes.
After a while Kris says, "Do you think we're..." and Adam has to go "hmm?" to get him to finish. "Are we addicted to it or something?"
"To the show? Probably."
"Think they make a cure for that?"
"Sure," Adam says. "Get off the phone and go wake up your wife."
Kris makes that fake-shocked noise he's gotten so good at. "I think she's more worn out than me."
"I thought that was why people got married."
"So they can...sleep together?"
"So you can wake each other up whenever you want to do something more interesting."
"Believe me, I'm not likely to get anything but my head cut off if I go in there right now. Katy loves to sleep. She'd have slept through our wedding if we'd had a morning service."
Adam yawns wide, and his jaw cracks. "I love to sleep," he says, scratching at his stomach.
"Go do it, man. I know you've got your eyes closed already."
"You think you know everything," Adam complains.
"I'm hanging up. Whatever day it is tomorrow, I'm sure I'll see you."
"See you," Adam says, and yawns again. "Miss you," he adds, then blinks and bites his lip hard.
"Yeah, me too," Kris says easily, and Adam's phone beeps once as the call clicks off.
+
He wakes up sweaty, ankle twisted in the bedding, a pillow between his hips and the mattress. He feels warm all over, loose and happy like he's had a long massage.
Right until he wakes up enough to remember his dream, Kris under him, laughing into a kiss.
"Fuck," he says, and drags his sorry ass into the shower. He knows better, even when he's running on empty and unconscious. Kris isn't some hot overcompensating football player or a cute straight-laced businessman with a ring on his finger looking for a wild night. As long as no one's talking shit about his friends, he's a sweet guy who always stood there with his head down taking whatever the judges dished out, hands clasped behind his back like he was just waiting for someone to give him permission to --
He's a good guy and a good friend with a good wife and Adam knows enough to leave well enough alone.
So what if Kris is his type, small and stubborn and sarcastic. So what if sometimes he turns his head and Kris is already staring back. So what if for that eternal minute after Ryan said Kris' name it was like they were the only two people left in the world --
Adam's not blind, but he still knows better.
+
Brad says, "Oh, I see how it is," but lets Adam take off his pants anyway. It took him an hour to come over after Adam called but of course he came, of course he did. Moments like these Adam has absolutely no clue why they broke up.
"Why did we break up again?" he asks against Brad's stomach, and Brad smacks the top of his head.
"So you could be America's sweetheart."
Adam has other things he'd rather do with his mouth than respond to that.
He feels greedy, sloppy, like he's swallowing Brad down because it tastes good to him, because it's what he wants. He slides two fingers alongside Brad's cock, then presses them in, just barely, just like Brad loves.
"Jesus," Brad sputters, "just fuck me already."
Adam sits back. "Yeah. How do you --"
"Oh no, no, you're the one who needs it this bad, you tell me how you want it. Have you had sex at all since the last time we --"
"No. Not really. Not like --" He is not going to count one handjob in a bathroom at an afterparty because he never should have done that anyway. He knows better than to think random hookups at this point will result in anything other than emails to Perez about his cock.
Brad pushes himself up on his elbows. "So? Here on the couch? Bed? Your conjugal visit awaits, big boy, just tell me the name of the game." Brad's smiling but he means exactly what he says. He's flushed and a little out of breath and as beautiful as always.
"Bed," Adam says. "Hands and knees."
Brad jumps up, wriggling out of his shirt. "As you wish," he says, and struts to the room.
Adam leaves his clothes in the hallway and by the time he comes in Brad's dug out condoms and lube and pushed all the covers down and is waiting. Adam loves the backs of Brad's thighs where the hair is short and soft, and how Brad's arms always shake when Adam runs one hand all the way up from the inside of his knee.
Now that they're like this, Adam doesn't want to rush through the fucking, no matter how long it's been. He drags his tongue up Brad's spine, rubbing his face against Brad's shoulders, the base of his neck. Their skin is hot together, Adam's stomach and chest and hips covering Brad's ass and back like an overcoat.
If Brad asked Adam's same question at him right now, why they broke up, Adam would say it had been the biggest fucking mistake of his life, his only regret of a million choices made to try to make it.
"Come on," Brad whispers, pushing back, "what are you waiting for?"
