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Chris is sweating, and making a fool out of himself, and dancing. He’s dancing because it’s a party. The Grammy Awards afterparty, in fact. One of several, and they’ve taken over this hotel ballroom and turned it into a club, music pumping, the entertainment elite cutting loose and getting tipsy on the open bar and the crystalline night. The floor’s flooded with club sounds, electronic remixes of nineties tunes and multifaceted spinning lights and undone tuxedo buttons.
Chris, having been nominated and not at all won anything for his first album, is sincerely happy just to be there. Cliché, yes; trite, yes. Also true. He’s aware that he and his acoustic guitar have come a long way from campsites and waterfalls and harborside benches. He’s written from his heart, finding that place of stillness and peace in the soul of the right note; he’d been shocked to find himself inexplicably ubiquitous on indie-rock radio stations seemingly overnight.
He’s also currently a little—okay, maybe a lot—drunk and letting himself be talked into joining Scarlett and Anthony on the dance floor. He can relax. It’s over. He’s earned this night and this exhilarated relief.
He’s also aware that he’s garnering some stares. He grins at the starers loopily. Waves his arms.
Anthony shakes his head, in perfect time to the beat. Mourns, “Man, we have got to get you lessons or something…”
“Hey,” Chris says, a bit too loudly, “I can dance! I can totally dance! I did tap! And swing!”
“Yeah,” Anthony agrees, “we can see that…”
Scarlett adroitly lifts her drink out of the way of Chris’s left hand, and notes, “Robert Downey Junior’s taking video…”
Perhaps they don’t appreciate the tapdance moves, Chris decides loftily. No culture. He’s willing to concede that it’s been a few years, but even so.
“You’re very very cute,” Anthony says, “but I’m pretty sure you’re gonna regret seeing this on YouTube in the morning, man.”
“I’m awesome,” Chris declares. “You just don’t understand the dancing. I understand the dancing. All the dancing!”
“I tried,” Anthony says, apparently to the middle-aged actress navigating the dance floor behind him. “I tried.”
“Chris,” Scarlett asks, “did you by any chance…take anxiety meds…and then drink alcohol?”
“Maybe,” Chris admits sunnily, and unleashes a dashing spin that would’ve made his long-ago instructors proud but makes the nearby lead singer of the glam-metal band Thor and His Mighty Hammers inch away. Scarlett steadies him, with a muttered, “I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry…”
“Hey,” Chris says, stopping for a second, hugging her. “I’m okay. I swear.” He mostly is. He’s floating above it all right now, the nerve-wracking tension that’d been eating up his stomach from the inside nearly gone. The judgment’s been passed, the awards show’s over, and he’s made it through.
“Come here,” Scarlett says in her very familiar no-nonsense shut-up-and-listen-to-me-Chris voice, and drags him over to the bar and orders him to drink an entire glass of water. Chris obediently drinks. Taps his toes to the beat. Some sort of extra-wild Fall Out Boy mix now, heightened and spun out into dance-floor ecstasy, but he’s pretty sure it’s the song from Big Hero Six. He likes that one.
He gulps more water. Movement catches his eye. He looks.
The boy dancing—with Chris Hemsworth of the aforementioned Thor and the Obnoxiously Large Hammers, of all people, which Chris’s tipsy brain decides is some kind of treachery—is slim and gorgeously long-legged and long-waisted, with dark hair and fair skin that catches all the kaleidoscopic lights and soaks them up in pure joy. Chris can’t see his eyes from this distance, and immediately quite dreadfully needs to know what color they are, whether they’re summer-blue or treebark-brown or shimmering jade.
The boy’s a ridiculously adorable dancer. Half self-conscious, playing up the awkward-cute baby-gazelle style; half just laughing and giving up and being goofy, not worrying about where shoulders and elbows and silly hand-gestures might end up. Hemsworth’s looking at him with an expression Chris has only previously seen reserved on that blond-god countenance for heartmeltingly bumbling puppies. It’s someplace between let me wrap you up in protective blankets forever and let me devour you from head to toe.
Chris knows for a fact that Hemsworth is contentedly married and almost certainly has no intentions. Still. It’s that kind of expression.
And Chris can sympathize. Because, watching the boy move under the cacophonous lights, watching that complicatedly self-aware silly clumsiness, Chris is falling in love for the first time.
He nudges Scarlett. “Who’s that? With the thunder god?”
Scarlett, who knows everyone, glances that way. Says a name, smothered under thumping bass.
“Who?”
“Sebastian Stan!”
