new fic: Scenes from a marriage, 2/4 [Brendon/Shane]
Scenes from a marriage, 2/4
part one here.
++
The car is half full, Dylan in her carrier in the backseat, three bags of groceries fulfilling everyone in the band's obscure addictions unable to be purchased at resort convenience stores, and two of Brendon's hoodies he forgot and apparently can't live without.
"They're in my room," Brendon had said, "somewhere," but it took Shane twenty minutes to find them, twenty minutes of digging through Brendon's t-shirts, of holding armfuls of soft cotton that smelled like Brendon's deodorant and fabric softener. He sat for a while on Brendon's bed, sheets neatly tucked in because Brendon always reverts to his good son habits on his way out of town.
When they moved in, Brendon said, "No, you take the master bedroom, I probably won't be here half the time anyway," and claimed one of the two smaller rooms for himself. The third is accumulated crap, guitars and keyboards and some lighting equipment Shane's dad gave him when he traded up. Brendon's room has a bed, and a closet full of clothes, and a Louis Vuitton trunk full of shoes. There are more shoes all over the floor, and more clothes, and Shane sat there for a while, looking at all of it like he was trying to block a scene, until he finally found the hoodie he'd been looking for.
Shane has just made the turn onto Kyle Canyon when his phone rings, caller ID unknown. But reception up on Mt. Charleston sucks, so it's probably just Brendon calling from the house phone, hoping he's not too late to have Shane pick up more beer.
"Hi Shane," Regan says. Fuck. They were supposed to have dinner soon. Was that tonight? Probably, from the way she said his name.
"Hey Regs," he says. He might as well jump in. "I know, dinner, I'm really sorry."
"Fuck you," she says, and he's so surprised he gooses the gas pedal, the engine a sharp roar under her voice as she bitches for a while about how he's never home, he never calls her any more, they've been doing this a long time but it's not the same when she's the only one who seems to give a fuck if they keep trying at all.
During a long, stretched out silence he says, "I know," because he's pretty sure there are things he should be saying, things boyfriends say at moments like this to get themselves out of the dog house, to make sure when they get home their girlfriend still lets them in the house, for starters, and that they can still get laid.
He can't actually remember, he realizes, the last time he and Regan had sex. He's seen her a couple times in the last week or two, both late nights when she called and he was already out drinking with someone and so she met them there. Late enough that he pretty much passed out as soon as they got to her place, and then he was up and out for work early.
"So who is it?" she says, barely even asking.
It's been twelve days since he had sex with Brendon, since the morning right before Brendon left for the cabin, when he climbed into Shane's shower and jerked him off, like it was something they'd done before, a quickie before some time apart.
But he can't tell her that. He can't tell her any of it, not any more than he could have when it was just one stoned hook-up.
"It's not like that," he says, and she tells him to go fuck himself again and hangs up. He throws the phone on the passenger seat and cranks up the stereo.
He drove this road a lot a couple winters ago, back when he was hanging out with Dustin and his ski bum friends, shooting crap-ass videos of kids boarding and biting it in equal measure. It was all fake snow but the sky was always blue and the drive from Vegas wasn't bad. If he didn't wait around for the other guys he'd call Regan from the road and they'd talk all the way back. He can't remember what they talked about, or why he couldn't wait to hear her voice until he got home.
In the dead of summer Dustin would skate at a concrete half-pipe Summerlin had built in a park to keep kids off drugs, and last year Shane hauled his new DV equipment out to shoot an audition tape so Dustin could get on an Xtreme Games reality show. Brendon had been fucking around like a douchebag, never trying anything hard enough to risk breaking his face, and when Shane had needed a third hand to hold a reflector, Brendon dropped his board and offered to help. Brendon was stuck back at his parents' house between tours, bored and annoyed, and they'd hung out a dozen times before he left again, matinees and stoned bowling and trips to the mall. It made Shane feel eighteen again. It made Brendon feel normal.
The phone rings again. "Maybe we should take a break," Regan says, and Shane doesn't say, isn't that what we've been doing? because he doesn't know when he stopped thinking things were only going to get more serious with her. He can't pinpoint when that ended. He doesn't think it has anything to do with Brendon but he isn't sure.
So he says, "Yeah, I think we should," and this time she says goodbye first.
He gets a little lost trying to find the right cabin, half-hidden private roads all twined together like branches, and by the time he pulls up behind Ryan's Mercedes he's feeling sort of dizzy, head crackling with tension.
Jon is on the porch smoking a cigarette, which he stubs out carefully on his shoe. "Only you can prevent forest fires," he says in greeting, and gives Shane a back-slapping hug. They manage to carry everything into the house in one trip, and Shane spins a bit, staring up at the vaulted beams, breathing in the sharp pine scent that permeates everything.
"Nice place to disappear, isn't it," he hears from above him, Ryan's dry fondness echoing in the large room. Hobo skitters into the room and she and Dylan sniff each other in a circle.
"It's beautiful," Shane says, almost surprised how deeply he means it, and blinks when Brendon appears at Ryan's shoulder at the top of the stairs. His chest is tight, and he imagines his lungs like a oxygen bag dropped mid-flight, squeezed empty from the pressure. Brendon smiles sunnily and waves before bounding down the stairs and wrapping himself around Shane. Shane has to curl one arm around him just to stay upright.
"Come see the rest of the house," Brendon says, already tugging Shane by the arm through a long hallway. He hears Jon and Ryan laughing low, talking about dinner, and then Brendon's got him shoved into a tiny wood-paneled room, the door pulled tight behind them, and he's pushing his hands up under Shane's shirt and kissing him like he's desperate for it. He's grown a dark scruff and it scratches, pricks of pain soothed by sloppy wet kisses. Shane tries and fails to catch his breath in the brief moments Brendon relinquishes his mouth. When Brendon pushes up Shane's t-shirt to bite at his chest, Shane's ragged gasps sound like thunder in the small space.
Brendon works his fingers into Shane's pants, yanking down the zipper, and Shane is still playing catch-up, apparently, because after that Brendon undoes his own, too, licking his palm and jerking their dicks together rough and fast. Shane braces his palms against the wooden walls, which only makes things spin slightly less. He'd worry about moaning or screaming every time Brendon twists his wrist like that except he can barely get enough oxygen to breathe at all. He comes first, head knocked into the wall and a heel kicked against the door, and Brendon grunts, "Fuck, Shane, twelve fucking days," and comes too.
He doesn't mean to close his eyes but everything goes black and muffled for a minute or two, or maybe just a few seconds. He feels warm fingers prodding at his cheeks, knuckles laid across his forehead, and when he swims back up to full awareness Brendon says, "Jesus fuck. Shane, are you okay?"
He's sitting on a wooden shelf that juts out from the wall, Brendon hunched down in front of him.
"I think you actually passed out," Brendon says, and pushes Shane's hair behind his ears. "Fuck, man, you kinda scared me."
"Sorry," Shane mumbles, and tries to visualize himself sitting up straight and unassisted. It almost works. He wants suddenly to tell Brendon that Regan broke up with him but that seems even more impossible than finding his balance.
"Altitude's a bitch," Brendon says, sounding less worried. "You have to train for this kind of vigorous workout."
"You didn't --" Shane starts, and then has a minor coughing fit. When he's finished he says, "You didn't really give me much of a chance to acclimate." Brendon's broad grin is reward enough for resuscitating his vocabulary.
"Practice, my friend," Brendon stage whispers.
++
They all stay up all night, playing poker at the big table in the main room. Jon wins $127 total, plus an IOU off Shane for another thirty bucks because he hadn't realized he needed to come loaded with cash to survive a game of hold 'em with the band. Brendon crashes on the couch around four a.m. and by the time the rest of them admit they're not winning anything back from Team Walker, as Jon refers to himself, Brendon is awake again. He wanders off to fool around on the piano a while, pointing Shane towards his bedroom to sleep.
Shane wakes up at two in the afternoon, sweaty and squinting. There's a lot of fucking light this far up the mountain, apparently, and it's all focused like a laser through the panes of Brendon's window. When he pokes his head into the hall there's no one around, so he digs through his bag and opens random doors until he finds a shower.
He almost pokes himself in the eye with a soapy finger when Brendon sticks his head in the door and sings his name in a sharp falsetto. "We were wondering where you were!" he says, as if Shane's the one who has been holed up in their undisclosed location of a practice room. Brendon leaves the door ajar and perches on the edge of the sink, yammering on about how Ryan is writing an amazing musical that is going to make their label freak the fuck out, about how last week they all dropped acid and watched Beatles movies, about how this is nothing like it was the last time they had to make an album.
Finally Shane has run out of things to wash, and he turns off the water. "Oh!" Brendon says. "I'll let you, you know." He slams the door on his way out, then opens it again a crack to say, "Sorry, it always falls shut really hard," and then he closes it carefully once more and disappears. Maybe Brendon has conversations with everyone in the shower. Maybe because he's always running around naked it doesn't occur to him that other people might take how he is in a different way, might assume this is the kind of thing people who spend time together naked do.
At whatever meal it is, Jon ladles extra soup into Shane's bowl and says, "I'll totally take the weird room tonight." There's an oblong single at the end of the hall, tucked under the triangular eaves. It has a low ceiling and a twin bed.
"No way," Shane argues, because he's not even really working. He's just up there for fun and the fact that they don't make him feel like the odd man out doesn't change the facts of it.
"Way," Jon says. "You're used to living with the little fucker anyway. I actually had a few months on my own and lost the skill of tuning out the way he talks in his sleep."
Brendon's glasses fog as he bends his neck over the steaming bowl. He slurps his soup and sings, "I hear the secrets that you keeeeep," and Shane tries to protest again but the deed, apparently, is done. That night there's more poker and more bullshit and at least seven bottles of red wine among them. They're talking about music but not playing it, and by this point Shane knows enough to know that could last for days, and he's still a few hours off the band's nocturnal clock. He passes out in Jon's musty sheets and wakes up to Brendon sucking him off, kneeling at the side of the bed, head half under the covers. His half-beard is scratchy on the inside of Shane's thighs but Shane kind of likes it, the contrast against how soft and wet his mouth is.
Brendon pulls off and chirps, "Good morning!"
Shane looks at the inky window. "Is it?" His voice is thick still and his vision feels blurry.
He gets a lopsided grin in return. "Does it matter?" Brendon arches his eyebrows and licks down Shane's hip, shoving the blanket off as he goes.
Shane supposes that it doesn't, and after Brendon's done and collapses on his back, legs still swinging over the edge of the mattress, Shane returns the favor.
++
The next day, or the next time he's awake -- Shane honestly isn't sure at this point what day of the week it is, and he can't find his cell charger so now his phone is dead, too -- things do not seem to be going so well. He wanders down after a cup of coffee and cereal and catches the tail end of Brendon bitching about the lyrics.
