[fic] i practiced falling off buildings and out windows, 2/4

[daisysusan]

i practiced falling off buildings and out windows
( masterpost)

(continued from here)
Regardless, Dustin makes a valiant effort at keeping to the status quo. As so many of his valiant efforts have done, though, it fails miserably. Mostly because a few days after the movie viewing of interminable sexual tension (that Dustin was probably half imagining; whatever), Chris meets his eyes as they’re moving around the kitchen to make coffee and throw together a bit of breakfast and says, “Are you planning on kicking me out at some point?”

It’s uncharacteristically blunt for him-a sure sign that something is wrong-and Dustin is taken aback. Before he even considers his answer, though, he hears himself answer, calmly and decisively, that he’s really not going to.

“Oh,” Chris says, turning back to the coffeemaker.

“Is everything okay?” Dustin asks, sitting down and sipping cautiously at the coffee and then downing a huge mouthful once he’s sure it’s cool enough to drink.

“Everything’s fine,” Chris replies. “I just don’t want to overstay my welcome. There are probably other people you want to be having to stay.”

As Chris slips into the seat across from him, Dustin feels the words “Stay forever” form in his throat and it takes all his willpower and a huge gulp of coffee besides to keep from saying them.

“That’s not something you ever need to worry about he,” he says instead. “And,” he adds, his voice light even if his mood isn’t, “having you here keeps Mark from using the couch as an auxiliary coding room. You’re a much better houseguest than he is.”

It’s not true, though. Well, it is-Chris is a superb houseguest. He does his own dishes and his own laundry and cleans, well, he cleans most of the house. It’s just that Dustin has stopped really thinking of Chris as a guest at all; he’s become more like a semi-permanent fixture in the house, and Dustin’s not wild about the idea of returning to a Chris-less existence.

“Do you not want to be here anymore?” Dustin asks, struck with a sudden worry that maybe Chris was just trying to find a polite way to extricate himself from the house-or, worse, from Dustin’s life. Again.

He doesn’t usually worry like this, has always been fairly confident in his position as a well-liked person, but Chris throws him off balance, mostly by making everything just matter so much more. The idea of having someone else not want to live with him doesn’t even phase him, but having Chris not want to would be a giant kick in the face of his dearest, unlikeliest dream.

Idly, briefly, he considers what it would be like if he were having this conversation with Mark. It would still hurt, he realizes. Differently, a bit, but it would still hurt.

“No,” Chris answers, vehemently.

“Okay,” Dustin says, catching Chris’s eye and smiling comically wide. Chris kicks him under the table.

“You’re going to be late for work,” Chris points out, downing the rest of his coffee and standing up.

“So what?” Dustin says. “It’s not like my boss actually knows how to show up on time.”

“Actually,” Chris starts to say, leaning against the doorframe, “I seem to recall-”

Dustin cuts him off. “That was just because he was scared of you. Without the threat of a severe dressing-down, he’s got nothing to motivate him to be in the office before 11. At the earliest.”

“Still, don’t you need to be there to supervise your employees? I know the programmers start obscenely early.”

“Nope,” Dustin says, grinning. “As it turns out, they’re all scared of me. Someone started a rumor about me teaching myself to code in three days-”

“I’m not sure it’s called a rumor if it’s actually true,” Chris complains.

“-and now all the programmers are really intimidated and too afraid to ask me for help.”

Chris laughs.

“I’m kind of offended,” Dustin says, mock-angry.

“You’re just the least intimidating person ever,” Chris tells him, grinning.

“I can be intimidating if I want to be,” Dustin whines.

“Of course you can,” Chris says. “If you give up playing flash games intended for twelve-year-olds, novelty boxers, spontaneously bursting into song, and cuddling.”

“I could do that,” Dustin insists. “I just don’t want to. I would lose all my charm!”

“Oh, is that what you’re calling it now?”

“Shut up, you know you like it,” Dustin says, standing and brushing past Chris to leave the kitchen. “Apparently I’m going to be late for work.”

From the stairs, he calls back, “Aren’t you going to be late too?”

“I have the day off!”

“Fuck you!”

Dustin can just barely hear Chris’s laughter as he gets into the shower.

That night, as he throws his backpack roughly onto the weirdly angled chair in the living room that no one uses for anything other than piling stuff, Chris calls to him from the kitchen. “I made dinner.”

“You would make an exceptional housewife,” Dustin shouts.