“…who?”
“Classical category, piano, nominated for best album earlier tonight, didn’t win? Romanian, I think.” She shrugs. “Pretty, if you like sweet and shy and likely to trip over sentences or run into furniture.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, some probably made-up story, he was playing at a club, Robert Redford came in, the kid got all starstruck and precious and tripped over his own piano bench, and Robert picked him up and dusted him off and introduced him to some producers? I don’t know, it’s what I heard.” She finishes off her drink. “Might be true. Look at him.”
Chris is. Chris can’t help but look at him.
“Aww,” Anthony Mackie coos, “eyes meeting across a crowded room? Man, Evans, I knew you were a hopeless romantic, didn’t realize this was actually a romance novel.”
“Shut up,” Chris says, not annoyed. Anthony laughs, not offended, and wanders off in search of another beer.
Chris glances back at the boy. And gets the shock of his life, literally staggering, making him wobble: the boy’s glancing over at him.
It’s a good shock. Like a first jump into a mountain pool, like surfacing under a waterfall. Cold clear water crackling all his nerve-endings into life, and the pounding rush of thunder in his ears.
The boy—Sebastian, he’s got a name, and it’s the best name in the universe, inarguably so: Sebastian Stan, alliterative and mellifluous on Chris’s tongue—ducks his head, might be blushing, might be embarrassed about getting caught looking; but then looks back through all the embarrassment and gives a tiny wave.
Sebastian’s waving. At him. With a combination of tentativeness and mischief that flings a net around Chris’s heart and scoops it up, dripping with excitement, caught forever.
Scarlett kicks him with only a minor amount of force, pretty high-heel to Chris’s ankle. “You’re so drooling.”
“I am not! …am I?”
“Only a little. Right there.”
“Ha. Very funny.”
“Want me to introduce you?”
“You know him?”
“Nope, but I’m good at meeting people, and you aren’t.”
“Please yes,” Chris implores. “Please help me. Make me look cool.”
“Ouch, helpless case, sorry.” She’s snickering at him. “He’s seen you dancing. Of course, we’ve just seen him dancing, too. So this’s sort of like Dirty Dancing, maybe, only terrible. You’re Jennifer Grey.”
“Thanks.” He’s distracted. A knot of intoxicated musicians and hangers-on has just eddied across the dance floor. Blocking his vision. Where’d Sebastian go?
“Did you lose him?”
“No!” He can’t find dark hair and endless legs anywhere. Not even when he hops up onto his toes, which he does, unashamed. The crowd pulses and writhes. “Can you—” And then he stops, because broad shoulders and blond hair have materialized next to them at the bar.
Hemsworth. Alone. Chris dives that way. “Hey, hi, ah—”
“Evans! Congratulations on the nomination, mate!” Hemsworth’s supernaturally nice, radiating sunshine and Australian surf-god cheer to everyone in his vicinity; normally Chris would be happy to bask in such undemanding uncomplicated friendship, but right now he’s got a more pressing concern.
He says, “Thank you, same to you, I, um—” Internal panic. No tactful way to ask: that boy you were dancing with, your beautiful friend, where’d he go? And why aren’t you with him? Why’d you leave him alone at a party full of drunken uninhibited celebrities?
Hemsworth crosses his arms. His biceps are bigger than Chris’s head. Chris spares all of one second to wonder if that’s why Thor and His Mighty Hammers always perform in sleeveless shirts, and then shakes himself back to the present. “Um…”
“You’re not here for me, are you?” Hemsworth sounds amused. Frolicking down-under sunshine in the accent. “He was lookin’ at you, anyway.”
“He was?”
“Yep. But—” One big hand unfolds and lands on Chris’s shoulder. “Listen, he’s a sweet kid, that one. He deserves someone who’ll be sweet to him, y’know?”
“I will,” Chris promises. Immediate and fervent. “I mean, I want to—I would—he waved at me—” Giving up: “I’d like to try.”
Hemsworth looks him up and down. Chris holds his breath. His heart’s racing. Earlier drinks, the taste of tequila and beer; the adrenaline of dance rhythms and eyes colliding; the apprehension and anxiety nipping at his bones.
Hemsworth nods, which seems to convey approval and leaves Chris feeling like he’s just passed five hundred deadly snake-pit-and-flying-spear heroic trials. “He got a message. Phone. Said he needed a minute or two. Said I could tell you that, if you asked. Said he’d be right outside, not going far, coming right back.”
“Is he okay?”
