A/N: I meant to write just one drabble, but hey, have six one-hundred word drabbles! And yay, I’m finally getting to the ask-prompts I took for Pinto de Mayo! It may take me a bit to get to the others; I appreciate your patience. ❤
The Same Page
i.
“So. What do you think?” Chris stood hovering in front of Zach, gripping his coffee mug with white knuckled hands.
Zach exhaled and pressed his palm against his forehead. “I’m on page seven, man; I don’t know yet.”
“Oh. Oh right.“ Chris’s face fell.
“I’m sure it’ll be great.“ Zach readjusted himself on Chris’s couch and turned his attention back to the thick manuscript.
Ten minutes passed.
“Um. Are you on chapter two yet? Because that transition–”
“Chris, do you want me to read this draft of your book or not?”
“Fine, fine. I’ll just.“ Chris gestured vaguely and disappeared.
ii.
Zach kept reading, through kitchen clattering (“Thyme!” Chris exclaimed in a eureka! voice after dropping what sounded like all of his pots), through snatches of exasperated phone conversations (“No, don’t set me up. I keep telling you I’m cool on my own, Katie”), and through a welcome stretch of silence after Chris made an exaggerated show out of tiptoeing out the back door.
He switched positions and locations, from the couch to the guest room bed to the comfy leather chair in Chris’s study, absently drinking from water glasses or coffee mugs that appeared silently within reach at regular intervals.
iii.
Twilight had crept in by the time Zach stood, stretching his stiff limbs, and went in search of Chris.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Chris said in a rush. He was on his knees in the garden yanking up what looked like half of the plants growing there. “It’s just the second draft, and all the writing books say–”
“Chris. It’s amazing.”
“Wait. Seriously?”
“I want to option it for Before the Door.”
Chris looked up, shading his eyes against the sun. “But it’s not – I don’t even have an agent.“
"Well, get one, because I want dibs.”
iv.
“Really?" Chris tossed his gardening gloves aside, sprang to his feet and flung himself at Zach.
"Whoa. You react this way to everyone who likes your book?” Zach snickered as he pulled Chris close and breathed in the sun-warmed scent of him.
It took a while for Chris to stop laughing in relief, the sound muffled against Zach’s shoulder. “Dude, you’re the first one I asked to read it.”
Zach stilled, Chris still in his embrace. “That’s pretty huge. Isn’t it?”
Chris smiled as drew back but didn’t move away entirely. “Who else would I ask first but you?”
v.
Zach resisted the urge to pull away, even though years of habit told him to. “In the story, remember how Iris gives Jack that box for safekeeping, and he loses it?”
Chris rolled his eyes, but his hands skimmed down to rest on Zach’s hips. “Do I remember – Zach, I wrote it.”
“You never said what the box held,” Zach persisted.
“Well, I didn’t want to reveal–”
“Chris.”
“Her journals." Chris flushed. "Though really, they were more like letters.”
“Written for him?”
Chris met Zach’s searching gaze, his blue eyes clear. “They could have been. If he’d read them.”
vi.
Zach brushed his thumb across Chris’s cheek, wiping away a smudge of dirt. “Tell me if I’m reading this wrong.”
Chris said nothing, but when Zach leaned in, he moved forward readily, and his soft kiss spoke volumes.
By the time they stopped kissing, Zach’s legs were wobbly and Chris looked dazed.
Zach hugged Chris tightly and started to laugh. “Oh my god, only you would write a goddamn novel just to tell me how you feel.”
“Hey! I wrote it for other reasons, too!”
“Shhhh, let’s just enjoy this character-defining moment of revelation,” Zach insisted, kissing Chris once more.
Tag: flove!
Too In Love to Let It Go
@loves-pie, this is for you. ❤
They find an urgent care clinic down the road from the hotel, one where they can slip in and out, use fake names, pay in cash. Zach cradles his hand close to his chest the whole way. One of Chris’s old t-shirts is wrapped around it, and once blood spot start bleeding through it, Chris’s heart rate jumps dramatically, cold sweat breaking out on the back of his neck like he is the one who’s hurt.
Zach cradles his hand close to his chest the whole way back too, but now it’s wrapped neatly in gauze and tape. His fingers are black and blue, but in the dark, in the diffuse orange light of the streetlamps, it’s hard to tell. Chris’s heart is still throwing itself frantically against his ribs though, because he can’t stop remembering how Zach had locked eyes with him when the nurse said Rate your pain, 1 to 10 and Zach had smiled and said I hardly feel it and the nurse had looked concerned.
“Only you, goddamnit,” Chris mumbles. He keeps drifting closer to Zach, pushed by invisible hands, nearly knocking into him before he realizes how close they are and pulls away again. Maybe he’s still a little drunk.
