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Phil Coulson has prosecuted vicious murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and white-collar criminals. He’s argued on speakerphone with egotistical FBI agents. He’s stood face-to-face with Nick Fury, Suffolk County District Attorney for four terms running, and told the man that he was wrong.
None of that, he thinks, compares with having a boyfriend who’s suspended from work.
Seriously.
None of it.
Day 12
“The problem’s how tense you get,” the unfamiliar voice explains as Phil walks through his front door at six-thirty, laden with his work bag and Chinese take-out for him and Clint. His house vaguely resembles a cartoon crime scene: the shoes in the front hall are strewn in crazy directions, a piece of wall art is crooked, and there’s a t-shirt lying in the middle of the floor. Phil’s grateful in strange, inexplicable ways that Clint prefers to spend his suspended time here, under Phil’s roof, instead of moping around in his own apartment, but Clint—
Clint is somehow simultaneously a reasonable adult with a law license and a messy, irresponsible teenager. It’s lucky the latter is so endearing.
The conversation in the kitchen continues.
“How the hell am I supposed to stop being tense?” Clint demands while Phil picks up the (damp) t-shirt and throws it down the hallway in the vague direction of the bedroom. “They’re not pairing me with you, they’re pairing me with some giant man-monster—”
“Hey, Piotr’s pretty cool, and I’m like sixty-three percent sure the ‘skull-crusher’ nickname’s just a joke.”
“—who growls in Russian before he takes me down.”
“I bet Natasha Romanoff has a sexy take-down growl.”
“Wade, I swear to god—”
Phil’s not interested in the threat—he’s heard approximately three hundred different methods of dismemberment and slow murder cursed over Xbox headsets in the last few days—but in the fact that a high-pitched shriek interrupts it. It’s only after Phil rolls his eyes and dumps his bags at the kitchen table that he realizes the shriek sounded distinctly like his last name, and—
“It’s his fucking house,” Clint grumbles.
Wade Wilson, legal aid defense attorney and Clint’s new martial-arts buddy, further scrunches his body behind Clint’s. He’s broad-shouldered but lanky, a far cry from Clint’s compact musculature, and he looks absolutely ridiculous trying to hide.
Phil sighs as he strips out of his suit coat. “I’d think with eight hours a day to yourself, you could at least not leave your sweat-soaked t-shirts in the middle of the hallway.”
He twists to look at Clint, who grins. He’s wearing a ribbed tank that shows off the full effect of his shoulders and arms, and somehow just the sight of him is enough to chase away the stress of a long day of work. He steps away from Wilson to open the fridge and pull out a beer to join the two half-empty ones on the counter. Phil expects that he’ll to hand it over and then return to his half-argument, but he sets it down instead.
Clint’s palm is cool even through the fabric of Phil’s button-down, and when he presses close, Phil can feel the heat that radiates off the rest of his body. Moisture clings to his hairline, and his lips are chapped from an afternoon of worrying them in concentration. Phil seriously considers spending the next hour tasting that rough mouth, but their dinner is cooling off swiftly and he, unwisely, skipped lunch.
“I grabbed lunch with Bruce and Tasha and then had muy thai with Wade,” Clint explains. Phil tracks the way his eyes wander to survey Phil’s mouth eagerly. “Figured you’d beat us back, anyway.”
“There’s an evidentiary hearing next week, and I’m down my favorite second chair,” Phil reminds him, and he feels his breath catch when Clint rewards him with a tantalizing, half-crooked smile.
“Pretty sure this is the part where you have sex on the kitchen counter,” Wilson announces. Phil glances over Clint’s shoulder in time to see Wilson pick up, chug, and then set down his beer bottle. “And, I mean, the dirtier the movie the better the movie, but I’d rather just use Pay-Per-View.”
Clint huffs a too-warm laugh, his eyes dancing. Phil shakes his head, a chuckle nearly escaping his lips, before suggesting, “You could go home.”
“Best idea you’ve had all day,” Wilson declares with a snap of his fingers. Phil notices for the first time that he’s wearing a threadbare Batman t-shirt and—
“Are those women’s yoga pants?”
Wilson glances down at the leopard-print monstrosities that are hugging every inch of his thighs. For a moment, Phil can’t decide whether Wilson’d forgotten his choice of attire, or whether he’s pretending he’d forgotten.