Pursed lips, a shrug of all those muscles, more approval. “Not sure. He said I didn’t need to come.”
“But you’re not sure.” The heroic trials aren’t over. The snakes’re hissing. Chris grits his teeth. He’s prone to panic attacks and overthinking and sweatiness around crowds, but he’ll damn well be a champion if Sebastian needs one. “And you know people can be—these kinds of parties get—what if he needs help? What kind of message?”
“Didn’t say.” Hemsworth pats him on the shoulder. “You’re as precious as a red-necked wallaby nibblin’ on a eucalyptus shoot.”
“I don’t even know what that means!”
“Oh, I know. Just messin’ with you, mate. Go on, then. Rescue your prince.”
“What the hell even is a red-necked wallaby,” Chris grumbles, and promptly leaves Scarlett to the perils of straight-faced Australian tall tales and impressive arms. He means thank you. He’s pretty sure they know.
Once out the ballroom door, he flounders, debating. He’d meant every word—he does want to help, he is worried, he wants to try. He’s not sure what specifically he can do, though. A message. Needing space. That’s all he’s got to go on. And Sebastian’s not in his immediate line of sight. His treacherous heart kicks its pace up a few notches.
He’ll leave if Sebastian seems to not want company, he honestly will, he just—needs to find Sebastian, first. He needs to know. That everything’s okay. That this other person, the person with the brilliant heartcapturing playful smile, is okay.
They’re on the third floor, and the windows shine huge and indigo, letting in cityscape electricity and nighttime shadows. The hotel echoes with reflected laughter and bass thumps and tipsy greetings, but the next hallway’s deserted, only Chris and pale sand-hued walls and an oddly geometric carpet. The pattern, picked out in green and gold, clashes cheerfully at him.
It’s not just him and the carpet, of course.
It’s him and the carpet and the slim strong-shouldered shape standing by one of those windows. The shape’s got long legs, and those shoulders slump slightly with an exhale, and one hand slips a mobile phone back into his pocket, and then both hands rub across his face, through his hair.
Sebastian’s not looking at Chris. Chris’s heart aches, not so much for the not looking as for the quiet resignation carried like an anvil in every weary muscle. He can feel the lead all the way across the yards of unfortunate carpet.
He takes a step forward because he can’t not, and then panics and tries to not take a step forward because oh God what if he’s intruding, what if the moment’s too private, what if, and consequently trips over his own confusion and windmills his arms frantically to stay upright.
He also hates himself and his second-guessing brain. More so when Sebastian turns, startled as a fawn at the crack of a branch, at a hunter’s footstep.
Blue eyes, Chris has time to think, pale ocean-blue and smoky, like campfires on a tropical beach, like watercolor splashes across cool parchment, like every overblown metaphor he could’ve ever dreamed up on a bad songwriting day. Like they’ve all come true—
And then Sebastian’s at his side, catching his arm, whippet-quick. The eyes’re even more breathtaking up close.
And Chris falls in love a second time, second and maybe fatal, no coming back from this one. Because: Sebastian Stan’s the kind of person who, when surprised out of melancholy, will step in to catch the ungainly intruding party with kind hands.
“I’m so sorry,” he flails. Despairing, desperate, head over heels. “I’m sorry, I just—you left the party, and you looked—I just wanted to—I’m so fuckin’ sorry, I’ll leave you alone forever, I just wanted to know if you were okay, not that you have to tell me, of course not, I didn’t mean—” He freezes, tongue tangled up mid-babble. Romanian, Scarlett’d said. Does Sebastian even speak English? Is a language catastrophe in progress? Is Chris going to have to try to learn Romanian and fail miserably and try again and go to seminars and buy translation software just so he can apologize to those seaspray eyes?
Looking at them, at the instant concern inches from his own gaze, he’s one hundred percent willing to do all of that. On the spot. Tonight.
Sebastian raises both eyebrows at him. “Was there more to that sentence? What did you mean?”
“…you speak—um. Of course you do. Not of course. I mean—I don’t even know what I mean. What was I saying. Oh God fuck me.”
“Really?”
“What—oh God.”
Sebastian actually laughs, soft and generous, tinged with something forlorn and hopeful as the city lights outside: glimmers of humanity in the night. “Only teasing. Come sit down.”
“Okay…”
Sebastian guides him over to a convenient bench. It beckons them with Hollywood-hotel glamor, curling lounge-style arms and deep green velvet cushions. It matches the dizzying carpet, and it’s proud of that.
