Work Text:
*
"If I were back on the farm, I'd give you a whack with this." Jamie's - he's - angry. He's really angry. His face is hot.
"What, seriously?" laughs Adam, twirling the hammer in one hand. "You'd bend me over the counter?"
"Yeah," Jamie says. And Adam - does. He just turns around and rests his elbows on the counter, and looks up at Jamie sidelong. It's ten thirty at night, the crew's packed up and gone home, and the broken steel scale - the one Jamie had spent the better part of a weekend balancing - is still spinning slightly in the middle of the floor. They've been arguing about how to weight it all day.
"Hey man, if it'll make you feel better, give me ten of what you've got," Adam says. He's still laughing, eyes big.
Jamie picks up the long ruler lying on the counter, and wraps his fingers around it. It feels good in his hands. Before he can think about it, he draws it back and whacks Adam's behind with the flat edge, hard. Adam jerks forward and yells, and Jamie does it again quickly, kind of messing up the stroke. This time, Adam doesn't yell; he sort of lurches forward again, presses his forehead to the table and breathes in hard through his nose. Jamie gives him a few seconds, but he doesn't move, so Jamie hits him again. Jamie watches Adam's shoulders bunch and loosen under his t-shirt.
"Six," Jamie says. Whack. "Five. Four."
When he finishes, they're both sweating, and there's no sound but their breathing. Jamie puts the ruler down on the table. He feels calm, the pressure inside his head is gone. Adam is taking slow, deep, quiet breaths, and is lying draped across the counter, still for the first time all day.
"Are you okay?" Jamie says.
Adam shifts, dragging first one arm back, then the other, like he doesn't have enough energy to co-ordinate both at once. He raises up on one elbow, tugs off his glasses, and wipes his face on the shoulder of his t-shirt. His nose is kind of snotty. Jamie pulls out his pocket handkerchief and takes it over to him, holds it in front of his face. Adam blinks at it. Jamie presses it to his face, careful. "Blow," he says. Adam does. Jamie folds the handkerchief and puts it in his pocket, then lifts Adam up by the shoulders. Adam winces as he stands upright, and gingerly touches his behind. He rubs the back of his head, rubs his fingers through his buzzed hair. His eyes droop closed for a moment.
"I'm driving you home," Jamie says.
*
In the pickup, Adam is quiet, watching the lights slide by out the window. He doesn't drum his hands on the counter, he doesn't tap his feet, he doesn't keep up a running commentary on anything they did that day. When Jamie pulls up in Adam's drive, he's asleep. Jamie turns off the engine and sits with him for a minute, in the dark.
"Adam," he says at last. He reaches over and touches his shoulder. Adam grunts and raises his head from the window. Jamie sees the wet reflection of his eyes blink and shine.
"We're at your place," he says. "Go to bed. We'll start again tomorrow."
"Okay," Adam says. His voice is soft, kind of husky. "Night, Jamie."
Jamie drives for a little while, lets the sounds of the road hum through him, the chain of cause and effect from his neurons to the muscles in his hands, to the wheel, to the drive shaft, to the friction of the wheels on the road. He likes his pickup. He goes home and sleeps for nine hours without dreaming.
*
Jamie isn't sure, the next day, how to act, but Adam is just the same as always - better, actually, and he finishes the wire frame they'd thought would take two days in twelve hours - so Jamie is just the same as always too. Adam's limping a little bit, but Jamie's sure he didn't really hurt him, and he doesn't want to talk to Adam about it, so he pretends not to notice, and the next day Adam's fine. They fix the scales, they bust the myth, and things go on just fine for a couple of weeks. Then, on a Wednesday, Adam burns his hand on the plastic vacuum mould, messes up a batch of ballistics gel, tries for five hours without success to bend a length of steel pipe in exactly the correct angles to fit inside the pump they found at the junkyard before discovering it's the wrong thickness for the heat conductivity they need anyway, and in the middle of an argument about the best kind of glue to use to stick the feathers to the baseball, Adam throws Jamie's wrench on the floor so hard it ricochets up and hits him in the knee.
"God damn it, fuck, Jamie, fuck off," Adam yells, hopping on one leg. He slams his hand down on the desk. "Shit!" He's bright red in the face.
