Work Text:
Mornings are devoid of motion when he gets up earlier than Sam. Not in the literal sense, but still, Colby’s brain takes longer to awaken without his favorite person by his side.
Alone, his thoughts wander in all kinds of directions. He’s not concentrating on anything in particular, and left to its own devices, his consciousness takes him to…
Nail polish.
He had to take his off yesterday before his evening shower. He still isn’t sure about wearing it to professional settings, especially with how clearly amateurly done it looks.
Colby can’t remember when he first saw a guy wearing nail polish.
Sam comes down and makes himself coffee with his eyes half closed. The clock tick-tocks away minutes.
It was probably some time during the summers he spent with Sam, hanging around the mall. He remembers watching the boys in queue for fast food restaurants and in the mirrored panels of walls on the first floor. He remembers Sam noticing him watching.
He smiles thinking about it. Sam tilts his head and squints against the morning sun, leaning against the counter opposite of Colby.
“Something fun?” he asks softly.
“Thinking about you is always fun,” Colby says and steals Sam’s mug from his hands while the other is busy grinning. Then he presses a coffee flavored kiss to Sam’s lips and goes off to his meeting.
Meetings without Sam always drag on way too long and make about half the sense they usually do, and that’s not a lot to begin with. Colby sometimes wonders if people will stop booking meetings with just one of them if they marry. Probably not.
He’s still thinking about nail polish.
“…very interested in working with you, Mr. Brock.”
“Yeah, it’s a great opportunity,” Colby suppresses the urge to sigh. “But I’ll have to discuss it with my partner, as I’ve mentioned before in our emails.”
She gives him an empty smile reflected in the polished surface of the table. Her french manicure is more interesting to Colby than whatever she has to offer to their business. He almost wants to ask where she got it done, but then his own acetone scraped fingernails scratch against the papers she hands him and he is reminded of how she sees him.
French is one of those that look kinda interesting, kinda like something barely noticeable that Colby would like to try, and yet is absolutely unattainable.
There is a difference between painting your own nails grunge style, polish getting all over your cuticles and music all the way from 2007 playing in the background and getting it done in a salon, lavender smell in the air and bright white lights burning your eyes.
One is acceptable, because it’s what a bunch of subcultures do, because it’s a teenage rebellion or at the very least so far outside the norm for a mainstream audience that it wraps all the way around to being okay. If you’re wearing chains and skinny jeans at twenty seven, the judgemental suburban dad will not blink an eye at you also wearing dingy nail polish. If you show up to a nail studio, that same suburban dad will be offended that you’re sat in the chair next to his wife. And if you show up to a business meeting about moving your merchandise in a trendy cut suit and with professionally done nails it will raise more eyebrows than Colby is personally prepared to handle.
“You’re catastrophizing a little,” Sam says.
He’s a reflection in the bathroom mirror, stood behind Colby. Colby wonders if Sam also watched boys in the mirror-covered walls on the first floor of their hometown mall, or if he was only looking at Colby, like he does now.
“We’re in Nevada. Not… in Kansas.”
Right, they’re not.
“And our audience loves your dingy polish and I’m sure will love the professional one too.”
Colby winces, shakes his head. The argument doesn’t make him feel any more at peace.
He finishes washing his hands in silence. He tells himself it’s not a hostile silence, but his chest is burning with annoyance at… he doesn’t know.
Colby knows Sam is still watching him, so he tries to keep his face even. Looking up, he’s met with Sam’s frown, his eyebrows at a tragic angle.
Annoyance disappears, replaced with vague disappointment in himself and the world in general.
“You’re right,” he murmurs, turning to Sam and in one swift step closing the distance between them to take his hands. “Sorry that I started ranting about it right as I came in—”
“No,” Sam shakes his head. “That’s okay, I want you to talk to me about this stuff.”
“Good,” Colby smiles, pressing their foreheads together and closing his eyes for a second. “You’re so good to me.”