Adam reaches for the lube, rises up on his knees and rolls on the condom. He sinks in slowly, holding his breath, and pulls Brad's head back to kiss the edge of his mouth. Brad shifts his legs wider, which means he wants more, wants it deeper and harder even when he's too far gone to ask coherently. Adam curls his fingers in Brad's hair and presses his forehead into the pillow, then tugs Brad's ass back and up closer, fucking into him like it's a race, like there's a prize at the end for the winner.
He makes Brad come first, a tight, rough hand around his cock that makes him scream, actually yell some word that's not a word or a curse or a name, just this raw noise. It makes Adam want to hold him above his head, arms raised high, spinning around and around in a dust storm of glitter and sweat and desert sun. He thrusts in one more time and comes.
When he pulls out Brad sinks down flat into the mattress with a happy moan, then grumbles and shifts over a foot and sighs again. Adam flushes the condom and washes his face. For the last six months they were together they quit using protection and it was like they had to learn how to fuck all over again, like they had twice as much sex because they both kept coming so fast, nothing to curb the intensity or dull their senses. The first time they hooked up again they'd had to scavenge a condom from some gift bag Brad got at a charity thing, and they laughed about it even though it wasn't really funny.
"Water," Brad says plaintively, and Adam fills his glass from the side of the bathroom sink. After Brad drinks it all down he asks, "How long are you on parole for?"
Adam stretches out on the other side of the bed, wet spot between them, and runs a hand over the curve of Brad's ass. "We're on a red-eye to New York. I think the car is coming at nine?"
"Ooh," Brad says. "Fancy." After a while he asks, "You and Kris going together?"
The week they moved into the mansion, Brad said, "Oh, you got the cute one, do something with that." Adam had made a bitchy comment about Kris being too busy praying to notice if Adam paraded around naked, and Brad had looked dubious but said, "Good, you deserve better than another confused child of Christ."
"Yeah," he answers. Brad's not the crazy jealous type but he's not blind either.
"If something happens to him, do you get to take his place? Is it like being vice president? Do you, you know, ascend or whatever?"
"Don't get any ideas," Adam warns.
"I know, I know, he's your friend, he's sooo nice, why are all the good ones straight, etcetera." Brad's enunciation is clipped like he's practicing a routine, and Adam doesn't know an honest way to say there's nothing for any of them to worry about.
+
LAX is eerily empty but Aaron only leaves Adam's side long enough to walk through the metal detector. There are a few business casual guys in the admiral's lounge, plus Kris, his bodyguard and two publicists in the far corner. Kris stands up and hugs Adam like it's been months, not less than 24 hours, and when Adam sinks into the club chair next to Kris everyone else wordlessly reseats themselves farther down along the same wall.
Kris leans in. "Was it something I said?" he asks close to Adam's ear.
"Our combined imminent fame was just too much for them," Adam says, and Kris puts back his head and laughs. He looks good, calm and rested. "You slept," Adam says.
"Yeah, finally, most of the day." He looks intently at Adam's face. "You look..."
"I slept," Adam says.
"I bet." His tone is funny. "You got a -- kinda proud, kinda guilty look going on."
Adam coughs and Kris snorts. He slaps Adam's knee.
"That's what I thought. You go out?"
"No," Adam says, and watches the puzzle play out on Kris' face. He knows more about the mating habits of gay men than he probably ever expected to, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be so crass as to hazard a guess. "Brad came over," he says finally.
"Ah." Kris nods. "Ex sex. I hear it's the best kind of revenge."
Adam shoves his shoulder. Kris is so fucking adorable. "Where did you hear that? What does that even mean?"
"You know, I do not have any idea what I am talking about, you are right. My brother and his old girlfriend broke up every other week, maybe that's where."
"Yeah," Adam says. "So."
Kris grins, the corner of his mouth coming up sly and crooked. "So?"
"It's -- it's not about revenge." He sighs and slumps in his chair, playing with the leather trim. "I always think it's going to be easy, that it's no big deal because it's nothing new."
"Of course it's a big deal," Kris says, almost primly, and Adam can't help but giggle.
"Please, go on," he says, and knocks the toe of his boot against Kris's shoe. "Tell me how I respect Brad too much to use him for sex just because I can."