"Just calm down," Jamie says. When Adam gets like this it makes Jamie tense. It doesn't last very long, but Adam's pretty unpredictable when he's mad. And he's loud, and he breaks stuff, and sometimes he can hurt himself. Jamie usually tries to steer him towards the office and leave him alone so Adam can let off steam without any equipment around, but today Adam's in the workshop with tools everywhere, and Jamie has to keep an eye on him, even though his just being there always seems to make Adam even madder.
"I will not fucking calm down! How can you be so - so fucking - why don't you just - I'm fine, I'm fine, give it back, you asshole, I'm going to fix that fucking pipe -"
Jamie holds the wrench out of reach. Adam sort of lunges around him and reaches for it, but stops shy of actually pushing him. "You'll break it."
"I will not break it, you superior sack of shit - okay, fine, you don't want to give me that, I'll get the other one."
"Adam." Jamie follows him, jogs behind him. "Stop being such a baby. Sit down before you hurt yourself."
"Go fuck yourself."
Suddenly, Adam trips on a bucket and goes sprawling. Jamie nearly trips over him, and instead drops to his knees and holds Adam down when he tries to get up, twists his arm up behind his back and pushes him against the floor.
"Fuck," Adam wheezes, and twists. "Fuck you, Jamie, let me up."
Jamie's stronger than Adam. He presses and presses down, until Adam's flat against the concrete floor. Adam strains and grunts against him, then tries to flip his legs back, so Jamie straddles him, settles his knees against Adam's thighs and bears down. He ignores Adam's heels kicking against his lower back, and concentrates on keeping Adam still, holding him so that he can't wrench his shoulder or something. Adam struggles for a couple of minutes, his arms cording against Jamie's hands, his breath coming short and sharp. Jamie can tell when he gives up; he doesn't go limp all at once, but he slows down, kicking and wriggling a few more times like a pinned snake, and finally goes still. Jamie keeps him pressed to the floor, carefully shifting his weight without relaxing his grip, to ease up on Adam's knees. The silence that rings around them and in Jamie's head is already familiar.
Adam's chest rises and falls, so his shoulders brush against Jamie's. He lets out a shaky breath, and sawdust rises where he sighs against the workshop floor. Jamie twists his arm up a little higher. Adam makes a noise. Jamie pushes up further, as far as he can without wrenching Adam's shoulder or breaking his arm, and he holds him until Adam is shaking underneath him, somewhere between laughing and crying, keeping up a whispered litany of, "Ow, ow, ow, jesus christ that hurts," but he doesn't ask Jamie to stop. Jamie keeps him like that for fifteen minutes by the wall-clock, until his own shoulders are burning with the effort.
"I'm going to let you go now," he says finally, and when he does, Adam collapses forward and eases his arm down and around with a groan.
"How're you doing?" Jamie says, sitting back and getting off Adam quickly, careful of his knees. The front of his shirt is damp with both of their sweat. Adam flaps one of his hands, then rolls onto his back, after a couple of false starts; Jamie thinks he's going to say something, but he just covers his eyes with his arm and just lies there. After some hesitation, Jamie goes to the kitchen. He stays out there for a while. When he comes back, Adam's gone home.
*
The next time Adam goes red in the face and starts yelling and throwing stuff when it's just the two of them around, there are handcuffs on the table beside him, so Jamie grabs them and cuffs Adam to the workbench.
"Hey!" Adam yells, his voice cracking. He tugs his wrist several times, staring every time the chain comes taut. "Jamie! Oh my god, you jerk!" He starts to laugh, which is what Adam does mostly all the time whenever anything happens. When he first met him, Jamie just thought he was stupid, or something. Now, he's beginning to tell the difference between when Adam laughs because he thinks something's funny, and when he's surprised, or freaked out, or mad.
"I'm going to keep you here until you calm down," Jamie says.
"I got to - " Adam says, looking around helplessly at the glass panels layed out around the workshop, and tugging at his wrist. "I - hey, where are you - hey! Jamie!"
He goes to get the nylon rope that doesn't leave splinters. When he's come back, Adam has sunk to sit down on the workshop floor. Jamie ties Adam up carefully to the bench where he's sitting, taking his time on the knots. Adam's swearing for the first part, then starts to push against the knots like he's testing them instead of fighting them. When he's mostly immobilized, his breathing gets deep and slow, and his face goes concentrated, the way it does when he's really caught up in a project. Jamie's seen Adam work for fifteen hours straight on a single thing, when he's making something; he's like Jamie, like that. It's about the only thing they have in common.
