fic: The Dangling Conversation, Part II
Title: The Dangling Conversation: Part II
Author: pulaski_casimir
Rating: R for sexytimes & language
Summary: As much as I hate you for what you’re about to do to me, I hate myself even more for what I’ve already done to you. The time between the finale and the tour, in which Adam & Kris try to forget about each other.
Notes: Dear Lord, I am pretty longwinded when it comes to writing angst. And angst it is. This is probably the angstiest thing I've written in a long time, and I found it simultaneously very depressing and sort of fun to write. The last two crack!fics I've posted have been mostly a form of therapy for me while writing this. There will be another installment, so fear not!
ETA: Due to Kris's win, this fic is now AU!
Please read Part I first if you haven't already.
It’s the second to last results show, and I know as soon as it happens that it’s one of those tiny, insignificant moments that I’ll remember in perfect, unflinching detail until I know why it matters. I won’t remember the disappointed slump of Danny’s shoulders afterwards or Ryan’s voice as he called out your name, piercing the low hum of the music and the adrenaline and the thousands of breaths being held back by a dam of anxiety. I won’t remember the way my fingers grasped instinctively in the air in front of me for your hand, your waist, the hem of your shirt, as my heart curled up and ignited high in the back of my throat. I’ll remember your face in that small moment when you turned to walk to me, the way the stage lights fell harshly across its angles, the way your eyes lit up but one corner of your mouth twisted infinitesimally downwards, and how I knew that this was either the beginning or the end of something, anything, everything. I’ll remember the check in your stride, almost like the ghost of an old injury, but the only wounds we have are the kind you can’t see, the kind that we've left on each other, and I can sense the words before you even say them. (This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real.)
But you don’t say anything, and the silence hangs heavy between us, lengths of wool and steel unmoved by your lips pressed chastely against my collarbone, a private kiss hidden behind my arms. I swallow hard, the muscles in my neck moving against your face, because I think I know this feeling.
The next week slides by so smoothly that I almost forget I’m losing you. The rehearsals are second nature by now, sheet music and forced pathos and your guitar pick held between your teeth and lower lip. You tell me that you think it feels like graduation night all over again, and I wish I could relate to that kind of all-American apple pie sentiment, because the closest thing I have to compare this to is closing night of the cabaret and pulling off my false eyelashes for the last time. You still kiss me, still wake up with your drool on my pillow, but even when your palms try to press some reassurance into my shoulders, they don't linger as long as they used to, and in the time that they do, the weight of your wedding band is suddenly bruising, inescapable. You tell me not to worry, but you don't tell me the things I need to hear-I love you, I won't leave you, I'm not ashamed. I guess it's just as well, because I think you'd be lying.
Your hand closes around mine that Wednesday night when Ryan tells me I've won. You don't look surprised or upset at all, but you let go of my hand and wrap just one arm around my back, and it's not quite like flipping a switch off, but I know that our time is up. The confetti is still falling, and, shit, my mascara is running, and it's not for victory. I could honestly care less about this whole competition right now, because we're being shuffled off to the after party and you're hugging your wife and I can feel the last few months crumbling, crumbling under the weight of the distance between yesterday and now and the thousands of things I have left to say.
But then we're swaggering through the mansion doors and there's entirely too much intent behind the way your steering me downstairs for me to handle. I know where this is going. I wasn't going to try for one last time, but there's something desperate and visceral about the sounds you're drawing up from deep inside my chest, and I know you're going to make me admit that I need this just as much as you do right now.
I know, I know, I know that we can’t do this anymore. This is only going to make it hurt more. But all of the sudden my knees are buckling against the mattress and you’re a man possessed, bending my body under yours for once, miles and years away from the sweet, soft-spoken Kris Allen I know. My brain keeps trying to figure this out, something about catharsis and performance adrenaline and pent-up sexual frustration, but, dammit, I can’t think straight when your breath is coming in quick, hot bursts on the back of my neck like that. I know you’re going to regret this tomorrow, or maybe you’re already regretting it now, but God knows I don’t have the strength to stop you. I can’t stop your hands from ripping my belt out of its loops, can’t stop your teeth from sinking into the skin of my shoulder, can’t stop the muscles in my back from shuddering under your fingernails. Our bodies don’t line up the way we’ve become used to, but the whole affair goes by in a blur of skin and choked cries and torn fabric, until you collapse on top of me and my last gasping exhale escapes in the form of your name, broken against the back of my teeth.
