new fic: Five Things Jason Street Was the First to Say
Title: Five Things Jason Street Was the First to Say
Author: Hth
Pairing: Jason/Lyla/Tim (sort of)
Rating: R
Disclaimers: FNL & associated whatnot are not my property.
Hey, it's my first 5 Things story! Really, I started out writing them just to get a feel for the characters and some potential key moments in their lives, thinking maybe I'd write a story. I still haven't decided exactly what kind of story I want to write, but in the meantime, I had these things. Five of 'em.
Five Things Jason Street Was the First To Say
by Hth
For a long time, Jason didn’t say anything. He was only half a boyfriend at best and he knew it, so was it really his right anymore? Even wanting to be everything to Lyla seemed equal parts ludicrous and unfair, so he shut his mouth and worked on not wanting it anymore.
He wouldn’t have said anything - he would have kept that promise to himself, honestly he would have - except she was just there one day, bright and stiff and competent, her ponytail bobbling cheerfully and her smile strained to bending, and he was sore and tired and lonely and sick of the implicit lies, the minefield between them. He lashed out his arm and knocked a pitcher of water off the table by his bed, and his voice shook as he said, “Go home, Lyla. Go home to Tim.”
And then it was one long, drawn-out scene, a week’s worth of bitter triple-breakup where Lyla cried and Tim cried and Jason hated them both for....
Mostly for making him feel bad for them. This wasn’t his fault, none of it was his fault, he’d never done anything to deserve the hospital, the chair, the regret, the weakness, the betrayal. He didn’t do anything wrong, and they did, so he shouldn’t hear Lyla’s sobs when he was alone in the dark, her voice saying, Jason, Jason, I need you more than anything, don’t do this, and he shouldn’t see that look on Tim’s face every time he closed his eyes, that haunted, hopeless look.
He shouldn’t wish it unsaid, and he shouldn’t want to go back to the lie. The lie was wrong, it was no way for any of them to live, and he hadn’t been happy then, either.
It was hard to wonder if he’d ever be happy again, without Lyla and Tim in his life.
Jason was pretty sure he missed them more than his legs.
*
He got drunk one night, not long after Christmas, not long after he was back home again, and sent Lyla an e-mail that said I miss you and I’m not mad anymore, I mean it. So Lyla drove over at two in the morning, wearing pink flannel pajama bottoms and a blue Student Government t-shirt, and sat in his lap and cried some more while she kissed him over and over.
“I’m sorry,” he said, running his hands up the sides of her neck, over her face, through her damp hair. “Baby, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“You’re drunk,” she said, laughing and crying at once. “You gonna - in the morning, you still gonna- ?”
“I’m always gonna love you,” he promised. “Always, no matter what you ever do. You’re my girl, you’ll always be my girl.”
“I don’t deserve- “ she started to say, but he stopped her, because he’d already forgiven her without all that, and anyway, it didn’t feel right to.... It was Tim she was talking about, not some...mistake. It was a mistake, of course, but...it was Tim. Completely by accident, Jason seemed to have forgiven him, too.
He tangled his fingers in her hair and ran his other hand up the smooth skin of her back and said, “I don’t care about that anymore.”
*
Tim came to pick him up at twilight, but he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to go. “I can see them okay from here,” he said, drumming his fingers softly on the windowsill.
“You don’t want to go,” Tim repeated, not a question, but still uncertain. He tossed his car keys from hand to hand, and then he sat down on the foot of Jason’s bed, slouching forward. “You don’t want to.... You want to just stay here by yourself?”
“All I want’s a little privacy.” He tried to make a joke out of it then, saying, “You’ll be sick of me soon enough. Catch a break while you can.”
Tim frowned. “Is it...is this about college? You nervous?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jason lied.
That seemed to relieve Tim. “Hell, Street, so am I. So’s everybody, it’s no big deal. And you’re smart, you’re gonna do great. I’m the one who’s probably gonna flunk out my first year.”
Until this year, Tim had never talked about college, not for himself. But he’d had a hell of a season - a hell of a season - enough to get a scholarship from Angelo State. Jason had his dorm assignment packet in his top desk drawer. First floor, handicap accessible. Tim’s name printed right above his. “You’re not going to flunk out,” Jason said. “I’m just saying, you’ll be stuck with me all next year. It’s a holiday weekend; you should go out. Meet a girl or something.”