“He likes how they fit,” Clint offers.
“And,” Wilson adds in a tone that suggests he’s said this exact thing numerous times before, “they make sure that my milkshake is bringing the right proportion of boys to the yard.”
Phil’s almost certain that Wilson leaves after that.
But really, he and Clint are too busy laughing to actually notice.
Day 31
“I have—” Phil tries to say, but Clint’s fingers are nimble for their breadth, tugging at the buttons on his shirt. Every time he raises his own hands and tries to force Clint away, lips or, worse, teeth leave warm, wet spots on his jaw. He groans, and not entirely voluntarily.
He feels the shape of Clint’s grin against his throat. When a hand snakes between opened buttons and scratches mindless patterns against his chest, Phil attempts to physically twist away. “I have docket today, there’s a pile of affidavits waiting on my desk.”
“They can wait another twenty minutes,” Clint murmurs against his neck. His breath is almost painfully hot, as searing and energizing as an entire pot of coffee.
Phil forces himself to take a step back. “It’s never twenty minutes,” he argues.
“A half-hour, then,” Clint challenges, and grabs for his hip.
Phil steps sideways, the clumsy dodge of a man in his work socks on a hardwood floor, and Clint seizes the opportunity. One second, Phil’s half-slipping his way away from the bed and the half-naked body, he’d spent hours handling the night before; the next, Clint’s fingers are tangled in his boxers, overbalancing him. Phil tips and falls onto the bed in the world’s least-dignified sprawl, his legs splayed and one arm caught awkwardly under his body. By the time he’s located all his limbs, Clint’s straddled his hips and is dragging his callused hands up his stomach, chest, and sides.
“This isn’t fair,” Phil attempts to complain, but his annoyance is betrayed by the way his hips cant up into Clint’s weight. Clint grins, an almost predatory gleam in his eyes. Phil hates that gleam, mostly because it causes all the blood to pool immediately in his belly. And lower, actually, promising that his clean boxers aren’t long for this world.
Especially when Clint shifts, rocking against him for a few seconds before he leans forward. He catches himself on his hands at the last second and looms over Phil.
He’s naked except for his own underwear, a symphony of corded muscle. Phil wants to taste every inch of him.
“Half an hour,” he says, his mouth maddeningly close to Phil’s. Phil has at least ten hours of work to slot into an eight-hour work day—but Clint’s lips are full, chapped in a way Phil knows’ll be rough against his own mouth.
All the dull drives to work in the world won’t extinguish the sudden jolt of want, not when he studies those lips.
“Half an hour,” he agrees, and his fingers reach up to thread through Clint’s hair before he kisses him, hot and hungry and exactly as rough as he’d suspected.
He walks into the D.A.’s office almost an hour later, his tie not quite tied straight and his suit jacket over his arm. Maria stops in the middle of a heated conversation with an intern to raise both her eyebrows.
“Don’t ask,” Phil commands, but her slow-burn smile indicates that questions aren’t necessary.
Day 26
“C’mon,” Clint whines, leaning his head against the closed cabinet door, “there’s gotta be an update on Operation Log-Splinter.”
Phil raises his eyebrows. “Operation Log-Splinter?” he asks.
Natasha scowls into one of Clint’s drawers, hip-checks it shut, and opens another. “First,” she comments, “how do you not own a paring knife?”
“Any knife’s a paring knife in my kitchen,” Clint retorts proudly.
“And secondly, don’t call it that. You sound like a lumberjack.”
Clint’s kitchen smells like a dream, a collection of scents that, for once, doesn’t include “three-months-out-of-date Plug-In air freshener” and “week-old pizza in the fridge.” There’s an actual pot roast finishing its day-long simmer in the slow-cooker, fresh vegetables waiting to be chopped and thrown into a salad, and that’s not counting the actually-decent wine Phil knows is chilling in the fridge.
He’s not entirely sure how it started, the decision to make an actual dinner and invite actual friends, but somehow that’s how it’s ended up: the two of them and Natasha crammed into Clint’s too-small kitchen while Phil’s slow-cooker (like Clint actually owned one) promised them a delicious dinner.
(Pepper, on the other hand, had declined the invitation by printing out a copy of her Outlook tasks page and taping it to Phil’s computer monitor.)
