Chapter Text
Alongside his constant rumination, Tom has also taken to eradicate hope through indulging much less in mind-altering vices. He'll have minimal opportunity to get drunk or high once in prison, not counting the zing of mere nicotine, so why further engineer that future withdrawal? Why make it worse?
That's how he explains it to Greg after paying the check, while he scrapes every crumb of rehydrated meat powder from his plate, and without skipping a beat explains that much as well:
"They make you finish it in prison, you know. You're not allowed to just not be hungry even if it's true. If you don't eat it they blend it up and make you drink it, Greg. So. I guess you could say I'm trying to get used to ignoring my biological cues, hah..."
Greg must not get why that should be funny, given the wobble of his head and thus his pillow-matted hair, and Tom lets it remain a private joke. The effort not to be upset at a lack of understanding is the smallest it's ever been. It shrinks faster as Greg asks,
"Is it like the thinking-about-it thing?"
Tom's turn to wobble his head.
"Like—the opposite I guess, like actually the normal sort of... tolerance break, right? Because like—I mean you definitely can't quit completely. Not around Log—the family, I mean..."
Half of Tom wants to continue to rescue him from everything including himself. Half of him will never not be amused by Greg stumbling through his words. He finds himself not really weighed down by Greg's bauble at all by the time they're headed for the exit.
"Are you suggesting we go get wasted, Gregory?" comes out of him through a real, painless grin.
"Well if—I'm not trying to mess up your whole like... system," Greg says more with his hands than otherwise, or that's at least what Tom stares at, "but it seems like you might... y'know, need it?"
Tom is careful to say this before opening the car door, where it could reach the driver's ears:
"Oh... I might need it. I see. Trying to get your vulnerable boss drunk amidst all the current investigations. Great idea—"
"I mean obviously I'll partake, dude, I—"
"Oh will you? You'll partake? Nevermind then—"
"—honestly I kinda need it too, I think, like if I wanna get back to sleep tonight?"
In place of admitting that the same is true for himself, Tom is about to accuse Greg and all his nervous laughter of being an alcoholic (a gracious step down from the first implication), and then he realizes that his grip on the car door's handle hasn't quite pulled it open yet. So in place of saying that, he says what he wants to and admits it. Lilts we're in this together, buddy and thus commences the return half of their pilgrimage.
A thrillingly self destructive instinct washes over Tom about halfway between the diner and the hotel. Something about the lights outside the window; something about the force of turning a corner making Greg slide toward him.
"Your room," Tom tells him, not at all hushed. "Shiv's asleep in mine."
*
He re-googled sporus on the elevator ride down to the lobby just to make sure that he had it right. After the initial flood of relief, among other things, Greg suddenly worried that everything he'd absorbed the first time he wanted clarification, just shy of a week ago and about this late at night, too, had at best been the wrong search—a misspelling. At worst, an utter hallucination. Some sort of demented, wishful thinking that managed to either ignore or put a rose tint on a huge pair of cauterizing scissors.
He still tells himself that it is. Tom says a lot of shit. Most of it seemingly purposefully above his comprehension. That Greg can hardly wrap his head around it or what the guy could possibly mean by this in particular should probably make him default to nothing at all.
Until Tom says it again, simply as Greg pours him some scotch—a biggie, he'd requested—from his hotel room's bar:
"Why thank you, Sporus."
Greg nearly breaks his neck catching Tom's eyes in the low light. Tom's smile is already hidden behind his liquor. And he's taking quite a long sip. Greg would look strange not using the time to pour one for himself. He knows he looks strange anyway but even a third time, which is generally the charm, doesn't do quite enough to convince him of anything but his own deluded nature.
The burden of question still doesn't quite dissolve until his own gulp of vodka has hit his stomach—which happens moments after his and Tom's asses have hit his little couch, and moments before Tom points to Greg's glass with a frown.
"Stoli Blueberry, huh? That's an... oddly specific bottle for this humble little suite..."
Greg has already felt himself loosen enough to just shrug. "I requested it."
Tom gives him a look.
"From room service."
"Yeah, I know how you request bottles."