But he didn’t go out. He just sat there, saying nothing, jingling his keys as the darkness fell. When the fireworks started, Jason could just barely see them over the Creek Ridge subdivision up the hill, but he could hear the whistling, and the distant thrum of explosions.
Out of nowhere, Tim said in a torn voice, “You don’t have to go. If you don’t want to. I know you got into TCU and Baylor, too.”
“My folks can’t afford Baylor,” he said, even though that wasn’t the point.
“You don’t have to go just because I do, is all,” Tim said. “You should.... That was fine for me, but you’re not me, Six. You don’t.... You would never have to follow behind anyone your whole life, if you didn’t want to. You’re not that kind of guy. People follow you.”
“So me and Lyla go to TCU, and where do you go?” Jason said shortly. “ASU’s where your money is; how’s Billy gonna pay for somewhere else, if he even wanted to? It’s this or split up. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Tim said, awkward and unhappy. “But you gotta take care of yourself. You can’t be.... I’m not going pro, Six. I’m not gonna be some rich guy. You blow your chances now, and I can’t - I can’t pay you back. I can’t promise you anything down the line.”
Down the line. Jason had stopped trying to plan his future back in August, when all his plans turned to blood and grief in his hands. Crazy to think that Tim, of all people, had picked up where he left off. “I never said you had to be some rich guy. And I’m not doing this for a paycheck.”
“You don’t have to throw anything away to prove we’re friends,” Tim said raggedly. “I know we’re.... I mean, that we’re even still friends at all proves....”
“I love you,” Jason said, watching the red spirals through his reflection in the window. “Sorry if that gives you one more goddamn thing to feel guilty about, but I love you, and if this is what I have to do to be with you, then let me tell you, I’ve been through worse. Okay?”
It must’ve been okay, because Tim stopped arguing. When he finally left for the night, he put his hand on top of Jason’s head for a minute and looked down into his eyes with scary intensity. “I can’t promise you things won’t change,” he said, almost in a growl. “Shit, I can’t even - tell you I don’t want them to.”
“Quit trying to scare me off, Riggs,” Jason said, trying and managing to sound like he didn’t care about the way Tim was working on peeling him open with his eyes. “You’re stuck with me.”
*
Lyla threw a five-star fit when Jason put his foot down about the formal. “I am sick of babying you through this,” she said, which made him smile a little, because Lyla would be trying to baby him into the next world and they both knew it. “This chair isn’t who you are, and I hate watching you act like it’s the thing that matters more than everything else. You are Jason Street; you’re smart and sexy and sweet and wonderful, you’re my boyfriend and I love you. I want you to be there. I want everyone to see how lucky I am.”
And she meant it, that was the thing. He couldn’t say something smart, or even roll his eyes at her, because she meant every word of it. All he could do was give her the same courtesy back. “They’re not going to think you’re lucky,” he said, as gently as he could. “Best case scenario, they think you’re some kind of saint for sticking with me.”
“I’m here because I love you, it’s not some kind of charity work!”
“Baby, I know that,” he said, holding her hand and trying so soothe her with his voice and his smile. “You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She leaned forward and rested her head against his chest, her elbow on the arm of his wheelchair. “I really wanted to go to this,” she said softly. “I was thinking about rushing as a sophomore, and....”
“Take Tim.” Her head snapped up, and Jason put a finger against her opened lips. No matter how long and hard he’d thought this through, how sure he was of what he was saying, he couldn’t keep his voice from shaking a little as he said, “It’s too late for me to be normal, Lyla, but it’s not too late for you - at least for one night. Go to the dance with Tim. He’s a good-looking guy, he’s a football player, he can dance with you. He can hold a fucking door open for you.”
“Don’t,” she begged. “Don’t do this to yourself, Jason.”
He stroked her cheek and said, “Do you think it doesn’t kill me, all the things I know you want that you’re never going to have because of me? The very least I can give you is the damn Alpha Phi formal.”