When it’s over, you let me pull you into my arms, but your body is stiff against my side and shifting away gradually, infinitesimally, sand in the hourglass. I’m breathing in shallow, carefully controlled breaths now, ignoring the burning tension in my throat, thinking about the space between your hips and mine, between Los Angeles and Conway, between the life that you deserve and the life I’ve shown you.
It’s not long before you roll out from under my arm like a stranger and leave me here, naked and alone, sheets stuck to my chest with sweat and the warm, familiar smell of your hair mingling with the thick, heady smell of four in the morning after a one-night stand-hairspray, saline, sex, shame. There’s the sound of you stumbling across the carpet, fumbling with the doorknob, and then your voice caught up in heaving, muffled sobs as you’re violently sick behind the bathroom door. My stomach turns, and suddenly a part of me feels ugly and used, filthy, torn apart between the calluses of your hands and drowning, drowning, drowning in guilt that doesn’t belong to me and the murky memory of my own sybaritic stare looking back at me from beneath your eyelashes.
As much as I hate you for what you’re about to do to me, I hate myself even more for what I’ve already done to you.
You’re gone before I even wake up the next morning, and it’s even worse than the first time we slept together, because I know you won’t be back. I can’t help but feel like I deserved more than this.
It takes me twenty minutes to pack up my things, and I don’t even bother calling my brother to come get me. Nobody wants to see a broken-down old queen cry because he’s been rejected by a married man and broken his favorite bottle of nail polish in his rush to get the fuck out. By the time I’m hailing my cab, I’m already biting back the bitterness at the thought of you leaving here with one arm around your wife and that adorable nose of yours full of the smell of her hair, headed back to your small town and the little white picket fences around your flower gardens. The closest I’ve ever come to a flower garden was a fucking tomato plant on the windowsill of my old downtown apartment, and I destroyed that too.
The anger comes in fast, but it doesn’t stay very long. It only takes the car ride to my old apartment for me to start missing you, and it only takes dinner alone and a cold shower for me realize that this need isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Life goes on. There are press junkets, interviews, photo shoots, meetings with executives. I’m coasting through with my cruise control set to Smooth Bastard, taking questions like I’ve been doing this my whole life, weaving through negotiations, running on caffeine and empty smiles. As far as anyone one knows, I’m fine. Just moving along, America’s favorite gay dandy, the quick wit and the big voice, but if anybody cared to look closer, they’d see it. They’d see the shadows under my eyes, how my shoulders are slightly off-kilter, the way my thumbs twitch in my lap when I’m remembering the downy hair at your temples. I always imagine that your finger hovers over the button for a fraction of a second before you switch off the TV whenever I come on, and your wife gives you a look, and you shrug and shove your hands in your pockets and push down, push down the thoughts of my mouth and your steady laughter and the things you swear you’ll never want again-God, I hope they haunt you.
Not that I want you to suffer. I just want you to miss me when you’re all tucked up safe and warm inside your small town life.
I think about that too much-the life you’re living now. The thoughts always come to me in flashes late at night when the loneliness gets all tangled up in the static dark and presses on my eyelids. I wonder if you think of me when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, when you’re pulling that tired old grin out of your back pocket for someone who wants another picture, when you’re settling in for another day of this life that was once all you wanted. I wonder if I’m there when you try to write a love song, braided into the chords, and if you have to try to dodge words like “inflection” and “reckless” and “missing” because they remind you of me. I wonder what your wife must think when you flinch away from her sometimes, because I know you must. I can almost picture you curled up on your side of the bed, cheeks sticky with salt, pages torn out of your bible and your heart beating ragged and arrhythmic within too-small rib caging.
But I know you, Kris Allen, and I know you won’t let anyone know you’re doing less than alright.
I think about coming to get you all the time. I imagine it a million times, a million different ways, down a million different paths we’ll never take. I imagine dredging up your flowerbeds with the heels of my boots and busting through your living room window, a maelstrom of righteous anger and fervent hands. I imagine you running to greet me when I round the corner of your neighborhood, your arms flung around my neck and your eyes all alight like none of this shit ever happened and I'm all you ever needed in the first place. I imagine finding you on the street and kissing you right there in front of everyone like a soldier back from war, except with eyeliner instead of service badges and a rush that has nothing to do with cannon fire and everything to do with the scandalized looks of the sweet citizens of Conway out for their afternoon stroll.
But I can’t, and I won’t, because, if I’m honest with myself, I really think you deserve more than what I can give you. I love you, honey, but I can’t be your happy ending.
At least, I don’t think so.
But none of that changes the fact that we’re three days from the start of rehearsals for the tour and I’m dialing your number at four in the morning, a thousand words on the tip of my tongue.
