Chapter Text
After a beat of awkward silence, Cameron broke the ice with a sincere "I like your outfit."
Brian looked down at his black dress shirt, tie, and slacks. "I just came from a funeral," he deadpanned.
Cameron raised the corner of his mouth in a half-smile as he took a sip of his beer. "Oh?" he asked, smacking his lips. "Whose?"
"My dignity's. Apparently, Andrew doesn't think that I can talk to people on my own."
Cameron leaned against a cabinet. "I'm sure it was a lovely service, but I think you could probably handle yourself just fine."
"I really can't," Brian said honestly, "though with all the time I have to spend on overdressing for parties and mourning the loss of my virtues, I guess I just haven't had the opportunity to practice good social skills."
Cameron's smile was fuller this time, and he even laughed a little. "I don't know, Brian, you've got a red Solo cup full of disgustingly cheap alcohol and one of your friends is passed out on the host's couch. Sounds like pretty standard party etiquette to me."
Brian shrugged, moving to stand next to him against the cabinet. "Just a fast learner. I've been taking notes all night."
"Me too. You wanna compare?"
Brian grinned, pantomiming flipping through a journalist's notepad. "Let's see. So far, I've got: destroy personal property in the name of getting hot action, force your friends to actually talk to nice, living human beings, and jam as many hairspray-clad teens into one house as physically and legally possible."
Cameron nodded. "Sounds about right, though you left out some adjectives. Just 'nice,' 'living,' and 'human'? Is that all I have going for me? Because I may have peppered in, oh, I don't know, a 'handsome' or 'charming,' or 'graceful as an eagle,' maybe."
"I didn't know that eagles were known for their grace."
"Oh, yeah. Totally. They have other things going on besides patriotism, you know." His eyes drifted down Brian's well-dressed form, and Brian preened, just a bit, standing up straighter. Eyes that blue should have been cold, but they were nothing if not warm. "So, parents?" Cameron inquired, gaze settling back on Brian's face.
"Yeah. Parents. You need them to change your diapers a couple of times and they think they own you forever. Which, come on, it can't be that easy to own someone. It seems like there should be some kind of secret exchange of money, or, like, black magic."
"Well, those are always options, but I think having kids is just easier."
"It's not as moral, though."
"Parenthood is more immoral than black magic?"
"Oh, sure, absolutely. Black magic is an art, or something. Parenthood is just sad."
"Art has a reputation for being sad."
"But when it gets too sad, you can leave it for happier art. You can't really abandon your kid when you realize that you're actually a pretty shitty parent."
"My dad did."
Brian felt his stomach drop. "I'm so sorry."
Cameron waved his hand. "I mean, he's still here, he's still around. He's just not really...there, ya know? He's had maybe four legitimate conversations with me since I was eight years old. "
Brian nodded in comprehension. "I get that. I've had more conversations than that with my parents, but a good ninety percent of them were criticisms, so. You can't pick your parents, I guess."
"If you could though, who would you choose?"
Brian let his head thunk against the wall, thinking. "Hm. I don't know. You go first."
"The parents from 'Little House on the Prairie'."
That was unexpected. Brian liked that, for some reason. "Wait, really?"
Cameron stretched, and a little bit of stomach poked out from under his raised hemline. Brian had to physically force himself not to stare at it.
"Yeah, man. They worked real hard for their kids. The dad built a whole cabin for them, all by himself. And Laura grew up to be a writer, which, I mean...I am extremely impressed by anything any woman did before people decided to maybe try and not be complete jackasses to them all the time. I'm impressed with her parents by extension."
"Makes sense."
"So, who would you pick?"
"Well, see, I think that for my dad, I'd want Abraham Lincoln. Because he's my favorite president, like, he wasn't afraid to do stuff differently when he knew it was for the greater good. He broke a lot of rules to make sure that people got what they deserved. But I wouldn't want Mary Todd for my mom, because she was nuts, and my real-life mom is already nuts."
"So, your ideal home-life would be Single Father Abraham Lincoln, then."
"Basically. Yeah, I like that. That sounds good."
They talked like that for hours, easy and not-flirting-but-definitely-flirting, when Cameron fondly said, "You know, you're a pretty cool person, Brian Johnson."
Brian meant to stammer some kind of thanks, but what came out instead was, "Do you wanna go outside for a walk or something?" And, wait, woah. Where the hell had THAT come from?
"Y-Yeah," Cameron said, visibly surprised, as Brian started to realize the possible implications of what he'd just asked, "A walk. Sure. Just lemme grab my jacket, I think Sloane put it in the closet."
They made their way over to the hallway with the coat closet, pushing and shoving through a thick sea of heavily-makeuped, slightly sweaty high schoolers.
"It's probably in the back," Cameron called over the music, as he flipped through row after row of coats that were not his, some obviously too small, others far more bedazzled and pink than Brian thought Cameron would probably own. His expression grew frustrated as he reached the end, and he exasperatedly shifted the hangers back to start sorting through again from the beginning. "I'm positive I saw her put it here," he huffed.
