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Alan twists, his spine popping as Kevin steps out of his line of view. Kevin circles him, once, twice, prowling slow as a tiger, before breathing out hard through his nose. His creeping shadow blocks the ladder-rung patterns of magenta light slicing through the drooping shutters and painted across his camel suit jacket. The arcade machine’s round yellow bulbs ripple behind the windows, eternally eclipsing in a hundred archs of spinning suns, and for a moment Alan goes dizzy.
“You look like you’re about to give a lecture on the War of 1812.” Eighteen-twe-alve , finished with a half-baked Southern twang.
A snicker from behind him. Alan pivots in the other direction, frowning, and watches as Lora tamps down a pink-lipped grin around her cherry-flavored lollipop.
Alan widens his eyes imploringly, all beguiling innocence, and Lora takes the bait with a hard elbow in Kevin’s side. Kevin curses, spluttering, but then Alan turns his not-at-all intentional doe eyes on him and he snaps his mouth shut.
“Uh–I mean. It’s got its own charm, man. Very…homely.”
Oh, it’s not going to be that easy. Let it be known that Alan Bradley the Third is not, in fact, the world’s #1 pushover, no matter how much Lora teases him. But before Alan can sling back what would have been an extremely witty retort concerning Kevin’s new perm and something circa France 1789, Kevin is sliding into his space with the smooth glide of a casanova to wrap his arms around Alan’s neck.
And that shuts him up embarrassingly fast.
“I’ve always kinda had a thing for teachers,” Kevin mutters against the corner of his lip, and Alan’s too busy kissing him back to cringe.
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Alan’s lips taste like salted caramel and orange soda from his arcade. Kevin could kiss him just like this for hours–hell, for the rest of his life. Right here, sinking into this ragged old beanbag, their legs tangled together and bumping ankles.
Some of those short brown bangs have flipped up from Alan’s forehead, boyishly tousled in a way that makes him look deliciously off-kilter. And his spit-slick lips are quirked just so in one of those hard-won smiles, and his eyes are like liquid light, glimmering amber pools of maple syrup, and oh this is very, very bad.
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Alan starts noticing Kevin’s waist after that.
Especially in that gray-and-red jacket. Pastor Evans’ heart would go into palpitations of Biblical degrees if he ever knew the wayward thoughts spinning through the mind of his favorite former student whenever Kevin Flynn waltzes by with those egregiously long legs and luscious golden curls.
I could wrap my hands around it and my fingertips would touch, Alan thinks, half-delirious as he tracks the supple stretch of muscle when Kevin bends over yet another arcade machine. There’s that coiled tension in his shoulder blades as he leans closer and closer to the screen, as if he’s on the verge of jumping into the game itself to wrench his certain victory from its pixelated icons. There’s the silent held breath, broken by the spiraling beep-beep-beep jingle as the machine tallies the score–and then there it is, KEVIN stamped across the leaderboard in glowing squares, big and blinking green.
1st place, always. The crowd goes wild.
He’s especially gorgeous when he’s riding the high of his hundredth high score, head thrown back with victorious laughter, t-shirt riding up his stomach to reveal a strip of skin that makes Alan’s cheeks burn fire-hot.
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“You did that on purpose,” Alan complains hotly against the shell of Kevin’s ear. His traitorous hands are already on Kevin’s hips, digging into rough denim like he’s got a personal vendetta against Kevin’s jeans, and all he gets in response is that stupid breathy laugh.
He knows he sounds plaintive, but he can’t help it.
This dingy bathroom is the last place Alan wants to be. The green-yellow tiles are so sticky his loafers nearly slip entirely off his heels when he takes a step forward to crowd Kevin against the porcelain white sink, and the lone vent in the ceiling is coughing with a concerningly-asthmatic rattle, choked with dust-lined cobwebs like silver Christmas tinsel. It’s scummy, downright gross –and it’s all Kevin’s fault.
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Everyone, except for Lora, never believes him when he admits that he’s the pettiest person he knows. They take one look at his soft brown puppy eyes, rumpled tweed suit jackets, and pretty goody two-shoes face, and they’ve already clocked him as a wimp who wouldn’t swat a fly. But you never stop me stealing from your popcorn bowl, Roy always protests, and Alan doesn’t argue the point.
It’s not that they’re wrong. It’s that one would be hard-pressed to find Alan in a situation where his eternal patience finally runs out.
But not impossible.
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Palm wrapped around Kevin’s neck just snug enough to feel the hard undulation of Kevin’s quick breaths, Alan tips his head to the side and licks a slow, wet stripe from his shoulder to his jaw. Inhibitions quickly become a thing of five seconds prior, when Alan didn’t have the salty-sweet taste of Kevin’s skin prickling on his tongue.
His melting neurons run the numbers, which are: Alan wants more, and Kevin isn’t stopping him. The odds are strongly in his favor.
Kevin’s head tips back onto his shoulder with a muffled groan. Alan smothers the bubbly giddiness welling up in his stomach by adjusting his grip so that the ridges of Kevin’s trachea dig into his palm and his thumb presses into the soft give under Kevin’s chin, giving his mouth access to that warm groove between tendons where Kevin’s jugular pulses against his lips.
In the mirror, Alan watches Kevin unraveling with a distinctly detached relish. As if it’s not his hands mapping untouched expanses of golden skin with evident fervor, as if it’s not his mouth sucking red bruises into the juncture of Kevin’s neck. He watches, unblinking, as he pulls up Kevin’s shirt and pushes the bunched-up hem between Kevin’s parted lips. Watches Kevin bite down around his fingers, blue eyes glazed-over like condensation on a glass of lemonade, and oh , he’s drooling.