ETA: This song is basically what made this fic happen, so I highly recommend giving it a spin while reading :)
Author: pulaski_casimir
Rating: R for sexytimes & language
Summary: As much as I hate you for what you’re about to do to me, I hate myself even more for what I’ve already done to you. The time between the finale and the tour, in which Adam & Kris try to forget about each other.
Notes: Dear Lord, I am pretty longwinded when it comes to writing angst. And angst it is. This is probably the angstiest thing I've written in a long time, and I found it simultaneously very depressing and sort of fun to write. The last two crack!fics I've posted have been mostly a form of therapy for me while writing this. There will be another installment, so fear not!
ETA: Due to Kris's win, this fic is now AU!
Please read Part I first if you haven't already.
It’s the second to last results show, and I know as soon as it happens that it’s one of those tiny, insignificant moments that I’ll remember in perfect, unflinching detail until I know why it matters. I won’t remember the disappointed slump of Danny’s shoulders afterwards or Ryan’s voice as he called out your name, piercing the low hum of the music and the adrenaline and the thousands of breaths being held back by a dam of anxiety. I won’t remember the way my fingers grasped instinctively in the air in front of me for your hand, your waist, the hem of your shirt, as my heart curled up and ignited high in the back of my throat. I’ll remember your face in that small moment when you turned to walk to me, the way the stage lights fell harshly across its angles, the way your eyes lit up but one corner of your mouth twisted infinitesimally downwards, and how I knew that this was either the beginning or the end of something, anything, everything. I’ll remember the check in your stride, almost like the ghost of an old injury, but the only wounds we have are the kind you can’t see, the kind that we've left on each other, and I can sense the words before you even say them. (This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real.)
But you don’t say anything, and the silence hangs heavy between us, lengths of wool and steel unmoved by your lips pressed chastely against my collarbone, a private kiss hidden behind my arms. I swallow hard, the muscles in my neck moving against your face, because I think I know this feeling.
The next week slides by so smoothly that I almost forget I’m losing you. The rehearsals are second nature by now, sheet music and forced pathos and your guitar pick held between your teeth and lower lip. You tell me that you think it feels like graduation night all over again, and I wish I could relate to that kind of all-American apple pie sentiment, because the closest thing I have to compare this to is closing night of the cabaret and pulling off my false eyelashes for the last time. You still kiss me, still wake up with your drool on my pillow, but even when your palms try to press some reassurance into my shoulders, they don't linger as long as they used to, and in the time that they do, the weight of your wedding band is suddenly bruising, inescapable. You tell me not to worry, but you don't tell me the things I need to hear-I love you, I won't leave you, I'm not ashamed. I guess it's just as well, because I think you'd be lying.
Your hand closes around mine that Wednesday night when Ryan tells me I've won. You don't look surprised or upset at all, but you let go of my hand and wrap just one arm around my back, and it's not quite like flipping a switch off, but I know that our time is up. The confetti is still falling, and, shit, my mascara is running, and it's not for victory. I could honestly care less about this whole competition right now, because we're being shuffled off to the after party and you're hugging your wife and I can feel the last few months crumbling, crumbling under the weight of the distance between yesterday and now and the thousands of things I have left to say.
But then we're swaggering through the mansion doors and there's entirely too much intent behind the way your steering me downstairs for me to handle. I know where this is going. I wasn't going to try for one last time, but there's something desperate and visceral about the sounds you're drawing up from deep inside my chest, and I know you're going to make me admit that I need this just as much as you do right now.
I know, I know, I know that we can’t do this anymore. This is only going to make it hurt more. But all of the sudden my knees are buckling against the mattress and you’re a man possessed, bending my body under yours for once, miles and years away from the sweet, soft-spoken Kris Allen I know. My brain keeps trying to figure this out, something about catharsis and performance adrenaline and pent-up sexual frustration, but, dammit, I can’t think straight when your breath is coming in quick, hot bursts on the back of my neck like that. I know you’re going to regret this tomorrow, or maybe you’re already regretting it now, but God knows I don’t have the strength to stop you. I can’t stop your hands from ripping my belt out of its loops, can’t stop your teeth from sinking into the skin of my shoulder, can’t stop the muscles in my back from shuddering under your fingernails. Our bodies don’t line up the way we’ve become used to, but the whole affair goes by in a blur of skin and choked cries and torn fabric, until you collapse on top of me and my last gasping exhale escapes in the form of your name, broken against the back of my teeth.
When it’s over, you let me pull you into my arms, but your body is stiff against my side and shifting away gradually, infinitesimally, sand in the hourglass. I’m breathing in shallow, carefully controlled breaths now, ignoring the burning tension in my throat, thinking about the space between your hips and mine, between Los Angeles and Conway, between the life that you deserve and the life I’ve shown you.