Natasha selects a knife of moderate size from a drawer and immediately plunges it into one of the freshly-washed green peppers. There’s something strangely alluring—and slightly savage—in the way she slices it open. “There’s no update,” she says after a few seconds of studious cutting.
Phil reaches around her for the dish towel. “Updates on what?” he asks.
Clint promptly ignores him. “But you’re my eyes on the ground!” he complains, hoisting himself up onto the countertop. Unlike the rest of them, he’s already broken open a beer, and he dangles it between his fingers. “You’re like— You know how, in a heist, somebody cases the joint while the mastermind sits back and watches?”
Phil sighs. “I’m officially deleting Leverage off my DVR.”
“I’m the mastermind, and you’re the joint-caser.”
“The joint-caser?” Natasha repeats.
“Yeah.” Clint shrugs and necks his beer. “It’s not a bad gig, if you can get it.”
There’s something mildly violent about the way Natasha throws the strips of green pepper atop the lettuce that’s already in the salad bowl. Phil’s salad bowl, by the way, just like it’s Phil’s salad spinner and Phil’s serving platter. For the first time, he’s grateful that his sisters love shopping at Williams-Sonoma. “Unlike some people,” she says, her knife cleanly slipping into a red onion, “I am currently working forty hours a week—”
“Ouch,” Clint intones, thumping his chest with a fist.
“—and don’t have time to follow Stark and Bruce around, tracking their googly eyes.”
“Wait,” Phil interrupts. He sets the platter down heavily on the counter and moves to stare at the two of them. Natasha shakes her head, curls bouncing, and continues cutting up the onion with ruthless efficiency, but Clint meets his eyes. “You two are talking about Stark and Banner’s—thing?”
“More about them getting their shit together,” Clint replies. When he moves to lift his beer to his lips again, Phil catches it and helps himself to a sip. He’s fairly sure that Natasha’s annoyed sigh is accompanied by an eye-roll. “They wanna hook up,” Clint continues once the bottle’s returned, “but they’re running circles around one another.”
“Circles are better organized than they are,” Natasha comments, dropping the onion in with the pepper.
Phil glances between the two of them, studying first the line of Natasha’s shoulders and then the lazy slouch of Clint’s body as he leans against the upper cabinets. He can’t help but track the way Clint’s jaw moves when he swallows, either.
“Please tell me this isn’t all you two talk about,” Phil finally says.
“Nah, we talk about sex, too,” Clint quips, and Phil snorts a laugh before he steals the rest of his beer.
The next handful of minutes is filled with lazy conversation that moves smoothly between work, television, sports (“I’m allowed to prefer hockey,” Natasha defends against Clint’s mocking), and a thousand other, unimportant topics. Operation Log-Splinter—“Like from Godspell,” Clint notes, and scowls when both Phil and Natasha frown at him—only crawls back into the conversation as Phil’s removing the roast, potatoes, and carrots from the crock-pot.
“Ten bucks says they’re sleeping together before Christmas,” Clint announces. It’s apropos of absolutely nothing.
Natasha lowers herself from her tip-toes, arms laden with plates. “Stark and Bruce?” she asks.
Phil sighs at the enthusiasm of Clint’s nod. “It’s disturbing you worry this much about Stark’s sex life,” he decides, and then swings for Clint’s fingers with the spoon. He misses, Clint makes off with a carrot and a grin, and Phil’s left to bite down on his own smile.
He only realizes that Natasha’s still standing in the middle of the kitchen, her lips pursed in thought, after Clint dodges around her and out to the living room. Her eyes are fiercely competitive, lit with a gleam that Phil’s not entirely sure he likes.
“Thanksgiving,” she says after a few seconds.
Clint’s head miraculously pops back into the doorway between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment. “What?”
“They’ll be sleeping together before Thanksgiving,” Natasha says, and then walks off to set the table.
Day 44
“Finally, I get to meet Mister Barton,” says the Clarion County judge, and Clint straightens his shoulders.
Clint’s case—Clarion County case number 12008EP—is literally the last one set for the Friday afternoon docket, leaving him, Phil, the prosecutor, and the court reporter alone with the judge in the wood-paneled courtroom. She’s a broad-shouldered woman with a thick thatch of dark, gray-streaked, curly hair. Phil’d watched her from the back row as she’d called docket, scolding defendants and the prosecutor alike while her long, green-painted fingernails tapped a nonsense pattern atop the bench. But the prosecutor’s sitting now, skimming something on his iPad, and the judge sizes Clint up.
