Chapter 12 #6
All the times he’s pictured Casey kissing him—and it has, if Will’s going to be honest about it, been quite a few—he’s imagined being kissed as though by a hurricane, all force and power and too much at once to keep track of, a marvel of nature you can’t help but admire until the moment it rips you apart.
But Casey doesn’t rush. Casey kisses Will like they’ve got all the time in the world, like the bridge repair’s been cancelled, like tomorrow’s never coming.
He splays the hand that isn’t holding Will flush against himself along the side of Will’s neck, fingers sliding against the tender skin underneath Will’s ear.
The sound Will makes into Casey’s mouth at this particular sensation is less than dignified, but far from making Casey back away, or snort in mockery, or roll his eyes, Casey tightens his grip and moves them both, spinning them so he has Will up against the stairwell wall.
Some time passes; Will couldn’t say how much.
Who could possibly say how much? The minutes burn merrily away, hissing and crackling as they go, thoughts and logic and hesitations going up in smoke right along with them.
He doesn’t pause when Casey says, “You wanna come up?” He doesn’t question himself, or the moment, or whether he’s making the best objective choice, the choice that runs the fewest risks in the circumstances.
He’s busy following Casey up the stairs instead, and being interrupted halfway through to be thoroughly kissed against the banister before, eventually, Casey grabs him by the wrist and growls, “C’mon. ”
As Will’s being pulled along behind him, he can’t help but remember the first encounter he and Casey had on a stairwell, which was somehow only the Saturday before last. What would have happened if it had all played out a little differently?
If Will had come out to the farm first that morning, instead of going to Mike’s for breakfast, and caught Casey fresh from the shower, still dripping with a towel slung around his waist?
Would they have screamed at each other and stormed away angry, the way it happened in reality?
Or would the tension, Casey’s bare chest, the thin light of the early hour, have tipped things past the breaking point?
Maybe Casey would have tossed him up against the landing wall, snarling, all that white-hot frustration pouring out of him as passion?—
“Will?” Casey’s staring at him, eyebrows up, when Will breaks out of this filthy train of thought at the top of the stairs. For the first time since he opened the door to the attic, he looks a little uncertain. “You good? We don’t have to do this, you know, if it’s too?—”
“No, God,” Will says, flushing. “Nothing like that. I was just…” He pauses, embarrassed, and then realizes that in the circumstances, he’s not sure he needs to be. “I was thinking about, um. How it might have gone differently the last time we were in close quarters on a set of stairs?”
Casey blinks at him for a second; then he smiles; then he laughs. “What,” he says, chuckling, “you mean if I’d said, ‘Is that a broom handle you’re poking me with, or are you just happy to?—’”
“Oh my God don’t make that joke,” Will says, half-groaning on a laugh of his own.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you said that, I hate you—” He freezes, a deer in the headlights, abruptly sure that he’s gone too far, made it weird, misread the moment, said the wrong thing, or otherwise killed the mood.
God knows it wouldn’t be the first time.
But Casey’s smile goes dark and purposeful again, and he steps close, right into Will’s space, until there’s only a single electric inch between them. “You hate me, huh?” he says, his voice low. “Go ahead, then. Prove it.”
Will launches himself forward like he’s leaping for shore, the very last dregs of his higher thinking skills swirling down the drain. He’s pretty sure he fails, over the next few hours, to prove that he hates Casey, but that’s all right; it’s not like he was ever really trying to.
Will wakes up slowly, stretching out, cat-like, against the sheets.
He’s alone in the room, but after a night involving quite a lot of exercise and very little sleep, he’s stiff in more ways than one.
Downstairs, he can hear the distant clattering of Casey puttering around.
Reassured that he hasn’t been abandoned in the night, he tries to doze for a few minutes, but finds he can’t quite manage it.
He’s too interested in the attic, which he had not observed closely last night, but which in daylight is so different from his memories as to feel like part of a different home.
It’s bright and open, the walls covered with framed vintage band posters and photos from all over the country, more light filtering through than Will would have imagined possible.
Fairly quickly, though, he starts to feel like his curiosity will overwhelm his good intentions if he doesn’t get out of here, and he’ll cross the line from observation into snooping.
He pulls on a pair of Casey’s sweatpants on the theory that it isn’t too presumptuous, since most of the clothes he’s been wearing recently are Casey’s anyway , and goes downstairs.
He finds Casey in the kitchen, making breakfast.
Well. He’s attempting to make breakfast, anyway.
He is, as Will has learned over these last few weeks, not much of a cook, so what he appears to be doing is heading towards burning a variety of breakfast items, but it doesn’t matter.
Standing in front of the stove, barefoot in boxers and a T-shirt that reads IDAHO: Big Potato Country , he’s hot to the point of practically burning Will .
He’d eat the food even if Casey reduced it to ashes, and with a sense of fellow-feeling.
Still: “You want some help with that?” Will’s voice comes out huskier than he means it to, not sure yet what the vibe is going to be between them, but when Casey looks up, he smiles, so that’s all right. “The, uh. Breakfast, I mean.”
“Sure,” he says, stepping aside slightly to let Will access the range.
“If you don’t mind.” Casey passes him the spatula, his hand brushing against Will’s for what’s surely longer than necessary.
His body heat, the nearness of him, the way he could reach down and grab Will’s arm, pull him close, is…
distracting, to say the least. Will’s sorry when he moves away, although he does, at least, finally notice he’s just stirring air , and lets the spatula descend into the potatoes.
“I don’t mind,” Will says, and looks up into Casey’s warm green eyes. “My pleasure, really. The least I can do, after last night.” The phone starts ringing in the other room; without breaking Casey’s gaze, he asks, “Do you need to answer that?”
“Eh,” Casey says, still looking directly at Will. “Let it ring. They can wait, whoever they are.”
Will smiles at him, and Casey smiles back.
The phone works through its ring cycle and finally clicks over to voicemail as Will, pulled toward the broad plateau of Casey’s chest like an iron shaving to a magnet, lists forward, all his hesitation and rationalizing and self-control falling away towards?—
“Pick up, Will! I know you’re there! Pick up!
” The voice is shrill and furious and loud even over the answering machine in the other room, and Will knows it immediately as Catherine Rose’s.
“You think you can just avoid me forever? Well, you can’t , Will, the deadline is in two days , and if you think I’m just going to let you ghost me like your stupid father always did, you have another thing coming!
I am Catherine Rose, goddamn it! I close .
It’s what I do . If I have to call up everyone you might be staying with, or come back to that backwater and hold the contract under your hand myself until you sign it, then that’s what I’ll do! Call! Me! Back!”
Will freezes, abruptly a pillar of ice, as panic radically diverts the path of his morning.