Trickster
Title: Trickster
Pairing: Kris/Adam
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 2300
Summary: An ordinary guy wouldn't be able to get his arms around you. Whatever else I might be, I'm not ordinary. (slight AU)
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Trickster
“Are you a top or a bottom, baby?”
So this was a proper proposition. What he--he--had in mind wasn’t ten minutes of hectic grappling in a locked bathroom stall. He meant to take Kris home with him.
“Well . . . ” This close, Kris could see the living thickness of his glossy dark hair, the spring of it above his temples. Freckles on the lips too pretty to need advertising, on the exposed skin of his forearms and chest. He dressed like he was famous already; tonight it was layers of black, leather and a silky low-dipping thing, barely a shirt. One tug, that was all it would take, two seconds for Kris to get his mouth on the nearest nipple.
“It’s OK, there’s no wrong answer.” The eyes that missed nothing--almost nothing--had the unsettling trick of collecting the club’s chilly underwater light. It took an effort to meet them without blinking. But they were warm. “For you, that is.”
“It’s just-- ” The music was too loud. He stooped obligingly so Kris could speak directly into his ear. “I’ve only done it once. With my ex-sort-of-boyfriend. He wanted to bottom, so I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. He had this very specific idea of how it should go down, but he never really seemed to get into it, so-- ”
“Whoa, sorry.” A wiry guy in a Kings of Leon t-shirt had stumbled out of the bass-throbbing darkness, nearly colliding with Kris. “Oh, hey.” He smiled with instant drunken friendliness.
“Hey,” he said mildly from half a foot above, his hand settling meaningfully on the nape of Kris’s neck, and the pretender to the throne retreated, palms out in exaggerated surrender. He had already returned his attention to Kris. “You should definitely try it both ways,” he murmured. “With someone who’s into it.” His hand skimmed down Kris’s spine.
“Are we going to introduce ourselves first? So I can say your name while we’re . . . ”
“Adam.”
Of course. “I’m Kris. With a K.”
“Pleased to meet you, Kris.” Adam moved in to claim the last of his personal space, and Kris fell back for him.
It wasn’t the shocking plunge he’d braced for. He held on as Adam took them under, and they sank by degrees, beneath the surge and ebb of the music, where it was quiet enough for conversation. Kris’s lips parting, Come inside, Adam’s tongue probing, asking, Like this?
Yes.
And there was the shock, how intimate it was, like whispering under a blanket in the dark. They were alone down here, the two of them. Deeper.
Kris opened his eyes to watch Adam pull out of the kiss, slow and unwilling, as though surfacing from a blissful trance. “Likewise,” he said.
“This is your first time here, right? It must be.”
“No, I’ve been a regular for few months now, actually.”
Adam’s face reflected a flattering disbelief. “I would’ve noticed you.”
“Honestly. I can’t tell a lie to save my life. What I can do is disappear. I’ve been in invisible mode.”
That got him a playfully arched eyebrow: Prove it. “Your favorite drink is something with lime,” Kris offered. “Although you get lots of different things. You like to dance. Those hips of yours could charm a snake out of a basket, by the way.” To watch them slink and coil was to know how he would be. The lithe boys who flocked to him knew. “You always leave alone.”
“Pretty impressive,” Adam said lightly. “What else can you do?”
“I can sing. Play guitar. Although that’s not what I can do so much as what I do, period.”
Adam nodded, understanding, Kris could tell. “Me too. Just sing, not play.”
“Are you any good?”
“Yes, I am. You?”
“Yep. But it’s not enough to be good. Not in Arkansas, definitely not out here.”
“It’s not even enough to be good and look like you.” Adam cupped a hand around Kris’s throat--holy shit, big--and Kris felt his pulse beating there, jumping into Adam’s touch. “Arkansas, hmm? So that’s where you sound like. Do you miss it?”
Kris hesitated. “It’s a hard place to get out of," he said at last. "I had to, though. My magic doesn’t work so well there.”
“Any more tricks up your sleeve? Can you blush? I’d like to see you blush.”
“I might’ve left that one back in Arkansas. But I’ll try my best.”
Adam hadn’t lifted his hand away. His thumb stroked casually as he said, “Do you want a drink, Kris?”