“Okay,” Sebastian echoes, sitting down beside him. That hand’s not left Chris’s arm. The warmth’s soaking all the way through Chris’s suit and skin and suffusing his soul. Sebastian’s older than he’d thought originally, maybe only a couple of years off Chris’s own age; the enthusiasm and the coltish legs are deceptive, but those eyes carry unequivocal depth, etched in blue, outlined in tiny crinkles of secret merriment and graveness. “Are you all right? Can you breathe?”
“I’m sorry,” Chris attempts again. He wants Sebastian to talk more, wants to hear that voice—extraordinary, rippling layers of accent like hidden stories under waves, lazy splashes of New York and mysterious hints of stray European fairylands underneath—but he needs to say this. “You wanted to be alone. And I—”
“And you came out here to ensure that I was all right.” Sebastian smiles at him. Not the farflung animated beacon of earlier. This one’s smaller, touched with wonder. Chris wishes suddenly for his guitar, for paper and pen, for a moment to turn this moment into chords and melody, to hold it close. “Thank you.”
“Are you? All right.”
“Fine.” Sebastian shrugs, one-shouldered and casual as a cat, and Chris thinks of feline wariness, too. But Sebastian’s decided for whatever reason to trust him; Chris has no clue why blue eyes kindle and soften when they skim his face, but Sebastian goes on, “I wanted to come back in and find you. I would have, in another minute. I’m Sebastian, by the way. I’ve just realized we’re doing this completely backwards…”
“Backwards works for me,” Chris says promptly. “Chris Evans. Um. I sort of play the guitar.”
“A bit more than that.” Sebastian’s smile’s now gently mocking both of them: Chris for the understatement, himself for…what? Knowing Chris’s music? “I listened to ‘Ink and Skin’ quite a lot when it first came out, you know. The whole album, really; did you honestly write the third song about your dog?”
“I…like my dog?”
“I like dogs. I’ve never had one.” Sebastian curls a leg up under him on the bench, faces Chris more fully. “I like that song, too. Very genuine. Like an actual person wrote it, having fun.”
“I was,” Chris says. “I am. Right now. You said you would’ve—you’d’ve come back and looked for me. I totally would’ve been easy to find. For you. If you were, um. Finding.”
“I…wanted to. Yes.” Sebastian shuts his eyes, opens them. “You made me want to smile.”
“But,” Chris says, reaching for his hand, threading their fingers together—daring, but Sebastian touched him first, wanted to touch him first, hasn’t stopped touching him—“but that’s how I felt. About you.”
Sebastian leans in. Close. Eyes serious but sparkling. “Clearly not a coincidence.”
“I think I love the way you dance,” Chris says. “The way you smile. What happened? If you want to tell me.”
Sebastian sighs, but doesn’t move away. They’ve only just met. They’re sitting together on a hotel bench at a distressingly expensive awards-circus afterparty that they’re both presently missing. The question should feel too intimate, too personal. It doesn’t.
Like they’ve always been meant to be right here. To be holding hands on tremendously ugly hotel furniture in the night. The city twinkles at them and their story.
“My mother texted me.” Sebastian’s voice is an lonely flag, a murmur, a dandelion-wisp in the wind. “She meant to be here tonight—she and my stepfather had planned to come, even if the classical categories aren’t really the big draws…they wanted to cheer for me, just being here…”
“They didn’t make it?” Chris squeezes that hand in his. Long fingers, longer than his, but more slender; Chris has broader palms. He likes the way Sebastian’s hand feels in his. He likes the way they fit. “Did something happen?”
“My father…my stepfather, though he’s been my father for—God, years…” Sebastian sighs again. Glances at their joined hands, as if he’s finding strength. “He has Alzheimer’s. Fairly advanced. I thought—we thought he’d been doing well, but yesterday evening…they couldn’t travel, let’s say. To summarize. My mother texted me just now to say they’re proud of me and I—” His voice shivers, splinters, breaks: snapping woodwinds and reeds.
“Oh,” Chris says, hurting for him, understanding maybe a little why Sebastian wanted to be alone, why the love in that message’d been so kindly brutal, why no words can sum up the bitter and the sweet. He can’t know, not exactly, but he can hear it. “Oh, yeah, I get that. About—sort of about being okay, and also kinda not?”
“Yes,” Sebastian whispers. And then bites his lip, looks down, flushes pink. “I honestly did mean to come back in and ask you to dance with me. I don’t know why I just told you this. Everything.”
“Because I want to know,” Chris answers, equally hushed, equally true, “and because I’d’ve said yes if you’d asked. Still would.”