“While you sit here and make yourself as miserable as you possibly can, getting jealous all over again of Tim and me- “
He cupped his hand under her jaw and held her just tightly enough to make her look into his eyes. “I’m not anymore,” he said. She’d have to believe him, looking into his eyes. She’d have to. “Giving you Tim doesn’t make me feel jealous. It makes me feel like I can take care of you like you take care of me every day.”
Her breathing was warm and just a little too quick against his face, her eyes wide. “Are we...still talking about the dance?”
Jason ran his thumb over her cheekbone and said, “I can’t tell you what you want, Lyla, and I can’t tell Tim what he wants, either. All I can do is - whatever you want, I can want it for you, too. He looks at you - when he thinks I can’t see, he looks at you like you’re more than his best friend’s girlfriend, and I know you...want more than I can....”
She gripped his hand hard between both of hers and said, “It’s enough for me, Jason. I swear it is.”
“Maybe I want you to have more than enough.” He leaned in close to her ear and murmured, “I remember how you used to look when I could still fuck you. I want to see your face like that again. I want you to have everything in the world, and if I want to be the guy that gives it to you, I’m gonna have to get creative about how.”
“I can’t risk hurting you,” she said, almost desperately. “You’ve been hurt too much already.”
Shit, he thought, closing his eyes. She needed - she deserved - every word the truth and nothing but. “I want it, too,” he said. He had to mean every word, just like Lyla always did; he would never go back to before, to the long field of lies. “For you, but...not just for you.”
For a minute, she didn’t speak. Then she said hesitantly, “For Tim?”
Every word. Nothing but. “For me,” he said, closing his eyes. “I want it.”
*
The QB called the apartment when Tim got hurt at practice; Jason listened to the voice on the answering machine, telling him that they’d rushed his best friend to the hospital, but it probably wasn’t serious.
Jason picked up the next call and said “okay” to everything they told him. Broken ankle, okay. Nothing major, okay. Maybe back on the field by the end of the season, okay. Being discharged right now, don’t bother to come. Okay. Jason thumbed the slick edges of his civil engineering texbook and stared at the wall, at the two pennants hanging side-by-side over the kitchen doorway - Dillon Panthers, Angelo Rams.
About half an hour later, Jason heard the scraping and thudding at the door, and he watched in amused sympathy as Tim let himself in clumsily, crutches and backpack and keys knocking against everything in reach, swearing bitterly under his breath. He pushed the door shut with one of the crutches and staggered awkwardly to collapse in a chair, in the line of sight of the open bedroom door. “Can I get you anything?” Jason asked mildly from his bed.
“You’re real funny,” Tim said.
He’d been half-serious. After five years, it was easier for him to pull his wheelchair around to the side of the bed and lift himself into it than it probably was for Tim to make it to the refrigerator on crutches. But he shrugged it off and went back to studying, and then to an early-evening power nap, and when he woke up it was mostly dark in the apartment and Tim was still sitting in that same chair, doing nothing.
Jason pushed up on his elbow and turned the lamp by his bed from low to high. “Well, come here,” he said impatiently, and Tim looked up in his direction but didn’t move. “Come here,” Jason said again, and Tim reached out slowly for his crutches and limped into the bedroom.
He laid down on Jason’s bed, not his own, and Jason shifted his arm up over their heads to make more room. Tim felt heavy against his side, but of course he couldn’t feel the weight or the coolness of Tim’s cast against his own leg. He smelled like sweat and dirt and Tim, but also like a hospital, and Jason closed his eyes. “So?” he said.
“It’s nothing,” Tim said tightly.
“I know it’s nothing. Tell me about it anyway.”
“I can’t,” he said. “You don’t - I can’t.”
Jason sighed. He had to do practically everything for Tim, sometimes. “It’s probably your whole season,” he said. “Senior year. Your last year to play, and you’re not gonna get to play.”
“What do you want me to say? You want me to say I’m mad, or maybe I’m sorry? Want me to say that there’s just one thing I’ve ever been really good at, and I didn’t know this morning when I woke up that it’d be over today, that I don’t know who I am, that I’m not ready to let go? I’m gonna say that to you? To you?”