But Alan won’t give him mercy yet.
With a patience he doesn’t feel, he runs his palm up syrupy-slow over the taut flesh of Kevin’s bare stomach, and his waist is just as satisfying to touch as Alan had dreamed. Kevin arches into it, flat fluorescent lights following the curve of his ribcage, and Alan sears the sight into his vision with religious zeal.
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Kevin’s nipple is soft under his fingertips, practically clamoring for his attention. And what can Alan do but oblige? He presses his thumb and forefinger into the silken skin, tentative, watching Kevin’s face carefully in the grimy glass.
Kevin heroically manages to stop the incessant tide of gasps and gritted noises to sneer, “Are you kiddin’ me, go harder– ”
“As you wish,” Alan whispers against his flushed cheek, and pulls.
Kevin’s knees buckle.
“Shit–!”
He whines, high-pitched and embarrassingly loud, and Alan doesn’t let up even as Kevin’s voice breaks off into something terribly close to a sob. With a gasp, the hem of his shirt, dark with saliva, falls disappointingly back over his stomach. Toppling forward, Kevin just manages to catch himself against the rim of the sink, palms scorching hot and sweat-damp against frigid porcelain. His head is bowed as a shudder wracks those sloping shoulders, and Alan can’t see anything but a tangled mop of golden hair as Kevin catches his breath.
For one frozen second, Alan fears he’s gone too far.
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Alan follows, relentless as a riptide. He thanks every deity out there for the few extra inches of height he has on Kevin by milking them for all they’re worth, folding himself over Kevin’s back like a second skin until they overlap and their edges blur together. Kevin is burning up like he has a fever, fusion and fission combined, a chain reaction burning itself to an inevitable end. Plastered against Kevin’s spine, he can feel every minute breath, every shudder, every involuntary twitch. His nose is buried into sweaty curls, dusty and sweet like stale candy, and Alan breathes it in ravenously.
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“Look at yourself,” Alan murmurs, cupping Kevin’s jaw so that he can look at the wondrous mess that he’s become in the mirror. The mess that Alan has made of him with nothing but a few well-placed touches. Kevin grimaces and jerks his chin away, eyes squeezed shut, and the last of Alan’s saintly patience withers. None too gently, Alan tugs him back in place, nails digging sharp into the jut of his hipbone in warning.
“I said, look .”
There must be something in his voice, which has gone deeper than Alan can ever recall sounding, because Kevin shivers and blearily opens his watery blue eyes.
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Kevin’s unfocused gaze slides off to the left, and the rebuke dies on his lips as Alan follows his line of sight.
No, Alan thinks, his thoughts skittering to a grinding halt. That can’t be me.
That wide-eyed, half-starved reflection staring back at him through smeared, cracked glass is unrecognizable. His tie’s loose, collar wrinkled and gaping open, suit jacket dangling off his shoulder. His usual neat side-comb is a mutilated echo of itself, bangs shoved back off his forehead every which-way by his own hands. Cheeks flushed red as raspberry preserves, lips parted and connected by a string of spit, pupils dilated into black holes that swallow the bathroom’s greasy light. Feral. Animal.
Kevin’s staring at him as if he could devour him with eyes alone, and Alan’s conscience finally rears it head through the drunken fog of desire.
Unwittingly, his hands have slowed to a crawl, and Kevin signals his displeasure with a grunt and a roll of his hips. Alan snaps out of his stupor at the feeling of Kevin grinding back against him like one of those blonde, grade-A pornstars Alan would sneak guilty glimpses of through a crack in his roommate’s doorway back in university.
He’s nearly forgotten that this is a game.
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“Man, what? You can’t be serious,” Kevin stammers, staggering to his feet with a noticeable tremor that Alan notes with glib satisfaction. Okay, perhaps he is a little sadistic. Who can blame him? “You can’t just–can’t just leave me hangin’ like this.”
Alan simply lifts one shoulder, sickly-sweet, a boy scout grin plastered on his rosy lips, and Kevin’s face crumbles.
“Shit, dude, I know you’re pissed, but c’mon–,” Kevin motions discreetly to the tent in his jeans, uncharacteristically sheepish. His ears are turning a bright, tropical-punch shade of red. Alan wants to nibble on them.
So you do have a sense of shame, after all?
“No can do,” Alan apologizes, brown eyes wide and sincere. He’s already halfway out the scratched-up door, hair neatly parted and shirt buttoned up to his neck. The abysmal look in Kevin’s eyes is so furious he has to fight not to laugh. Fortunately, months of playing cards with Lora have honed Alan’s poker face into something legendary.
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And then Kevin is looking back over his shoulder, that unmistakable gleam in his eye that he gets when it’s the last Recognizer in Space Paranoids left and the crowd presses eager and sweaty around his shoulders and he shoves the squeaking controls to their limit as he aims the cannon.
Kevin grins, lips glossy pink and curls sticking to his forehead, and the floor falls out from under Alan’s feet.
He thinks, this is how he got Lora. Like a hapless comet streaking through the black velvet of space, drifting through a silent eternity of nebulae and asteroid fields with nothing to stop his inertia, he is helpless against the siren-sweet call of a superior mass. Kevin loops him into his orbit as easily as breathing, big and loud and blazing hotter than a supernova.
And what’s the point of fighting gravity?
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