“What do you think I want, Adam?” I’m not going to let you get away with everything. Where’s the fun for you in that?
And sure enough, Adam laughed, good-naturedly conceding the point. “Baby, I’m not supernatural like you. But it doesn’t take much to read your mind right now.”
Kris did say yes, absently, to a vodka cranberry as he stood looking around Adam’s small apartment. Some people were oddly diminished by the surroundings they’d created for themselves, he’d noticed, the limits of their imaginations on display for the world to see. Not Adam; everything he owned was a page from a story. The Thousand and One Nights in a WeHo studio.
An ordinary guy wouldn’t be able to get his arms around you. Whatever else I might be, I’m not ordinary.
The huge vase on the coffee table, that was erotica in blown glass, a heavy cylinder of shallow-water blue, flecked with gold like the fancy schnapps Kris had tried once. Three clear rock-candy chunks clung to the rim, rippled with fingertip whorls that Kris guessed were chisel marks. “Go on,” Adam urged, handing him a brimming martini glass. He could take off the armful of bondage-y cuff bracelets, Kris decided, and leave on the narrow collar with its dangling fringe of fine chains. “You’re supposed to touch.”
A friend had made it, an artist he’d met at Burning Man, Adam went on to explain. “It’s actually called Adam. Isn’t that amazing?”
Kris stated the obvious. “He wants to sleep with you.”
“Nah, he’s straight.”
“Trust me, he wants to.” The amazing thing was that Adam didn’t see it--didn’t see himself, maybe.
I’m going to show you.
On sheets the color of ripe plums, Kris knelt between the long decorative legs he’d admired in fuck-off leather boots. He said candidly, “I don’t have a lot of practice at this either. But I’ve been doing some research-- ”
“PornHub?”
“Google. I read an article--don’t laugh, it was very informative.” Kris bent to lick at Adam’s belly, and Adam rocked his hips up in luxurious anticipation. “What did it say?”
“'Worship his cock.'”
His big smooth-sculpted cock. Even smoother once Kris had gotten it good and wet, Adam watching, ready to rescue him if he needed it. Worship his cock. Not to put him on a pedestal; Adam's beauty, too, was the kind that was meant to be touched, and Kris would never be satisfied with making art out of him, anyway. Kris had to have. Adam’s sighing breaths, edging toward moans now; Adam’s cock crowding the back of his throat, sliding down easy as Purple Kush smoke, thick and hot--there, that was a full-bodied moan out of Adam, and God, how would he sound if . . . Adam must have read the covetousness on Kris’s face, because he spread his thighs wider and said, soft, “Fuck me, Kris.”
Kris’s concentration went everywhere, shattered on Adam's siren rocks, but he recovered, even remembered, at the end, to let everything collect in his mouth before trying to swallow. The taste was strong and salty, essential; it was what it was supposed to be, that was all.
Kris wiped his mouth. He hovered, wanting, unsure of the etiquette. He should’ve known that Adam would pull him down and welcome his tentative kiss, make him open up and share. “Adam,” he said, too desperately. He wasn’t watching from across the room, he was in Adam’s bed, his bed, in his arms. “Adam,” rubbing up on him too hard, too much friction for Adam so soon after he’d come. But Kris was here, the taste of Adam still in his mouth.
Adam’s fingers worked into the cleft of his ass and pressed lightly at his hole, seeking permission, and God, yes, anything-- “Just a minute, baby, just a second-- ” Prying himself off Adam so Adam could pour out lube, Kris managed a blush after all. Stupid, feeling exposed when he hadn’t been hiding anything, really. “There we go. Oh,” Adam said, in a different tone. “How sweet you are.”
He hadn’t forgotten Kris’s inexperience, and Kris shuddered with the slow initiating care of Adam’s fingers as much as with the new fullness inside his body, his body that needed no persuading.
“I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I?” Kris said, a bit later.
They were sharing a pillow. Adam had to tilt his head back to give Kris not a look, but a Look. It was something, the expressive range of Adam’s right eyebrow.
“Hooking up, I mean. I’m not supposed to--like you so much.”
“I like you too. Enigmatic Kris.” Adam considered him, shrewd. “You’re ingenuous, but you’re crafty, too, aren’t you? Elusive. Like a little fox.”