Zach snorts. “Whatever, Pine. You’re more injury prone than anyone I know.”
He’s smiling again, a bright, brassy smile, like he thinks this is all just so fucking hilarious. Meanwhile Chris is still trying to get over the fact that four days ago, when he called Zach in the middle of the night with a long-shot plan about meeting up in London, Zach had agreed before he even got the whole sentence out. And now Zach is here, real and solid and grinning like an idiot, grinning like Chris hasn’t seen him grin in so, so long.
Back in the hotel room, Zach sits down hard on the edge of the bed and stares down at his injured hand. Chris stares at it too. It looks like the bruising has spread a little, but that could just be his imagination. Sighing, he fishes the pill bottle out of his pocket, the painkillers that the nurse pushed into his hand rather than handing them to Zach. He rattles the bottle and raises his eyebrows when Zach looks up.
“You want?”
Zach’s grin sharpens as he nods. “Yeah. Please.”
Chris goes to the bathroom to fill a glass with water, then comes back and shakes two pills into the palm of his hand. He sits down next to Zach on the bed and holds out his palm, and he can’t suppress a shiver when Zach’s fingernails scrape across his skin.
Zach puts the pills on his tongue, then just stares at Chris, a silent challenge. Chris feels something inside him give way as he lifts the glass to Zach’s mouth himself, one hand cradling the back of his head, his eyes on Zach’s throat as he swallows. Once Zach is done, Chris drains the rest of the water himself and sets the glass down on the floor.
“How much does it hurt?” he asks. Zach’s hand looks so fragile wrapped up like that. Chris knows it’s not, but it looks that way now.
Zach’s voice pitches low, rumbling like distant thunder. “Less now.”
It’s too soon for the painkillers to have kicked in, but Chris doesn’t think they’re really talking about that anymore. He wraps his fingers around Zach’s wrist and lifts the injured palm to his mouth, brushing his lips over the purple skin at the base of Zach’s fingers.
“How about now?” he asks, and slides his tongue up the outside of Zach’s ring finger until he feels him twitch and hears him hiss.
“Now?” Zach still sounds like a storm, a violent summer storm. He uses his healthy hand to jerk Chris up by the collar of his jacket, to bring their mouths almost together. Almost, but not quite. “Now, not at all.”
A Place to Rest
I am trash and I got to talking about tonight’s events with @cardassiansunrise and I decided that I needed to write a ficlet about it, because my emotions just could not be contained. This is ridiculous. Everyone please forgive me.
—-
After the PR team leaves, after Chris has stood in the shower for thirty minutes to wash away the thick film of embarrassment, after he has changed into his softest flannel pajama pants and climbed into bed, he sees he has five missed calls from Zach. As exhausted and drained as he is, just seeing Zach’s name makes him want to burst into tears. Which brings on the embarrassment all over again. Wonderful.
Too exhausted to even hold the phone, he lays it on the pillow next to his head and hits the call button and then the speaker button. He stares at the ceiling while he listens to it ring…and ring…and ring…until he’s sure that Zach isn’t going to pick up, and the urge to give in and cry grows almost too big to ignore. But then the line clicks and all of a sudden Zach’s voice is right there in his ear.
“Neato bandido, Pine? Really?”
The wave of relief that breaks over him is immense and immediate. After two hours of feeling like a zoo animal, the familiarity of Zach’s gentle ribbing acts like a balm on his poor tired, introverted soul. If Zach wants to make fun of him for the rest of the fucking night, until they both fall asleep, he can go for it. It would be more than welcome.
Pinto, 9 <3
9: A First Kiss
The thing was, it was a hair too long.
And whatever, good friends could kiss each other goodbye, they could embrace and do the whole bro-hug back-pound love-ya-see-you-soon thing, they could tip together in the middle of it for a whole weird quasi-cheek-kiss thing and accidentally get confused as to whose face goes where and hit almost square on the soft, warm, just slightly chapped lips. And there wasn’t a reason to apologize or get weird about it, they’d seen each other in locker rooms and dressing rooms practically naked for fuck’s sake. There was no good reason for Zach to be lying in his bed hours after the fact stewing over this, when Chis had probably already landed and eaten and probably crashed out on his couch.
It’s just, an accidental kiss doesn’t ever last that long. You kind of go, whoops, shit, my bad and back off. Which Zach would have done had Chris hand not had a grip on the back of his neck. And that wasn’t weird either, anyway, because that was a thing Chris did a lot, he was all about the whole neck-grab-squeeze variety of friendly affection. It was all very bro-ish. Deep bros. What did it matter if it had never happened before? There was a first time for everything. There was a last time for everything too, and more than likely, the event of an accidental smooch with one’s bro was one of these singular instances. It didn’t even matter that they’d spent this week kind of opening up and sharing more personal stuff than usual, deep intense stuff that Zach rarely shared with anyone, and same for Chris, probably. That was a thing really great friends did.