He’s dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and an equally-black tie, almost mannequin-like in its matching perfection. Phil’d stood in the doorway to his bedroom and watched him fidget through the act of dressing: buttoning his shirt, fumbling with his tie, selecting and then re-selecting a belt. He’d handed him his suit jacket wordlessly, and Clint’d shrugged it on before pressing him against the doorjamb and kissing him breathless.
“Is this for luck?” Phil’d wondered aloud, once the oxygen reached his brain again.
“It’s for something,” Clint’d replied, then slipped the car keys out of Phil’s pocket and headed for the door.
“Your reputation precedes you,” the judge says presently, her fingers stilling against the top of the bench. “I got a letter. Did you know that? Your bar disciplinary committee sent me a letter, copied to the prosecutor, talking about how I ought to expunge your crimes.”
Phil watches Clint’s back bunch under his suit jacket, his shoulders square and tight. “I know,” he says.
“Pretty serious crimes, if I read your history right.”
Clint nods. “Yes, your honor.”
“Mmm.” The judge reaches up to remove her glasses, then places them gingerly on the bench. For a few moments, there’s absolute silence in the courtroom save for the occasional soft swipe of the prosecutor’s finger across the surface of his iPad. Phil watches the judge’s dark eyes run down the length of Clint and then back up again, almost as though she’s trying to see through him.
Finally, she releases the serious press of her lips. “And what do you think?” she asks.
The abruptness of the question causes Clint to start. He twists, almost as though he plans to glance over his shoulder at Phil, then aborts the motion halfway through. He reaches up and presses his palms against the podium. Like when he’s nervous while prosecuting a case, Phil thinks.
“About my expungement?”
“About anything,” the judge says. She shrugs her shoulders before leaning back in her seat. “The letter says you’re an upstanding lawyer and attaches your full disciplinary file. From the sound of it, there’s not an attorney in your county who doesn’t think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Phil thinks he catches Clint casting an embarrassed look down at the podium. “But I want to know more about you, Mister Barton.”
“Me?” Clint repeats.
“You. Like, for instance: you gotten into any trouble since your convictions back in the day?”
Clint’s head shake is immediate. “No, your honor,” he answers quickly. From anyone else, the immediacy might seem suspicious, but Clint somehow sounds painfully earnest. “I mean, unless you count a couple speeding tickets, but I paid them on time.”
The judge’s lips purse into a tiny, glimmering smile. “I don’t,” she assures him. She rocks back in her seat a few times. “Any contact with your co-defendants?”
He hesitates for a moment. Phil can see his hands curling into fists, nervously looking for something to do. “I ran into one of them at the courthouse one day,” he admits with the tiniest shrug of his shoulders. “And, I mean, there’s my brother.”
“Barney?”
“Right. He’s, uh, he’s doing better.” He pauses to wet his lips. “We text a little, that kinda thing. Nothing major, and I don’t run with his crowd.”
Every word tumbles awkwardly from his lips, brimming with trepidation, and Phil rolls his lips together. He feels an uptick in nerves the same way he knows Clint must, urgent and uncertain. He knows he can’t object, but part of him wants to.
But, unexpectedly, the judge sits up in her chair and smiles. “I don’t expect you to abandon your brother to save your career, Mister Barton. Family’s just a little more precious than that.”
When Clint exhales, all the tension in his shoulders releases, too. “Thank you,” he says, no stilted title tagged onto the end. At least, not until he amends, “Your honor.”
She laughs then, a booming bark that fills the room, and Phil’s relief triples when he sees Clint finally smile. “I like you,” she decides, thumping the bench with the palm of her hand. “You’ve got a good heart. I figured as much from all those letters, but I think you mostly need to look somebody in the eye before you can make a decision like this. See if what’s on paper matches up.”
There’s something half-challenging in Clint’s voice when he asks, “And?”
“And you exceeded my expectations, I think. Though you’ve got to do something about how nervy you get in front of a judge, because if you’re like this here, lord knows what you’re like in front of Patty English back in Suffolk County!” The judge laughs at Clint’s blink of surprise and then shakes her head. “Mister Barton, as of today, your juvenile convictions are expunged. Give me ten minutes, then you and your boy can come around to my office and pick up the official order.”
