The second try
You taste just like glitter
Mixed with Rock and Roll
-- Lady Gaga, Boys Boys Boys
By the time they arrived, the girls had already left, this time without texting him. Both Jessie and Hannah had seen him wait outside for over an hour, so they probably already knew what was up. Despite consistently getting the lowest grades of all of them, Jessie was a lot smarter than most of them combined when it came to situations like this. People were her specialty.
Laith lined up the bottles by the kitchen sink while Theodore took a seat at the counter.
“Make the nachos while I take care of the guacamole.” Laith placed the ingredients in front of him and turned back towards the sink.
“Yes, chef.”
He threw the chips all on a plate and sprinkled the rest of the ingredients on top of them, already eating in the meantime. It sobered him up a bit; a gradual process that stopped the growling in his stomach. By the time Laith finished the guacamole, half of the nachos were already gone. Dark eyebrows scowled down at them, semi-disbelief on Laith’s face.
“Man, I didn’t know you were hungry. We could’ve gotten something actually filling.”
“This is fine.” Theodore scooped the guacamole with a tortilla chip and ate it. “Good stuff, dude. Did you put cilantro in here?”
“Of course. Do I look like an animal?”
He scoffed out a laugh while Laith had a chip and turned back around, this time to go through the overhead cabinets. The knives had been very easy to find, all in the drawer closest to him; cutting board right behind the faucet, bowls under the sink. A brief search of the cabinets showed him to the glasses, nothing fancy or cocktail-worthy. He took a couple and mixed them both a clear drink with an orange peel in each cup.
“What’s this one called?” Theodore asked.
“It’s just a martini in a tall glass.”
Theodore sipped on it. The vermouth itself was a mystery, impossible to tell apart from the vodka, at least to his capabilities, which didn’t help much. There was only ever beer at house parties, and since he still wasn’t old enough to drink, nightclubs only teased him with their extensive list of cocktails that he couldn’t order. This was probably his first proper one, even if the glass was the wrong type; the drink was sweet and the orange gave it a nice aftertaste. If all cocktails were like this, then he could get behind them.
Laith clinked their glasses together and drank from his own.
“Are you a bartender?” Theodore asked.
“Hell no; this is one of the easiest drinks out there. Easier than this, only a vodka soda.”
“What else can you make?”
“With what we have? Only variations of this.”
Laith leaned both elbows on the counter, shoulders up to his neck, pecs squeezed together. The way his shirt hugged his body made them look really nice.
“There isn’t much room to go crazy here. I guess the most we could do is incorporate juice. I’ve never had a martini with juice before, but I know they exist.”
Laith went on about the martini, but Theodore barely heard him. His attention was fixed on Laith’s chest, dog tags tucked between his pecs. He pictured the bleeding saint and the Greek letters in a circle kissing each other. Lettering peeked from under his shirt collar, something that Theodore couldn’t read, a different language—that was new. He could kiss it, lips trailing along Laith’s collar bone. Two kisses upwards would lend him right over the fern leaf.
“Theo.”
His name drew his eyes up like a spell was just broken, eyebrows high on his forehead, perfectly nonchalant despite getting caught staring. The burning in his stomach kept him emotionally distant from it all.
Laith raised an eyebrow back at him, the one with the split near the end. “Do you wanna try some with the juice? I feel like we’d need a liqueur for that.”
He watched the way Laith’s lips moved around each word, the delicate roundness of his O’s, how they pursed with the word liqueur, pearly white teeth flashing for just a moment. None of what Laith had just said registered in his brain, too busy staring at his mouth, not a single tattoo on his face. Why?
Theodore absently grabbed his jaw, fingertips careful on his skin, just how Laith had held the avocados at the store. A small lean pushed their faces together, his lips on Laith’s own, as soft as last time, heart beating deeply. Their mouths moved, their tongues met, and he let himself go; lost in the way Laith made him feel, eyes rolling to the back of his head.
There was a rhythm to this, a perfect synchrony to their movements, which he picked up without even thinking about it. A ¾ time signature, a waltz. Laith brushed the side of his face with a hand and burned it, a very brief touch on the way to his neck. Fingers carded through the hair on the base of his skull, much shorter than the bangs over his forehead.
The way Laith kissed him had a tenderness to it, subdued, that was deliberately hidden, even if badly. There was an attempt. Laith held their faces together with a fabricated austerity only there to mask the kindness. The only thing that really did, though, was travel straight to Theodore’s crotch, mind whirring—Laith’s hands on his body, squeezing his cock; Laith’s mouth on his neck, between his thighs. Squeezing Laith’s jaw, he leaned forward. The warmth in his chest swallowed him whole, fingertips digging into Laith’s cheeks, tongue on his palate, teeth on his lips. Every part of him screamed for more—more touching, more grabbing, more Laith on his skin. The closeness made him insane.
A deep breath reached his lungs as he broke away, hand pushing Laith back. That was way too much right now; if he kept it up, a lot more would have to follow. Something about Laith just lit him on fire, an incredible hunger that bubbled within his bloodstream, an urge that ate him up inside. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to just make out tonight, if kissing Laith like this already made him want so much more, but if they couldn’t even do that, then he wasn’t sure what they could do. Getting up, he took his glass and drank from it.
“Make a jar of this,” he ordered, pulse racing fast, blood still warm. There was a lot of cooling off to do.
Laith leaned away from the counter. “A whole jar?”
“Yes, for refill.”
The specifics didn’t matter; Laith just needed to be busy for a while so Theodore could breathe and calm down.