“Yeah, to me,” Jason said. “Who else? I’m the best friend you’ll ever have, Timmy, you might as well say it to me.”
Tim snorted a laugh. “Fuck football,” he said. “Damn game tried to kill us both.”
Jason echoed his laugh softly. “Get outta here. You love it.”
“Yeah, so do you. So we’re both pretty fucking stupid.”
Jason dropped his hand to Tim’s head, turning it on the pillow to face him. Tim’s eyes went wide and dark as Jason moved his own head awkwardly until there was hardly room to drop a pencil between his mouth and Tim’s. “You can call it whatever you want,” he said quietly.
“Six, you don’t know the half of what I want.”
“I do, and I know why it scares you, too. But somebody doesn’t always get hurt,” Jason said, and when Tim opened his mouth like he had every intention of arguing that, Jason amended it to, “I won’t hurt you. I swear to God, I will never hurt you. It’s okay - what you want, there’s nothing wrong with it. You’re safe with me, you hear me, Riggs?” Tim nodded once, his cheek rubbing against the pillow, and he closed his eyes when Jason kissed him.
He rolled over on top of Jason with a moment’s pause to heave his plaster-weighted leg into a better position and took Jason’s face between his hands, kissing him back deeper, desperately. He stroked the tendon in Jason’s neck and sucked on his bottom lip, and it didn’t feel the slightest bit like a first kiss, which in a way it wasn’t, really. Lyla knew everything there was to know about Jason’s body, pre-accident and post, and Jason knew good and well that there was no such thing as having a secret from Tim if Lyla knew it, or the other way around, either. Somehow or other, what belonged to one of them always ended up belonging to both.
Tim broke the sloppy kiss and looked at him with a kind of quiet amazement that, just like the kiss, was new and old at the same time. Jason put his fingers against Tim’s beautiful, slick mouth and said, “I watch you. With Lyla. I watch you and Lyla. I wish I could...I wish I could feel....”
Tim put his hand up Jason’s shirt, resting it splayed across his chest. He lowered his head to lick gently behind Jason’s ear and then to bite down, slow and firm, on the upper curve. “Feel this?” he rumbled, almost nothing more than breath and pressure.
“You know I do,” he said. As much as he’d watched, so had Tim. Tim had always watched, and not just Lyla. Jason and Lyla. Jason. Nothing that Jason responded to was likely to come as a shock to Tim.
Bit by bit, Tim broke him in a thousand places - sucked each of Jason’s fingers inside his mouth, dipped his tongue into Jason’s navel, scratched his blunt, crooked nails down the inside of Jason’s arms, groaned against the vampire spot on Jason’s neck and sent vibrations all over. Jason could feel him rocking, pressing him into the bed, and he guessed - he hoped - that Tim was hard inside his sweatpants. He slipped a hand down the back of them and palmed Tim’s ass, urging him to ride harder against his hip, as hard as he needed to.
When Lyla came over after her Panhellenic meeting, she found them sweaty and sticky, talking about the Raiders with their foreheads pressed together, grinning stupidly in the half-circle of lamplight. “Y’all are a mess,” she announced, little worry lines appearing between her eyes.
Tim rolled back and put his arm out, wrapping it around Lyla’s legs just under her ass and pulling at her until her knees hit the edge of the mattress. “I know, baby. I was hoping to get a little of that Lyla Garrity special sponge-bath action.”
She pulled the pillow out from under his head and hit him in the face, only hard enough to make him laugh. “You better walk yourself into the bathroom on your one good leg and make yourself decent - and you’re washing the sheets, too, Tim Riggins, I’m not doing it.”
“I knew she liked you better,” Tim said to Jason.
“Well, she’s got some taste,” Jason said.
“Good thing you don’t,” Tim said, pushing himself to sit up.
Lyla picked up his crutches from the floor and held them so Tim could get a decent grip and boost himself up on them. He kissed the top of her head absently, and she said in a timid voice, “Tim, are you okay? I didn’t meant to make fun- “
“I’m okay,” he said. “Don’t give me that look. I said I’m fine.”
“Is he fine?” Lyla asked Jason, pointedly. Tim rolled his eyes.