For a half second, Clint sputters. “My—boy?” he asks.
“He’s sat in the back row with you all afternoon, waiting on this hearing,” she comments, gesturing vaguely in Phil’s direction. This time, Clint turns around to look at him, and Phil finds himself smiling. It’s not entirely accidental, that smile, but it feels that way. “No way he was anything other than your boy.”
She adjourns the court after that, leaving the prosecutor to pack up his cart of files and the court reporter to trail her out of the courtroom. Clint stands at the podium longer than is absolutely necessary, staring at the bench with the smallest of smiles playing across his lips. Phil nods to the prosecutor as he wanders up the aisle, but he keeps his comments to himself and his hands in his pockets.
He’s still attempting to work out what Clint’s feeling—excitement, fear, surreality, more nerves—when the courtroom doors swing shut. Within seconds, Clint’s terrifying, ninja-like reflexes spring into motion, and Phil finds himself being crowded against the podium with hands plastered to his hips.
“Please don’t tell me you have a courtroom-sex fantasy to go with your office-sex fantasy,” he comments dryly, and Clint’s laughter is the greatest sound in the world. Clint kisses him then, but without any sort of urgency. It’s soft, almost sweet, and Phil finds himself smiling against Clint’s mouth before they break apart.
“What?” Phil asks, but Clint says, “Thanks,” in the same breath. When he raises an eyebrow, Clint ducks his head in a way that’s very nearly shy.
“Thanks for what?” Phil asks while his hand drifts along Clint’s side.
Clint shrugs. “For being my ‘boy,’ mostly,” he replies, and kisses Phil again while Phil laughs.
Day 39
“You dishonor your ancestors!” Thor’s voice booms, and Phil’s pen scratches an ugly black trench across his legal pad.
The usually-tinny speakers on Clint’s television perfectly amplify bomb blasts, machine-gun fire, and Thor’s shouts of tragedy and triumph, and Phil feels his thin veneer of patience start to chip away. He’d spent Friday night with Clint, alternating between sleeping and enthusiastically not sleeping, only to wake up three hours later than he’d planned. The pleasant ache in his thighs kept him from insisting on their morning run—“Think we got enough exercise,” Clint’d winked while he started the coffee—and Clint’s cajoling, coaxing hands on his sides and waist kept him from heading home for the day.
“I need to work,” Phil’d reminded him for approximately the fifty-seventh time in the last few days.
Clint’d pressed his face against his neck. “So work here,” he’d half-whined, and Phil—
Phil decides in that moment that he is an absolute sucker.
He places his pen back where it’s meant to be, a dozen lines higher than where it’d landed, just as Clint starts to cackle. He tries his best to ignore it as he scribbles down the question he needs to ask the officer—an officer who, by the way, wrote the worst police report known to man—when another blast causes Thor to groan over the speakers. It’s nearly obscene.
“You obtain your results unjustly!” his voice announces, and Clint’s laughter echoes through the tiny apartment. Phil removes his glasses for the express purpose of rubbing his eyes. “You wait until your comrade is wounded—”
“Comrade?” Clint interrupts, scoffing. “It’s set on every-man-for-himself, there’s no comrades!”
“—and use your ill-begotten tools of war—”
“Just ‘cause you don’t know where to find the rocket launcher, you turn into a sore loser.”
“—to destroy those who have never harmed you!”
Thor’s last declaration is accompanied by Clint’s uproarious laughter. It thankfully drowns out the sound of Thor pouting and grumbling, and the game’s momentarily silent before the shooting and explosions start up again. Phil listens to the taunts and jabs for a few more minutes before he pushes his chair out from under the dining table and stalks over to the television set.
He knows, intellectually, that there’s not much else for Clint to do. Technically, he’s not allowed to even look at Phil’s case files, and Phil’s already turned down another few hours of bedroom gymnastics.
But on the other hand, Thor is just so loud.
Clint yelps when Phil shoves the headset’s audio cable into the jack on the television, and for a mad-cap minute, Clint abandons his control to turn down the volume. He’s wearing his sweatpants and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. All that corded muscle distracts Phil from everything—his mission to find quiet, his horrible police report and need for clarifying questions, his frustration at Thor—but then Clint’s scowling at him. Phil scowls back for a half-second, then returns to the dining table.