"Adam." Kris says it sharply, not shocked but like he's surprised he has to say it at all. "You're still in love with each other, of course the sex is complicated."
Kris doesn't have to point that out for Adam to know it's true. "I wasn't going to ask him to wait while I went on this show he never thought I should care about in the first place."
For all that Kris will say he's not an emotional guy, his face is an open book. Right now it's telling a sad story about how anyone who knows Adam should've been totally behind him.
"If it's really right, you guys'll find your way back," Kris says. "And if you go through all this and he's not there on the other side, well, then it's not really right. You want a boyfriend who waits, that's what you should have, not just some guy you can screw around with whenever you want."
There's this awful thrill that goes up Adam's back the way Kris says it so naturally. As if because a guy like Kris can talk about Adam's sex life so easily it means he's interested in being part of it.
"Do you two talk about other people?" Kris asks, squinting up at a TV monitor like he's only half paying attention to the question.
"Like other guys we sleep with?"
"Yeah."
"We always used to talk about guys we thought were hot, you know, at a bar or in a movie or whatever."
Kris nods, still distracted by basketball highlights.
"We brought guys home sometimes," he says, and that gets Kris' attention, just as expected. "It's not that weird, lots of people do it." Kris stares at him like he's got something growing on his face. "What? You were in college. Nobody ever got drunk and said some cute friend of Katy's should come over?"
Kris smiles. "I love when you say stuff just to see if I'm really listening," he says. "Katy does that, too."
"Oh good. Glad to know it's not just me you're ignoring."
"If anyone's getting the short end of my attention it's not you," Kris says.
Adam swallows and says, "And how's Katy feel about that?"
"It's funny," Kris says, though Adam can't tell if he means it. "Somebody asked her how she felt about us, you and me -- it was kind of a messed up question, really, what they were aiming for."
Kris doesn't offer what Katy's answer was but eventually Adam says, "I think Brad's a little jealous."
"What, were you talking about me while you two were --" Kris makes a wavy hand gesture and Adam slaps at it.
"What is that, what was that sign language you just -- was that the international symbol for gay sex, is that what you were doing?"
"Shut up," Kris says, "I don't know. I obviously don't know what I'm talking about." He elbows Adam once more for good measure but then settles down, gets his serious face on. "I don't know that Katy and I have ever really been -- had our marriage tested, I guess. Before this, even when we were at different schools we saw each other every weekend."
"Yeah," Adam says. He should say something more, something reassuring. But he doesn't want to say something untrue, either, and every sentence he starts in his head ends up derailed by his own doubts.
There's a muted announcement and all their assorted people gather their stuff and look over at Kris and Adam. They stand up in unison and Adam slings his arm around Kris' shoulders. Kris turns his face into Adam's chest for half a hug.
"I guess it's just what any couple goes through," Kris says. "I'm not really worried. I know better."
+++
+
Never find nobody
Adam/Kris, Adam/Brad
They know better.
Explicit, though probably not in the way that's expected. ~3,000 words.
It's not quiet in Adam's apartment, but it sounds wrong. There's no controlled hum of central air, just the steady whir of the ceiling fan. He stares up at the dusty blades, fuzzy like they've grown moss. The windows are all open but it still smells stale. He should hire a cleaning service so whenever it is he gets a few days off the place still feels like his and not his grandmother's guest room.
That's a sudden and unpredicted option: paying someone to keep an empty house clean. Maybe he can pay someone to tell him how to relax when he has a night to himself for the first and probably last time in months.
He's lying dead center in the middle of the mattress, arms hanging off each side at the wrist. In the hotel he'd been in a huge suite, with a gigantic bed he almost never got to sleep in, but at the mansion they'd all had doubles and every morning he'd wake up to find all the sheets kicked to the floor.
"You got something against that comforter?" Kris asked, right at the beginning, and when Adam said, "Yeah, it's lime green," Kris had held his stomach and laughed and said, "Fair enough."
His phone buzzes, dancing across the nightstand, and he rolls onto his side to reach it.
can't sleep to save my life. hope you're having better luck.