Spencer snaps, "What is this, 2005?" Brendon throws a sheaf of papers into the air with an angry snap of his wrist. Shane has his SLR hanging around his neck and the video camera in his hand but he just stands there, waiting to be seen, waiting to be given permission to even come into whatever is going on. Jon sort of looks like he feels the same.
Ryan has his back turned to the room but Shane can see how tightly he's gripping the neck of his guitar. "Then I don't know what the fucking point is," he says, turning slowly around, and his lips draw together when he sees Shane.
He looks slowly to Brendon, who's slumped against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, and back to Shane.
"Why aren't you filming," Ryan says with a sneer, and Shane flips the video camera on with his thumb, bringing it up to his shoulder before he can stop to think whether he should be agreeing. "That's what you're here for, isn't it? Or was there some other reason for your visit, perhaps. Tell me, Shane, are you here on business or pleasure?"
Ryan glowers like he can command the lens with sheer determination. No one else in the room moves for a minute, and then Spencer says, "Then we might as well do our fucking jobs too, right?" and only then does Brendon open his eyes and push off from the wall.
They run through three songs, and Shane's never heard them before but he's pretty sure the last one doesn't go at all as written. "So much for the magical mystery musical tour," Brendon mutters, and Shane's not sure the mic picked it up but he thinks Jon heard, too, maybe all of them. By the end Ryan is swinging his guitar around his head like a lasso, and as soon as Spencer stops drumming Ryan slams it into the ground, snarling when it bounces a little on the thin carpet.
Jon says, mildly, "Maybe you need to hit it against something sturdier," so Ryan tries the edge of an amp and then the wall, both of which work better.
When Ryan crumples to the floor like a baby who's cried himself out, Brendon says his name soft and gentle and folds down next to him. Shane turns off the camera and walks out.
Jon finds him about twenty minutes later, not that Shane was hiding or anything. He was sitting out by the driveway wondering if maybe he should just grab his shit and go. "We're done for the night," Jon says, and shrugs a cigarette out of a pack. "And, uh, welcome to the band. If you've been randomly reamed out by Ryan and he let you live to see him fall apart, you're officially one of us now."
Shane tries to laugh but it comes out weak and hurt. Jon holds out the pack and Shane takes one, lets him light it.
Jon takes a long drag and says on the exhale, "Come on, Ryan's got some crazy ritual planned. I don't know, a bonfire maybe, probably doing some obscure drug he had smuggled in. We've got just about anything you could smoke, snort or drink. There's this amazing shit from Maui Spence's been hoarding, or we've got a couple tabs of LSD left over from the other night. Fuck, Brendon even found some blow stashed in his guitar case, if you want."
Shane stands and holds up the camera instead of asking the question.
"Only if you want," Jon says.
++
Ryan pours five glasses of absinthe, having magically produced not only the bottle but an elaborate silver spoon and sugar cubes out of his sleeve or something. He also declares that they will drink the entire bottle before dawn. They all clink glasses and Ryan shyly asks Shane if he'll turn on the camera just long enough to burn the guitar alive. It looks beautiful through the viewfinder and Shane can feel the liquor sink under his skin, a buzzy glow that spreads down each of his arms. When Jon's phone rings it sounds like church bells, but not like a ringtone, like an actual huge set of bells being chimed right above their heads, in the middle of the darkened sky. He wanders off and Spencer comes to sit by Shane. The fire they'd made in the stone pit is down to embers.
Spencer bumps his shoulder against Shane's. A few yards away, Brendon takes a swig of absinthe straight from the bottle, then screws up his face and acts like he's going to spit it back in Ryan's face.
"I told you," Ryan says, "it's a refined drink for a refined man, you have to --" He stops, laughing as Brendon starts poking him in the ribs over and over again, Ryan lazily batting him away like a pesky cat.
"You know they never -- you know," Spencer says, with a slow jut of his chin.
Oh. Shane watches them a little closer and feels stupid for not having seriously considered it, especially after everything that's happened. Before he and Brendon started he hadn't thought much at all about whether Brendon was gay, not like that, not seriously. He'd always seemed to Shane to be generally open, equally interested and disinterested in guys or girls depending on his mood. Mostly he'd seemed too young for something serious, unsettled in a way that was nothing like how Jon and even Spencer were practically old married men, both happy for a spot of stability amid all the bullshit. And Ryan was -- well, Ryan was Ryan. If anything Shane had thought Ryan was the gay one, even after he met Keltie. He was so fussy and fey and quick to take offense.
Plus Brendon has a unique bond with each of the guys, obvious even if Shane hadn't been spending so much time staring at them through a lens. Jon and Brendon will walk with their arms around each others' waists, heads tilted together, whispering to each other. Spencer's eyes soften when Brendon has finally crashed from some fit of hyperactivity, and Brendon always seems to catch him at it, to look up and share a smile that's half-apology, half-shrugged what else would you expect from me. What Brendon and Ryan have always struck Shane as deeper than that, more difficult somehow, but not altogether different.
"People always think," Spencer goes on, "you know, because of the show or whatever. Or how they are, I guess. People assume."
Shane swallows. "I didn't," he says. He probably should have.
"Well, yeah. I'm sure Brendon told you."
Shane reaches for a stick and pokes the fire until it roars alive. In the orange glow he can see Spencer staring into the flames. Shane stands up. "You want a drink or something?" he asks, and Spencer says, "nah," still fixated.
The green fizz from the absinthe has faded and half Shane's body feels frozen, the other half overheated. Brendon cackles, Ryan's lower laugh beneath it, and Shane says Brendon's name sharp and loud before he's even realized his mouth is open. Brendon bounces up like a jack in the box and Shane says, "Come inside for a second," and Brendon says, "Yeah, okay."
Brendon follows Shane up the stairs, closing the door behind him as they go into their room. "Yeah, okay," Brendon says again, just as casually enthusiastic, and Shane says, "So Jon said you're using your guitar case to hold your coke."
"Oh God, please don't say that around Zack, I swear it was a mistake and you know he's so fucking serious about that kind of thing, but --"
"Where's the case?"
"Oh, it's -- hang on," Brendon says, and ducks back out. Shane isn't really sure what the fuck he's doing but he takes off his hat and scarf and jacket anyway, turns on one lamp on the nightstand. He doesn't want to go back outside, and he doesn't want anything else to drink, and he doesn't want to be a fifth wheel any more.
Regan hates it -- hated it, he guesses, is more correct at this point -- when Shane and Brendon did a few bumps before going out to a club. They saved it for boys' nights out. It was such a cliche, she said, but Shane would rather be a cliche than feel like this.
Brendon comes back in, dangling the mini-Ziplock, and it's worse than a cliche. It's almost a joke. Shane just says, "Good," and waits for Brendon to do the honors.
Brendon looks around the room, messy with clothes and random crap, magazines and half-eaten bags of chips. "You know," he says, contemplative. "I am supposedly a rock star and yet I have never done blow off a stripper's ass. Not once."
"Fuck you," Shane says, and sounds madder than he means. That's the kind of joke this should be. Brendon's funny, or would be if Shane wasn't residually pissed off and unamused. He points. "There's a perfectly good dresser right there," he says, and Brendon rolls his eyes.
"You are no fun at all, Shane Valdez."
There's a rolled-up hundred in the bag, too, Brendon's longstanding insurance policy that is always either carried forward to the next batch or invested in immediate reinforcements. "Which would you rather," he explained once, and it seemed sensible even later, dead sober. "Run out halfway through the party or resort to using a five for the second round?"
Brendon carves the pile into neat halves, then snorts his side, sniffling and swallowing noisily. That's familiar in its own way, too, all part of the ridiculous ritual. "I'm a phlegmy guy," he said the first time, elbow to elbow in a bathroom stall like a couple of Swingers assholes.
Shane splits his jumbo-sized line in two and lets the burn drip down the back of his throat. The faint hum of drunkenness disappears in a clean wipe. He settles his weight on the edge of the dresser and lets his legs fall open in a V.
"Oh, now you want to have fun," Brendon says. When he's on coke he talks even more than usual, one long monologue about nothing at all, the same as every other conversation they have but on fast-forward. He does come closer, though, standing between Shane's knees and tilting forward for a kiss. He tastes like licorice, and if he's babbling the whole time it's not like Shane's unaccustomed to tuning him out. It's not like they weren't going to do this, the way things have been going and their own room now to boot. Even after getting schooled in the art of war by a band full of passive-aggresive pretty boys Shane knew this is where they would end up.
"Shut up for a minute," he says, and pushes down on Brendon's shoulder with one hand, and when Brendon smirks on his way down Shane feels anger race down his spine, neck and neck with lust. Brendon unbuttons Shane's jeans, nosing his way across Shane's cock where it already feels scorching hot against the cool cotton of his boxers, and Shane juts his crotch forward until he can feel the head of his dick drag across Brendon's mouth, stopping for one blissful second the stream of words.
Then Brendon starts mumbling again, filthy nonsense about fucking and sucking and licking and how much he enjoys all of the above, how amazing it is that they can do this whenever they want, how fucking hot Shane is, he has no idea. Shane lets the words drift up to him and finally unscrews his own jaw enough to talk back.
"You're wearing too much," he says, because Brendon's still got on a hoodie and a baseball shirt. He winds his fingers into Brendon's hair, tugging up until Brendon gets his feet under him.
Shane strips both Brendon's layers off and his jeans too, then turns Brendon around and walks him back towards the bed, helping tip the balance when Brendon starts to fall. He bounces a few times from the momentum and Shane yanks his own shirt off, kicks away his shoes and his jeans and leaves his boxers in a puddle on the rug. Brendon's lips are moving now but without sound, like a kid reading to himself.
Shane says, "Turn over," and Brendon twists halfway at the waist before he stops and thinks about it.
"Why, what are we, are we going to --"
"I'm gonna do a line off your ass," Shane says, and for a change he's able to get through the deadpan delivery without cracking. "Now turn the fuck over."
It's even easier to do than it was to say, and Shane's happy to blame all that and the sarcasm on the coke. He barely waits for Brendon to reposition himself before he climbs on top of Brendon's back. Brendon makes a soft grunt but doesn't struggle, turning his face and quickly getting distracted rubbing his cheek against the comforter. Shane's just settled his weight when Brendon starts shimmying around, twitching from his forehead down to his toes. Shane presses a hand down hard on his lower back and Brendon doesn't still so much as seem to focus really hard on pushing his hips into the mattress.
Shane lays himself like a blanket across Brendon, and like this it's so clear they're not the same size at all. It's obvious every time Shane snags a hoodie off the back of the couch and can barely fit an arm in it, but it's even more ridiculous when Brendon's whole body fits beneath his, Shane's arms draping over on either side.