“Hey, I need any advantage I can get. You’re heavily armed." Kris saw the glint and preempted him. "Not that. Not just that.”
And since he wasn’t about to stop, he said, “Your eyes, what color are they, anyway?”
“Gray?” Kris greeted this with the disparaging snort it deserved. “You tell me, then.”
Kris reached for the answer the way he did when he was writing a song, by not thinking about it too hard. An instinctive sideways grab. “Atlantic,” he said, and those eyes--not gray or green or blue, nothing so fixed to a definition--widened in surprise.
“Don’t expect a lot of poetry from me,” Kris added quickly. “I’m not very articulate. Words run away when they see me coming.”
Adam made the disbelieving face again, but he said only, “I went through a poetry-writing phase. Trying to convince myself of my serious-artist cred.”
“And did you achieve serious artistry?”
“Well . . . my friends said nice things. Look at you smirking. Such a-- ” Adam interrupted himself to kiss Kris’s mouth into a more appreciative shape.
They made out for a while, lazy, and then Kris patted down Adam’s hair, the wayward strands that had sprung up in little hair horns, and told him about his day job clerking at Barnes & Noble--just something he could do, rather than something he did. It wasn’t music, but it wasn’t soul-crushing or anything. He’d met Leonardo DiCaprio--well, rung up his copy of Hot, Flat and Crowded and escorted him to the rear exit so he could dodge the paparazzi lurking out front. (“Oh wow, Leo,” Adam exclaimed, getting all excited and cute about it. “The star of my teenage fantasies. My brother called him Leonardo DiCrapio to be a pain in my ass. Was he nice?”)
Adam talked about his understudy role in the resident production of Wicked, a step up from being a chorus boy, as he wryly put it, but not exactly the big break of his dreams. “So I guess that’s my Arkansas. Sameness. Staleness. Did you go to college?” he asked unexpectedly.
“Yeah, for a few years. I ended up dropping out. Part of my great escape.”
“I only lasted a month. I had this vision of, like, an onramp to the sky. To my dazzling future.” Self-mocking italics. “I wasn’t going to wait four whole years to get on that ramp. That was--shit, eight years ago, and I haven’t gotten any better at waiting. I’m a pretty impatient person.”
“I bet you can be really patient.” With a play of a smile, a lift in his voice, it could’ve passed for flirtation. Adam would’ve flirted back instead of biting his lip, silenced, and then maybe they would’ve finally gotten the hookup thing right.
I’ve got a different ending to this story.
Kris said gently, “You were made for a bigger stage. The biggest. You’re going to have that, Adam. And everything else you’ve been waiting for.”
“Kris-- ” This time Adam kissed him as though frantic to push through--through what, Kris couldn’t have put into words, but he knew, and he fought it from his side. “Kris, can I fuck you?”
“Yes. Please,” he added, so there could be no mistaking his answer for sure, whatever.
And Adam was patient, so patient, even after he’d put on the condom and eased his body down on top of Kris’s, his cock a fascinating presence between Kris’s legs, a promise that they would both have what they’d been waiting for. It nudged at him, slick, and went in, just the head. Adam’s shoulders were damp where Kris gripped on tight. Restraint was hard work.
A quick twitch of his hips, an equal and opposite reaction, and Kris was free. He felt Adam’s indulgent smile spread against his mouth. Little fox, Adam was thinking. Next time, he'd let Adam catch him.
“It’s going to be so good,” Kris said. It would hurt some, and he would take the pain gladly, although he didn’t need pain to make it important. Adam would do it the way he did everything else, like he was asking all the right questions--the questions you’d longed to hear--and listening. They would go so far, discover so much, out there beyond sight of Arkansas and every familiar landmark. And then--
“And then what happens?” Adam was stroking a pensive E-string melody on Kris’s cheek, a same old song of three a.m. on the clock, a single glass on the nightstand, and a question for the universe: When? “Are you going to disappear?”
“I’m not going to disappear."
I’m going to stay. I’m going to stay, and write a song about your sea-change eyes.
--end--
Note: I stole Adam's vase from Dale Chihuly. Gallery of Chihuly's Jerusalem Cylinders.