He left the kitchen for the living room, glass in hand, alcohol burning in his stomach. It was a nice kind of fire, innocent, that warmed his face and turned the air around him a little too stuffy. Laith’s body was still at the forefront of his mind, but doing his best to ignore it, he took the remote and sat on the couch, glass placed on the arm next to him.
“What do you wanna watch? A movie or a series?” he asked, like it mattered at all.
“Does it matter?”
Ugh.
“Please, just choose.”
The sound of liquid pouring into a recipient echoed from the kitchen. “Put on a horror movie.”
As an admirer of any kind of movie except for horror, Theodore wasn’t sure what to look for, or which one of these titles was the least scary one. Horrible monsters and terrifying creatures already haunted his everyday life; he didn’t need a piece of media to make him even more conscious of that, but of course Laith would dive head-first into it like a fix to an addict, obsessed with freaking himself out. If he kept looking into the dark, it’d look back one day. Then again, that was probably what he wanted.
Theodore only really knew the big titles whose ads manifested in his nightmares, so at least he could avoid those. Maybe an unknown, B-list kind of movie would suffice; maybe the special effects wouldn’t be so realistic and the monsters would be silly. If they happened to be people, that’d be even better.
Laith joined him in the living room just in time, martini jar placed on the TV stand. “Nice choice; the blood in this one looks like a waterfall.”
Right, of course Laith had already seen it.
“I can put on something else.”
“No, it’s fine; I don’t mind.”
Fair enough, but Laith could at least pretend to be interested, or pretend he’d spend a second watching it at all. While thoroughly infuriating, his openness about it still ran Theodore’s blood warm, knuckles pressed against his own lips. Did Laith have anything in mind?
With his glass refilled, Laith crossed the rug for the closest seat to Theodore’s. It was only then that Theodore realized this was the first time he’d taken the arm in two weeks.
To say that he’d watched even a single second of the movie would be an indisputable lie. There were harrowing screams and fake blood gushing out of arteries within the first fifteen minutes, which, on a normal day, would at least make an impression on him, but with Laith sitting this close, there wasn’t a single cell in his brain that could remain focused on anything else. Their bodies were a mere inch apart, Laith’s forearm resting on a thigh, knees spread comfortably. Theodore had never sat like that in his entire life, but could pretend to be one of the guys who did just for tonight, and slowly leaned his leg closer to Laith’s so their knees would touch. In shorts, all he could feel was the fabric of Laith’s pants, but it was the gesture that mattered. Laith had no reaction to it, so he considered it a win.
Their sitting arrangement broke the moment Laith’s glass ran empty, pushing him off the couch for a refill. Obviously disinterested in the movie, maybe even more than Theodore, he didn’t mind going back and forth, topping his host off every couple of rounds, out of courtesy. Every time he came back, the gap between them lessened; knees brushing together, thighs less than a hair apart. It was agony. Theodore drank until the floor began to wobble and the room lost its stability, hoping it’d be enough to finally scoot over and blame the alcohol for it, but in the end, he didn’t even have to. Laith, properly drunk, did it for him; plopping down on the couch as messily as he’d poured the last refill in the jar, still able to get it all in the glass somehow.
Much like last time, the knowledge that Laith was far more wasted than him shot pure adrenaline down his veins, stomach burning low. This close to each other, the alcohol in his bloodstream convinced him that every impure thought going through his mind was a good idea on how to progress the night. Since Laith’s arm practically touched his own, he went ahead and bridged the gap, forearms brushing lightly. That got Laith’s attention, green eyes dark. No negative reactions thus far, so Theodore kept going. A hand moved closer and touched the inside of Laith’s forearm, fingertips light on his skin, tracing over the comedy and tragedy masks. Laith watched that in silence. His arm flipped face-up for better access, scars barely visible in the dark, metal bracelet glinting under the glow of the TV screen.
The undeniable fact that Laith’s crotch was right there haunted every one of Theodore’s thoughts, even if his pants covered everything. Instead of going straight for it though, he grabbed Laith’s arm and used it for leverage, knees pushing him off the couch. A delicate lean allowed him to press his lips to Laith’s neck, amber and tobacco strong in his lungs. He kissed and nibbled, tongue on Laith’s pulse, flames racing down his veins. This time, he tried not to give him any hickeys.
Laith leaned his head back for him, broad shoulders relaxing against the couch. Surely, after what had happened, he thought Laith would at least say something about this. Was that what he’d meant by being good, that he’d shut up and just let whatever happen? The thought ran Theodore’s blood hot, and overtaken by excitement, he sucked on Laith’s neck a little too hard. Still, no objections. The compliance sunk teeth into Laith’s flesh.
Very carefully, he moved a knee over Laith’s thigh to straddle it, going for a better angle. As he shifted around, Laith brushed him on the leg, fingertips slipping under the hem of his shorts. He didn’t push very far up, so Theodore allowed it.
In charge of tonight and completely free to do whatever he wanted, Theodore touched the low of Laith’s stomach, palm pressed flat against it. His hand slipped under Laith’s shirt next, touching the skin between the wings tattooed there, the bird a perfect picture in his mind. Laith’s body was warm, stomach firm under his palm, a ripple of muscles all the way to his chest. Theodore pulled away to look down for a moment. Laith’s shirt was hitched up to his neck, chest rising and falling with each breath. The sight set Theodore’s blood on fire. Pushing on the space between Laith’s pecs, he leaned forward and pressed his lips against Laith’s ear.
“Touch yourself.”
***
A/N: To access the rest of this scene, consider buying a physical copy for $9.99 or the Kindle version for $4.99 and support the author! (Buy here.)
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