"God," Adam breathes, and twists against the rope again, so hard Jamie's worried for a second that he'll dislocate his shoulder, but the rope holds Adam steady and still.
"No gag?" Adam says, a little hoarsely.
Jamie thinks about it. He doesn't think they have anything clean enough, except for the spare dishclothes in the kitchen, but they're too small to tie around Adam's head, and he doesn't want to stuff one in Adam's mouth.
"Not if you're good," Jamie says.
Jamie doesn't leave him there alone - it isn't safe - so he tidies up the shop and finishes up on the lathe. When Jamie thinks to pay attention again, he finds Adam has stopped struggling at all, and is leaning his forehead against the wood, looking out at nothing. Jamie walks into Adam's line of vision, and Adam blinks, refocuses softly.
"Hey," Adam croaks.
Jamie gets the glass of water he's had ready and holds it to Adam's mouth, and Adam slurps at it. He gets water droplets in his beard and on his t-shirt. Jamie rubs his fingers to check his circulation, then leaves him another ten minutes. When he unties him, Adam staggers into the office and falls asleep on the couch.
When he doesn't come back for a couple hours, Jamie assumes he's gone home, but Adam comes back out to the workshop just as Jamie's about to set down his tools and lock up. It's dark outside by then, and silent, and the creak of the door makes Jamie jump.
"Hi," Adam says. He's got pink crease marks all down the side of his face, and his hair is sticking up every which way. He looks sleepy and private, and looking at him makes Jamie feel suddenly uncomfortable, so he focuses on arranging his toolbox.
"What's up?"
"Uh," says Adam. "Hey look, man, are we talking about this? Like, I'm not sure this is part of a normal working relationship."
"We had a normal working relationship?" Jamie says, because it's the only thing he can think of to say. Adam scrunches up his face and laughs a little, without smiling. Jamie hates it when he does that. He tries again. "It's not as if we do normal work."
"Look, man, okay," Adam says. "You don't want to talk about it, we don't have to talk about it. I just - you know, I'm just noting for the record, I am pretty sure this isn't normal."
Jamie shrugs. He closes all the drawers and locks the top. "If it works."
Adam laughs again. "The Jamie Hyneman management philosophy." He does a silly voice. "Corporal punishment in the workplace - it works!"
Jamie thinks that it doesn't seem to stop Adam doing stupid shit or losing his cool, and so it doesn't actually seem to work, in the traditional sense of punishment as deterrent, and he's not even sure that it is punishment, since Adam seems to kind of like it, but he holds himself back from mentioning that. Adam's yawning again into the back of his hand. Jamie can hear the hush of the rain on the roof and on the tarmac outside.
"You okay to drive home?"
"See, this is what I like about you, Jamie," Adam says, and Jamie can't tell if he's serious or not. "You really care."
"I'm a real considerate boss," Jamie says, and, as an afterthought, daring, thwacks the screwdriver down into his palm with a slap. Adam laughs, a real laugh, and Jamie feels the warm glow of getting it right.
*
It's just easier to deal with Adam this way. It does work. Jamie knocks Adam around with a table tennis paddle, a bamboo cane, a plastic fan blade, a remote control plane aerial. He gets sort of inventive. He ties him to the work table, gags him with duct tape, straps him into an airplane cockpit chair, and hangs him from the ceiling in a net for an hour, clamps his wrists in front of him, one night, and puts long red lines across his back and shoulders with an extendable tape measure.
"Hey, we could count your freckles out like this," he says, later. He's helping Adam tug off his t-shirt, which is spotted with little dots of blood across the back. Jamie sponges across the welts with cotton wool and iodine as Adam hisses. It's the first time Jamie's drawn blood on Adam; he's very careful, but the tape's edges were sharper than he was expecting. It's almost like all the times Jamie's patched Adam up after he's hurt himself in the shop, except Adam is still all docile and isn't complaining at all. It's actually a little eerie. Smack him up a little, Jamie has discovered, and he goes as limp and yielding as ballistics gel. Jamie sometimes imagines when they do this, in the silence and dark of the workshop late at night, he can see right through Adam's skin, right through his whole body. It almost makes Jamie want to talk. "We could just, you know, make some grid lines, map them out."