Jason smiled at both of them and said, “He looks okay to me.”
Author: Hth
Pairing: Jason/Lyla/Tim (sort of)
Rating: R
Disclaimers: FNL & associated whatnot are not my property.
Hey, it's my first 5 Things story! Really, I started out writing them just to get a feel for the characters and some potential key moments in their lives, thinking maybe I'd write a story. I still haven't decided exactly what kind of story I want to write, but in the meantime, I had these things. Five of 'em.
Five Things Jason Street Was the First To Say
by Hth
For a long time, Jason didn’t say anything. He was only half a boyfriend at best and he knew it, so was it really his right anymore? Even wanting to be everything to Lyla seemed equal parts ludicrous and unfair, so he shut his mouth and worked on not wanting it anymore.
He wouldn’t have said anything - he would have kept that promise to himself, honestly he would have - except she was just there one day, bright and stiff and competent, her ponytail bobbling cheerfully and her smile strained to bending, and he was sore and tired and lonely and sick of the implicit lies, the minefield between them. He lashed out his arm and knocked a pitcher of water off the table by his bed, and his voice shook as he said, “Go home, Lyla. Go home to Tim.”
And then it was one long, drawn-out scene, a week’s worth of bitter triple-breakup where Lyla cried and Tim cried and Jason hated them both for....
Mostly for making him feel bad for them. This wasn’t his fault, none of it was his fault, he’d never done anything to deserve the hospital, the chair, the regret, the weakness, the betrayal. He didn’t do anything wrong, and they did, so he shouldn’t hear Lyla’s sobs when he was alone in the dark, her voice saying, Jason, Jason, I need you more than anything, don’t do this, and he shouldn’t see that look on Tim’s face every time he closed his eyes, that haunted, hopeless look.
He shouldn’t wish it unsaid, and he shouldn’t want to go back to the lie. The lie was wrong, it was no way for any of them to live, and he hadn’t been happy then, either.
It was hard to wonder if he’d ever be happy again, without Lyla and Tim in his life.
Jason was pretty sure he missed them more than his legs.
*
He got drunk one night, not long after Christmas, not long after he was back home again, and sent Lyla an e-mail that said I miss you and I’m not mad anymore, I mean it. So Lyla drove over at two in the morning, wearing pink flannel pajama bottoms and a blue Student Government t-shirt, and sat in his lap and cried some more while she kissed him over and over.
“I’m sorry,” he said, running his hands up the sides of her neck, over her face, through her damp hair. “Baby, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“You’re drunk,” she said, laughing and crying at once. “You gonna - in the morning, you still gonna- ?”
“I’m always gonna love you,” he promised. “Always, no matter what you ever do. You’re my girl, you’ll always be my girl.”
“I don’t deserve- “ she started to say, but he stopped her, because he’d already forgiven her without all that, and anyway, it didn’t feel right to.... It was Tim she was talking about, not some...mistake. It was a mistake, of course, but...it was Tim. Completely by accident, Jason seemed to have forgiven him, too.
He tangled his fingers in her hair and ran his other hand up the smooth skin of her back and said, “I don’t care about that anymore.”
*
Tim came to pick him up at twilight, but he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to go. “I can see them okay from here,” he said, drumming his fingers softly on the windowsill.
“You don’t want to go,” Tim repeated, not a question, but still uncertain. He tossed his car keys from hand to hand, and then he sat down on the foot of Jason’s bed, slouching forward. “You don’t want to.... You want to just stay here by yourself?”
“All I want’s a little privacy.” He tried to make a joke out of it then, saying, “You’ll be sick of me soon enough. Catch a break while you can.”
Tim frowned. “Is it...is this about college? You nervous?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jason lied.
That seemed to relieve Tim. “Hell, Street, so am I. So’s everybody, it’s no big deal. And you’re smart, you’re gonna do great. I’m the one who’s probably gonna flunk out my first year.”
Until this year, Tim had never talked about college, not for himself. But he’d had a hell of a season - a hell of a season - enough to get a scholarship from Angelo State. Jason had his dorm assignment packet in his top desk drawer. First floor, handicap accessible. Tim’s name printed right above his. “You’re not going to flunk out,” Jason said. “I’m just saying, you’ll be stuck with me all next year. It’s a holiday weekend; you should go out. Meet a girl or something.”