“I would make an exceptionally bored housewife,” Chris calls back.

“That too,” Dustin says as he walks into the kitchen. When Chris said that he made dinner, he wasn’t kidding. Dustin was anticipating pasta or maybe omelets, but instead, there’s a bottle of wine open on the kitchen table, some extravagant-looking fish concoction in a skillet on the stove, and a box on the counter that he rather suspects came from a gourmet store. It might be chocolate.

“Damn,” Dustin says, impressed. “You weren’t kidding.”

Chris turns slightly red and says, “Yeah, I got a little ambitious.”

Dustin’s not sure that hugging him is the appropriate thing to do, even though he really wants to because Chris is adorable and blushing and made him-made them? It’s amazing either way-a fancy dinner. If Dustin were the type of person to jump to conclusions about other people (which he is, but to a much lesser extent than Mark or even Chris), he might think that Chris was trying to seduce him.

That’s probably not an idea he should let his brain run away with.

Of course, then Chris starts pouring the wine and ushering Dustin towards his usual chair. If he’d thought-and he had-that their lives had gotten weirdly domestic, well, this took it to a whole new level. It was like he’d moved into an especially progressive episode of Leave it to Beaver or something.

Like he knew what Dustin was thinking and wanted to complete the illusion, Chris said, “How was your day?” as he dished the food out quickly.

“Pretty uneventful,” Dustin answers. “Nothing crashed, no one set anything on fire, and Mark only yelled at me once.”

Chris laughs, shaking his head a little. “Did you run out of time to provoke him?”

“He was in meetings most of the day, actually. So he was too busy yelling at other people to pick on me.”

“I’m not sure that counts, Dustin,” Chris says, mock-serious. He sets the dishes of food down on the table and drops into his hair. Before Chris has even has time to reach for a serving spoon, Dustin is reaching to serve himself. It’s been a while since he had anything this impressive; Chris cooks pretty regularly but he doesn’t usually have time to pull together fancy meals.

The fish thing, whatever it is, is predictably amazing. Like, foodgasm amazing. Dustin never wants it to not be in his mouth. He tells Chris as much.

Chris, for his part, blushes and little and thanks him.

They chat amiably over their food, as usual; Chris has a tale of woe about crazy people at the specialty grocery store, and Dustin jokingly soothes him, rebutting with his own story of the old man convinced that Dustin’s email was actually his son’s-of note, of course, was the fact that this guy was not Dustin’s father.

He tries not to get too distracted by the way Chris’s eyes crinkle up when he laughs or how broadly he’s smiling even as he implores Dustin to be nice to the man.

“I was!” Dustin says. “But he wouldn’t believe me. I kept telling him that I’m not who he thought I was, but he clearly just wasn’t getting the message.”

Chris snickers softly.

“Pun intended,” Dustin concludes.

Making Chris laugh is, like, the highlight of any day when he pulls it off, and he’s done it multiple times today. Possibly the best day ever.

Well, after the day he decided to start sneaking movie quotes into facebook’s code.

He looks up from his plate to see that Chris’s smile has calmed slightly into something that’s more fond than it is amused, and he’s holding his wine glass. Quickly, Chris downs the rest of his wine and sets the glass back on the table. There’s a purpose to his movement usually absent from their casual dinners.

In the silence, he reaches forward and rests his hand over Dustin’s where it lies on the table. Dustin swallows his questions, not wanting to break the moment, but Chris seems expectant, somehow. At a loss for anything else to do, Dustin turns his hand over and lets their palms rest against each other.

He guesses that was the right thing to do because Chris meets his eyes and doesn’t look away.

It feels almost like a mating ritual of some sort-Dustin’s pretty sure he’s not making things up when he thinks that-but no one has taught him the rules. He’s used to flirting at parties and joking with strangers at bars, but he’s never had Chris watching him intently across his kitchen table. It’s disconcerting and exciting and overwhelming all at the same time.

But mostly it’s confusing, because Dustin doesn’t know to act. He knows for sure that it’s better to have Chris around and pine a bit than it is for Chris to be across the country and he doesn’t want to drive him away.

At this point, it’s probably a stupid fear, given that he’s never seen that look-intense and full of feelings he doesn’t want to name and focused-on Chris’s face before. But there’s nothing better than fear at holding people back; there’s a reason the posters around facebook tell people, basically, not to be afraid.