Brendon's skin is warm, and he's sweating a lot, so when Shane tries to shift around and get a little more balanced his dick drags smoothly across Brendon's hip. "Oh fuck," Brendon sputters out, like he's reinvented English all over again, and Shane rocks his hips again, slower this time, working a knee between Brendon's legs. It's better this way, this angle. Shane can feel his heartbeat pounding through his cock, his fingertips throbbing against Brendon's ribs.
He looks down between their bodies, the swell of Brendon's ass curving against Shane's stomach. They could fuck like this, actually fuck. He could spread Brendon's legs farther apart, tilt his pelvis up and push in. He feels good right now, he feels like not actually knowing how to fuck a guy isn't any real obstacle. He could figure it out.
"Fuck," Brendon says more loudly, "keep fucking moving, Shane, come on," and Shane thrusts forward, reaching down to shove the tip of his cock between Brendon's ass cheeks and, fuck, that feels good, it's like fucking a girl's tits but better. Brendon squeezes his thighs tighter and bucks into the mattress, flailing an arm back to scrabble at Shane's shoulder as he pants out, "hand, your hand, Shane, fuck, help."
Shane can almost touch his knees to the bed on either side of Brendon's hips and he lifts up just enough to fit his palm across Brendon's stomach and around his cock, knuckles pressed into the comforter as he tries to make some kind of awkward rhythm between his wrist and Brendon's cock and Brendon's ass and the skidding friction of Shane's cock against it.
Brendon comes wet and hot in Shane's hand and Shane hears himself say, "Oh, that'll work better." He carefully slips his hand free and uses the mess to slick himself up, then guides his cock down to slide along the crack of Brendon's ass. He's thrusting roughly, sharp, shallow jabs and a small pool of sweat at the base of Brendon's spine drips down over his dick, too, allowing it to push farther between, to fleetingly expose Brendon's shiny pink asshole before Brendon whips his head around and says, "Are you -- don't try to fuck me, dude, that's --"
"No, what the --" Shane says, as if he hadn't been raising his thumb to his mouth to lick at it so he could try getting at least that much in. He doesn't really know what he's doing and for all this, for all they've done Shane's not really sure if Brendon does either.
"Fuck, I'm not even high any more," Brendon says, "don't try that," and Shane says, "No, no, I wasn't." Brendon's neck flops back down, forehead to the bed, and he lets out a long, annoyed sigh.
Shane won't but he wants to, wants to even more now that the cocaine fever has ebbed and it almost feels like something they'd do anyway, something they'd have gotten around to someday soon. Something they could just want and try and figure out together, just like all the rest of it.
It feels real, the soft, almost clammy pale skin of Brendon's ass under Shane's hands, the bony ridge of Brendon's back as he arches a half-inch and then sinks back into the mattress.
Shane needs to come now, can feel the ache in his balls as he kneels back so he can grip his cock and pull hard two, three times and then he's coming so hard. His hand opens wide, and he shoots between his knuckles and onto Brendon, shiny streaks like lash marks across his spine. Brendon shivers and says, through a giggle, "Now I've got some lines you can do."
Shane says, "Shut the fuck up," and slaps Brendon's ass lightly. But he cranes his neck in for a curious lick, and it's not that different from swallowing at the end of a blowjob. Not good enough to get off on, so he tugs a corner of the sheet out and uses that to clean them both off instead.
They lie side by side on their backs, staring up at the wooden ceiling and waiting for the rest of their sweat to dry. "Do you have a pack of cigarettes?" Brendon asks, and hums Simon and Garfunkel as Shane reaches around on the floor for his shirt. "We've all come to look for America," Brendon sings, stretching out the vowels while Shane locates the lighter and someone else's Parliaments and they smoke in the dim room until the sun starts to come up again.
++
Shane opens his eyes and he's about an inch from Brendon's mouth. Every low, purring snore as Brendon breathes in and out flutters against Shane's face. It's calm, like standing on the edge of Lake Mead on a day with a faint breeze, even if mostly the room smells like stale smoke and sex. He shuts his eyes again, wondering if there's a stream near the cabin they could hike to, maybe not now if it's already practically night again. But maybe tomorrow. Brendon's breaths stay steady, timed as even as Spencer's metronome.
Shane should probably wake him up, should scoot down and suck Brendon off or at least start something, use his hand maybe. And it's not that he doesn't want to, that he isn't also itchy with the need to press their bare bodies together again. He's just sort of into this, this quiet, familiar kind of beginning to a day.
His eyes are still closed when Brendon's phone explodes with noise, the synthetic sounds so jarring Shane flinches hard. Brendon rolls smoothly onto his back, winking one eye and then the other before bursting loudly into Rihanna. After a few lines he shrugs at Shane and says, "What? She's totally hot." He sits up straight and bends over the edge of the bed. "Where is my fucking cell-a, cell-a, cell-a," he sings along, and then says, almost normally, "Hello?"
Shane wallows in the relative peace, letting his eyes linger on Brendon's back, tiny dark freckles dotting the pale skin.
"Oh!" Brendon says, "hey, hi." He twists around and his mouth is quirked up, kind of a smile, but his eyes have that rare awkward look he gets sometimes around overeager fans. Shane pushes himself up to sit against the headboard. "Uh, yeah," Brendon says, "hang on, he's right here." Brendon presses the cell into Shane's palm. "It's your dad. Did you lose your charger again?"
"What?" Shane says stupidly, and then says, "hey" into the phone before he means to. Brendon is already halfway across the room with a jolly wave, though he stops when he seems to remember he's naked, grabbing a towel off the floor to wrap around his waist as he steps into the hall. He pulls the door shut behind him and Shane realizes his dad's already talking, something about a job and a voicemail box being full and, "What?" Shane says again, but this time tries to pay attention to the answer.
++
Raising Arizona is playing on IFC in the background while Shane finishes cleaning the house. He hasn't been there much anyway, not before or after he came back from Mt. Charleston, but even with the housekeeper a month of general neglect has left the place feeling stale.
The fridge is restocked, two kinds of beer and five flavors of ice cream and enough Capri Suns to fuel an entire soccer league. Earlier he opened all the windows and the back door and now at least things smell a little less musty and a little more like cold desert air, sage and dirt. He did three loads of laundry, mostly jeans and t-shirts, and only when he was putting clean sheets back on his bed did he think how that might look, how eager or presumptuous.
They were pretty rank, though, after the last week of him tossing and turning through half the night. Brendon's still on graveyard shift and his texts at four a.m. are about stupid shit that shouldn't be so distracting to Shane, things like what's the difference between a raccoon and a possum? jon says equally dirty but if neither is peta-protected we might have to kill a bitch or got pine sap all over my pants is there anything that gets this shit off??.
One night he said, we r out of all the good drugs and ryan's being a fucktard. don't youwish you were here?, and Shane slid his hand into his boxers and was gasping against his pillow before he realized he was still clutching the phone, thinking about how Brendon scrunches his eyebrows together while he's thumb-typing, about how his face goes slack just before he comes.
Now the sheets smell flowery from whatever fabric softener Brendon insists they buy because it's what his family always used, but it's not like he's going to get them dirty again in the hour before Brendon's due back. Brendon's got his own room, anyway, so maybe Shane is being a fucktard himself to think it matters in the slightest what his bed smells like.
Mostly he's looking forward to having a conversation with someone other than his dad and his dad's friends. They're all great guys and taught Shane basically everything he knows about being a filmmaker. But they still treat him like a kid without meaning to, always double-checking his set-ups or frowning slightly as he explains why he likes something they consider just a little too edgy or underexposed.
Plus he never again needs to have a serious talk with his dad about Regan that somehow, after two glasses of whiskey each, sitting side by side at a bar like they were drinking buddies, turned into a very carefully phrased reassurance that whatever artistic choices Shane made were valid and accepted. Shane wanted to argue the point except he wasn't entirely comfortable with what point exactly it was that they were arguing, and when his dad said, "And they should be paying you, if you're going to film them working on the album like that," Shane didn't disagree, just asked his advice how to structure the deal.
He's sitting down on the couch with a just opened beer, Nic Cage looming large on the flat screen. Mostly he's congratulating himself on being a grown-up with an actual career he loves and being able to afford half of a house that feels like a real home when Brendon walks in the door. Brendon snorts a laugh, drops his bag on the floor and says, "Son, you got a panty on your head." Shane finishes the line with him, head tipped back to follow Brendon's movement as he crosses the room.
"You're back," he says, and doesn't manage to sound at all as nonchalant as he'd intended.
Brendon does a U-turn around the end of the couch. "Home sweet home," he says with a broad smile. He puts one knee on the cushion, swings Shane's feet up and tugs Shane down by the waist of his jeans until he's lying flat on his back. Shane puts his beer on the floor just in time for Brendon to kiss him.
It's more of an attack than a kiss. About ten seconds in and Brendon's already got one hand shoved inside the waistband of Shane's jeans, fingers scratching through the hair just above his cock. Brendon's other hand worms its way under Shane's ass, propping him up at an angle until Shane wraps his leg around the back of Brendon's knee so nobody gets jabbed in the balls.
"Ug," Brendon says, and now his dick sort of slides along Shane's where it's creeping out the top of his jeans. Mostly, though, Brendon's cock is a hard line against Shane's inner thigh, and when Brendon shifts a few inches and he thrusts down instead of forward there's a warm, solid pressure against the crack of Shane's ass.
In the past week Shane has been thinking about this a lot, not just how things would be when Brendon came back, but what they would do, what exactly they would do. Shane hasn't thought this much and this stupidly about sex since he was still a virgin. He kind of is a virgin at this, though. He doesn't know what he wants; he wants everything; he wants Brendon and anything Brendon will do is fine; he wants to not want this so much because it makes no fucking sense, actually, that he wants it at all.
Before Brendon he never wanted this, never wanted to kiss a guy or jerk him off or go down on him, to pin his hips to a bed and fuck into him, to have his dick inside a guy's ass. He has friends who wondered about some of those things, a few who even admitted it, and he's spent the last year hanging out with a band that's made an art out of at least asking the question and acting interested in the answer. Shane wasn't that guy, or maybe he was just happy enough with what he could get with girls he never bothered looking any further.
Or maybe it's just Brendon. Brendon's forehead is shiny with sweat and his crotch is hot where it's nestled into the curve of Shane's ass. Shane's fingers have gotten twisted in Brendon's collar, and he loosens his grip to let them slide across Brendon's back. At the intersection of pants and t-shirt, Shane lets one wander up, under the cotton, and the other slide down over denim pockets.