"...Well, I just didn't like the default selection much." Greg expects some comment, then, about drinking something fruity and easy instead of something that you have to acquire a taste for, but it doesn't come. He almost doesn't know how to continue. "Uh. I dunno if it's the hotels or if it's Logan but I guess there's just... like, only so much dark liquor I can handle..."
"And you didn't go for a rosé for your little custom pick? We know how you like the Belle Glos..."
"I mean I guess—" He can't help but chuckle, somewhat at merely having his tastes known, even looser now— "I wanted to get drunk a little faster...?"
And he sips. And Tom sips. And they both keep looking, and no one turns on the TV yet, and no one turns the lights any brighter until Greg, who has forgotten entirely about Nero and Sporus again as it's buried by a more actionable worry, holds out his glass.
"You wanna try some?"
"Uh—no," Tom scoffs.
Greg pulls it back mouthing more for me—and Tom, in a flash, reaches out to wrest it away from his lips.
"Actually—yeah, gimme."
"Fuck—you're gonna spill it, dude—"
"I'm going to prison for you, I think you can deal—"
"—c'mon, man, you're..."
Tom soon has a glass in either hand, and Greg sees his eyes widen with the stolen sip and tells him, "I can just pour you your own if you'd rather have something that actually like, tastes good—"
"Oh fuck off," the man says, but he's laughing. But he's also handing it back. He promptly searches for the remote with his newly empty hand.
Before tinny voices and 3AM commercial jingles light up the glass already inches from his eyes again, Greg watches Tom in the near-dark and imagines they're in a different room three floors up. The picture doesn't even have to swim. It still does. It swims and stays the same once it's done. Shiv's in the next room, unasked about, just barely acknowledged. It doesn't fit but it doesn't matter, in fact it matters much more that Greg has absolutely no business thinking this way—she's lying, heralded by Tom's rambling, at the bottom of a tall set of stairs.
And Greg is here, limbs folded comfortably, inexplicably asking Tom for a sip of his scotch. Taking the excuse to lean across and meet the man in the middle of the empty cushion, all just to scrunch up his face and then pretend that he didn't when Tom starts razzing. For no real reason he's determined to argue the matter. But I feel so fucking bad for you. You're really not okay. I just want to curl up with you.
Greg thinks hard but not long about the fall down those stairs.
Tom thinks, not yet distracted enough by the drink, of all the advice he gave and accrued today. It feels quickly urgent that he stabilizes it all in the mental bank. Though it feels more likely that some inane late-night television might rot his brain than that alcohol would.
He thinks of those pitiful mouthfuls of wine that he sloshed around earlier tonight, and which did as little for him as the rest of that vineyard will. He recalls the heavy nothing as Shiv tried to fix it with her touch and the heavier nothing that spanned from then until he had the spark of brilliance to call Greg. Now he's got a prickling something that he's as ever unsure is much better. He wants to blame it on the heat, so within a few seconds his sweater is crumpled on the arm of the couch. He watches Greg's hoodie follow suit and half-listens to a preemptive insistence that the man isn't copying, Tom only reminded him. Then he fiddles indecisively with the volume of the game show network.
He thinks of mogul Ron Petkus and his son and—a something that he wanted to be nothing and—
Shiv's voice, so sudden, so blunt, and the terror that it was knowing and then the pain that it wasn't.
Ron Petkus blew his son's archery instructor.
We asked a hundred women what's the most brain-eating thing that they could tell their husband and they said—
Ron Petkus blew his son's archery instructor.
The sight of Steve Harvey is now what Tom blames the weight in his throat on. He chugs his scotch and smothers subsequent thoughts of close-quarters in prison moreso by mashing the channel button, consistently feeling more tempted than he ought to whenever he passes through the cartoon channels, and is finally interrupted by Greg's notice:
"Alcohol not working, huh?"
Well, it's sure working on Greg. Tom knows from his voice even before rolling his head over to Greg's side of the couch. His restlessness meets some funny line in the other man's inebriated face and that seems to be it. Poof.
"...Depends what you mean by working," he muses after a moment. Greg nods like he needs no further details. Tom decides to believe him.