Adam chuckles. "That's - a really weird idea," he mutters, his voice catching, and he drops his head forward as Jamie swipes the cotton up to wash a cut at the base of his neck.
On impulse, Jamie touches the skin there with the tip of his finger, strokes along above one of the welts, where Adam's skin is very hot, and very soft. The muscles in Adam's shoulders jump a little in a shiver. Jamie does it again, and Adam arches back a little against his hand, makes a hoarse noise in the back of his throat. Jamie is conscious, for the first time, of how this, what they're doing, is kind of like sex, a little, or it's somewhere in the same ball park.
"Okay," Adam says. His voice always sounds a little different, after Jamie's been hitting him. "Thanks. Help me back on with this?"
Jamie tugs the t-shirt down over Adam's head, careful of his glasses, and over the cuts on his back. He runs his fingers over the soft cotton, down over Adam's back, careful not to press on the scratches.
"Oh," Adam says, and his eyes flutter closed for a minute. "That burns."
Jamie pulls away. "Sorry."
"No, it's actually -" Adam says. "Not bad-burns. It's weird, but it doesn't feel bad, you know? It's like, somewhere between hurting and feeling really good. Do you think it's because of, like, the nerves being really spread out? Try it again, will you?"
Interested enough to push back his unease at touching Adam like this, Jamie spreads his palm flat over Adam's back and fans his fingers wide. He presses down a little. One of his fingers is directly over one of the band-aids, he can feel the t-shirt sliding against it. Adam's head drops forward.
"That's - yeah," he croaks, and squirms a little, pushes back against Jamie's palm. Jamie's breath comes short, suddenly, frighteningly, and he backs up fast.
He says, "Okay, you're all patched up," and gets up. Adam blinks at him. "I'm going home."
"Okay," Adam says, and rubs his fingers through his hair. "Night, Jamie."
In the pickup, driving home, Jamie has to acknowledge to himself that Adam's right. He and Adam don't have a normal working relationship. That means he doesn't know what they have. He really hates not knowing things.
*
They're out in the desert, shooting a bullet into the air to see what happens. Jamie was interested in the physics of the experiment, back in the shop, but the myth itself is kind of stupid; or at least, it involves them walking around in the desert looking for a bullethole, which is really stupid. Adam seems excited about it, but Adam's always excited. Jamie's on edge, a little; there are a lot of people out there with them, a lot of variables, bullets flying around, and unpredictable winds above ground level. They all crouch beneath the blast screens that look like little airplane cockpits.
"Clear!" Jamie yells, when it's safe. His little booth is awkward, but he twists around to watch Adam unfold himself from under the screen and stand up in the sun, because he's kind of worried that he hurt Adam, yesterday.
"What?" he says, laughing. "Do I have something on my face?"
"No," Jamie says. "Just that thing with a couple of holes in. For smelling."
Adam cracks up, even though it's dumb, and Jamie smiles. His chest feels tight.
"Let's go find some bullets!" Adam says, and Jamie nods. Adam trots out across the cracked ground, until he's just one black, shimmering outline next to the others, but when Jamie looks over towards them, he can still tell which one Adam is. Adam's wearing a white t-shirt and a black jacket, and under them both, he still has the bruises Jamie made on him.
All of a sudden, Jamie is all hot and bothered, thinking about that. He has to go and walk out on his own, before he can get himself under control, and it puts him out of sorts for the rest of the day.
*
Jamie hadn't ever noticed how many kinky sex jokes Adam made while they were on camera. Suddenly, he seems to be doing it all the time, and it gets under Jamie's skin in a way it didn't before, because he doesn't know if Adam was always doing it, and he never noticed before, or if Adam's only just started doing it. He doesn't know which he'd prefer. Adam's all, doing silly voices, "I don't know what the hell that attachment does, but I think I'd only try it in the privacy of my own home," and, "Jamie, if you wore that to some clubs downtown, you would become famous in a whole other way," and, "It's not every day me and Jamie roll around in a tub of corn syrup - only Tuesdays." One day he makes J.P. laugh so much he nearly clocks Tory with the boom mike.