Pairing: Kris/Adam
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 2300
Summary: An ordinary guy wouldn't be able to get his arms around you. Whatever else I might be, I'm not ordinary. (slight AU)
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Trickster
“Are you a top or a bottom, baby?”
So this was a proper proposition. What he--he--had in mind wasn’t ten minutes of hectic grappling in a locked bathroom stall. He meant to take Kris home with him.
“Well . . . ” This close, Kris could see the living thickness of his glossy dark hair, the spring of it above his temples. Freckles on the lips too pretty to need advertising, on the exposed skin of his forearms and chest. He dressed like he was famous already; tonight it was layers of black, leather and a silky low-dipping thing, barely a shirt. One tug, that was all it would take, two seconds for Kris to get his mouth on the nearest nipple.
“It’s OK, there’s no wrong answer.” The eyes that missed nothing--almost nothing--had the unsettling trick of collecting the club’s chilly underwater light. It took an effort to meet them without blinking. But they were warm. “For you, that is.”
“It’s just-- ” The music was too loud. He stooped obligingly so Kris could speak directly into his ear. “I’ve only done it once. With my ex-sort-of-boyfriend. He wanted to bottom, so I was like, yeah, sure, whatever. He had this very specific idea of how it should go down, but he never really seemed to get into it, so-- ”
“Whoa, sorry.” A wiry guy in a Kings of Leon t-shirt had stumbled out of the bass-throbbing darkness, nearly colliding with Kris. “Oh, hey.” He smiled with instant drunken friendliness.
“Hey,” he said mildly from half a foot above, his hand settling meaningfully on the nape of Kris’s neck, and the pretender to the throne retreated, palms out in exaggerated surrender. He had already returned his attention to Kris. “You should definitely try it both ways,” he murmured. “With someone who’s into it.” His hand skimmed down Kris’s spine.
“Are we going to introduce ourselves first? So I can say your name while we’re . . . ”
“Adam.”
Of course. “I’m Kris. With a K.”
“Pleased to meet you, Kris.” Adam moved in to claim the last of his personal space, and Kris fell back for him.
It wasn’t the shocking plunge he’d braced for. He held on as Adam took them under, and they sank by degrees, beneath the surge and ebb of the music, where it was quiet enough for conversation. Kris’s lips parting, Come inside, Adam’s tongue probing, asking, Like this?
Yes.
And there was the shock, how intimate it was, like whispering under a blanket in the dark. They were alone down here, the two of them. Deeper.
Kris opened his eyes to watch Adam pull out of the kiss, slow and unwilling, as though surfacing from a blissful trance. “Likewise,” he said.
“This is your first time here, right? It must be.”
“No, I’ve been a regular for few months now, actually.”
Adam’s face reflected a flattering disbelief. “I would’ve noticed you.”
“Honestly. I can’t tell a lie to save my life. What I can do is disappear. I’ve been in invisible mode.”
That got him a playfully arched eyebrow: Prove it. “Your favorite drink is something with lime,” Kris offered. “Although you get lots of different things. You like to dance. Those hips of yours could charm a snake out of a basket, by the way.” To watch them slink and coil was to know how he would be. The lithe boys who flocked to him knew. “You always leave alone.”
“Pretty impressive,” Adam said lightly. “What else can you do?”
“I can sing. Play guitar. Although that’s not what I can do so much as what I do, period.”
Adam nodded, understanding, Kris could tell. “Me too. Just sing, not play.”
“Are you any good?”
“Yes, I am. You?”
“Yep. But it’s not enough to be good. Not in Arkansas, definitely not out here.”
“It’s not even enough to be good and look like you.” Adam cupped a hand around Kris’s throat--holy shit, big--and Kris felt his pulse beating there, jumping into Adam’s touch. “Arkansas, hmm? So that’s where you sound like. Do you miss it?”
Kris hesitated. “It’s a hard place to get out of," he said at last. "I had to, though. My magic doesn’t work so well there.”
“Any more tricks up your sleeve? Can you blush? I’d like to see you blush.”
“I might’ve left that one back in Arkansas. But I’ll try my best.”
Adam hadn’t lifted his hand away. His thumb stroked casually as he said, “Do you want a drink, Kris?”