Then even in silence, he has a much better time watching the other man than the TV. He thinks passively of the hour and of when he's got to wake up. He spends a few more seconds on merely everything that twinkles on the other end of the couch.
"You know I—I act real... tough out here, I guess," he hears himself say. The words slough out; the alcohol is certainly working. The laugh that spasms through him is something else, though. "I'm sure you've seen firsthand how thick this fucking shell is but... fuck, man, I just think—I know that I get in there and they confiscate it at the fucking door. I get in there and I'm naked again. You know what they—" he snorts— "what they fucking do to you in prison when you're naked..."
While Tom's current albeit flimsy shell will only allow him to laugh through it, Greg responds with a solemn nod and a lingering pat on his knee. He glances at the screen and finds some salesman. He glances back.
"I'll be someone's butt-boy for sure," he says abruptly, knowing full-well that he's testing if Greg's hand will stay.
It does, but Greg visibly swallows back all his innards so that he has room to argue. Tom beats him to it, fiercely competitive in the moment—
"I know I'm not as... pretty as you, Greg, hah—but I've been..." Ron Petkus. Shiv on contraception. Big nothing. Nothing at all. "Thinking a lot, about how, you know—"
"No, man—"
"If I'm gonna wind up getting fucked in prison anyway..."
Silence. He's tempted to stop. There's so much something. Greg is shaking his head too softly to be rid of it. Too much. Ron—
"I think I'd prefer that my first time... doing that," Tom manages to say utterly unlike the inhuman gasping that he thought might come out, smiling again, and the scotch is undoubtedly flowing through him, "wasn't with some... ugly bastard that I barely know. Against my will at that. I think I. If it comes down to it I'd, I'd really fucking prefer that my first time is with... fucking, y'know, someone I know. And trust."
And what the fuck is he saying, is the question in his own eyes when he looks at Greg, and reflected right back at him too.
Is he even relieved when it fades, is the question he stuffs into his cheeks.
"I mean... same, man," Greg breathes. Now his hand retreats from Tom's knee. Tom realizes how badly his ears are ringing. "But I'm—I swear I'm not just trying to make you feel better, like this is just... an honest observation, Tom, that you're pretty big? And, if it's not weird to say, presumably quite strong—?"
"Sure, but I really don't work out nearly as much as I could... Working out is all they do in prison, Greg. I'll get there and be a baby among men with months of nothing but hard labor under their belt." Panic's in the letters that make up the words but nothing else. Greg still looks, infuriatingly, like he hears it. Tom grits his teeth like a sieve against a sip of scotch and waits a beat and hears nothing and convinces himself that it's just to fill the awful silence, or a joke he hasn't decided the punchline to yet—"Would you do that for me? Greg?"
There's no point, he hears. To making love?
No Ron. Greg's wide eyes. His dark shining eyes. His Stoli Blueberry perched endlessly on his lips. It all fucking shines.
"You're asking... if I would...?"
He can't say it. Maybe if there was some cocaine to interact with his drink. But Greg is too woefully conscious, still. It's too misshapen to let out and too much to swallow, either.
Without his hoodie he's suddenly too cold again. Maybe the hotel AC just picked up. Maybe it's how thin his blood is getting. Maybe Tom's unprecedented, unrelenting patience is sending a more psychosomatic chill through him. You're really not okay.
"I think that's maybe not... a great idea?" And he waits for Tom to laugh at him for taking a joke too seriously. He knows he must be, even as Tom just blinks and averts his gaze to his glass. No response quickly has a spark in Greg's brain running in circles and he just can't help it, he needs to see some evidence of life: "I think... like, dude, you don't even want that. Even if it did come down to it. I don't think either of us would want to do that kind of thing out of fear—like, even looming fear of the future... would we?"
And Tom wants to laugh because he really wouldn't know how else to do it. But he already feels the beginnings of a threat beneath his eyes. He knows he'd overflow given just one good squeeze.
"So you wouldn't do that for me?" he snaps with just the curl of a lip instead. "You'd fucking let the first cock up my ass be some cellblock rando? Gee, Greg—"
"Okay, no offense, I really don't think that would happen to you, Tom. You're pretty well built, you're big—"
"And you're a broken record, you know that—?"