It makes Jamie feel kind of hot and uncomfortable, and Adam gets wind of that in about five seconds, because he always knows how to wind Jamie up, and does it even more. It's like the guy can't go five minutes on camera without trying to get Jamie to tie him up with something or smack him on the ass, and it takes all Jamie's effort not to get all wound up while he's at work and on camera. Jamie goes around for a couple of weeks with a constant prickle up his back, irritation that he just can't shake, and it makes him mad, because it makes him want to not stay the extra hours at the shop like he usually does, and there are only so many chores he can do at home. He cleans out the garage. He services the air conditioning, even though it doesn't really need it. He organizes his journals, which have got a little out of order. Then, one evening, the fifth one in a row Jamie's snuck out early, Adam calls him at home.
"Hey," Adam says. Jamie knows it's Adam, but he says, "Who's that?" just to piss him off, because he doesn't like it when people call him at home, and Adam knows that.
"It's me," Adam says.
"Who's me?" Jamie says, and Adam's breath goes staticky in Jamie's ear.
"Jamie, I need - look, could you just - shit, I've screwed up this goddamn piece of crap again, I can't get the mould to fit, and - I can't concentrate -" he breaks off into a laugh. It's one of the bad ones. Jamie can hear something in the background, the radio. He doesn't let them play it in the shop, it's distracting.
Adam says, "Look, I'll break something if it'll make you come out here."
"That's not much of an incentive," Jamie says. He hears a noise, looks down, and finds his car keys are in his hand.
"Don't make me ask, man," Adam says. "This is fucking weird enough as it is, you think I don't get that?"
"Say please," Jamie says. He grips the keys hard in his fingers, watches them turn white.
The static burns in his ear again as Adam breathes out. "Please," he says. "Please, Jamie, pretty please with cherries on."
Jamie locks his front door and gets in the car. When he's halfway out of the driveway, he stops the car, gets out and goes back into the house to get his other belt.
*
"What did you do?" Jamie says. The belt is rolled up in his back pocket, digging into his ass. It's uncomfortable and probably looks really stupid from behind, but he didn't want Adam to see it right away in case that wasn't what he meant. He isn't really sure how to handle this.
Adam looks like crap, he's all-over shaky with whatever it is gets him sometimes, pacing up and down and he can hardly look Jamie in the eye. "Oh, god, Jamie, don't fuck around with me, I'm going out of my mind here, and I can't even believe I called you, just -" he puts his face in his hands, then kicks hard at one of the tools lying on the floor, so it spins across the concrete.
"That's enough," says Jamie. "You're going to make yourself sick. Put your hands on the bench. Keep still."
Adam just does it, drops right down over the bench with a huge sigh. There's an extra-large band-aid on his arm that wasn't there this morning.
"I just can't leave you alone for five minutes," Jamie says, unwinding the belt around his fingers. He turns off the radio, and the silence echoes. Adam looks up at him quickly, his eyes going from the belt to Jamie, then back again. Jamie hesitates.
"This is - you meant this, right?"
"Yeah," Adam says, staring back at the bench again. Jamie notices that his fingers are pressed so hard against the wood that all the fingernails are white. "Yeah. Jamie. Come on, man."
Tension loosens in his chest. "Say please," he says, because Adam's been really pissing him off, and he wants to draw this out a little.
Adam drops his head forward onto his hands, like he's given up all at once, and groans, "Please."
The slaps ring from the hard ceiling and the concrete floor, and Adam presses his forehead to the bench and groans out loud at every single one. With every swing, Jamie feels his own body loosen up a little more.
After Jamie says, "One," and winds the belt tight around his fist to stop himself hitting Adam any more, Adam sags onto the bench. After a moment, he puts his face into the crook of his elbow, and takes a few sharp, wet breaths.
"It's a physiological reaction to a release of tension." His voice is all cracked, and muffled by his arm. "I'm not actually crying right now."
"Okay," says Jamie. He's sweating from the workout, and his shoulders feel good. He looks at the band-aid on Adam's inner arm, right where the skin is thinnest; it's probably a burn from Adam welding without his gloves again. He feels a surge of - something. Annoyance. Adam doesn't take care of himself. "Did you even eat today?"
Adam pulls himself up and wipes his face. "Oh. Jesus. You know, actually, I don't think I've eaten since ten this morning. Oh my god, that was really stupid." He laughs weakly into his hand, and covers his face again. "Christ, could you just get me a granola bar or something so I can stop being so embarrassing?"
"Get in the car," Jamie says. "We're going to the In'N'Out."