But he didn’t go out. He just sat there, saying nothing, jingling his keys as the darkness fell. When the fireworks started, Jason could just barely see them over the Creek Ridge subdivision up the hill, but he could hear the whistling, and the distant thrum of explosions.
Out of nowhere, Tim said in a torn voice, “You don’t have to go. If you don’t want to. I know you got into TCU and Baylor, too.”
“My folks can’t afford Baylor,” he said, even though that wasn’t the point.
“You don’t have to go just because I do, is all,” Tim said. “You should.... That was fine for me, but you’re not me, Six. You don’t.... You would never have to follow behind anyone your whole life, if you didn’t want to. You’re not that kind of guy. People follow you.”
“So me and Lyla go to TCU, and where do you go?” Jason said shortly. “ASU’s where your money is; how’s Billy gonna pay for somewhere else, if he even wanted to? It’s this or split up. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Tim said, awkward and unhappy. “But you gotta take care of yourself. You can’t be.... I’m not going pro, Six. I’m not gonna be some rich guy. You blow your chances now, and I can’t - I can’t pay you back. I can’t promise you anything down the line.”
Down the line. Jason had stopped trying to plan his future back in August, when all his plans turned to blood and grief in his hands. Crazy to think that Tim, of all people, had picked up where he left off. “I never said you had to be some rich guy. And I’m not doing this for a paycheck.”
“You don’t have to throw anything away to prove we’re friends,” Tim said raggedly. “I know we’re.... I mean, that we’re even still friends at all proves....”
“I love you,” Jason said, watching the red spirals through his reflection in the window. “Sorry if that gives you one more goddamn thing to feel guilty about, but I love you, and if this is what I have to do to be with you, then let me tell you, I’ve been through worse. Okay?”
It must’ve been okay, because Tim stopped arguing. When he finally left for the night, he put his hand on top of Jason’s head for a minute and looked down into his eyes with scary intensity. “I can’t promise you things won’t change,” he said, almost in a growl. “Shit, I can’t even - tell you I don’t want them to.”
“Quit trying to scare me off, Riggs,” Jason said, trying and managing to sound like he didn’t care about the way Tim was working on peeling him open with his eyes. “You’re stuck with me.”
*
Lyla threw a five-star fit when Jason put his foot down about the formal. “I am sick of babying you through this,” she said, which made him smile a little, because Lyla would be trying to baby him into the next world and they both knew it. “This chair isn’t who you are, and I hate watching you act like it’s the thing that matters more than everything else. You are Jason Street; you’re smart and sexy and sweet and wonderful, you’re my boyfriend and I love you. I want you to be there. I want everyone to see how lucky I am.”
And she meant it, that was the thing. He couldn’t say something smart, or even roll his eyes at her, because she meant every word of it. All he could do was give her the same courtesy back. “They’re not going to think you’re lucky,” he said, as gently as he could. “Best case scenario, they think you’re some kind of saint for sticking with me.”
“I’m here because I love you, it’s not some kind of charity work!”
“Baby, I know that,” he said, holding her hand and trying so soothe her with his voice and his smile. “You think I’d be here if I didn’t know that?”
She leaned forward and rested her head against his chest, her elbow on the arm of his wheelchair. “I really wanted to go to this,” she said softly. “I was thinking about rushing as a sophomore, and....”
“Take Tim.” Her head snapped up, and Jason put a finger against her opened lips. No matter how long and hard he’d thought this through, how sure he was of what he was saying, he couldn’t keep his voice from shaking a little as he said, “It’s too late for me to be normal, Lyla, but it’s not too late for you - at least for one night. Go to the dance with Tim. He’s a good-looking guy, he’s a football player, he can dance with you. He can hold a fucking door open for you.”
“Don’t,” she begged. “Don’t do this to yourself, Jason.”
He stroked her cheek and said, “Do you think it doesn’t kill me, all the things I know you want that you’re never going to have because of me? The very least I can give you is the damn Alpha Phi formal.”