"—unlike, like, look at me, man," Greg tells him seriously and spills some vodka and doesn't care and doesn't seem to realize how rapidly he's gotten Tom's gaze on his, "I would be so much more likely to be targeted—"
"I don't want to think about that."
Tom cuts him off cold. Greg's mouth shuts without a second thought and Tom only even stays looking at him long enough to see that. Seems it's once out of sight, once the other set of eyes in the room favor the carpet, that the man feels safe to inhale sharply with a well,
"Well—fuck, Tom, you're making me think about you getting, like..."
"I don't want to think about some fucking disgusting ogre's hands all over you."
Greg gasps. The image of a different set of hands on him is instantly vivid. He doesn't know whether to feel relieved or sorry for himself that Tom doesn't turn back.
"...Me neither," he mutters into the dark, tries to muster a laugh. There's always something in him. And there's something to be confident of, now. "And I, I mean... it's not going to happen. Thanks to you."
Tom raises his head first forward, to the nothing on the TV, and then with purpose to everything on his right. Though his eyes still fall soon after.
"Thanks to me," he repeats, a mirthless breath between his slumped shoulders.
He briefly raises his glass as though for a toast and doesn't finish it off, ready as it is, until Greg follows suit. Then it's quiet for what feels like a long time. It's however long it takes for Tom to cross his legs on the couch, his head pounding but the cushion plush beneath him, and to live whether he wants to or not a few weeks ago, in the night that he invited Greg to his own place.
It's a night that never happened because Greg never came, and which has existed none too thinly in Tom's head ever since it didn't happen. He's living where it began, where he and Greg shared more than a grim fate and a couple of beers—where they made eye contact for such a long time that someone had to move, someone had to take charge and make them forget about prison—where Tom slotted his hands into Greg's ribcage and pushed him into his (much longer and more accommodating than this) couch with the longest, warmest kiss ever had in that loft or anywhere else—where Tom let the beer do its job and allowed his body to melt into Greg's until they were one. Where beforehand one of them had the foresight to pick Shiv's pantyhose up off the floor and no one was ever unsettled by the time his lawyer left, not even Mondale, and who knows what other fantastic things didn't happen between then and the next time the front door opened, all between desperate declarations, internal or otherwise, of I've missed you, I've missed you.
It feels like half of his thoughts about Greg these days, even and especially in nights that do happen, are I've fucking missed you. But Tom was glad in the midst of it that Greg wasn't there, wasn't he. Shaking and urgently gulping down brandy and thinking of imminent prison and of fuck Greg for leaving him in the dust, leaving him to do this alone while he's off with Kendall, but also thank god that Greg didn't have to hear that he was probably going to prison just now. Thank god that Tom didn't have to see that pain and blame in Greg's eyes again.
He fears something else entirely from Greg's eyes now. He's terrified of what would be in his own if he let himself look. He hears Greg breathe and god, he knows what the man already sees. As much as he doesn't want to Tom tries to hear anything, anything else. We asked a hundred men what's going on in their pants right now—
"Tom—"
"I gotta piss," comes some gruff sound from Tom's chest, like starting an engine that takes him to safety.
The unfinished thought may very well have turned into something else had he been allowed to finish but it's a heavy, sticky force of nature in the back of Greg's throat while he watches Tom dart away, while he finds himself blinking away tears—
I know you said there was no quid pro quo here but I wanna do something for you, he wanted to say, I really do. I wanna give you this, Tom...