"What'd look like?"
"Black. Zipper, no buttons."
It was as vague a description as he could have offered, and Brian probably would have said something sarcastic then, had Cameron been literally anybody else. However, because it seemed as though the universe hated Brian more than any other person who had ever dared to inhabit it, it had made Cameron too tall and too handsome and too funny and too likable for him to do anything besides flounder helplessly and start looking for a black jacket with a zipper, not buttons.
He'd started from the opposite end, and because he and Cameron sorted through the coats at a mostly equal pace, they met in the middle with an unexpected brush of arms. Brian felt his face heat up like an electric iron at the direct skin-on-skin contact, and he found himself cursing his entirely Irish background, because now Cameron was staring at him in a way that indicated that he definitely noticed the blush. Instead of ignoring it, or looking away politely, or just walking away from the closet and Brian's flustered self altogether, he kept his eyes trained on Brian's, slowly closing the door.
He stepped forward hesitantly, clearly waiting for Brian to give him some kind of signal that this was okay, that he was reading the situation correctly. Brian's brain was torn between wanting to shout "YES, OF COURSE, PLEASE," and "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND, WE CAN'T, WE COULD NEVER, BUT ESPECIALLY NOT HERE, WHERE ANYONE COULD COME IN AND THEY'D SEE, THEY'D KNOW."
People always talk about sex like it's something that you absolutely need — they even call it that a lot of the time, "needs", as though it were equal to food or shelter or medicine. Unfaithful men and women since the dawn of time have claimed that their cheating was a necessity, that they were totally unable to let their attraction to their lovers go unresolved. Teenage boys talk about blueballs as though it were a terminal affliction bestowed upon them by an angry deity, rather than their young, abstinent girlfriends. Nobody understands what a crock of horseshit all this is better than queer people, and Brian knew that succumbing to his desires would be more of a testament to his own weakness and stupidity than the strength of his libido. Queer people understand that no, you do not, in fact, need to have sex, ever, and that it is often, actually, incredibly unwise to do so. Queer people do not get to need to have sex. Queer people are not allowed to get caught up in romantic spontaneity. Queer people do not get to let their physical desires take precedence over their common sense. These things are all heterosexual fabrications, privileged only to them.
Which is why Brian knew he should yell the second thing.
That is not, however, what Brian did.
What he did instead was remain completely quiet and still, his face growing ever redder, so that he imagined that he resembled a very un-sexy tomato. His blush and silence were enough for Cameron, who leaned down, then, pressing his lips gently against Brian's, the contact sweet and careful.
Brian's heart beat so hard that he was pretty sure it was about fling itself out of his ribcage and hit Cameron right in his beautiful face. It would be embarrassing, but Brian would almost definitely be dead anyway, so he supposed it wouldn't really matter — as long as his mourning parents thought that heart-flinging-itself-out-of-chest was a symptom of a perfectly normal deadly illness and was not, in fact, the product of the most romantic moment of Brian's life hitting him full force.
He opened his mouth a little to deepen the kiss, effectively sealing his fate as both weak AND stupid but also very, very excited. Cameron responded to this with enthusiasm, letting one hand wander into Brian's hair, the other gripping his hip, pulling him in closer. Cameron's fingers played with the strands at the nape of his neck, and the fronts of their jeans rubbed together dangerously, allowing Brian to realize that he could feel how hard Cameron was, knowing that there was no way that Cameron wasn't feeling him right back.
That's when Brian Ralph Johnson lost his motherfucking mind.
He pushed Cameron to the back of the closet, which he shouldn't (and usually wouldn't) have been able to do, except that the action caught both of them off guard. He pulled the coats in front of them, because even though the door was locked, hiding was still safest. He moved his mouth to Cameron's smooth neck, which was easy with the height difference. He sucked hard and slow, bruising the tender skin there. Cameron let his head hang down, his warm, shuddery breath tickling Brian's ear, sending a shiver down his spine. He let his hand trail down Cameron's flat stomach until his fingers were just resting under the top of his waistband, and he let them linger there until he felt Cameron nod quickly against his shoulder. He thrust his hand down Cameron's pants then, feeling, for the first time, a cock that was not his own, both alien and reassuringly familiar. He could only do what he knew he himself liked after several years of late-night jerk-offs in his bedroom, always trying not to focus on the images of James Dean and Cary Grant that floated into his mind, always disappointed when his dick went soft after trying to think about the actresses and models he knew were popular.
It was really strange, Brian thought, how you can think about something for years and years, dream about it, want it with every self-hating and shameful cell in your body, and when you finally do get it, it still feels like everything's happening head-spinningly fast.
Cameron seemed to like Brian's technique just fine, bucking his hips into Brian's hand as he fingered the head. He kissed Brian's temple, just a quick peck, and Brian almost stopped, because, just, wow. He didn't have any experience whatsoever, but he suspected that that was not a thing that happened all the time, that it was probably a Cameron-specific thing, and Brian didn't think he'd ever liked someone quite so much in such a short period of time.