“While you sit here and make yourself as miserable as you possibly can, getting jealous all over again of Tim and me- “
He cupped his hand under her jaw and held her just tightly enough to make her look into his eyes. “I’m not anymore,” he said. She’d have to believe him, looking into his eyes. She’d have to. “Giving you Tim doesn’t make me feel jealous. It makes me feel like I can take care of you like you take care of me every day.”
Her breathing was warm and just a little too quick against his face, her eyes wide. “Are we...still talking about the dance?”
Jason ran his thumb over her cheekbone and said, “I can’t tell you what you want, Lyla, and I can’t tell Tim what he wants, either. All I can do is - whatever you want, I can want it for you, too. He looks at you - when he thinks I can’t see, he looks at you like you’re more than his best friend’s girlfriend, and I know you...want more than I can....”
She gripped his hand hard between both of hers and said, “It’s enough for me, Jason. I swear it is.”
“Maybe I want you to have more than enough.” He leaned in close to her ear and murmured, “I remember how you used to look when I could still fuck you. I want to see your face like that again. I want you to have everything in the world, and if I want to be the guy that gives it to you, I’m gonna have to get creative about how.”
“I can’t risk hurting you,” she said, almost desperately. “You’ve been hurt too much already.”
Shit, he thought, closing his eyes. She needed - she deserved - every word the truth and nothing but. “I want it, too,” he said. He had to mean every word, just like Lyla always did; he would never go back to before, to the long field of lies. “For you, but...not just for you.”
For a minute, she didn’t speak. Then she said hesitantly, “For Tim?”
Every word. Nothing but. “For me,” he said, closing his eyes. “I want it.”
*
The QB called the apartment when Tim got hurt at practice; Jason listened to the voice on the answering machine, telling him that they’d rushed his best friend to the hospital, but it probably wasn’t serious.
Jason picked up the next call and said “okay” to everything they told him. Broken ankle, okay. Nothing major, okay. Maybe back on the field by the end of the season, okay. Being discharged right now, don’t bother to come. Okay. Jason thumbed the slick edges of his civil engineering texbook and stared at the wall, at the two pennants hanging side-by-side over the kitchen doorway - Dillon Panthers, Angelo Rams.
About half an hour later, Jason heard the scraping and thudding at the door, and he watched in amused sympathy as Tim let himself in clumsily, crutches and backpack and keys knocking against everything in reach, swearing bitterly under his breath. He pushed the door shut with one of the crutches and staggered awkwardly to collapse in a chair, in the line of sight of the open bedroom door. “Can I get you anything?” Jason asked mildly from his bed.
“You’re real funny,” Tim said.
He’d been half-serious. After five years, it was easier for him to pull his wheelchair around to the side of the bed and lift himself into it than it probably was for Tim to make it to the refrigerator on crutches. But he shrugged it off and went back to studying, and then to an early-evening power nap, and when he woke up it was mostly dark in the apartment and Tim was still sitting in that same chair, doing nothing.
Jason pushed up on his elbow and turned the lamp by his bed from low to high. “Well, come here,” he said impatiently, and Tim looked up in his direction but didn’t move. “Come here,” Jason said again, and Tim reached out slowly for his crutches and limped into the bedroom.
He laid down on Jason’s bed, not his own, and Jason shifted his arm up over their heads to make more room. Tim felt heavy against his side, but of course he couldn’t feel the weight or the coolness of Tim’s cast against his own leg. He smelled like sweat and dirt and Tim, but also like a hospital, and Jason closed his eyes. “So?” he said.
“It’s nothing,” Tim said tightly.
“I know it’s nothing. Tell me about it anyway.”
“I can’t,” he said. “You don’t - I can’t.”
Jason sighed. He had to do practically everything for Tim, sometimes. “It’s probably your whole season,” he said. “Senior year. Your last year to play, and you’re not gonna get to play.”
“What do you want me to say? You want me to say I’m mad, or maybe I’m sorry? Want me to say that there’s just one thing I’ve ever been really good at, and I didn’t know this morning when I woke up that it’d be over today, that I don’t know who I am, that I’m not ready to let go? I’m gonna say that to you? To you?”