For days, weeks even, he and Kris have talked about having a day off, a night off, any stretch of time that'd give them a chance to grab a little sleep. The idea of actually getting caught up was more elusive, more make-believe than the idea of winning.
He folds the pillow in half and types back with one thumb.
no such luck.
The phone rings in his hand twenty seconds later, and he smiles into the pillow as he answers. "It's impossible to fall asleep when you're talking," he says.
Kris laughs, low and hoarse. "Not true, you fell asleep in the middle of that story about Germany and kept talking half the night."
"I just had my eyes closed. I was totally awake."
"You were snoring between sentences."
Adam lays back, shoving the sheet off his legs. A siren cries sharply on Kris' end. "Where are you?"
"Balcony. I can't tell if there are more ambulances than usual or if it just seems that way 'cause I've been out here a while."
Adam dated a guy for a month or two who worked nights in the ER at Cedars. "It's always busy there on the weekend," he says.
Kris says, "Is it the weekend?" and Adam giggles. "No, for real, man, I have just about no idea whatsoever what day it is any more."
"It's Saturday," Adam says, but the more he thinks about it the less sure he is. "It's Saturday," he says again. "I think."
"Saturday night or Saturday morning?"
"Night. Wait, what does that -- it's night now. Do you mean is tomorrow Sunday?"
"Yeah," Kris says, and it's almost a sigh.
"I don't honestly know," Adam admits. He closes his eyes.
After a while Kris says, "Do you think we're..." and Adam has to go "hmm?" to get him to finish. "Are we addicted to it or something?"
"To the show? Probably."
"Think they make a cure for that?"
"Sure," Adam says. "Get off the phone and go wake up your wife."
Kris makes that fake-shocked noise he's gotten so good at. "I think she's more worn out than me."
"I thought that was why people got married."
"So they can...sleep together?"
"So you can wake each other up whenever you want to do something more interesting."
"Believe me, I'm not likely to get anything but my head cut off if I go in there right now. Katy loves to sleep. She'd have slept through our wedding if we'd had a morning service."
Adam yawns wide, and his jaw cracks. "I love to sleep," he says, scratching at his stomach.
"Go do it, man. I know you've got your eyes closed already."
"You think you know everything," Adam complains.
"I'm hanging up. Whatever day it is tomorrow, I'm sure I'll see you."
"See you," Adam says, and yawns again. "Miss you," he adds, then blinks and bites his lip hard.
"Yeah, me too," Kris says easily, and Adam's phone beeps once as the call clicks off.
+
He wakes up sweaty, ankle twisted in the bedding, a pillow between his hips and the mattress. He feels warm all over, loose and happy like he's had a long massage.
Right until he wakes up enough to remember his dream, Kris under him, laughing into a kiss.
"Fuck," he says, and drags his sorry ass into the shower. He knows better, even when he's running on empty and unconscious. Kris isn't some hot overcompensating football player or a cute straight-laced businessman with a ring on his finger looking for a wild night. As long as no one's talking shit about his friends, he's a sweet guy who always stood there with his head down taking whatever the judges dished out, hands clasped behind his back like he was just waiting for someone to give him permission to --
He's a good guy and a good friend with a good wife and Adam knows enough to leave well enough alone.
So what if Kris is his type, small and stubborn and sarcastic. So what if sometimes he turns his head and Kris is already staring back. So what if for that eternal minute after Ryan said Kris' name it was like they were the only two people left in the world --
Adam's not blind, but he still knows better.
+
Brad says, "Oh, I see how it is," but lets Adam take off his pants anyway. It took him an hour to come over after Adam called but of course he came, of course he did. Moments like these Adam has absolutely no clue why they broke up.
"Why did we break up again?" he asks against Brad's stomach, and Brad smacks the top of his head.
"So you could be America's sweetheart."
Adam has other things he'd rather do with his mouth than respond to that.
He feels greedy, sloppy, like he's swallowing Brad down because it tastes good to him, because it's what he wants. He slides two fingers alongside Brad's cock, then presses them in, just barely, just like Brad loves.
"Jesus," Brad sputters, "just fuck me already."
Adam sits back. "Yeah. How do you --"
"Oh no, no, you're the one who needs it this bad, you tell me how you want it. Have you had sex at all since the last time we --"
"No. Not really. Not like --" He is not going to count one handjob in a bathroom at an afterparty because he never should have done that anyway. He knows better than to think random hookups at this point will result in anything other than emails to Perez about his cock.