“Would you?” Sebastian looks up. Smile back in those eyes: armor, but with chinks and gaps that he’s not hiding, letting Chris see. “Now?”
“Hell yeah I would. Come on.” He hops to his feet. Still clinging to that hand in his. “Right here. In this hallway. It’s totally a dance floor.”
Sebastian considers the carpet, then considers Chris with an expression that suggests immense skepticism; but what he in fact says is, “This dance hall’s apparently been decorated by insane leprechauns,” and he says this while getting up, and Chris grins ear to ear.
Insane leprechauns. Awesome.
“Dance with me,” he suggests, and then starts humming, because the tune’s popped into his head. It has nothing at all to do with the Top Forty rhythms persistently emanating from the ballroom behind them. Older. Incongruous. He doesn’t worry about that.
Sebastian listens for a second or two. Then laughs. “Orleans? ‘Dance With Me’? Are you seriously trying to woo me with a song once performed on The Brady Bunch?”
“I want to be your partner,” Chris quotes at him, tugging him closer, some sort of uncategorizable part waltz, part swing, part nothing at all, bodies aligned and moving to a beat they’re making up together, “can’t you see…”
“The music is just starting,” Sebastian jumps in, proving that he does in fact know the lyrics just as well as Chris does, “night is calling, and…”
“…I am falling,” Chris finishes, and Sebastian smiles again and lets Chris dip him and catch him, long limbs and sudden laughter and trust under the hallway-light glow.
Later, after the dance, after that first dance, they end up in Sebastian’s hotel room. It’s smaller than Chris’s suite, but Chris’s suite has Mackie and Scarlett in the other rooms, so Sebastian’s it is, after a rapid-fire text to let them know where he’s gone and matching thumbs-up replies in return. A Starbucks cup’s decorating the room’s only table, and scarves and skinny jeans’ve exploded across the bed, and it’s wonderful. Sebastian gets gloriously flustered—“I’d’ve cleaned!”—and Chris waves a hand in an wordless everything’s perfect, you’re perfect, this is perfect gesture and shoves the jeans away, despite how hard they try to cling to his hand and participate. Sebastian does an astonishing lovely not-quite-laughing lip-bite at that, so Chris swoops in and kisses him soundly and replaces the nibbles with his own.
He should be nervous about this—sex, falling into bed together, falling into bed with a near-stranger at a music-industry afterparty—but he’s not. Not even a question. Just rightness. Pure and true.
He is nervous that Sebastian’ll think it’s something less on his part, something that’s only the night and a random hook-up. He starts to say, “This isn’t—I mean, I want—I want to wake up with—”
Sebastian hooks thumbs into the waistband of Chris’s suit pants, and says, meeting his gaze, “Me, too.”
They’re as naturally matched in bed as they are on a dance floor. This means that Sebastian smacks his hand rather badly on the headboard at one point, and Chris manages to elbow him in the stomach. They don’t care. They don’t care at all. Sebastian wraps both legs around Chris’s waist and gasps “Yes, that, there, more—!” in multiple languages, and Chris moves inside him and Sebastian moves with him and the rest of the world fades away. It’s them, and it’s real.
In the aftermath, Chris flops down atop him—not on purpose; his arms’ve given out—and pants, “That was…wow…you’re wow…tell me if I’m too heavy…fuckin’ wow…”
“I like…feeling…your weight on me,” Sebastian retorts between exhausted exuberant breaths, hair sticking to his face, cock softening between them and delicious against Chris’s stomach, “and you are also…very wow…Chris?”
“Definitely wow. Yeah?”
“I like dancing with you,” Sebastian tells him, which is when Chris falls in love for the third time that night, just in case he somehow hadn’t before: third time and that’s the charm, or maybe Sebastian’s the charm, the enchantment, the magic he’s never known he needed. Blue eyes and that smile and an open heart, and Chris is wholeheartedly in love.
He whispers, “I like…dancing…with you too,” innuendo firmly in place. Sebastian laughs like sunrise, like the dawn rapidly approaching, lying under him and with him and holding him.
They fall asleep together. They wake up entwined. Sebastian smiles. Chris grins back. The hotel sheets—also green, happy as emeralds and good luck—smirk messily.
The next year, when they accept the Grammy for best collaboration, for Sebastian’s classical piano and Chris’s classic-rock guitar weaving harmonies of key and string, they run up on stage hand in hand. Chris’s mother and brother and Sebastian’s parents, sitting together in the audience, cheer.