Bathroom door slams shut and Greg's gaze is even sharper in that direction. For all his tendency to doubt, even in this lighting, he knows he didn't imagine a growing bulge in Tom's sweatpants. With further confidence he knows what he wanted to do about it. Wants. Still. Maybe he even knows, not just hopes but knows what Tom is really doing in there—
Gripping the sink, turning it on, allowing himself to breathe only once the water is running, tearing himself from the mirror a split second later and propping himself against the wall behind the toilet instead—
Greg's eyes flutter closed as his hand declares freedom and shoves itself down past his waistband—
Tom shuts his eyes furiously tight and yanks down his pants, freeing his—
Greg could think of nothing but leaning over and palming it and promising Tom over and over again with his eyes up until the very moment of dipping down and giving him what he deserves. Helping him out. Sucking him off. He gasps and bites his lips to muffle a moan like that's what's happening when he wraps his fingers around his own cock—
Tom pumps himself with no hesitation but all the shame, all the heat of anything and everything that could be happening, just needing to beat this away, just needing to hurry up and fix what Shiv couldn't and shouldn't, anymore, just needing... needing to push his knuckles into the wall so hard that they fucking hurt. He needs it to hurt. He needs to have a good reason to be in here. He needs to get fucking ready—to get used to this, to bending over, to it hurting, to spreading his legs, to—
To Greg, fuck...
He shoves his fingers in his mouth, too. He needs the weight. He needs some approximation of what would have happened. Of Tom's. He starts with two, adds another, feels his head go numb and his heart lurch and his cock pulse and his eyes roll back.
It's him, it's him as soon as the thought is in Tom's head, and he fucking lets it be him as long as it's solid—he can't think of anyone else. He doesn't want to think of anyone else. He doesn't want to want anything, he just needs it. He needs it more than he needs to breathe and that's why he barely does, why he bites down on his trembling lower lip and pushes air out of his nose like he's dying to get it all out for good. Tom's own body has been so fucking far away from him but he's here, now, he's fucking here with Greg behind him, with his knuckles stinging and his cock getting rubbed frantically raw and with Greg's cock shoving inside of him, Greg's cock making him shake like this, Greg—if fucking anyone Greg making Tom his bitch...
He needs it and so he feels it. He feels the kind of soreness he's always imagined. He cries from it. He feels fingertips pressing bruises into his thighs and he feels Greg coming—Greg staggering his hips, holding onto him, using him to come—
On the couch Greg comes with a jerk of his long legs and a muffled cry, sucking on his own fingers.
On the cold tile Tom's body pulses with all the carnal exhaustion, and with the briefest twinge of bliss, of someone thoroughly used. He stays in there for a minute. Just long enough to pick the pieces of himself up off the floor and wipe the tears from his face and then his come off of the seat. None of that supposed clarity that he's heard about seems to kick in.
*
Greg stares blankly, mildly afraid, like someone woken unexpectedly, at the shape that approaches from the bathroom. At his cousin's husband and his boss and inarguable best friend. As if he even wanted to argue.
He shifts underneath the blanket that's meant to hide the new stains on his pants. He swallows and still feels the prints of his own fingertips on the back of his throat. Then he catches Tom's deep, tired eyes.
"I'm crashing, man," Greg says hoarsely, and truthfully. His own eyes squint to near slits at the rectangle of bathroom light behind Tom.
Tom doesn't sit back down but makes it to the edge of the couch and stares back, starts to open his mouth. He might wonder if he hadn't already trained himself not to tarry much with hope.
"...Yeah—"
"Are you staying?"
All's quiet for another good second. Tom pictures the five or so hours of sleep ahead and for the first time in weeks it feels closer than prison. It feels optimistically closer than his own hotel room. Than the bathroom. Even as his legs waver.
Still, he thinks about archery and a ballroom of Republicans.
"Uh—no." He coughs. Suddenly Tom is the one exerting control over his feet. It's more than he can do about the slack in his face. "I'm gonna go pass out in a bigger bed."
Greg nods, understanding but curling up under the blanket. There's this loudly empty crescent of space under there with him that he feels mildly guilty for the longer it doesn't get filled. He watches Tom one last time for the night—just his movements, slow and dreamlike. Preparing for the walk back up those stairs. Sweater. Shoes. Shoulder—his own shoulder. Greg recognizes it and the other man's look late. His little session seems to have beaten any remaining drop of energy from him.
"Night, Tom," he uses the dregs to call across the room. "And—thanks again. So much, man. I'm serious."
Perhaps from the way Tom smiles, goodnight, sporus is what Greg then expects to hear. Hopes to hear. He hopes it so hard and so half-conscious that even as Tom lets that smile be the end before the swing-shut of the door, Greg is convinced that he said it.