While Dustin is trying not to be crippled by fear, he feels Chris twine their fingers together slowly and it occurs to him that maybe he’s not the only one not entirely sure what to do.

“Chris,” he begins to say, not really having decided where the sentence should go but unable to handle the silence any longer.

“Yeah?” Chris says, cocking his head.

Dustin squeezes his hand for lack of a better thing to do.

Chris bites his lip.

There’s a moment of utter stillness, and then Chris starts to lean forward incrementally, so slow and hesitant that Dustin wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been focused only on Chris. Dustin tilts his head slightly and leans slightly forward as well.

The table’s not particularly wide, just a small breakfast one, and neither of them has to move too far before Dustin feels Chris’s lips brush against the corner of his mouth. It’s barely even a kiss, not by the standards of anyone out of elementary school, but still. Chris’s lips touched his.

Dustin doesn’t quite pull back, and Chris doesn’t quite pull back either, and they’re left hanging, almost kissing but not quite. It’s too close for conversation but too far for anything else, and mostly Dustin just wants to kiss him again.

Before he can second-guess himself (again), he lets his head move forward the minute amount it takes for him to be kissing Chris again-for real this time, his lips lingering but not forcing. And then Chris’s hand tightens around his, and he presses his mouth a little harder against Dustin’s and, okay, yeah, they’re kissing for real now. Chris’s lips are sealed over his, and he can feel Chris’s tongue ghosting across his lip.

The fact that there’s a table between them is going to get problematic pretty soon, because Dustin really wants to curl his hands around Chris’s hips and feel the warm skin of his back and taste the mixture of sweat and soap on his neck.

Chris runs his free hand down the back of Dustin’s neck-Dustin shivers a little bit-and, after pressing a brief kiss to his lips, pulls back enough to talk to him.

“Are we doing this?” he asks.

“Hmm?” Dustin says, still a little hung up on the feel of Chris’s fingers running down his neck.

“I just.” Chris hesitates, glances down. “I just want to be sure that this means the same thing to both of us.”

Dustin swallows. “This isn’t a joke,” he says. He swallows the words that threaten to follow it, offering to back off if Chris isn’t serious about it, but this matters too much.

“Good,” Chris says. His fingers trail across Dustin’s cheek and Dustin turns his head to press a light kiss to Chris’s palm. Chris starts to lean in toward him again, but Dustin pulls away and stands up.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” he says, standing in front of Chris and pulling him out of his chair. “I don’t want to make us wait any longer than we need to.”

Chris’s eyes flick down over his torso-and lower-and then back up to his lips.

“Okay,” he says.

And then Dustin is kind of pressed against the wall and being kissed more thoroughly than he thinks he’s even been before.

They don’t even make it upstairs the first time.

Being curled up against Chris, their foreheads nearly touching, ranks pretty damn high on the list of best places Dustin’s ever been. It’s comfortable and warm in a way that goes beyond the physical, like his heart is warm or maybe glowing. He feels kind of stupidly sappy thinking about it, letting himself get hypnotized by the soft touch of Chris’s fingers as they trace his ribs.

When he lets himself drift too far into his thoughts, almost more asleep than awake, he finally notices it, this stupid little twinge of missing. He misses the way Mark sprawls across the bed, greedy and starfish-like and uncharacteristically cuddly, his limbs heavy where they drape across Dustin’s and the weight somehow-anchoring.

And then the guilt sets in.

He didn’t exactly call things off with Mark before he-yeah. It was more like they stopped. They weren’t exclusive or anything, he tells himself, not quite believing the words even as he thinks them. It’s not like they went on dates or were Facebook official. They never made each other any promises. And besides, there wasn’t any official starting point to it, either.

It was just sex.

Right?

But Dustin’s half asleep and he’s still pretty sure that friends-with-benefits don’t spend the night curled up together, or make each other breakfast (okay, toast, sometimes burned; neither he nor Mark is exactly a culinary genius), or kiss each other goodbye in the mornings (it only happened a few times, and after all of them, Mark pulled away, blushing and biting his lip, but it still happened). The more he thinks about those things (and about the thousand other stupid things he and Mark do together), the more it feels startlingly-domestic. Like they could probably have spent the rest of their lives doing that and no one would have thought it was odd.

It’s-confusing does not even begin to cover what it is. And Dustin’s being lulled to sleep by Chris’s touch, too drowsy and comfortable to try and make sense of his life.