Brendon's ass is round and firm, almost like palming a basketball, the way Shane's hand can fit across the arc of it. He squeezes a little, more like getting in a good grope than encouraging anything in particular, but Brendon moans open mouthed, dropping his forehead to Shane's shoulder. Shane pulls his knee up higher, until his calf almost brushes his own fingers curved around Brendon's ass and he bucks up. Brendon is light, not totally unlike having a girl on top of him, but Shane's never gotten this tangled up in someone's body before, not from this angle. He's a little surprised how bent in half he is already, so quickly.
Brendon's fingers fall out of Shane's underwear, which feels like a step back until he wraps them around the back of Shane's thigh, pinning it down until Shane's knee is digging into Brendon's back. Shane wants out of his pants altogether, wants Brendon to be bearing down on him without the interruption of thick layers of clothes. He wants off this fucking couch where he can barely open his legs wide enough for Brendon to fit between them.
He swallows, Brendon still rocking shallow against him with his face in Shane's neck, and licks his lips, looking for words. He never, ever wanted a guy to fuck him before he met Brendon. Two weeks ago he was ecstatic to be getting the best blowjobs of his life on a semi-regular basis and to find he was generally enthusiastic about trying it himself.
"Bed," he says, and his voice is so fucked, rough and needy, and he doesn't even fucking care. "Clothes," he adds, "fuck. Too many clothes."
Brendon pushes up, their chests separating as he holds himself above Shane. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah?"
Shane nods.
"Okay," Brendon says, and grins his asshole smile with just a hint of true excitement embedded at the edges. "Okay. Bed. Clothes. Fuck."
There's a moment when Shane manages to get to his feet, light-headed and dizzy though he's basically stone-cold sober, where he wants to take it all back, where he wants to say good night and run off to his clean sheets and shut the door and be alone and figure out what the fuck has happened to his normal life.
It's only like eight o'clock, though, and Brendon's lips are bitten and red and his shirt is stretched out from Shane pulling on it. It helps that Brendon looks a tiny bit confused, even though he's got his determined face on. Shane isn't sure at all why Brendon wants this, wants him, but they're in this now and he is sure as hell he doesn't want to stop.
He walks carefully to his bedroom, one foot in front of another like a drunk, and after the first few steps Brendon crowds close to him, a hand on his tailbone that makes the rest of the distance seem easy. The second he stops at the end of the bed, Brendon is tugging his shirt off and then Shane's, and when that's done they take their pants off, and then Brendon gently curls his fingers around Shane's waist.
"Lay down," he says, so Shane sits and then scoots back until he's in the middle of the bed. He lies back, adjusting a pillow under his neck. Brendon runs his hands through his hair, tugging at it as he laughs a little. "Holy shit," he says.
Shane doesn't want to wait for Brendon to figure how to ask, so he reaches over to the nightstand, digging in the drawer to find the stuff he bought last week. Of course then he's got a condom and a bottle of lube in his hand and no idea what to do with either. He drops them on the bedspread. Brendon shakes his body out like he's going to dive off the high board, a head to toe shimmy, and then in a rush clambers on top of Shane, their legs and arms all colliding, skin scorching everywhere it touches.
Fuck, they're really going to do this, Shane thinks, and wraps his leg back around Brendon's, then shifts so it's higher, up around Brendon's waist. They're basically where they left off back on the couch, but this time without clothes.
He kind of wishes he'd done something more than stand in the aisle at Walgreens and buy what seemed like the probably necessary supplies. He remembered to get lube, a pretty impressive victory given how fast he wanted to get out of there, like a scared kid expecting to get caught with a skin mag instead of a 27-year-old who's been having sex for like a decade. There are probably magazines just about this, or maybe even websites with actual advice and visual guides.
He figured out blowjobs just fine without printed directions, though, and now that they're naked it's pretty obvious exactly what's going to go where. The way Brendon's dick is leaking a little on Shane's thigh, rubbing softly in the crease of his hip there, it doesn't seem half as crazy an idea as it has in the past, the concept that you can actually have a dick up your ass and think it feels good. Shane can almost see how it might feel good.
Brendon is sucking shallow kisses on Shane's neck, one hand curved around his ribs and the other pushing Shane's thigh up against his chest. He starts inching that hand down, a slow awkward skid of skin until the tip of one finger brushes against Shane's asshole. Shane pushes up towards it and Brendon pushes back down to keep his balance and then, fuck, Shane can feel Brendon's finger inside of him, and then more of it, and then the rest of Brendon's hand wraps around his tailbone like maybe he's in all the way.
Brendon fucks him a little like that, his finger rocking in and out, and that plus the scrape of his nails on Shane's lower back and how Brendon is panting against his collarbone, staring down their stomachs, it's already almost too much. He reaches around until he finds the condom and fumbles to get it open with his teeth.
There's probably a better way to do that, too, but if he doesn't figure this out soon they're both going to get off like this, and Brendon's finger feels great but that's not the point of all this. Shane ducks his neck a little until his lips are pressed near Brendon's ear. "Put it on," he says, and Brendon's hips stutter forward, cock dragging wetly along Shane's leg.
Brendon sits back, finger slipping out as he moves far enough away to roll the condom on. Shane lowers his legs for a minute, knees spread wide on the bed. Brendon's hands are shaking a little, and Shane slides his hands down Brendon's thighs and back up again.
He squeezes lube into Brendon's palm, so much that it drips through Brendon's fingers onto Shane's stomach, cold and kind of sticky, and Shane really does not give a shit, he just wants to feel Brendon inside him. He grips Brendon's wrist and guides his hand down, smearing lube messily around his asshole, and then around Brendon's dick so to slick him up, too. This definitely seems like it will go better if everything's as wet as possible.
Then Shane rests his shoulders back onto the pillows, tilting his hips and bringing his knees up again. He presses one heel into Brendon's back until he shuffles forward the final few inches, and then Shane closes his eyes because that's Brendon's cock, that slippery pressure inching inside. It actually really fucking hurts, it's so much more than having a finger up his ass, and that makes perfect sense but obviously sense didn't really factor into this decision, because who ever would think this is a good idea, letting Brendon fuck him up the ass just like that, just like they have any idea what they're doing.
Brendon pauses, breathing in loud, fast gasps, and when Shane opens his eyes Brendon falls forward, smashing their mouths together. That shoves Brendon's cock in even further and Shane doesn't scream but only because he bites his tongue. It hurts way fucking worse than he was expecting, and for about three terrifying long seconds he almost asks Brendon to stop. Then a sharp streak of lust shoots up his spine, cutting through the pain or maybe adding to it somehow, and he arches his back and kicks at Brendon's ass so he'll come closer, so he'll just fucking move.
Brendon moves, finally, short little jabs and then, fuck, slow deep ones in a smooth roll like maybe he actually has some experience in the fucking department. His stomach is rubbing against Shane's dick with every thrust, driving Shane crazy because it's not enough, it's not in the same fucking universe as enough. And then Brendon lifts Shane's leg up a little higher and fucks in again and Shane is coming, fuck, he didn't even realize he was close and he's still coming, spurting all over his stomach and Brendon's chest as he pushes forward again.
"Fuck," Brendon says, looking down at Shane's dick like he's a little awed. "Fuck, that feels so good, you have no idea," he says, and speeds up. Shane lets his neck go slack.
His thighs are quivering and if Brendon wasn't holding them up and open they would fall back down. That'd be nice, actually, but Brendon isn't done. On the downward slope of his orgasm Shane can feel everything more distinctly, feel Brendon's cock from every angle, the head pressing somewhere deep, the shaft rubbing back and forth against parts of Shane's body he's never before been aware of even having.
It doesn't hurt, not like before, but it only leaves him wanting more of the high, more buildup so it's less of a surprise, so it lasts and lasts. Brendon groans and his shoulders shake, his knee slipping a bit on the bed. He falls flat on Shane's chest as he comes. "Jesus," Shane says, and it comes out in a wheeze. He's shaky and breathless and a little scared what happens next, like he's gotten the wind knocked out of him.
"Fuck, sorry, sorry," Brendon says, and then "sorry" again as he pulls out, both of them wincing at the slow, sore slide. He drops the condom somewhere on the floor and collapses on his back, shoulder still overlapping Shane's.
Shane flexes his foot, his legs aching, and chuckles. Sex is so fucking ridiculous. Dylan wanders in then, of course, yipping and then running away again. "Fuck," Shane says, "we didn't even close the fucking door."
Brendon turns his face into Shane's neck, pressing a wet kiss right where Shane's pulse is still skittering. "Dude, nobody lives here but us."
Shane smiles into Brendon's hair, laughing when Dylan barks. He can hear her nails clicking against the glass door. He sighs. "She needs to go out."
Brendon says, "Uhhhh," like he always does when he's trying to get out of something.
"It's cool, you just got back." Shane extricates his arm and absolutely does not wince when the gentle impact of his heels hitting carpet reverberates all the way up his vertebrae.
Brendon smushes his face into the pillow, blindly flapping a hand out. On his second try he manages to nick Shane's hip with a ragged nail. "Bring back drinks?" he asks, hoarsely. Shane would accuse him of vamping it up out of laziness but then Brendon props his chin on his hands and goes and bats his fucking eyes, too. Shane just doesn't have that kind of willpower.
"I'm not your butler," Shane says for the sake of it being said. When he comes back with a Corona Brendon's already asleep.
++
Basically, they fuck their brains out.
Shane keeps trying, even if only in his own head, his own voiceovers, to come up with a better way of saying it. That sounds too much like Brendon -- but it's true, and anything else reeks of trying to be polite, and there's nothing all that polite about what they're doing. Shane hasn't washed sheets this often since he was 15. And he's never in his life gone through this many condoms in two weeks. Three boxes. Three and a half, really, because they finished off one Brendon had in his bathroom cabinet.
It's not that they've stopped any other kind of fooling around so much as now it all always seems to end in the same place: back in bed, fucking. Shane isn't sure at first how that is going to work out, if he really wants it enough to always let Brendon be the one fucking him, or what either always wanting it or letting Brendon anyway means about him if he does. After the third or maybe fourth time they do it, he just asks, "Can I try?"
Brendon laughs high and nervous. But he also says, "It's only fair."
It goes a little more smoothly than Shane's first time, or at least it seems that way from Shane's side. Brendon is more flexible, it turns out, much more so than Shane would have predicted even having seen him climb all over Zack or walk on his hands when he's bored. He slings his feet over Shane's shoulders, ankles knocking against Shane's ears, and even bent in half with Shane fucking into him he swears it didn't hurt.
Shane's gotten used to a certain amount of bruising and strained muscles and bite marks he doesn't remember Brendon making but there they are in the acid glow of the bathroom bulbs. Some days he gets up and goes to a job and groans when he reaches to adjust a light. Then he remembers exactly why his back feels like he's been lifting hundred-pound weights for hours on end. Once it hits him he always feels ridiculous, like everyone around him can tell, or like he's been doing it wrong and that's what they'll notice instead.