“What do you think I want, Adam?” I’m not going to let you get away with everything. Where’s the fun for you in that?
And sure enough, Adam laughed, good-naturedly conceding the point. “Baby, I’m not supernatural like you. But it doesn’t take much to read your mind right now.”
Kris did say yes, absently, to a vodka cranberry as he stood looking around Adam’s small apartment. Some people were oddly diminished by the surroundings they’d created for themselves, he’d noticed, the limits of their imaginations on display for the world to see. Not Adam; everything he owned was a page from a story. The Thousand and One Nights in a WeHo studio.
An ordinary guy wouldn’t be able to get his arms around you. Whatever else I might be, I’m not ordinary.
The huge vase on the coffee table, that was erotica in blown glass, a heavy cylinder of shallow-water blue, flecked with gold like the fancy schnapps Kris had tried once. Three clear rock-candy chunks clung to the rim, rippled with fingertip whorls that Kris guessed were chisel marks. “Go on,” Adam urged, handing him a brimming martini glass. He could take off the armful of bondage-y cuff bracelets, Kris decided, and leave on the narrow collar with its dangling fringe of fine chains. “You’re supposed to touch.”
A friend had made it, an artist he’d met at Burning Man, Adam went on to explain. “It’s actually called Adam. Isn’t that amazing?”
Kris stated the obvious. “He wants to sleep with you.”
“Nah, he’s straight.”
“Trust me, he wants to.” The amazing thing was that Adam didn’t see it--didn’t see himself, maybe.
I’m going to show you.
On sheets the color of ripe plums, Kris knelt between the long decorative legs he’d admired in fuck-off leather boots. He said candidly, “I don’t have a lot of practice at this either. But I’ve been doing some research-- ”
“PornHub?”
“Google. I read an article--don’t laugh, it was very informative.” Kris bent to lick at Adam’s belly, and Adam rocked his hips up in luxurious anticipation. “What did it say?”
“'Worship his cock.'”
His big smooth-sculpted cock. Even smoother once Kris had gotten it good and wet, Adam watching, ready to rescue him if he needed it. Worship his cock. Not to put him on a pedestal; Adam's beauty, too, was the kind that was meant to be touched, and Kris would never be satisfied with making art out of him, anyway. Kris had to have. Adam’s sighing breaths, edging toward moans now; Adam’s cock crowding the back of his throat, sliding down easy as Purple Kush smoke, thick and hot--there, that was a full-bodied moan out of Adam, and God, how would he sound if . . . Adam must have read the covetousness on Kris’s face, because he spread his thighs wider and said, soft, “Fuck me, Kris.”
Kris’s concentration went everywhere, shattered on Adam's siren rocks, but he recovered, even remembered, at the end, to let everything collect in his mouth before trying to swallow. The taste was strong and salty, essential; it was what it was supposed to be, that was all.
Kris wiped his mouth. He hovered, wanting, unsure of the etiquette. He should’ve known that Adam would pull him down and welcome his tentative kiss, make him open up and share. “Adam,” he said, too desperately. He wasn’t watching from across the room, he was in Adam’s bed, his bed, in his arms. “Adam,” rubbing up on him too hard, too much friction for Adam so soon after he’d come. But Kris was here, the taste of Adam still in his mouth.
Adam’s fingers worked into the cleft of his ass and pressed lightly at his hole, seeking permission, and God, yes, anything-- “Just a minute, baby, just a second-- ” Prying himself off Adam so Adam could pour out lube, Kris managed a blush after all. Stupid, feeling exposed when he hadn’t been hiding anything, really. “There we go. Oh,” Adam said, in a different tone. “How sweet you are.”
He hadn’t forgotten Kris’s inexperience, and Kris shuddered with the slow initiating care of Adam’s fingers as much as with the new fullness inside his body, his body that needed no persuading.
“I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I?” Kris said, a bit later.
They were sharing a pillow. Adam had to tilt his head back to give Kris not a look, but a Look. It was something, the expressive range of Adam’s right eyebrow.
“Hooking up, I mean. I’m not supposed to--like you so much.”
“I like you too. Enigmatic Kris.” Adam considered him, shrewd. “You’re ingenuous, but you’re crafty, too, aren’t you? Elusive. Like a little fox.”