Sam is trying his best, he tells himself. Colby doesn’t even know himself what the fuck he wants to hear, so how is Sam supposed to ease it all?
“I hope I am,” Sam whispers against his skin.
The clock tick-tocks away minutes, hours, days.
The work-life balance is still hard to keep, even if they got better at it in the last few years. It’s a constant tug of war between finding satisfaction in their job and finding peace away from it. So no wonder Colby forgets all about the skirts and the nail polish sometimes, too engrossed in doing what he knows how to do and enjoys doing.
His job is safe and familiar. He doesn’t paint his nails because he doesn’t have the time.
Sam checks them into a hotel for one of their shoots. They’re going to sleep on location, but it’s always good to have a backup. Only getting that backup set up means that they have like five hours to kill before the actual filming starts.
Colby lets Sam pick what they do in those five hours.
Sam puts their cameras in the bag, zips it, and says,
“There’s a nail salon down the street.”
Colby blinks.
He hasn’t thought about this lately.
He’s been kinda avoiding thinking about it — one slight breakdown about it was enough, he didn’t have the time for any more right now.
“And I thought, okay,” Sam drops down on the bed next to him. “I didn’t like how… how I handled that last conversation we had about this—”
“You’re fine,” Colby says automatically. “You are right, I was—”
“Well, it’s not about me being right, is it,” Sam interrupts him. Colby stares down at his hands, runs a finger over the ring that matches Sam’s. “So, my idea was, we could go do it together?” Sam continues after a moment of silence. “And if you want to, if you need more justification — although I don’t think you should need it, but I can give it to you — we can say in the video that we got the nails because the ghost of that girl, what’s her name, Rose? Rose,” Sam nods to himself, looking ahead of them at the mirror on top of the dresser where reflection-Colby is looking at him with wide eyes now. “There was like one personal account that said she liked doing her makeup real bold, and I know it’s a stretch, but we can say it’s for that. To attract her.”
Colby’s heart aches and asks to get out of his chest. Sam turns to look him in the eye, smiles shyly.
“Everything for the job,” he jokes softly, tilting his head. It’s almost a question.
It’s so easy to lean in and kiss him. Push of his lips against Sam’s, familiar and soft. Sam’s hand comes to rest on his cheek, thumb smooths down the angle of his jaw.
“You’ll go with me?” Colby whispers against the corner of his mouth. Sam nods and hums.
A slight switch in initiative, Sam pushing the salon’s door without Colby having to ask him to: and it turns into another one of their adventures instead of a horror story. Colby’s eyes still burn a little from the lights, but while they wait for two technicians to be available at once, Sam distracts him by taking some photos in the giant mirror next to the entrance.
The lights turn into a good photo opportunity instead of an assault on his sight. The suburban mom in the corner of the salon doesn’t pay them any attention, too busy chatting with the girl that’s doing her manicure. Colby feels like a fucked up Cinderella, rotten pumpkins turning into golden carriages all around him.
He stumbles over the designs anyway, but ends up going with a black and yellow sunflower design that reminds him of Sam in the most obvious way possible.
He looks over to his left and Sam is there, pointing at a baby blue color.
“We’re kinda opposite matching,” Colby says, presenting his hands to the camera later and wiggling his fingers so that the rings click and the sunflowers shimmer under the light. He knows he’s grinning like a maniac about it and he can feel Sam staring at him with what’s probably one of those fond as fuck looks that will get clipped and edited to hell.
He looks up and stares back, just as ecstatic and in love. Behind Sam is a mirror, and Colby can see himself, and he looks good. His nails, when he lifts his hand and puts it on the back of Sam’s head, also look good in his hair. They normally don’t kiss in front of the camera even if there’s no one else here, but Colby makes an exception. Just a bit more editing for them. It’s no big deal.
He looks beautiful and his heart is splitting apart with gratitude. For all of it, but most of all, for Sam.