He doesn't think they're doing it wrong.
continued here.
part one here.
++
The car is half full, Dylan in her carrier in the backseat, three bags of groceries fulfilling everyone in the band's obscure addictions unable to be purchased at resort convenience stores, and two of Brendon's hoodies he forgot and apparently can't live without.
"They're in my room," Brendon had said, "somewhere," but it took Shane twenty minutes to find them, twenty minutes of digging through Brendon's t-shirts, of holding armfuls of soft cotton that smelled like Brendon's deodorant and fabric softener. He sat for a while on Brendon's bed, sheets neatly tucked in because Brendon always reverts to his good son habits on his way out of town.
When they moved in, Brendon said, "No, you take the master bedroom, I probably won't be here half the time anyway," and claimed one of the two smaller rooms for himself. The third is accumulated crap, guitars and keyboards and some lighting equipment Shane's dad gave him when he traded up. Brendon's room has a bed, and a closet full of clothes, and a Louis Vuitton trunk full of shoes. There are more shoes all over the floor, and more clothes, and Shane sat there for a while, looking at all of it like he was trying to block a scene, until he finally found the hoodie he'd been looking for.
Shane has just made the turn onto Kyle Canyon when his phone rings, caller ID unknown. But reception up on Mt. Charleston sucks, so it's probably just Brendon calling from the house phone, hoping he's not too late to have Shane pick up more beer.
"Hi Shane," Regan says. Fuck. They were supposed to have dinner soon. Was that tonight? Probably, from the way she said his name.
"Hey Regs," he says. He might as well jump in. "I know, dinner, I'm really sorry."
"Fuck you," she says, and he's so surprised he gooses the gas pedal, the engine a sharp roar under her voice as she bitches for a while about how he's never home, he never calls her any more, they've been doing this a long time but it's not the same when she's the only one who seems to give a fuck if they keep trying at all.
During a long, stretched out silence he says, "I know," because he's pretty sure there are things he should be saying, things boyfriends say at moments like this to get themselves out of the dog house, to make sure when they get home their girlfriend still lets them in the house, for starters, and that they can still get laid.
He can't actually remember, he realizes, the last time he and Regan had sex. He's seen her a couple times in the last week or two, both late nights when she called and he was already out drinking with someone and so she met them there. Late enough that he pretty much passed out as soon as they got to her place, and then he was up and out for work early.
"So who is it?" she says, barely even asking.
It's been twelve days since he had sex with Brendon, since the morning right before Brendon left for the cabin, when he climbed into Shane's shower and jerked him off, like it was something they'd done before, a quickie before some time apart.
But he can't tell her that. He can't tell her any of it, not any more than he could have when it was just one stoned hook-up.
"It's not like that," he says, and she tells him to go fuck himself again and hangs up. He throws the phone on the passenger seat and cranks up the stereo.
He drove this road a lot a couple winters ago, back when he was hanging out with Dustin and his ski bum friends, shooting crap-ass videos of kids boarding and biting it in equal measure. It was all fake snow but the sky was always blue and the drive from Vegas wasn't bad. If he didn't wait around for the other guys he'd call Regan from the road and they'd talk all the way back. He can't remember what they talked about, or why he couldn't wait to hear her voice until he got home.
In the dead of summer Dustin would skate at a concrete half-pipe Summerlin had built in a park to keep kids off drugs, and last year Shane hauled his new DV equipment out to shoot an audition tape so Dustin could get on an Xtreme Games reality show. Brendon had been fucking around like a douchebag, never trying anything hard enough to risk breaking his face, and when Shane had needed a third hand to hold a reflector, Brendon dropped his board and offered to help. Brendon was stuck back at his parents' house between tours, bored and annoyed, and they'd hung out a dozen times before he left again, matinees and stoned bowling and trips to the mall. It made Shane feel eighteen again. It made Brendon feel normal.
The phone rings again. "Maybe we should take a break," Regan says, and Shane doesn't say, isn't that what we've been doing? because he doesn't know when he stopped thinking things were only going to get more serious with her. He can't pinpoint when that ended. He doesn't think it has anything to do with Brendon but he isn't sure.
So he says, "Yeah, I think we should," and this time she says goodbye first.
He gets a little lost trying to find the right cabin, half-hidden private roads all twined together like branches, and by the time he pulls up behind Ryan's Mercedes he's feeling sort of dizzy, head crackling with tension.
Jon is on the porch smoking a cigarette, which he stubs out carefully on his shoe. "Only you can prevent forest fires," he says in greeting, and gives Shane a back-slapping hug. They manage to carry everything into the house in one trip, and Shane spins a bit, staring up at the vaulted beams, breathing in the sharp pine scent that permeates everything.
"Nice place to disappear, isn't it," he hears from above him, Ryan's dry fondness echoing in the large room. Hobo skitters into the room and she and Dylan sniff each other in a circle.
"It's beautiful," Shane says, almost surprised how deeply he means it, and blinks when Brendon appears at Ryan's shoulder at the top of the stairs. His chest is tight, and he imagines his lungs like a oxygen bag dropped mid-flight, squeezed empty from the pressure. Brendon smiles sunnily and waves before bounding down the stairs and wrapping himself around Shane. Shane has to curl one arm around him just to stay upright.
"Come see the rest of the house," Brendon says, already tugging Shane by the arm through a long hallway. He hears Jon and Ryan laughing low, talking about dinner, and then Brendon's got him shoved into a tiny wood-paneled room, the door pulled tight behind them, and he's pushing his hands up under Shane's shirt and kissing him like he's desperate for it. He's grown a dark scruff and it scratches, pricks of pain soothed by sloppy wet kisses. Shane tries and fails to catch his breath in the brief moments Brendon relinquishes his mouth. When Brendon pushes up Shane's t-shirt to bite at his chest, Shane's ragged gasps sound like thunder in the small space.
Brendon works his fingers into Shane's pants, yanking down the zipper, and Shane is still playing catch-up, apparently, because after that Brendon undoes his own, too, licking his palm and jerking their dicks together rough and fast. Shane braces his palms against the wooden walls, which only makes things spin slightly less. He'd worry about moaning or screaming every time Brendon twists his wrist like that except he can barely get enough oxygen to breathe at all. He comes first, head knocked into the wall and a heel kicked against the door, and Brendon grunts, "Fuck, Shane, twelve fucking days," and comes too.
He doesn't mean to close his eyes but everything goes black and muffled for a minute or two, or maybe just a few seconds. He feels warm fingers prodding at his cheeks, knuckles laid across his forehead, and when he swims back up to full awareness Brendon says, "Jesus fuck. Shane, are you okay?"
He's sitting on a wooden shelf that juts out from the wall, Brendon hunched down in front of him.
"I think you actually passed out," Brendon says, and pushes Shane's hair behind his ears. "Fuck, man, you kinda scared me."
"Sorry," Shane mumbles, and tries to visualize himself sitting up straight and unassisted. It almost works. He wants suddenly to tell Brendon that Regan broke up with him but that seems even more impossible than finding his balance.
"Altitude's a bitch," Brendon says, sounding less worried. "You have to train for this kind of vigorous workout."
"You didn't --" Shane starts, and then has a minor coughing fit. When he's finished he says, "You didn't really give me much of a chance to acclimate." Brendon's broad grin is reward enough for resuscitating his vocabulary.
"Practice, my friend," Brendon stage whispers.
++
They all stay up all night, playing poker at the big table in the main room. Jon wins $127 total, plus an IOU off Shane for another thirty bucks because he hadn't realized he needed to come loaded with cash to survive a game of hold 'em with the band. Brendon crashes on the couch around four a.m. and by the time the rest of them admit they're not winning anything back from Team Walker, as Jon refers to himself, Brendon is awake again. He wanders off to fool around on the piano a while, pointing Shane towards his bedroom to sleep.
Shane wakes up at two in the afternoon, sweaty and squinting. There's a lot of fucking light this far up the mountain, apparently, and it's all focused like a laser through the panes of Brendon's window. When he pokes his head into the hall there's no one around, so he digs through his bag and opens random doors until he finds a shower.
He almost pokes himself in the eye with a soapy finger when Brendon sticks his head in the door and sings his name in a sharp falsetto. "We were wondering where you were!" he says, as if Shane's the one who has been holed up in their undisclosed location of a practice room. Brendon leaves the door ajar and perches on the edge of the sink, yammering on about how Ryan is writing an amazing musical that is going to make their label freak the fuck out, about how last week they all dropped acid and watched Beatles movies, about how this is nothing like it was the last time they had to make an album.
Finally Shane has run out of things to wash, and he turns off the water. "Oh!" Brendon says. "I'll let you, you know." He slams the door on his way out, then opens it again a crack to say, "Sorry, it always falls shut really hard," and then he closes it carefully once more and disappears. Maybe Brendon has conversations with everyone in the shower. Maybe because he's always running around naked it doesn't occur to him that other people might take how he is in a different way, might assume this is the kind of thing people who spend time together naked do.
At whatever meal it is, Jon ladles extra soup into Shane's bowl and says, "I'll totally take the weird room tonight." There's an oblong single at the end of the hall, tucked under the triangular eaves. It has a low ceiling and a twin bed.
"No way," Shane argues, because he's not even really working. He's just up there for fun and the fact that they don't make him feel like the odd man out doesn't change the facts of it.
"Way," Jon says. "You're used to living with the little fucker anyway. I actually had a few months on my own and lost the skill of tuning out the way he talks in his sleep."
Brendon's glasses fog as he bends his neck over the steaming bowl. He slurps his soup and sings, "I hear the secrets that you keeeeep," and Shane tries to protest again but the deed, apparently, is done. That night there's more poker and more bullshit and at least seven bottles of red wine among them. They're talking about music but not playing it, and by this point Shane knows enough to know that could last for days, and he's still a few hours off the band's nocturnal clock. He passes out in Jon's musty sheets and wakes up to Brendon sucking him off, kneeling at the side of the bed, head half under the covers. His half-beard is scratchy on the inside of Shane's thighs but Shane kind of likes it, the contrast against how soft and wet his mouth is.
Brendon pulls off and chirps, "Good morning!"
Shane looks at the inky window. "Is it?" His voice is thick still and his vision feels blurry.
He gets a lopsided grin in return. "Does it matter?" Brendon arches his eyebrows and licks down Shane's hip, shoving the blanket off as he goes.
Shane supposes that it doesn't, and after Brendon's done and collapses on his back, legs still swinging over the edge of the mattress, Shane returns the favor.
++
The next day, or the next time he's awake -- Shane honestly isn't sure at this point what day of the week it is, and he can't find his cell charger so now his phone is dead, too -- things do not seem to be going so well. He wanders down after a cup of coffee and cereal and catches the tail end of Brendon bitching about the lyrics.