Adam starts to laugh, and doesn't stop until about fifteen minutes later when Jamie shoves a burger at him through the pickup window and tells him to eat it. Even then, he's kind of laughing between the first few bites, until he swallows, closes his eyes and groans. A few crumbs drop to the floor, and Jamie winces. He never lets people eat in the pickup, but he's making an exception just this once, although he isn't really sure why. He just didn't think Adam should go anywhere.
"Oh my god, Jamie, I love you," he says, and eats the rest of the burger with his eyes closed, which is lucky, because Jamie can't stop watching him, and it must look strange.
*
Jamie drives him home. When they're out on the highway, Adam says, "You know you can call me too, right? If you want to let off a little steam. You don't have to wait for me to ask."
Jamie blinks, then laughs. "What, just call you up and say, hey Adam, I want to smack you around?"
"Sure!"
Adam isn't joking, Jamie realizes. He steers the pickup into the right lane carefully, frowning.
"But how would I know if you're freaking out about something?"
"What?"
"You're the one who needs calming down."
"What the heck are you talking about?" Adam turns in his seat. "Look, just stop the car and look at me."
"I don't need to stop the car."
"Stop the fucking car, Jamie!"
Adam's yelling, so Jamie pulls over before Adam can do something stupid. He turns off the engine. They sit by the road, with the white and red shadows of cars going home sliding across the dashboard.
"Well, we've stopped."
"Don't tell me you don't like this," Adam says.
"Sitting in the car?"
Adam smacks the dashboard. "Can you just stop being obtuse for five seconds and have an adult conversation with me about the fact that you like tieing me up and hitting me?"
"I don't -" Jamie starts to say, then stops. He needs to think. Adam's staring at his face, and he wishes he were wearing his sunglasses.
"I don't fucking believe this," says Adam. "You have a hang-up about it now?"
"I don't have a hang-up," Jamie says, annoyed. "I just don't want to talk about it."
"Just tell me you like it," Adam says, and folds his arms. "We are not leaving until you say, 'Yes Adam, I like hitting you.' "
"Don't do that."
"What?"
"Do impressions of me. I don't like it."
"That was my normal voice, Jamie. You can tell when I'm doing impressions of you because I have a moustache then, look -"
Adam does that stupid thing where he wiggles his fingers over his mouth. Jamie grabs his hand and pulls it down. Adam stares at him. A car goes by, and the white glow lights up Adam's face, but Jamie still can't really tell what he's thinking. They're holding hands, he realizes.
"I didn't mean to cut you," he says. "The other day."
"I know that," Adam says softly. He squeezes Jamie's fingers a little, and little sparks of warmth settle in Jamie's chest. Then Adam lets go, and rubs the back of his neck. "Look, just take me home."
Adam falls asleep, curled against the pickup window. Jamie thinks for a little more, in the silence.
He shakes him at last, gently, when they pull up in Adam's drive. "Hey, Adam."
Adam wakes up, rubs his face, and smiles. "Oh, hey, was I asleep?"
"Yeah," Jamie says. "Go to bed."
Halfway back to his own place, Jamie pulls over again, and gets out his phone. He calls Adam. It takes seven rings.
"Yeah?"
"It's Jamie."
"I know."
"I like hitting you, Adam."
There's silence for a moment. Then Adam says, "Okay, Jamie. Wow."
"When you piss me off."
"Which is all the time, right?" Jamie thinks he can hear him smiling.
"Most of the time."
Adam laughs, a rush of breath and noise in Jamie's ear.
"You happy now?"
"I - yeah. Thanks. Can I go to sleep now?"
"Sure!" Jamie says, and Adam laughs again.
"Night, Jamie."
"Night."
*
They don't talk that much the next day, or the day after that, but then, on camera, Adam suggests that Jamie tries shooting the rubber pellet from the gravy gun at Adam's ass, so then they have to do it.
"We should do a practice run," Jamie says to Adam, when they're out of earshot. He's not sure he can aim the gun that well and he wants to try it with the guards first, that they don't use on camera because they look stupid or something, but when Adam jerks his head once and says, "Okay - yeah. Yeah. That's - good, okay," he realizes what it sounded like. He doesn't tell Adam to put on the guards. Adam's gone a little red. He braces against the workshop table, laughs, and says, "Okay."