This was what Bender meant when he would call Brian a sap.
Cameron came into his palm after less than two minutes of Brian jacking him off, and Brian knew that he probably didn't get much action, either. And what a shame that was, Brian thought, that nobody but him got to see how gorgeous Cameron looked when he was flushed and panting and looking at him like he'd just cured him of blindness or leprosy or some other Biblically important disease. Cameron pulled down his shirt to cover the dark stain in his jeans, and Brian wiped his hand off on one of the uglier coats in the closet. That was rude, he knew, but he rationalized that it probably belonged to a person who got to do amazing sexual things like this on the regular, so fuck them and their ugly coat. Just then, Cameron dropped to his knees.
"You lose somethin'?" Brian asked, stooping next to him. He started looking around on the floor for a wallet, or maybe a pack of cigarettes. Cameron look at him quizzically before laughing, harder and harder by the second, so that he had tears pricking the crinkled corners of his unfairly blue eyes. Brian was mortified, because even though he didn't know exactly why Cameron was laughing, it was clearly at him, and that was pretty shitty.
Cameron's laughter petered out enough that he could look at Brian and see that he hadn't caught on to what was happening. His expression shifted from amused to nervous in about .3 seconds, and his chuckle now had a slightly hysterical edge to it. "I'm...no, sorry, Brian, I wasn't laughing at you, I swear. I'm just....just worse at this than I thought, I guess. I, uh...I was gonna..." He gestured from his kneeling position to Brian's crotch area. "I mean, I never did it before, and I guess I should have asked, but. Do you want me to?"
Brian was suddenly reminded of being seven years old at an amusement park with his parents, staring up at Thunder Mountain, and being so scared and so excited that he threw up BEFORE he ever got on the ride.
Cameron took his hand and pulled him back up into a standing position, leaning his forehead against Brian's.
"D...do YOU want to?" Brian responded quietly, eyes trained on Cameron's soft pink lips.
Cameron's voice was low and scratchy. "Yeah."
He lowered himself back to the floor and unbuttoned Brian's pants. "You ready?" He asked, which Brian thought was a little weird, because, like, shouldn't he have been the one to ask Cameron that? He just nodded, and Cameron nodded back, pulling out Brian's dick. He just kind of looked at it for a minute, not sizing it up, exactly, just taking it in. He gave an imperceptible shrug, mostly to himself, before opening his mouth wide and enveloping Brian's cock.
It felt so good and seemed like such a heavy thing to Brian that he kind of understood why it used to be illegal. Every swish of Cameron's tongue sent a shock of sensation all the way up Brian's spine, and he could feel each and every hair on his flushed body stand on end. His hands found their way into Cameron's hair, tangling it, tugging on its roots, as if he wanted him to feel everything just as much as he did. He loved this, he loved each of the thirty thousand feelings that were flowing from Cameron's mouth to every one of his nerves, but it was also so, so much, and it meant a lot of things — some of them good, some not at all. It was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.
It was all over quickly, of course, though he'd had time to pull out and release in the low corner of the closet, which he privately thought was pretty impressive aiming. Especially considering the fact that his eyes were still a little crossed.
He shoved his now-limp dick back into his dress pants, and he looked at Cameron, now incredibly and inexplicably shy. "I know this is kinda out of order, but could I maybe get your phone number?"
Cameron's lip quirked into a little smile, and he fished around in the pockets of the coats until he found a bubblegum wrapper and a pen. He scribbled a number and placed it into Brian's open hand, but Cameron jerked it back away before he had the chance to close his fingers around it.
"This is not my number," he explained, "my parents have cut me off from all outside contact since I wrecked my dad's car. Officially, I'm at home in bed right now. This is Ferris's number." He dropped the wrapper into Brian's hand again, letting him take it this time. "You call him when you wanna talk to me, and me and him'll find a way for me to get over to his house, and we'll talk. Okay?"
"Okay." Brian answered, pocketing the wrapper carefully, letting his thumb brush over it affectionately.
Neither of them moved for a minute, unwilling to leave the shared space they'd found for themselves. But then, somebody started jiggling hard on the handle, and they silently agreed that it was time to go.
"Why were you guys locked in the closet?" The door-jiggler asked, suspicious.
"We were looking for a jacket," Cameron called over his shoulder, as he and Brian headed back towards where they came from.
"Hey!" Claire shouted over the party noise, motioning them over to her. "Brian, where'd you go? You're my ride home. I need you to help me load Bender into the car."
She took his elbow gently and led him away. Brian looked over his shoulder at Cameron, who batted his eyelashed and mouthed "Call me!" while making an exaggerated, theatrical imitation of a phone with his hand. Brian's reply was an overly cheesy wink-and-finger-gun combination, and it was really lucky that his friends were all either too oblivious or drunk to notice how disgustingly flirty they were being.
Then again, it still would have been worth it.