Spencer snaps, "What is this, 2005?" Brendon throws a sheaf of papers into the air with an angry snap of his wrist. Shane has his SLR hanging around his neck and the video camera in his hand but he just stands there, waiting to be seen, waiting to be given permission to even come into whatever is going on. Jon sort of looks like he feels the same.
Ryan has his back turned to the room but Shane can see how tightly he's gripping the neck of his guitar. "Then I don't know what the fucking point is," he says, turning slowly around, and his lips draw together when he sees Shane.
He looks slowly to Brendon, who's slumped against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes closed, and back to Shane.
"Why aren't you filming," Ryan says with a sneer, and Shane flips the video camera on with his thumb, bringing it up to his shoulder before he can stop to think whether he should be agreeing. "That's what you're here for, isn't it? Or was there some other reason for your visit, perhaps. Tell me, Shane, are you here on business or pleasure?"
Ryan glowers like he can command the lens with sheer determination. No one else in the room moves for a minute, and then Spencer says, "Then we might as well do our fucking jobs too, right?" and only then does Brendon open his eyes and push off from the wall.
They run through three songs, and Shane's never heard them before but he's pretty sure the last one doesn't go at all as written. "So much for the magical mystery musical tour," Brendon mutters, and Shane's not sure the mic picked it up but he thinks Jon heard, too, maybe all of them. By the end Ryan is swinging his guitar around his head like a lasso, and as soon as Spencer stops drumming Ryan slams it into the ground, snarling when it bounces a little on the thin carpet.
Jon says, mildly, "Maybe you need to hit it against something sturdier," so Ryan tries the edge of an amp and then the wall, both of which work better.
When Ryan crumples to the floor like a baby who's cried himself out, Brendon says his name soft and gentle and folds down next to him. Shane turns off the camera and walks out.
Jon finds him about twenty minutes later, not that Shane was hiding or anything. He was sitting out by the driveway wondering if maybe he should just grab his shit and go. "We're done for the night," Jon says, and shrugs a cigarette out of a pack. "And, uh, welcome to the band. If you've been randomly reamed out by Ryan and he let you live to see him fall apart, you're officially one of us now."
Shane tries to laugh but it comes out weak and hurt. Jon holds out the pack and Shane takes one, lets him light it.
Jon takes a long drag and says on the exhale, "Come on, Ryan's got some crazy ritual planned. I don't know, a bonfire maybe, probably doing some obscure drug he had smuggled in. We've got just about anything you could smoke, snort or drink. There's this amazing shit from Maui Spence's been hoarding, or we've got a couple tabs of LSD left over from the other night. Fuck, Brendon even found some blow stashed in his guitar case, if you want."
Shane stands and holds up the camera instead of asking the question.
"Only if you want," Jon says.
++
Ryan pours five glasses of absinthe, having magically produced not only the bottle but an elaborate silver spoon and sugar cubes out of his sleeve or something. He also declares that they will drink the entire bottle before dawn. They all clink glasses and Ryan shyly asks Shane if he'll turn on the camera just long enough to burn the guitar alive. It looks beautiful through the viewfinder and Shane can feel the liquor sink under his skin, a buzzy glow that spreads down each of his arms. When Jon's phone rings it sounds like church bells, but not like a ringtone, like an actual huge set of bells being chimed right above their heads, in the middle of the darkened sky. He wanders off and Spencer comes to sit by Shane. The fire they'd made in the stone pit is down to embers.
Spencer bumps his shoulder against Shane's. A few yards away, Brendon takes a swig of absinthe straight from the bottle, then screws up his face and acts like he's going to spit it back in Ryan's face.
"I told you," Ryan says, "it's a refined drink for a refined man, you have to --" He stops, laughing as Brendon starts poking him in the ribs over and over again, Ryan lazily batting him away like a pesky cat.
"You know they never -- you know," Spencer says, with a slow jut of his chin.
Oh. Shane watches them a little closer and feels stupid for not having seriously considered it, especially after everything that's happened. Before he and Brendon started he hadn't thought much at all about whether Brendon was gay, not like that, not seriously. He'd always seemed to Shane to be generally open, equally interested and disinterested in guys or girls depending on his mood. Mostly he'd seemed too young for something serious, unsettled in a way that was nothing like how Jon and even Spencer were practically old married men, both happy for a spot of stability amid all the bullshit. And Ryan was -- well, Ryan was Ryan. If anything Shane had thought Ryan was the gay one, even after he met Keltie. He was so fussy and fey and quick to take offense.
Plus Brendon has a unique bond with each of the guys, obvious even if Shane hadn't been spending so much time staring at them through a lens. Jon and Brendon will walk with their arms around each others' waists, heads tilted together, whispering to each other. Spencer's eyes soften when Brendon has finally crashed from some fit of hyperactivity, and Brendon always seems to catch him at it, to look up and share a smile that's half-apology, half-shrugged what else would you expect from me. What Brendon and Ryan have always struck Shane as deeper than that, more difficult somehow, but not altogether different.
"People always think," Spencer goes on, "you know, because of the show or whatever. Or how they are, I guess. People assume."
Shane swallows. "I didn't," he says. He probably should have.
"Well, yeah. I'm sure Brendon told you."
Shane reaches for a stick and pokes the fire until it roars alive. In the orange glow he can see Spencer staring into the flames. Shane stands up. "You want a drink or something?" he asks, and Spencer says, "nah," still fixated.
The green fizz from the absinthe has faded and half Shane's body feels frozen, the other half overheated. Brendon cackles, Ryan's lower laugh beneath it, and Shane says Brendon's name sharp and loud before he's even realized his mouth is open. Brendon bounces up like a jack in the box and Shane says, "Come inside for a second," and Brendon says, "Yeah, okay."
Brendon follows Shane up the stairs, closing the door behind him as they go into their room. "Yeah, okay," Brendon says again, just as casually enthusiastic, and Shane says, "So Jon said you're using your guitar case to hold your coke."
"Oh God, please don't say that around Zack, I swear it was a mistake and you know he's so fucking serious about that kind of thing, but --"
"Where's the case?"
"Oh, it's -- hang on," Brendon says, and ducks back out. Shane isn't really sure what the fuck he's doing but he takes off his hat and scarf and jacket anyway, turns on one lamp on the nightstand. He doesn't want to go back outside, and he doesn't want anything else to drink, and he doesn't want to be a fifth wheel any more.
Regan hates it -- hated it, he guesses, is more correct at this point -- when Shane and Brendon did a few bumps before going out to a club. They saved it for boys' nights out. It was such a cliche, she said, but Shane would rather be a cliche than feel like this.
Brendon comes back in, dangling the mini-Ziplock, and it's worse than a cliche. It's almost a joke. Shane just says, "Good," and waits for Brendon to do the honors.
Brendon looks around the room, messy with clothes and random crap, magazines and half-eaten bags of chips. "You know," he says, contemplative. "I am supposedly a rock star and yet I have never done blow off a stripper's ass. Not once."
"Fuck you," Shane says, and sounds madder than he means. That's the kind of joke this should be. Brendon's funny, or would be if Shane wasn't residually pissed off and unamused. He points. "There's a perfectly good dresser right there," he says, and Brendon rolls his eyes.
"You are no fun at all, Shane Valdez."
There's a rolled-up hundred in the bag, too, Brendon's longstanding insurance policy that is always either carried forward to the next batch or invested in immediate reinforcements. "Which would you rather," he explained once, and it seemed sensible even later, dead sober. "Run out halfway through the party or resort to using a five for the second round?"
Brendon carves the pile into neat halves, then snorts his side, sniffling and swallowing noisily. That's familiar in its own way, too, all part of the ridiculous ritual. "I'm a phlegmy guy," he said the first time, elbow to elbow in a bathroom stall like a couple of Swingers assholes.
Shane splits his jumbo-sized line in two and lets the burn drip down the back of his throat. The faint hum of drunkenness disappears in a clean wipe. He settles his weight on the edge of the dresser and lets his legs fall open in a V.
"Oh, now you want to have fun," Brendon says. When he's on coke he talks even more than usual, one long monologue about nothing at all, the same as every other conversation they have but on fast-forward. He does come closer, though, standing between Shane's knees and tilting forward for a kiss. He tastes like licorice, and if he's babbling the whole time it's not like Shane's unaccustomed to tuning him out. It's not like they weren't going to do this, the way things have been going and their own room now to boot. Even after getting schooled in the art of war by a band full of passive-aggresive pretty boys Shane knew this is where they would end up.
"Shut up for a minute," he says, and pushes down on Brendon's shoulder with one hand, and when Brendon smirks on his way down Shane feels anger race down his spine, neck and neck with lust. Brendon unbuttons Shane's jeans, nosing his way across Shane's cock where it already feels scorching hot against the cool cotton of his boxers, and Shane juts his crotch forward until he can feel the head of his dick drag across Brendon's mouth, stopping for one blissful second the stream of words.
Then Brendon starts mumbling again, filthy nonsense about fucking and sucking and licking and how much he enjoys all of the above, how amazing it is that they can do this whenever they want, how fucking hot Shane is, he has no idea. Shane lets the words drift up to him and finally unscrews his own jaw enough to talk back.
"You're wearing too much," he says, because Brendon's still got on a hoodie and a baseball shirt. He winds his fingers into Brendon's hair, tugging up until Brendon gets his feet under him.
Shane strips both Brendon's layers off and his jeans too, then turns Brendon around and walks him back towards the bed, helping tip the balance when Brendon starts to fall. He bounces a few times from the momentum and Shane yanks his own shirt off, kicks away his shoes and his jeans and leaves his boxers in a puddle on the rug. Brendon's lips are moving now but without sound, like a kid reading to himself.
Shane says, "Turn over," and Brendon twists halfway at the waist before he stops and thinks about it.
"Why, what are we, are we going to --"
"I'm gonna do a line off your ass," Shane says, and for a change he's able to get through the deadpan delivery without cracking. "Now turn the fuck over."
It's even easier to do than it was to say, and Shane's happy to blame all that and the sarcasm on the coke. He barely waits for Brendon to reposition himself before he climbs on top of Brendon's back. Brendon makes a soft grunt but doesn't struggle, turning his face and quickly getting distracted rubbing his cheek against the comforter. Shane's just settled his weight when Brendon starts shimmying around, twitching from his forehead down to his toes. Shane presses a hand down hard on his lower back and Brendon doesn't still so much as seem to focus really hard on pushing his hips into the mattress.
Shane lays himself like a blanket across Brendon, and like this it's so clear they're not the same size at all. It's obvious every time Shane snags a hoodie off the back of the couch and can barely fit an arm in it, but it's even more ridiculous when Brendon's whole body fits beneath his, Shane's arms draping over on either side.