Except there was that warm huff he’d done, that puff of air through his nostrils against Zach’s upper lip, almost a sigh, combined with just a hint of a noise from his throat, and come on, shit like that was involuntary reaction of surprise, right? And if Zach had gasped a little, then that was the same thing, it was just an oops, we kind of fucked that up, but it’s fine, because we’re buddies and we’re secure in our respective varieties of manhood and the state of our relationship and it seriously didn’t mean anything. At all.
His phone hummed where it lay on his end table, glowing up at the ceiling before it faded. Could be anybody. Zach had lots and lots and lots of friends who texted him at all hours. No reason to answer it immediately. He took a deep breath and looked at it.
Are you home?
Zach typed back, yeah, r u?
Dunno
Frowning, Zach sat up and quickly sent, are you ok? where r u
I’m at your apartment.
What the hell, Chris left six hours ago, he should have flown across the country by now.
Buzz me in, I messed up.
He lurched up, jogging out to hit the buzzer, then ran back to find some pants to quickly pull on. Why hadn’t Chris caught his flight? Was it delayed? Why didn’t he call earlier?
Pulling open his door, the elevator down the hall dinged open, Chris stepping out with the carry-on bag over his shoulder. He seemed to hesitate upon seeing Zach standing in his open door in the middle of the night, but then his stride took on a determined speed down the hallway.
“Chris, what happened? Is everything okay? Did you miss your fl-hmgh…”
Lips. Soft, warm, that little rough spot smoothed with a faint cherry flavor, and this time the little huff was longer, this time the little throat sound was louder, this time Chris’ hand gripped his neck and the wide span of his fingers raked up into the back of Zach’s hair, a thump as the bag fell to their feet and the other hand joined its partner. Wet, a tongue, tasting of coffee and sugar sweet seeked entrance, and this time, Zach gasped open, granting it.
This time when Chris pulled their mouths part, he didn’t say, later, man. He said, “Better.”
One of the doodle requests made by dragonvamp. Pinto kissing at a premier. More soon!
Now I want to write this.
Pinto, 87
Puzzled
“Uhh, Zach?”
Zach snatches for the phone, but Chris is too fast, jerking away from him and skittering backward out of reach.
“Dude,” Zach gasps, prematurely mortified. “When someone hands you their phone to look at a picture, you do not swipe left or right. That’s common fucking courtesy!”
Chris ignores him. And his thumb is still moving, Zach’s phone held way too close to his wide eyes. There is an attractive little furrow between his brows, and his mouth is turned down at the corners. “Oh, Jesus. You still have…you still have—”
This time, when Zach grabs for the phone, he’s successful. But Chris doesn’t even drop his hand, just stands there staring at thin air like he’s trying to do intricate math problems in his head. Zach is afraid to even ask. He just chews on his lip and waits for whatever Chris is going to say next.
“You still have the pictures I sent you. From when we were…”
Zach doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t trust himself to. Chris is still wearing his long-division face, so he is probably going to get there himself eventually.
“You were so pissed when we…when I said we should stop…” Chris’s hand falls back to his side with a slap. “I would have thought you’d delete…”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t.” Zach juts his chin defiantly, even though he isn’t feeling that defiant. He feels like his insides have turned into hummingbirds.
He can actually see the moment Chris figures it out, the way the bewilderment melts off his face and his expression becomes terrifyingly unreadable. “You’re not over me.”
It isn’t a question, but Zach can’t help but answer, like Chris is reaching down his throat and dragging the words out himself.
“Of course I’m not,” he says.
“Of course you’re—” Chris eyes widen again. He shakes his head. “Of course you’re not?”
Zach makes a vague gesture in Chris’s direction—an all-encompassing gesture that does absolutely nothing to explain how impossible it would be to even think about getting over him. When Chris broke things off, Zach hadn’t even bothered attempting to move on. He moved, sure. He lived his life. But he didn’t move on.
Chris breaks through his pit party with a dramatic sigh. “Well. I’m glad I’m a much better photographer now.”
It’s Zach’s turn to be puzzled. He searches Chris’s face, notes the slight crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the way his lips are pursed like he’s fighting a smile. The hummingbirds turn into albatrosses. “Why’s that?”
“Because those pictures were horrible,” Chris says as he steps in close. “The lighting, the framing. All wrong. So wrong.”
“And this time around you’ll do a better job?” Zach asks breathlessly, his hands settling automatically on Chris’s waist.
When Chris speaks, their lips brush. “You betcha.”
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