Brad pushes himself up on his elbows. "So? Here on the couch? Bed? Your conjugal visit awaits, big boy, just tell me the name of the game." Brad's smiling but he means exactly what he says. He's flushed and a little out of breath and as beautiful as always.
"Bed," Adam says. "Hands and knees."
Brad jumps up, wriggling out of his shirt. "As you wish," he says, and struts to the room.
Adam leaves his clothes in the hallway and by the time he comes in Brad's dug out condoms and lube and pushed all the covers down and is waiting. Adam loves the backs of Brad's thighs where the hair is short and soft, and how Brad's arms always shake when Adam runs one hand all the way up from the inside of his knee.
Now that they're like this, Adam doesn't want to rush through the fucking, no matter how long it's been. He drags his tongue up Brad's spine, rubbing his face against Brad's shoulders, the base of his neck. Their skin is hot together, Adam's stomach and chest and hips covering Brad's ass and back like an overcoat.
If Brad asked Adam's same question at him right now, why they broke up, Adam would say it had been the biggest fucking mistake of his life, his only regret of a million choices made to try to make it.
"Come on," Brad whispers, pushing back, "what are you waiting for?"
Adam reaches for the lube, rises up on his knees and rolls on the condom. He sinks in slowly, holding his breath, and pulls Brad's head back to kiss the edge of his mouth. Brad shifts his legs wider, which means he wants more, wants it deeper and harder even when he's too far gone to ask coherently. Adam curls his fingers in Brad's hair and presses his forehead into the pillow, then tugs Brad's ass back and up closer, fucking into him like it's a race, like there's a prize at the end for the winner.
He makes Brad come first, a tight, rough hand around his cock that makes him scream, actually yell some word that's not a word or a curse or a name, just this raw noise. It makes Adam want to hold him above his head, arms raised high, spinning around and around in a dust storm of glitter and sweat and desert sun. He thrusts in one more time and comes.
When he pulls out Brad sinks down flat into the mattress with a happy moan, then grumbles and shifts over a foot and sighs again. Adam flushes the condom and washes his face. For the last six months they were together they quit using protection and it was like they had to learn how to fuck all over again, like they had twice as much sex because they both kept coming so fast, nothing to curb the intensity or dull their senses. The first time they hooked up again they'd had to scavenge a condom from some gift bag Brad got at a charity thing, and they laughed about it even though it wasn't really funny.
"Water," Brad says plaintively, and Adam fills his glass from the side of the bathroom sink. After Brad drinks it all down he asks, "How long are you on parole for?"
Adam stretches out on the other side of the bed, wet spot between them, and runs a hand over the curve of Brad's ass. "We're on a red-eye to New York. I think the car is coming at nine?"
"Ooh," Brad says. "Fancy." After a while he asks, "You and Kris going together?"
The week they moved into the mansion, Brad said, "Oh, you got the cute one, do something with that." Adam had made a bitchy comment about Kris being too busy praying to notice if Adam paraded around naked, and Brad had looked dubious but said, "Good, you deserve better than another confused child of Christ."
"Yeah," he answers. Brad's not the crazy jealous type but he's not blind either.
"If something happens to him, do you get to take his place? Is it like being vice president? Do you, you know, ascend or whatever?"
"Don't get any ideas," Adam warns.
"I know, I know, he's your friend, he's sooo nice, why are all the good ones straight, etcetera." Brad's enunciation is clipped like he's practicing a routine, and Adam doesn't know an honest way to say there's nothing for any of them to worry about.
+
LAX is eerily empty but Aaron only leaves Adam's side long enough to walk through the metal detector. There are a few business casual guys in the admiral's lounge, plus Kris, his bodyguard and two publicists in the far corner. Kris stands up and hugs Adam like it's been months, not less than 24 hours, and when Adam sinks into the club chair next to Kris everyone else wordlessly reseats themselves farther down along the same wall.
Kris leans in. "Was it something I said?" he asks close to Adam's ear.
"Our combined imminent fame was just too much for them," Adam says, and Kris puts back his head and laughs. He looks good, calm and rested. "You slept," Adam says.