It’s a few minutes later when he hears Clint say, “Yeah, I get it, victor and spoils, gimme a sec,” and then hears the rattle of the controller hitting the floor. Clint’s spent enough time in sullen silence, hardly grunting an insult, that Phil expects he’ll receive the cold shoulder for another half-hour at least. Which is fine, since in a half-hour he’ll be finished with the atrocious report and can actually—
All coherent thoughts race away when Clint slips arms around his neck from behind. The momentary hug’s warm and familiar, and Phil abandons his pen to reach up and stroke his hands over the backs of Clint’s. Hands, then wrists, then up his forearms, just feeling the strength and heat there.
Clint presses his face into the back of Phil’s hair. “Sorry for being a loud asshole,” he murmurs.
Phil sighs and closes his eyes. “Sorry for being petulant.”
Clint snorts against his scalp. “That’s a good word for your little hissy fit.”
“It wasn’t a hissy fit.”
“You could’ve deafened me.”
“I’m not sure you wouldn’t’ve deserved it.”
Clint laughs then, and Phil can’t help but smile. When Clint starts to pull away, Phil twists around just long enough to catch his lips. “Gimme another half-hour,” he says, their mouths still almost pressed together.
He can’t see Clint’s smile, but he can feel it. “Careful, I might time you.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” Phil replies, and Clint kisses him again before he trots back to the couch—and to Thor.
Day 8
There are ten people eating brownies in Phil’s living room.
Phil counts them as he stands in the doorway, surveying the collection of strangers that are scattered around his house, chatting over coffee and baked goods. On a second pass-through, he realizes that not all the people are, technically, strangers; for instance, he recognizes Jane Foster’s tinkling laugh, as well as Bruce Banner’s unmistakable mess of hair and faded purple shirt.
Phil’s had an exceptionally long day, and he knows he wears every minute of frustration on his entire body. Besides their secured computer program crashing and two freak power outages (caused, an e-mail claimed, by maintenance trying to fix the crashed systems server), he’s spent the day arguing. In court, on the phone, with an angry detective who didn’t understand why his shoddy investigation resulted in the “aggravated” part of a robbery charge being dropped . . . He feels like the first eight hours of his day consisted entirely of yelling.
Followed promptly by a Suffolk County Bar Association meeting in which no fewer than eight people referred to Clint as “that attorney in your office who just got suspended.”
In short, Phil is in an absolutely fantastic mood.
And there are ten people in his living room.
Eleven if you count Clint, who steps out of the kitchen that instant with a swagger in his step, a grin on his face, and a cup of coffee in his hand. The swagger and the grin both falter when he catches Phil standing in the doorway, though, and he pauses only long enough to hand over the cup of coffee before heading in Phil’s direction.
The coffee’s in one of the half-dozen mugs Phil’d “liberated” from his law school’s career development office during the height of his coffee addiction.
“Sorry,” Clint says in a rush as he crowds into the doorway. He’s wearing a t-shirt that Phil suspects is a size too small and a pair of jeans that threaten to show off his hipbones. Somehow, Clint always manages to wear clothes Phil wants to physically rip off him. “I was gonna text, but I figured you were already on your way and not gonna check your phone in the car anyway, so—”
“Why, exactly, are they all here?” Phil interrupts with a wave of his hand. A wave of the hand that’s still holding the tie he’d pulled off in the car. He’s tieless, and shoeless, because this is his house. It’s just presently full of people.
Across the living room, Jane finger-waves, and Bruce—because he’s Bruce, after all—ducks his head to stare at the floor. The tips of his ears go bright red.
“Like I said, I’m sorry,” Clint repeats. He at least sounds like he means it. “We were supposed to have book club at Jane’s, but Thor’s been screwing around with their kitchen remodel and busted a pipe. My place is kinda small, but yours is perfect.”
“For book club,” Phil repeats.
“Yeah.”
“You’re in a book club?”
Clint’s smile is the most delicious kind of crooked. Someday, Phil knows, that smile will either kill him or force him to kill someone else. Besides, of course, making him want to kiss Clint until neither of them can breathe. “Darcy and I were Skyping ‘cause I was bored, and Jane overheard and thought I might wanna give it a try. I mean, not much else for me to do, right?”