Brendon's skin is warm, and he's sweating a lot, so when Shane tries to shift around and get a little more balanced his dick drags smoothly across Brendon's hip. "Oh fuck," Brendon sputters out, like he's reinvented English all over again, and Shane rocks his hips again, slower this time, working a knee between Brendon's legs. It's better this way, this angle. Shane can feel his heartbeat pounding through his cock, his fingertips throbbing against Brendon's ribs.
He looks down between their bodies, the swell of Brendon's ass curving against Shane's stomach. They could fuck like this, actually fuck. He could spread Brendon's legs farther apart, tilt his pelvis up and push in. He feels good right now, he feels like not actually knowing how to fuck a guy isn't any real obstacle. He could figure it out.
"Fuck," Brendon says more loudly, "keep fucking moving, Shane, come on," and Shane thrusts forward, reaching down to shove the tip of his cock between Brendon's ass cheeks and, fuck, that feels good, it's like fucking a girl's tits but better. Brendon squeezes his thighs tighter and bucks into the mattress, flailing an arm back to scrabble at Shane's shoulder as he pants out, "hand, your hand, Shane, fuck, help."
Shane can almost touch his knees to the bed on either side of Brendon's hips and he lifts up just enough to fit his palm across Brendon's stomach and around his cock, knuckles pressed into the comforter as he tries to make some kind of awkward rhythm between his wrist and Brendon's cock and Brendon's ass and the skidding friction of Shane's cock against it.
Brendon comes wet and hot in Shane's hand and Shane hears himself say, "Oh, that'll work better." He carefully slips his hand free and uses the mess to slick himself up, then guides his cock down to slide along the crack of Brendon's ass. He's thrusting roughly, sharp, shallow jabs and a small pool of sweat at the base of Brendon's spine drips down over his dick, too, allowing it to push farther between, to fleetingly expose Brendon's shiny pink asshole before Brendon whips his head around and says, "Are you -- don't try to fuck me, dude, that's --"
"No, what the --" Shane says, as if he hadn't been raising his thumb to his mouth to lick at it so he could try getting at least that much in. He doesn't really know what he's doing and for all this, for all they've done Shane's not really sure if Brendon does either.
"Fuck, I'm not even high any more," Brendon says, "don't try that," and Shane says, "No, no, I wasn't." Brendon's neck flops back down, forehead to the bed, and he lets out a long, annoyed sigh.
Shane won't but he wants to, wants to even more now that the cocaine fever has ebbed and it almost feels like something they'd do anyway, something they'd have gotten around to someday soon. Something they could just want and try and figure out together, just like all the rest of it.
It feels real, the soft, almost clammy pale skin of Brendon's ass under Shane's hands, the bony ridge of Brendon's back as he arches a half-inch and then sinks back into the mattress.
Shane needs to come now, can feel the ache in his balls as he kneels back so he can grip his cock and pull hard two, three times and then he's coming so hard. His hand opens wide, and he shoots between his knuckles and onto Brendon, shiny streaks like lash marks across his spine. Brendon shivers and says, through a giggle, "Now I've got some lines you can do."
Shane says, "Shut the fuck up," and slaps Brendon's ass lightly. But he cranes his neck in for a curious lick, and it's not that different from swallowing at the end of a blowjob. Not good enough to get off on, so he tugs a corner of the sheet out and uses that to clean them both off instead.
They lie side by side on their backs, staring up at the wooden ceiling and waiting for the rest of their sweat to dry. "Do you have a pack of cigarettes?" Brendon asks, and hums Simon and Garfunkel as Shane reaches around on the floor for his shirt. "We've all come to look for America," Brendon sings, stretching out the vowels while Shane locates the lighter and someone else's Parliaments and they smoke in the dim room until the sun starts to come up again.
++
Shane opens his eyes and he's about an inch from Brendon's mouth. Every low, purring snore as Brendon breathes in and out flutters against Shane's face. It's calm, like standing on the edge of Lake Mead on a day with a faint breeze, even if mostly the room smells like stale smoke and sex. He shuts his eyes again, wondering if there's a stream near the cabin they could hike to, maybe not now if it's already practically night again. But maybe tomorrow. Brendon's breaths stay steady, timed as even as Spencer's metronome.
Shane should probably wake him up, should scoot down and suck Brendon off or at least start something, use his hand maybe. And it's not that he doesn't want to, that he isn't also itchy with the need to press their bare bodies together again. He's just sort of into this, this quiet, familiar kind of beginning to a day.
His eyes are still closed when Brendon's phone explodes with noise, the synthetic sounds so jarring Shane flinches hard. Brendon rolls smoothly onto his back, winking one eye and then the other before bursting loudly into Rihanna. After a few lines he shrugs at Shane and says, "What? She's totally hot." He sits up straight and bends over the edge of the bed. "Where is my fucking cell-a, cell-a, cell-a," he sings along, and then says, almost normally, "Hello?"
Shane wallows in the relative peace, letting his eyes linger on Brendon's back, tiny dark freckles dotting the pale skin.
"Oh!" Brendon says, "hey, hi." He twists around and his mouth is quirked up, kind of a smile, but his eyes have that rare awkward look he gets sometimes around overeager fans. Shane pushes himself up to sit against the headboard. "Uh, yeah," Brendon says, "hang on, he's right here." Brendon presses the cell into Shane's palm. "It's your dad. Did you lose your charger again?"
"What?" Shane says stupidly, and then says, "hey" into the phone before he means to. Brendon is already halfway across the room with a jolly wave, though he stops when he seems to remember he's naked, grabbing a towel off the floor to wrap around his waist as he steps into the hall. He pulls the door shut behind him and Shane realizes his dad's already talking, something about a job and a voicemail box being full and, "What?" Shane says again, but this time tries to pay attention to the answer.
++
Raising Arizona is playing on IFC in the background while Shane finishes cleaning the house. He hasn't been there much anyway, not before or after he came back from Mt. Charleston, but even with the housekeeper a month of general neglect has left the place feeling stale.
The fridge is restocked, two kinds of beer and five flavors of ice cream and enough Capri Suns to fuel an entire soccer league. Earlier he opened all the windows and the back door and now at least things smell a little less musty and a little more like cold desert air, sage and dirt. He did three loads of laundry, mostly jeans and t-shirts, and only when he was putting clean sheets back on his bed did he think how that might look, how eager or presumptuous.
They were pretty rank, though, after the last week of him tossing and turning through half the night. Brendon's still on graveyard shift and his texts at four a.m. are about stupid shit that shouldn't be so distracting to Shane, things like what's the difference between a raccoon and a possum? jon says equally dirty but if neither is peta-protected we might have to kill a bitch or got pine sap all over my pants is there anything that gets this shit off??.
One night he said, we r out of all the good drugs and ryan's being a fucktard. don't youwish you were here?, and Shane slid his hand into his boxers and was gasping against his pillow before he realized he was still clutching the phone, thinking about how Brendon scrunches his eyebrows together while he's thumb-typing, about how his face goes slack just before he comes.
Now the sheets smell flowery from whatever fabric softener Brendon insists they buy because it's what his family always used, but it's not like he's going to get them dirty again in the hour before Brendon's due back. Brendon's got his own room, anyway, so maybe Shane is being a fucktard himself to think it matters in the slightest what his bed smells like.
Mostly he's looking forward to having a conversation with someone other than his dad and his dad's friends. They're all great guys and taught Shane basically everything he knows about being a filmmaker. But they still treat him like a kid without meaning to, always double-checking his set-ups or frowning slightly as he explains why he likes something they consider just a little too edgy or underexposed.
Plus he never again needs to have a serious talk with his dad about Regan that somehow, after two glasses of whiskey each, sitting side by side at a bar like they were drinking buddies, turned into a very carefully phrased reassurance that whatever artistic choices Shane made were valid and accepted. Shane wanted to argue the point except he wasn't entirely comfortable with what point exactly it was that they were arguing, and when his dad said, "And they should be paying you, if you're going to film them working on the album like that," Shane didn't disagree, just asked his advice how to structure the deal.
He's sitting down on the couch with a just opened beer, Nic Cage looming large on the flat screen. Mostly he's congratulating himself on being a grown-up with an actual career he loves and being able to afford half of a house that feels like a real home when Brendon walks in the door. Brendon snorts a laugh, drops his bag on the floor and says, "Son, you got a panty on your head." Shane finishes the line with him, head tipped back to follow Brendon's movement as he crosses the room.
"You're back," he says, and doesn't manage to sound at all as nonchalant as he'd intended.
Brendon does a U-turn around the end of the couch. "Home sweet home," he says with a broad smile. He puts one knee on the cushion, swings Shane's feet up and tugs Shane down by the waist of his jeans until he's lying flat on his back. Shane puts his beer on the floor just in time for Brendon to kiss him.
It's more of an attack than a kiss. About ten seconds in and Brendon's already got one hand shoved inside the waistband of Shane's jeans, fingers scratching through the hair just above his cock. Brendon's other hand worms its way under Shane's ass, propping him up at an angle until Shane wraps his leg around the back of Brendon's knee so nobody gets jabbed in the balls.
"Ug," Brendon says, and now his dick sort of slides along Shane's where it's creeping out the top of his jeans. Mostly, though, Brendon's cock is a hard line against Shane's inner thigh, and when Brendon shifts a few inches and he thrusts down instead of forward there's a warm, solid pressure against the crack of Shane's ass.
In the past week Shane has been thinking about this a lot, not just how things would be when Brendon came back, but what they would do, what exactly they would do. Shane hasn't thought this much and this stupidly about sex since he was still a virgin. He kind of is a virgin at this, though. He doesn't know what he wants; he wants everything; he wants Brendon and anything Brendon will do is fine; he wants to not want this so much because it makes no fucking sense, actually, that he wants it at all.
Before Brendon he never wanted this, never wanted to kiss a guy or jerk him off or go down on him, to pin his hips to a bed and fuck into him, to have his dick inside a guy's ass. He has friends who wondered about some of those things, a few who even admitted it, and he's spent the last year hanging out with a band that's made an art out of at least asking the question and acting interested in the answer. Shane wasn't that guy, or maybe he was just happy enough with what he could get with girls he never bothered looking any further.
Or maybe it's just Brendon. Brendon's forehead is shiny with sweat and his crotch is hot where it's nestled into the curve of Shane's ass. Shane's fingers have gotten twisted in Brendon's collar, and he loosens his grip to let them slide across Brendon's back. At the intersection of pants and t-shirt, Shane lets one wander up, under the cotton, and the other slide down over denim pockets.
Brendon's ass is round and firm, almost like palming a basketball, the way Shane's hand can fit across the arc of it. He squeezes a little, more like getting in a good grope than encouraging anything in particular, but Brendon moans open mouthed, dropping his forehead to Shane's shoulder. Shane pulls his knee up higher, until his calf almost brushes his own fingers curved around Brendon's ass and he bucks up. Brendon is light, not totally unlike having a girl on top of him, but Shane's never gotten this tangled up in someone's body before, not from this angle. He's a little surprised how bent in half he is already, so quickly.