He wakes the next morning wrapped around Chris, who’s still sound asleep, curled in on himself. Dustin runs his fingers softly across Chris’s forehead, barely even moving his hair, and tries to go back to sleep. Just staring at him would be, well, a little creepier than he’s entirely comfortable being, but he doesn’t want to get up and he certainly doesn’t want to wake Chris, who just looks so tired all the time now.

Lying there, though, unable to sleep and too comfortably happy to get up, it’s hard to keep from thinking.

And Dustin’s not entirely sure he likes where his thoughts are going.

He never anticipated circumstances under which he might be lying in bed with Chris and not be completely and totally happy, and the sheer insanity of missing Mark of all people is baffling to him.

Dustin forces himself to put it from his mind, at least for now. Sleep-and Chris-are more important.

In all honesty, it’s not the fault of his wandering thoughts when he’s late to work the following day. That one falls entirely on the (arguably somewhat ill-advised) decision to have morning sex. Not that Dustin regrets it or anything, because really, rolling around in bed with Chris (and the orgasms!) was a perfectly wonderful way to start the day.

Unfortunately, in addition to being late to work, Dustin discovers once he’s there that he kind of has a giant hickey on his neck. Or at least he hopes that’s the reason that people are staring at his neck, because the alternatives are kind of creepy. Honestly, he doesn’t care that much if people know he got laid, but he also kind of doesn’t want Mark to find out-and then come to the blindingly obvious and also correct conclusions-before Dustin has a chance to talk to him and break the news gently, or whatever.

Of course, he has absolutely no luck whatsoever. (Frankly, he probably used it all up in the process of somehow making Chris want to kiss him and have sex with him and-yeah, that was pretty fucking lucky, really.) Mark walks into his office way earlier than Dustin expects him to; frankly, it’s way earlier than Mark is usually at the office at all.

Dustin’s tapping away at his email, so the voice behind him comes as a complete shock.

“Are you actually working?” he hears Mark say, half incredulous, half laughing.

“No,” Dustin replies, deadpan.

Mark doesn’t quite giggle, but it’s a frighteningly near thing.

“Um,” Dustin says. He doesn’t turn away from his computer, just stares down at the keyboard and grimaces preemptively.

“Spit it out,” Mark says. Dustin swallows hard and spins around to face him. Mark’s eyes trail across the hickey he located in the mirror after three interns didn’t meet his eyes on his way to his desk.

“We can’t do our-thing-anymore,” Dustin says, possibly more bluntly than he should have.

“What?” Mark’s eyes were still resting on the hickey, not meeting Dustin’s.

Okay, yeah, maybe that wasn’t clear enough.

“The thing,” Dustin tries again, “You know, where we have sex. We can’t do that anymore.”

“Oh,” Mark says. “Okay.” There’s a brief pause, and then he continues. “Can you finish that thing I told you about yesterday?”

“Oh, sure,” Dustin says.

Mark doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the day, but around 5:30, Dustin gets an email telling him to go home, because he probably has more important things to be doing. It’s beyond strange, given that Mark is Mark, and given that they’d sort of been, well, fuck buddies or something. Dustin shrugs it off and stays for another 35 minutes-Chris is a bit of a workaholic anyway, he won’t be home till later.

When Dustin finally does get home, Chris is already there. Honestly, things don’t change that much from all the other nights he’s come home to find Chris curled up in the living room reading or standing in the kitchen making dinner or lazing at the kitchen table with his laptop. He does get a quick kiss hello, which definitely a pleasant change, but that’s the only real difference.

With the exception of there being more kissing and more sex, really, Dustin’s life doesn’t change in any noticeable way now that he and Chris are-whatever they are. Boyfriends, probably. The biggest shift is that the guest room Chris had been occupying slowly edges towards complete disuse. Like, living together would probably have been a big step except that they already kind of were, and if they were going to be having sex almost every night-and seriously, Dustin cannot imagine not> wanting to have sex with Chris regularly-there was no reason that they shouldn’t just sleep in the same bed. They snuggle a bit more, Dustin supposes, but there was already kind of a lot of snuggling before, so yeah.

Honestly, the only change bigger than there being a sudden uptick in Dustin’s sex life is the way that Mark treats them. He got, well, quite frankly, he got bitchy. At work, he gets even tetchier than usual, and outside of work, he stops making any effort to spend time with them. Not that he’d made much of one before-it was Mark-but now there’s just nothing.