"Yeah, finally, most of the day." He looks intently at Adam's face. "You look..."
"I slept," Adam says.
"I bet." His tone is funny. "You got a -- kinda proud, kinda guilty look going on."
Adam coughs and Kris snorts. He slaps Adam's knee.
"That's what I thought. You go out?"
"No," Adam says, and watches the puzzle play out on Kris' face. He knows more about the mating habits of gay men than he probably ever expected to, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be so crass as to hazard a guess. "Brad came over," he says finally.
"Ah." Kris nods. "Ex sex. I hear it's the best kind of revenge."
Adam shoves his shoulder. Kris is so fucking adorable. "Where did you hear that? What does that even mean?"
"You know, I do not have any idea what I am talking about, you are right. My brother and his old girlfriend broke up every other week, maybe that's where."
"Yeah," Adam says. "So."
Kris grins, the corner of his mouth coming up sly and crooked. "So?"
"It's -- it's not about revenge." He sighs and slumps in his chair, playing with the leather trim. "I always think it's going to be easy, that it's no big deal because it's nothing new."
"Of course it's a big deal," Kris says, almost primly, and Adam can't help but giggle.
"Please, go on," he says, and knocks the toe of his boot against Kris's shoe. "Tell me how I respect Brad too much to use him for sex just because I can."
"Adam." Kris says it sharply, not shocked but like he's surprised he has to say it at all. "You're still in love with each other, of course the sex is complicated."
Kris doesn't have to point that out for Adam to know it's true. "I wasn't going to ask him to wait while I went on this show he never thought I should care about in the first place."
For all that Kris will say he's not an emotional guy, his face is an open book. Right now it's telling a sad story about how anyone who knows Adam should've been totally behind him.
"If it's really right, you guys'll find your way back," Kris says. "And if you go through all this and he's not there on the other side, well, then it's not really right. You want a boyfriend who waits, that's what you should have, not just some guy you can screw around with whenever you want."
There's this awful thrill that goes up Adam's back the way Kris says it so naturally. As if because a guy like Kris can talk about Adam's sex life so easily it means he's interested in being part of it.
"Do you two talk about other people?" Kris asks, squinting up at a TV monitor like he's only half paying attention to the question.
"Like other guys we sleep with?"
"Yeah."
"We always used to talk about guys we thought were hot, you know, at a bar or in a movie or whatever."
Kris nods, still distracted by basketball highlights.
"We brought guys home sometimes," he says, and that gets Kris' attention, just as expected. "It's not that weird, lots of people do it." Kris stares at him like he's got something growing on his face. "What? You were in college. Nobody ever got drunk and said some cute friend of Katy's should come over?"
Kris smiles. "I love when you say stuff just to see if I'm really listening," he says. "Katy does that, too."
"Oh good. Glad to know it's not just me you're ignoring."
"If anyone's getting the short end of my attention it's not you," Kris says.
Adam swallows and says, "And how's Katy feel about that?"
"It's funny," Kris says, though Adam can't tell if he means it. "Somebody asked her how she felt about us, you and me -- it was kind of a messed up question, really, what they were aiming for."
Kris doesn't offer what Katy's answer was but eventually Adam says, "I think Brad's a little jealous."
"What, were you talking about me while you two were --" Kris makes a wavy hand gesture and Adam slaps at it.
"What is that, what was that sign language you just -- was that the international symbol for gay sex, is that what you were doing?"
"Shut up," Kris says, "I don't know. I obviously don't know what I'm talking about." He elbows Adam once more for good measure but then settles down, gets his serious face on. "I don't know that Katy and I have ever really been -- had our marriage tested, I guess. Before this, even when we were at different schools we saw each other every weekend."
"Yeah," Adam says. He should say something more, something reassuring. But he doesn't want to say something untrue, either, and every sentence he starts in his head ends up derailed by his own doubts.
There's a muted announcement and all their assorted people gather their stuff and look over at Kris and Adam. They stand up in unison and Adam slings his arm around Kris' shoulders. Kris turns his face into Adam's chest for half a hug.
"I guess it's just what any couple goes through," Kris says. "I'm not really worried. I know better."
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