It’s not long before you roll out from under my arm like a stranger and leave me here, naked and alone, sheets stuck to my chest with sweat and the warm, familiar smell of your hair mingling with the thick, heady smell of four in the morning after a one-night stand-hairspray, saline, sex, shame. There’s the sound of you stumbling across the carpet, fumbling with the doorknob, and then your voice caught up in heaving, muffled sobs as you’re violently sick behind the bathroom door. My stomach turns, and suddenly a part of me feels ugly and used, filthy, torn apart between the calluses of your hands and drowning, drowning, drowning in guilt that doesn’t belong to me and the murky memory of my own sybaritic stare looking back at me from beneath your eyelashes.
As much as I hate you for what you’re about to do to me, I hate myself even more for what I’ve already done to you.
You’re gone before I even wake up the next morning, and it’s even worse than the first time we slept together, because I know you won’t be back. I can’t help but feel like I deserved more than this.
It takes me twenty minutes to pack up my things, and I don’t even bother calling my brother to come get me. Nobody wants to see a broken-down old queen cry because he’s been rejected by a married man and broken his favorite bottle of nail polish in his rush to get the fuck out. By the time I’m hailing my cab, I’m already biting back the bitterness at the thought of you leaving here with one arm around your wife and that adorable nose of yours full of the smell of her hair, headed back to your small town and the little white picket fences around your flower gardens. The closest I’ve ever come to a flower garden was a fucking tomato plant on the windowsill of my old downtown apartment, and I destroyed that too.
The anger comes in fast, but it doesn’t stay very long. It only takes the car ride to my old apartment for me to start missing you, and it only takes dinner alone and a cold shower for me realize that this need isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Life goes on. There are press junkets, interviews, photo shoots, meetings with executives. I’m coasting through with my cruise control set to Smooth Bastard, taking questions like I’ve been doing this my whole life, weaving through negotiations, running on caffeine and empty smiles. As far as anyone one knows, I’m fine. Just moving along, America’s favorite gay dandy, the quick wit and the big voice, but if anybody cared to look closer, they’d see it. They’d see the shadows under my eyes, how my shoulders are slightly off-kilter, the way my thumbs twitch in my lap when I’m remembering the downy hair at your temples. I always imagine that your finger hovers over the button for a fraction of a second before you switch off the TV whenever I come on, and your wife gives you a look, and you shrug and shove your hands in your pockets and push down, push down the thoughts of my mouth and your steady laughter and the things you swear you’ll never want again-God, I hope they haunt you.
Not that I want you to suffer. I just want you to miss me when you’re all tucked up safe and warm inside your small town life.
I think about that too much-the life you’re living now. The thoughts always come to me in flashes late at night when the loneliness gets all tangled up in the static dark and presses on my eyelids. I wonder if you think of me when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, when you’re pulling that tired old grin out of your back pocket for someone who wants another picture, when you’re settling in for another day of this life that was once all you wanted. I wonder if I’m there when you try to write a love song, braided into the chords, and if you have to try to dodge words like “inflection” and “reckless” and “missing” because they remind you of me. I wonder what your wife must think when you flinch away from her sometimes, because I know you must. I can almost picture you curled up on your side of the bed, cheeks sticky with salt, pages torn out of your bible and your heart beating ragged and arrhythmic within too-small rib caging.
But I know you, Kris Allen, and I know you won’t let anyone know you’re doing less than alright.
I think about coming to get you all the time. I imagine it a million times, a million different ways, down a million different paths we’ll never take. I imagine dredging up your flowerbeds with the heels of my boots and busting through your living room window, a maelstrom of righteous anger and fervent hands. I imagine you running to greet me when I round the corner of your neighborhood, your arms flung around my neck and your eyes all alight like none of this shit ever happened and I'm all you ever needed in the first place. I imagine finding you on the street and kissing you right there in front of everyone like a soldier back from war, except with eyeliner instead of service badges and a rush that has nothing to do with cannon fire and everything to do with the scandalized looks of the sweet citizens of Conway out for their afternoon stroll.
But I can’t, and I won’t, because, if I’m honest with myself, I really think you deserve more than what I can give you. I love you, honey, but I can’t be your happy ending.
At least, I don’t think so.
But none of that changes the fact that we’re three days from the start of rehearsals for the tour and I’m dialing your number at four in the morning, a thousand words on the tip of my tongue.
ETA: This song is basically what made this fic happen, so I highly recommend giving it a spin while reading :)