Most days, Dustin avoids him, but a certain amount of interaction between him and, well, his boss is unavoidable. Mark’s even more terse than usual; when Dustin wanders into his office half out of habit and half to run some stuff by him, he doesn’t even grudgingly engage in banter. In fact, Mark barely takes his eyes off his computer screen the entire time Dustin is talking to him.

If Dustin were going to speculate, he would say that Mark was jealous.

Not that that really makes sense or anything, because Mark’s not going to be chosen as captain of the feelings squad anytime soon. He’s pretty sure that if Mark had an emotional experience that he understood, his head would explode. It’s not even that he thinks Mark doesn’t have feelings, it’s that if Mark actually paid attention to them, he might have to focus on something other than computers and his own intellect for a few seconds, and then it might start raining fire so maybe Dustin shouldn’t hope for that too much.

Chris invites Mark over for dinner the week after everything started going weird, because he thought Dustin was exaggerating the weirdness, and because Chris does things like that. He has people over for dinner because that’s what adults do with their friends-whereas Mark and Dustin tended to just fall sideways into evenings spent together much as they had in college.

The three of them sitting around the table together isn’t comfortable, at least not for Dustin. Mark’s not making eye contact with either of them, though he is shoving his food around his plate like a grouchy kid who doesn’t want to eat his peas. Dustin can recognize the behavior from doing it all the time as a kid.

Under the table, he lets his ankle rest against Chris’s, hoping that the contact grounds him somehow. It works, sort of. The touch of skin to his is a reminder of what he has, of Chris and comfort and why he definitely shouldn’t be remembering what Mark’s lips felt like pressed to his. Or what they felt like pressed anywhere else, for that matter.

“How’s work?” Chris says into the lingering silence.

Mark shrugs and grunts; it’s like they’re back at Harvard, except he’s even less communicative and this time there’s no Eduardo to drag conversation from him. “Don’t you already know?” he finally mumbles. “Dustin can tell you as much as I can.”

Dustin doesn’t even have to look at Chris to know that he’s rolling his eyes. “Not to get too trite, but I want to hear it from you.”

“S’ all the same,” Mark says, not looking up from his plate.

Chris reaches across the table and stills Mark’s hand where he hasn’t stopped stirring his food without eating it. “It’s really not,” he says, voice just the right side of being a snap.

When Mark looks up, his face is unreadable. It’s an improvement from surly, Dustin supposes, and Mark does answer Chris’s question. He speaks, rapid and clipped, about new developments at facebook, about the overwhelming stupidity of the people he deals with on a daily basis.

“I miss getting to code,” Mark says, and Dustin sees Chris’s hand tighten where it’s wrapped around his wrist.

He starts to speak, but Dustin isn’t listening. His eyes are fixed on Mark and Chris’s hands and his mind is fixed on stopping himself to reach out and stacking his hand on top of theirs. Dustin doesn’t really think he’s ever had an epiphany before, but maybe this is what Mark felt like when he realized what facebook could be-like all the pieces of something that was almost there but not quite have settled into place and he knows exactly what he needs to do.

Or what he wants to do, at least.

The thing is, no one ever prepared him for the possibility that he might be in love with more than one person at the same time.

He watched movies as a kid-and as a teenager and as an adult-and learned all these things about what it was like to love someone; about nerves and desperately wanting them like you and tingly feelings of happiness any time you touch accidentally.

Then he got a bit older and he experienced them for real, with all the crushes whose names he’s now forgotten, and then all over again with Chris.

And his parents were open-minded enough, and he’s glad about that, because, well, Chris. And there were love triangles, sometimes, people forced to choose between two people they loved equally.

But no one ever bothered to mention that maybe being in love with two people didn’t necessarily mean it had to be a choice.

Or maybe it does have to be a choice.

Over the next week, Dustin keeps finding himself just watching, trying to parse out every second of Mark and Chris’s interaction, half convinced he’s just seeing what he wants to see but also kind of too desperate to keep from hoping.

Right now, they’re arguing good-naturedly, Chris cooking and Mark sitting at the kitchen table, being, as usual, completely useless. Chris tosses a carrot at the back of his head, which makes a quiet noise when it makes contact. “Make yourself useful,” he says, “and go get the vinegar out of the cabinet, please.”

“Can’t Dustin do it?” Mark whines.