“Hey, I need any advantage I can get. You’re heavily armed." Kris saw the glint and preempted him. "Not that. Not just that.”
And since he wasn’t about to stop, he said, “Your eyes, what color are they, anyway?”
“Gray?” Kris greeted this with the disparaging snort it deserved. “You tell me, then.”
Kris reached for the answer the way he did when he was writing a song, by not thinking about it too hard. An instinctive sideways grab. “Atlantic,” he said, and those eyes--not gray or green or blue, nothing so fixed to a definition--widened in surprise.
“Don’t expect a lot of poetry from me,” Kris added quickly. “I’m not very articulate. Words run away when they see me coming.”
Adam made the disbelieving face again, but he said only, “I went through a poetry-writing phase. Trying to convince myself of my serious-artist cred.”
“And did you achieve serious artistry?”
“Well . . . my friends said nice things. Look at you smirking. Such a-- ” Adam interrupted himself to kiss Kris’s mouth into a more appreciative shape.
They made out for a while, lazy, and then Kris patted down Adam’s hair, the wayward strands that had sprung up in little hair horns, and told him about his day job clerking at Barnes & Noble--just something he could do, rather than something he did. It wasn’t music, but it wasn’t soul-crushing or anything. He’d met Leonardo DiCaprio--well, rung up his copy of Hot, Flat and Crowded and escorted him to the rear exit so he could dodge the paparazzi lurking out front. (“Oh wow, Leo,” Adam exclaimed, getting all excited and cute about it. “The star of my teenage fantasies. My brother called him Leonardo DiCrapio to be a pain in my ass. Was he nice?”)
Adam talked about his understudy role in the resident production of Wicked, a step up from being a chorus boy, as he wryly put it, but not exactly the big break of his dreams. “So I guess that’s my Arkansas. Sameness. Staleness. Did you go to college?” he asked unexpectedly.
“Yeah, for a few years. I ended up dropping out. Part of my great escape.”
“I only lasted a month. I had this vision of, like, an onramp to the sky. To my dazzling future.” Self-mocking italics. “I wasn’t going to wait four whole years to get on that ramp. That was--shit, eight years ago, and I haven’t gotten any better at waiting. I’m a pretty impatient person.”
“I bet you can be really patient.” With a play of a smile, a lift in his voice, it could’ve passed for flirtation. Adam would’ve flirted back instead of biting his lip, silenced, and then maybe they would’ve finally gotten the hookup thing right.
I’ve got a different ending to this story.
Kris said gently, “You were made for a bigger stage. The biggest. You’re going to have that, Adam. And everything else you’ve been waiting for.”
“Kris-- ” This time Adam kissed him as though frantic to push through--through what, Kris couldn’t have put into words, but he knew, and he fought it from his side. “Kris, can I fuck you?”
“Yes. Please,” he added, so there could be no mistaking his answer for sure, whatever.
And Adam was patient, so patient, even after he’d put on the condom and eased his body down on top of Kris’s, his cock a fascinating presence between Kris’s legs, a promise that they would both have what they’d been waiting for. It nudged at him, slick, and went in, just the head. Adam’s shoulders were damp where Kris gripped on tight. Restraint was hard work.
A quick twitch of his hips, an equal and opposite reaction, and Kris was free. He felt Adam’s indulgent smile spread against his mouth. Little fox, Adam was thinking. Next time, he'd let Adam catch him.
“It’s going to be so good,” Kris said. It would hurt some, and he would take the pain gladly, although he didn’t need pain to make it important. Adam would do it the way he did everything else, like he was asking all the right questions--the questions you’d longed to hear--and listening. They would go so far, discover so much, out there beyond sight of Arkansas and every familiar landmark. And then--
“And then what happens?” Adam was stroking a pensive E-string melody on Kris’s cheek, a same old song of three a.m. on the clock, a single glass on the nightstand, and a question for the universe: When? “Are you going to disappear?”
“I’m not going to disappear."
I’m going to stay. I’m going to stay, and write a song about your sea-change eyes.
--end--
Note: I stole Adam's vase from Dale Chihuly. Gallery of Chihuly's Jerusalem Cylinders.