Brendon's fingers fall out of Shane's underwear, which feels like a step back until he wraps them around the back of Shane's thigh, pinning it down until Shane's knee is digging into Brendon's back. Shane wants out of his pants altogether, wants Brendon to be bearing down on him without the interruption of thick layers of clothes. He wants off this fucking couch where he can barely open his legs wide enough for Brendon to fit between them.
He swallows, Brendon still rocking shallow against him with his face in Shane's neck, and licks his lips, looking for words. He never, ever wanted a guy to fuck him before he met Brendon. Two weeks ago he was ecstatic to be getting the best blowjobs of his life on a semi-regular basis and to find he was generally enthusiastic about trying it himself.
"Bed," he says, and his voice is so fucked, rough and needy, and he doesn't even fucking care. "Clothes," he adds, "fuck. Too many clothes."
Brendon pushes up, their chests separating as he holds himself above Shane. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah?"
Shane nods.
"Okay," Brendon says, and grins his asshole smile with just a hint of true excitement embedded at the edges. "Okay. Bed. Clothes. Fuck."
There's a moment when Shane manages to get to his feet, light-headed and dizzy though he's basically stone-cold sober, where he wants to take it all back, where he wants to say good night and run off to his clean sheets and shut the door and be alone and figure out what the fuck has happened to his normal life.
It's only like eight o'clock, though, and Brendon's lips are bitten and red and his shirt is stretched out from Shane pulling on it. It helps that Brendon looks a tiny bit confused, even though he's got his determined face on. Shane isn't sure at all why Brendon wants this, wants him, but they're in this now and he is sure as hell he doesn't want to stop.
He walks carefully to his bedroom, one foot in front of another like a drunk, and after the first few steps Brendon crowds close to him, a hand on his tailbone that makes the rest of the distance seem easy. The second he stops at the end of the bed, Brendon is tugging his shirt off and then Shane's, and when that's done they take their pants off, and then Brendon gently curls his fingers around Shane's waist.
"Lay down," he says, so Shane sits and then scoots back until he's in the middle of the bed. He lies back, adjusting a pillow under his neck. Brendon runs his hands through his hair, tugging at it as he laughs a little. "Holy shit," he says.
Shane doesn't want to wait for Brendon to figure how to ask, so he reaches over to the nightstand, digging in the drawer to find the stuff he bought last week. Of course then he's got a condom and a bottle of lube in his hand and no idea what to do with either. He drops them on the bedspread. Brendon shakes his body out like he's going to dive off the high board, a head to toe shimmy, and then in a rush clambers on top of Shane, their legs and arms all colliding, skin scorching everywhere it touches.
Fuck, they're really going to do this, Shane thinks, and wraps his leg back around Brendon's, then shifts so it's higher, up around Brendon's waist. They're basically where they left off back on the couch, but this time without clothes.
He kind of wishes he'd done something more than stand in the aisle at Walgreens and buy what seemed like the probably necessary supplies. He remembered to get lube, a pretty impressive victory given how fast he wanted to get out of there, like a scared kid expecting to get caught with a skin mag instead of a 27-year-old who's been having sex for like a decade. There are probably magazines just about this, or maybe even websites with actual advice and visual guides.
He figured out blowjobs just fine without printed directions, though, and now that they're naked it's pretty obvious exactly what's going to go where. The way Brendon's dick is leaking a little on Shane's thigh, rubbing softly in the crease of his hip there, it doesn't seem half as crazy an idea as it has in the past, the concept that you can actually have a dick up your ass and think it feels good. Shane can almost see how it might feel good.
Brendon is sucking shallow kisses on Shane's neck, one hand curved around his ribs and the other pushing Shane's thigh up against his chest. He starts inching that hand down, a slow awkward skid of skin until the tip of one finger brushes against Shane's asshole. Shane pushes up towards it and Brendon pushes back down to keep his balance and then, fuck, Shane can feel Brendon's finger inside of him, and then more of it, and then the rest of Brendon's hand wraps around his tailbone like maybe he's in all the way.
Brendon fucks him a little like that, his finger rocking in and out, and that plus the scrape of his nails on Shane's lower back and how Brendon is panting against his collarbone, staring down their stomachs, it's already almost too much. He reaches around until he finds the condom and fumbles to get it open with his teeth.
There's probably a better way to do that, too, but if he doesn't figure this out soon they're both going to get off like this, and Brendon's finger feels great but that's not the point of all this. Shane ducks his neck a little until his lips are pressed near Brendon's ear. "Put it on," he says, and Brendon's hips stutter forward, cock dragging wetly along Shane's leg.
Brendon sits back, finger slipping out as he moves far enough away to roll the condom on. Shane lowers his legs for a minute, knees spread wide on the bed. Brendon's hands are shaking a little, and Shane slides his hands down Brendon's thighs and back up again.
He squeezes lube into Brendon's palm, so much that it drips through Brendon's fingers onto Shane's stomach, cold and kind of sticky, and Shane really does not give a shit, he just wants to feel Brendon inside him. He grips Brendon's wrist and guides his hand down, smearing lube messily around his asshole, and then around Brendon's dick so to slick him up, too. This definitely seems like it will go better if everything's as wet as possible.
Then Shane rests his shoulders back onto the pillows, tilting his hips and bringing his knees up again. He presses one heel into Brendon's back until he shuffles forward the final few inches, and then Shane closes his eyes because that's Brendon's cock, that slippery pressure inching inside. It actually really fucking hurts, it's so much more than having a finger up his ass, and that makes perfect sense but obviously sense didn't really factor into this decision, because who ever would think this is a good idea, letting Brendon fuck him up the ass just like that, just like they have any idea what they're doing.
Brendon pauses, breathing in loud, fast gasps, and when Shane opens his eyes Brendon falls forward, smashing their mouths together. That shoves Brendon's cock in even further and Shane doesn't scream but only because he bites his tongue. It hurts way fucking worse than he was expecting, and for about three terrifying long seconds he almost asks Brendon to stop. Then a sharp streak of lust shoots up his spine, cutting through the pain or maybe adding to it somehow, and he arches his back and kicks at Brendon's ass so he'll come closer, so he'll just fucking move.
Brendon moves, finally, short little jabs and then, fuck, slow deep ones in a smooth roll like maybe he actually has some experience in the fucking department. His stomach is rubbing against Shane's dick with every thrust, driving Shane crazy because it's not enough, it's not in the same fucking universe as enough. And then Brendon lifts Shane's leg up a little higher and fucks in again and Shane is coming, fuck, he didn't even realize he was close and he's still coming, spurting all over his stomach and Brendon's chest as he pushes forward again.
"Fuck," Brendon says, looking down at Shane's dick like he's a little awed. "Fuck, that feels so good, you have no idea," he says, and speeds up. Shane lets his neck go slack.
His thighs are quivering and if Brendon wasn't holding them up and open they would fall back down. That'd be nice, actually, but Brendon isn't done. On the downward slope of his orgasm Shane can feel everything more distinctly, feel Brendon's cock from every angle, the head pressing somewhere deep, the shaft rubbing back and forth against parts of Shane's body he's never before been aware of even having.
It doesn't hurt, not like before, but it only leaves him wanting more of the high, more buildup so it's less of a surprise, so it lasts and lasts. Brendon groans and his shoulders shake, his knee slipping a bit on the bed. He falls flat on Shane's chest as he comes. "Jesus," Shane says, and it comes out in a wheeze. He's shaky and breathless and a little scared what happens next, like he's gotten the wind knocked out of him.
"Fuck, sorry, sorry," Brendon says, and then "sorry" again as he pulls out, both of them wincing at the slow, sore slide. He drops the condom somewhere on the floor and collapses on his back, shoulder still overlapping Shane's.
Shane flexes his foot, his legs aching, and chuckles. Sex is so fucking ridiculous. Dylan wanders in then, of course, yipping and then running away again. "Fuck," Shane says, "we didn't even close the fucking door."
Brendon turns his face into Shane's neck, pressing a wet kiss right where Shane's pulse is still skittering. "Dude, nobody lives here but us."
Shane smiles into Brendon's hair, laughing when Dylan barks. He can hear her nails clicking against the glass door. He sighs. "She needs to go out."
Brendon says, "Uhhhh," like he always does when he's trying to get out of something.
"It's cool, you just got back." Shane extricates his arm and absolutely does not wince when the gentle impact of his heels hitting carpet reverberates all the way up his vertebrae.
Brendon smushes his face into the pillow, blindly flapping a hand out. On his second try he manages to nick Shane's hip with a ragged nail. "Bring back drinks?" he asks, hoarsely. Shane would accuse him of vamping it up out of laziness but then Brendon props his chin on his hands and goes and bats his fucking eyes, too. Shane just doesn't have that kind of willpower.
"I'm not your butler," Shane says for the sake of it being said. When he comes back with a Corona Brendon's already asleep.
++
Basically, they fuck their brains out.
Shane keeps trying, even if only in his own head, his own voiceovers, to come up with a better way of saying it. That sounds too much like Brendon -- but it's true, and anything else reeks of trying to be polite, and there's nothing all that polite about what they're doing. Shane hasn't washed sheets this often since he was 15. And he's never in his life gone through this many condoms in two weeks. Three boxes. Three and a half, really, because they finished off one Brendon had in his bathroom cabinet.
It's not that they've stopped any other kind of fooling around so much as now it all always seems to end in the same place: back in bed, fucking. Shane isn't sure at first how that is going to work out, if he really wants it enough to always let Brendon be the one fucking him, or what either always wanting it or letting Brendon anyway means about him if he does. After the third or maybe fourth time they do it, he just asks, "Can I try?"
Brendon laughs high and nervous. But he also says, "It's only fair."
It goes a little more smoothly than Shane's first time, or at least it seems that way from Shane's side. Brendon is more flexible, it turns out, much more so than Shane would have predicted even having seen him climb all over Zack or walk on his hands when he's bored. He slings his feet over Shane's shoulders, ankles knocking against Shane's ears, and even bent in half with Shane fucking into him he swears it didn't hurt.
Shane's gotten used to a certain amount of bruising and strained muscles and bite marks he doesn't remember Brendon making but there they are in the acid glow of the bathroom bulbs. Some days he gets up and goes to a job and groans when he reaches to adjust a light. Then he remembers exactly why his back feels like he's been lifting hundred-pound weights for hours on end. Once it hits him he always feels ridiculous, like everyone around him can tell, or like he's been doing it wrong and that's what they'll notice instead.
He doesn't think they're doing it wrong.
continued here.