“Yeah, to me,” Jason said. “Who else? I’m the best friend you’ll ever have, Timmy, you might as well say it to me.”
Tim snorted a laugh. “Fuck football,” he said. “Damn game tried to kill us both.”
Jason echoed his laugh softly. “Get outta here. You love it.”
“Yeah, so do you. So we’re both pretty fucking stupid.”
Jason dropped his hand to Tim’s head, turning it on the pillow to face him. Tim’s eyes went wide and dark as Jason moved his own head awkwardly until there was hardly room to drop a pencil between his mouth and Tim’s. “You can call it whatever you want,” he said quietly.
“Six, you don’t know the half of what I want.”
“I do, and I know why it scares you, too. But somebody doesn’t always get hurt,” Jason said, and when Tim opened his mouth like he had every intention of arguing that, Jason amended it to, “I won’t hurt you. I swear to God, I will never hurt you. It’s okay - what you want, there’s nothing wrong with it. You’re safe with me, you hear me, Riggs?” Tim nodded once, his cheek rubbing against the pillow, and he closed his eyes when Jason kissed him.
He rolled over on top of Jason with a moment’s pause to heave his plaster-weighted leg into a better position and took Jason’s face between his hands, kissing him back deeper, desperately. He stroked the tendon in Jason’s neck and sucked on his bottom lip, and it didn’t feel the slightest bit like a first kiss, which in a way it wasn’t, really. Lyla knew everything there was to know about Jason’s body, pre-accident and post, and Jason knew good and well that there was no such thing as having a secret from Tim if Lyla knew it, or the other way around, either. Somehow or other, what belonged to one of them always ended up belonging to both.
Tim broke the sloppy kiss and looked at him with a kind of quiet amazement that, just like the kiss, was new and old at the same time. Jason put his fingers against Tim’s beautiful, slick mouth and said, “I watch you. With Lyla. I watch you and Lyla. I wish I could...I wish I could feel....”
Tim put his hand up Jason’s shirt, resting it splayed across his chest. He lowered his head to lick gently behind Jason’s ear and then to bite down, slow and firm, on the upper curve. “Feel this?” he rumbled, almost nothing more than breath and pressure.
“You know I do,” he said. As much as he’d watched, so had Tim. Tim had always watched, and not just Lyla. Jason and Lyla. Jason. Nothing that Jason responded to was likely to come as a shock to Tim.
Bit by bit, Tim broke him in a thousand places - sucked each of Jason’s fingers inside his mouth, dipped his tongue into Jason’s navel, scratched his blunt, crooked nails down the inside of Jason’s arms, groaned against the vampire spot on Jason’s neck and sent vibrations all over. Jason could feel him rocking, pressing him into the bed, and he guessed - he hoped - that Tim was hard inside his sweatpants. He slipped a hand down the back of them and palmed Tim’s ass, urging him to ride harder against his hip, as hard as he needed to.
When Lyla came over after her Panhellenic meeting, she found them sweaty and sticky, talking about the Raiders with their foreheads pressed together, grinning stupidly in the half-circle of lamplight. “Y’all are a mess,” she announced, little worry lines appearing between her eyes.
Tim rolled back and put his arm out, wrapping it around Lyla’s legs just under her ass and pulling at her until her knees hit the edge of the mattress. “I know, baby. I was hoping to get a little of that Lyla Garrity special sponge-bath action.”
She pulled the pillow out from under his head and hit him in the face, only hard enough to make him laugh. “You better walk yourself into the bathroom on your one good leg and make yourself decent - and you’re washing the sheets, too, Tim Riggins, I’m not doing it.”
“I knew she liked you better,” Tim said to Jason.
“Well, she’s got some taste,” Jason said.
“Good thing you don’t,” Tim said, pushing himself to sit up.
Lyla picked up his crutches from the floor and held them so Tim could get a decent grip and boost himself up on them. He kissed the top of her head absently, and she said in a timid voice, “Tim, are you okay? I didn’t meant to make fun- “
“I’m okay,” he said. “Don’t give me that look. I said I’m fine.”
“Is he fine?” Lyla asked Jason, pointedly. Tim rolled his eyes.
Jason smiled at both of them and said, “He looks okay to me.”