Jamie automatically nearly recites the test stats - gravy gun, twenty feet at Adam's ass, shot one. But it isn't a real test. Instead he says, "Stand still," and he aims and fires. The pellet snaps across the room. Adam staggers forward, makes a long, high noise through his nose, then puts his hands on his knees and says, "Oh, man, that stung."
An answering tug in Jamie's stomach takes him across the room. "You okay?"
Adam looks up at him and grins. His pupils are really big, and he looks kind of spaced out. "Yeah. You ready to do that on camera?"
"I'm ready if you are," Jamie says. But when he shoots the gun at Adam on camera with four other people in the room, Adam arches back, graceless and lovely, and Jamie has to look away.
*
Jamie's been watching Adam get more and more worked up all day, and he's been getting more and more antsy, waiting for everyone to go home. He's working on some plans, but he can't really concentrate; the second he hears something crash to the floor in the shop and Adam's curse, he's out there, getting in Adam's face. His heart is beating really fast.
"I'm trying to work, stop that," he says.
"Yeah, Hyneman, make me," Adam says, and Jamie takes three strides towards him, grabs him and spins him around, then pins his wrists in the small of his back and twists his arm up. Adam huffs a laugh.
"Stop laughing," Jamie says to the back of his neck. He pulls him backwards, forcing Adam to keep up with him so his arm doesn't come out of his socket, but careful not to let him trip. He yanks him up against the exposed piping, which Jamie knows is strong enough to take Adam's weight and then some, because they used it to stabilize a rocket-powered desk chair earlier in the year, and he ties Adam's wrists to it with the twine he has in his pocket. He rubs Adam's hands to check the circulation when he's done, running his fingers along Adam's, across Adam's palms and wrists. Adam's hands aren't still even now, even when he's tied up; they twitch and flex against Jamie's as Adam strains against the twine, and his head falls back against the pipe. He grabs Jamie's thumb for a moment and squeezes, then lets go.
"Okay," he says, breathily. "That was surprisingly effective. God, you're really strong."
"You like that?" Jamie says. He means it to be a factual question, but out loud it seems kind of flirty.
"Yes, I do, in fact, like it," Adam says. He has his eyes closed. "Oh, god. Oh, fuck, that's better. Christ, Jamie, hit me or something."
Jamie kisses him. On the mouth, nothing fancy. Adam makes a noise that buzzes against his lips, then kisses him back, and strains forward when Jamie steps back, shaken. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. It's tingling.
"Of course you'd wait until I was tied up to do that," croaks Adam, and he lets his head fall back again with a dull clang.
"Uh," says Jamie. His chest feels tight and his breath is coming fast and his face is hot, and he doesn't - "That was an accident."
"Jamie," says Adam to the ceiling, "Please kiss me again. Pretty please with cherries and bells, and, goddamn chemical reactions and coke and mentos and little robot Santas -"
"Okay," Jamie says, and kisses him again. Things get a little out of hand, and he winds up jerking Adam off in his pants while he's still tied to the pipe, and Adam makes all kinds of stupid noises and squirms and gasps against Jamie's shoulder and licks his neck. After, with their sweaty foreheads pressed together and Adam so close Jamie can't see his face, Adam murmurs, "Jamie, man, I have got to tell you, my crush on you is totally out of control right now."
"You have a crush on me?" says Jamie, feeling kind of stupid and turned on. "Since when?"
"Oh, you know, nineteen ninety eight," Adam breathes, "Look, although that was, like, number five on my top ten sexual fantasies involving you, could you please untie me now?"
Jamie reaches around him to untie the knot by feel, and Adam sighs and pushes himself against Jamie's chest as Jamie works. "I want to blow you," he says, and once his hands are free, he sort of bears Jamie down to the floor, laughing, all arms and legs. It's like hugging a giant puppy.
"Did you just call me a puppy? Man, I knew you were into dogs, but -" Adam laughs, unfastening Jamie's pants and tugging them open.
"Why don't you just put that mouth to good use," Jamie says, embarrassed. He feels hot, and he knows his face must be bright red. He wants - he wants Adam. He doesn't know what to do with his hands.
Adam looks up at him, grinning. "I will bet you a thousand dollars that you have wanted to say that to me for years."
"No bet," Jamie says, shivering as Adam touches him.
It's weird, doing this in the workshop, lying on the concrete floor with the lights high above them. He thinks about the dirt getting on his clothes only until Adam mutters, "Easy, come on, Jamie," and he closes his eyes and lets his hands settle in Adam's hair, like he's always wanted to.