“I like him better,” Chris answers, and Mark stands up, his frown barely holding.

Dustin keeps trying to figure it out, who he’d pick if he had to, but he keeps coming back to the same things. Chris makes him want to be a better person, Mark makes him want to be smarter person (and Eduardo makes him want to be nicer, but that’s-kind of moot, at this point).

He just wants both of them.

And no one ever bothered to tell him that that was even an option.

His thoughts must make him uncharacteristically quiet, because Chris is watching him with concerned eyes and cocking his head inquisitively. When Dustin stands up to get a glass of water (and snag some of the carrots), Chris presses close to him and whispers, “Hey, are you okay?”

Dustin forces himself not to glance over at Mark before he replies. “I’m good but, uh, can we talk later?”

“Sure,” Chris says with a quick smile.

It weighs on Dustin, though, the threat of having to sit down and look Chris in the eye and say-something. He could tell the truth (because telling the truth is always a good thing, except when it isn’t), but there’s just so much at stake. At least things are easy between the three of them again, even if making eye contact with Mark isn’t always the most pleasant thing.

He thinks Mark might miss him, too. For whatever reason.

Dustin stays quiet for the rest of the night, looking and thinking and forcing himself not to down glass after glass of wine. If there was ever a conversation he needed to have a clear head for, this is definitely it. So he sips at the glass of wine Chris pours him, and ignores the feeling of Mark’s eyes drilling into his skull, angry or concerned or maybe just bored; Dustin doesn’t know, because he hasn’t dared to look at him since before dinner started to look less like piles of vegetables and more like food.

Eventually, Mark downs the rest of his glass of water and excuses himself for a few minutes. But even now that he and Chris are alone, if only temporarily, Dustin’s reluctant to start the conversation now, preferring to just sit in not-quite-comfortable silence, watching Chris and navel-gazing.

So, predictably, Chris is the first of them to speak.

“Dustin,” he says, voice soft but steady, “Is this about Mark?”

And Dustin, because he may be a coward but he’s not a liar and he’s absolutely not a liar to Chris, nods, unable to really find the words he needs to explain it properly.

“It’s, uh,” he begins, but there’s not anywhere he’s ready to let that sentence go. The worst case scenario-the possible outcome so horrifyingly bad that thinking about it makes his stomach hurt a little bit-is losing Chris and Mark, fucking things up with Chris and then turning to Mark and finding-nothing.

He’s not stupid enough to think that it’s not a possibility.

“I know you two were sleeping together,” Chris continues. “I’m not blind.”

“Oh,” Dustin says, because he kind of hadn’t wanted Chris to know, in a stupid way that’s, well, it’s stupid and it makes no sense, especially given-everything. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

Chris’s voice shakes the slightest bit when he speaks. “Would you rather be with him?”

“No,” Dustin says, the denial almost automatic, “No, never.” He swallows hard and continues speaking. “If I had to choose, I would choose you.”

“But,” Chris says slowly, the word trailing off into nothing.

“I don’t want to choose,” Dustin whispers. Actually saying it is simultaneously the most relieving and most terrifying thing he’s ever done. He clenches his fists to try and stop his hands from shaking, but his heart’s still pounding and he’s actually so nervous he feels sick to his stomach.

Chris doesn’t answer immediately, which doesn’t do anything to decrease Dustin’s anxiety level.

Finally-it feels like it’s been a year, and Dustin’s pretty sure he’s aged three-Chris says, “What do you want to do about it?” He looks a little shaken, maybe, and Dustin can tell from the tension in his arms and shoulders that he’s not as calm as he wants to seem, but he doesn’t seem angry, which is a pretty big relief.

“I don’t really know,” Dustin says, because the truth is the easiest thing to remember. “The ball’s kind of in your court.”

Reaching across the table, Chris grabs Dustin’s hand and runs a thumb across his knuckles.

“I think,” he says slowly, biting his lip. “I think that we ought to talk to Mark.”

It’s an answer that takes Dustin aback. He’s fairly certain that he’s just gaping at Chris, his mouth slack and his eyes wide. “Do you …” he starts to say, despite not being entirely sure what question he’s asking or what answer he wants to hear. The idea of Chris having feelings for Mark makes his stomach twist, half excitement and half jealousy.

“It’s not just you,” Chris confirms.

Okay then. Dustin can work with that, he thinks.

(continued here)