“Besides read books?” Phil asks, and Clint nods. There’s something eager in it, almost like he’s waiting for Phil’s explicit approval. Phil knows the last week and a half’s tortured Clint, leaving him feeling useless and, worse, bored. A book club’s better than knocking over a liquor store, right?
He’s still studying the broad grin that’s playing across Clint’s face when Clint reaches over and plants a hand on his arm. “C’mon,” he goads, giving Phil a tiny tug. “Jane made killer brownies. You can eat a couple and listen to me talk about, I dunno, crappy foreshadowing or whatever.”
“You don’t actually talk about foreshadowing,” Phil accuses.
Clint’s eyes spark. “Wanna bet?” he demands, and drags Phil into the living room.
Day 20
“She’s actually not a terrible writer.”
Clint’s tucked up in the armchair that used to be next to the book cases but is now, inexplicably, by the window. The afternoon sunlight turns his hair into spun gold and bronzes his skin, including the toes that are curled around the edge of the chair’s cushion—and his bare arms.
Phil sometimes thinks Clint would go bare-armed at work if he could.
As it stands, Clint is chewing on a pen cap as he marks something down on the stack of papers he’s clutching. His eyes squint through his glasses, and Phil—Phil, who has three hearings tomorrow, thank you, and who would rather not spend his Sunday afternoon distracted by his boyfriend’s lips and spun-gold hair—watches him from the couch. There are files spread all around him, his laptop balanced on his thighs, but for a moment, Clint’s his focus.
Most weekends, Clint’s ninety-five percent of his focus.
“You’ve been complaining about her piece for three days,” he recalls, turning back to the computer.
“Yeah, I know,” Clint agrees. His track pants hiss against the chair as he shifts around. “But, I mean, it’s not terrible. Just kinda—scattered.”
Phil snorts. “Like her boss’s personality, you mean?”
“Yeah, like— Hey!” Phil ducks just in time to avoid the (damp) pen cap. It pings off the wall and skitters behind the couch. “You weren’t complaining about her boss’s ‘scattered personality’ last night.” He can hear the slow-burn smile teasing across Clint’s lips. “Actually, I don’t think you had the ability to complain about anything last night, the way I was—”
“Finish that sentence,” Phil interrupts, “and you can sleep in your own bed.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
Clint laughs then, an easy sound, and allows Phil to return to his typing. He finishes up his main points for direct examination and moves to a new page in the document to plan his cross when he catches himself glancing over at Clint. Phil spends almost all his free time with Clint, these days—afternoons, weekends, six nights out of seven—but sometimes, Clint still surprises him with a thousand different traits: his attention to detail, the noisy joy of his laughter, his unexpected talents in the kitchen. He’s learning the ins-and-outs of Clint Barton through his suspension, and most days, he’s desperate to learn more.
Today, he’s desperate to finish his hearing prep, but Clint’s nearness distracts him.
“Y’know, I’m kinda jealous I never did the law review thing,” Clint comments offhandedly as he scratches a note across the bottom of a page. He never glances up, but Phil suspects he knows that Phil’s watching. “Between all the classes and my job, I didn’t have time for it, but I think it would’ve been fun.”
Phil snorts a laugh, shaking his head. “You would’ve spent six months of your life cursing law school, and you still only would’ve had a one-in-ten chance of getting published.”
“Yeah, but I mean, look at what Darcy’s getting out of it.” Clint holds up the packet of papers. “Thirty-eight pages of solid research, of good analysis, of—”
“Scattered writing?” Phil offers with a sly smile.
Clint rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying,” he defends, tucking himself up further in the chair, “it’s not all bad.”
“And Friday, Darcy microwaved her cell phone in the break room because she’s hasn’t slept in three days.” Phil decides in that moment that there are few things more satisfying than Clint’s flabbergasted, fish-faced expression. He shrugs and returns to the computer. “You missed nothing on law review.”
“Her cell phone?”
“Nothing,” Phil repeats, and starts planning his cross.
Day 57
“I can’t wait until you go back to work,” Phil groans against the pillowcase.
He can practically hear Clint blink. It’s those eyelashes. They’re long and golden brown and Phil swears they whisper together every time the man moves his eyes. They’re not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure. “Why?”
“Because I’m never going to get anything done if you don’t,” Phil replies, and Clint, damn him, laughs.