*
Jamie drives Adam home, after, kind of sore and with unnerving warmth curling through him, so that he feels good, even though he's already thinking that what they just did was really stupid. He's forgotten that about sex, the way it makes him get stupid. He keeps hoping Adam will fall asleep so he won't ask Jamie how he feels or something, but Adam doesn't fall asleep, even though he's nestled up against the window. He keeps looking over at Jamie, like he's going to say something, but he doesn't, and it makes Jamie's stomach feel even tighter than it already does. In the driveway, Jamie turns off the engine. They sit in the dark.
"You want to come in?" Adam says, after a little while.
"I don't think that's a good idea," Jamie says. Then he forces himself to say, "I don't think we can have a relationship, Adam."
Adam lets go of the door handle and sits back in the chair, looking straight out the windshield.
"Newsflash, Hyneman," he says at last, "we're already in one. Did you seriously not realize that?"
"I guess you should have told me," Jamie says, kind of sick and shaky, suddenly. "Like how you have a crush on me."
"What in god's name did you think that whole conversation was - oh my god, you make me insane. Will you just come in? No, wait, okay, no, don't come in. We'll talk about this tomorrow. I'm going to sleep."
"Fine."
Adam slams the door. Jamie drives around for most of the night in his pickup. He's buzzing in his skin, and he isn't tired.
*
They end up going out back to sit behind the sound truck, midway through the afternoon. But then, Jamie can't think of anything to say, and Adam just drums his hand on the wall.
"I just think we'd drive each other crazy," Jamie says.
"Look, correct me if I'm wrong, but we already seem to have developed a pretty good method of dealing with that. You're the one who said it works, and it really kind of does -"
"I wasn't talking about that."
Adam takes a deep breath and lets it out through his nose. "Look, you like sex, right? I mean, you seemed like you liked it last night."
"I like sex."
"Okay. Okay. You like sex. We're getting somewhere. So do you -"
Jamie puts his hand on Adam's arm, because he has to - he needs - "Just stop talking for a minute. Keep still."
Adam looks at him, and stops. He starts to tap his feet on the floor, then frowns, and stops that too. After a few seconds, when Adam's still enough that he could almost be asleep in the passenger seat of Jamie's pickup again, Jamie's able to think.
He thinks about Adam, leaving a trail of mess and beautiful things through his workshop, through his life. He thinks about it for about ten minutes.
"Okay," he says.
"Oh, thank god," Adam says, and sags against the side of the truck, then shakes his whole body and blows his lips out, like a dog coming out of the water. "Oh my god, don't ever do that to me again, I don't think I've kept that still for that long in my entire life, that was horrible." Fond warmth wells up in Jamie, and he laughs; Adam blinks at him, then gives him the brightest, sweetest grin he's got, like Jamie's built him something that works perfectly. Or that's going to make a really, really big explosion. Jamie guesses he sort of has.
"Hey! Guys! Can you get behind the screens so we can do sound?" Amanda yells from out front.
Adam slaps Jamie on the arm, and holds it, grips his shoulder. He squeezes, and Jamie smiles again, like Adam's pressed a button for it. Adam grins, yells, "Sure!" and jogs out. Jamie follows, careful of the wires.
Waiting for the guys to wire them in for sound, Jamie eyes the four dead pigs wearing pirate hats and bandannas. They're really disturbing.
"There's something wrong with you," he says.
Adam looks at Jamie, and, for once, doesn't laugh. "Maybe, man," he says. "But you're the one who's firing the cannon."
"Is this another relationship conversation?" Jamie says.
Adam laughs so hard he kind of falls against Jamie, and presses his forehead against Jamie's shoulder. Jamie gets the warm sparks in his stomach again, and he just waits quietly for Adam to finish.
"Yeah," Adam manages at last. "I guess, for us, this counts, Hynie Man."
Jamie puts his hand on Adam's back, right over where he knows there's a bruise, and presses gently with his palm. "Don't call me that," he says. Adam rocks forward a little, and grins, looking at him in a way that makes Jamie think about sex.
Jamie slaps Adam harder on the shoulder, and he takes a deep breath and hisses, "I swear to god, Jamie, if you make me throw a boner at work again -"
Jamie grins. "I guess this works for me," he says.
End