5. Chapter Four #2
In fact, Joe was pretty sure—for an attractive, employed, only in town for the night pilot— that was an understatement. Quentin could probably find someone willing to have a less complicated and unencumbered evening between here and the front door.
Quentin sat back in the booth. He looked amused. “Trust me,” he said. “You can ask anyone, if I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be.”
The urge to fucking melt caught Joe off guard.
He could feel the flush crawl up his throat.
It was only the need to keep Cody distracted that stopped him from sliding off the seat and under the table.
He spared a moment to be relieved that Jessie and Benjy were still occupied with the claw machine.
If they’d been at the table, they would definitely have made a comment.
Joe fought off the heady mixture of infatuation and embarrassment with a liberal splash of cynicism.
“Let me guess,” he said as he cocked his head to the side to look Quentin over. That distracted him enough for Cody to grab the salt off him. “Savior complex? Did all your exes swoon when you swept in on your shining white Airbus to save the day?”
Quentin snort-laughed at that. The undignified noise seemed to fluster him more than Joe’s accusation did. He shrugged.
“Maybe I just like you,” he said.
Heat crawled up from Joe’s throat into his face.
Before he could think through the blush to come up with a response to that, Cody took advantage of their distraction to grab for the coveted bowl of crab dip.
It all happened in slow motion at that point.
A fat, little hand slapped the bowl; it flipped, and the crab dip splattered all over a startled Quentin’s shirt and lap.
Joe felt a sinking sense of inevitability as he stared at the mess.
“Oh, yeah?” Joe said as he grabbed a handful of napkins and passed them over the table. “Why?”
****
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” Joe said as he hovered guiltily in the doorway. “If you need anything—”
That got him an eye roll of scorn from the two tweens. The pair of them were top and tailed on the bed, Jessie’s feet in aggressively quirky socks on what would be Joe’s pillow, and engrossed in different media on their phones.
“It’s the hall, Joe,” Jessie pointed out witheringly. “You’re not going off to the club.”
“Yeah, what are we going to need?” Benjy asked, the flickering lights of his game playing over his face. “Ice?”
Joe didn’t actually know how to answer that. They weren’t wrong, he supposed, but it still felt like he was being a neglectful parent(al figure). He supposed that was his problem.
“I am not looking forward to you being teens,” he said tartly.
Jessie didn’t look away from the make-up tutorial she was glued to as she sniggered. “I am going to be so good at that,” she said and held her foot up expectantly.
Benjy absently freed up one hand long enough to high-five (high-sole?) the bottom of her foot.
Joe rubbed his hand over his face. That was weird, but probably in the acceptable range. Not the ‘our fathers died together and now what little stability we have depends on an idiot’ range. He’d look for a book when they got home.
“Just…don’t set anything on fire,” he said.
They didn’t dignify that with a response. Joe decided to take that as a win. A quick glance confirmed Cody was still asleep in the borrowed hotel crib, and he closed the door gently behind him as he stepped back into the hall.
“I really am sorry…” he started to say as he turned around.
The words dried up somewhere between his brain and his mouth as he caught Quentin halfway through unbuttoning his stained shirt.
He was wearing a thin, white undershirt beneath it, which should have made it less ogle-worthy but somehow didn’t.
Maybe it was the way it clung to his lean chest, or the light scruff of dark hair just visible over the neckline.
“Don’t worry about it,” Quentin said as he shrugged the shirt off his shoulders. “Accidents happen.”
Joe squinted at him. “Would you stop being so nice to me?” he asked plaintively. “I am finding it very hard to roll with.”
“It’s a shirt,” Quentin said. “I have a spare.”
“I get that, but…could you just demand I pay for dry cleaning?”
Quentin gave him a puzzled look. “I actually get a stipend to cover that,” he said. “Joe? I work for an airline. Crab dip is not the worst thing I’ve had on my uniform. By a long shot.”
Well, ewww, and obviously , now Joe thought about it, but that wasn’t the point.
He just needed to prove to himself that he was right, that this wasn’t some ridiculously romantic Hallmark movie.
Quentin was just Some Guy, and it wasn’t going to be the biggest regret of Joe’s life that he wasn’t in any position to do anything about the connection he felt.
“I could wash the shirt out?” Joe offered as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. He glanced down to where the shirt dangled from Quentin’s hand. His eyes caught on Quentin’s undershirt, where the greasy dip had soaked through to stain it too. He gestured at it. “That too.”
“Are you just trying to get me naked?” Quentin asked, his voice thick and sweet with amusement.
Joe jerked his eyes up and tried to ignore the sudden slap of heat that scorched his face. “No!” he blurted out. Well, maybe now that he thought about it…but not that he was going to admit that. “Of course not. I just…I feel bad that you’ve been so nice and had such a shit night.”
That made Quentin raise his eyebrows. “I had a great night.”
Joe gave a dry look back. “What was your favorite part? My sticky kids pestering you about flying a plane or the crab dip bath?”
Quentin crinkled his nose as he thought about the answer. “Probably the plane questions,” he said finally, then just had to go for the throat with… “And you.”
That was…
…the perfect, corny thing to say. Of course, it was. Joe took a step back and scrubbed his hand through his hair.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“You sure?” Quentin asked.
The way he looked at Joe, like he saw him, like he couldn’t see anything else but him, made the ‘no’ bubble up in the back of Joe’s throat. It would be so easy to say it, and who would it hurt?
Of course, his brain couldn’t leave it at that. It ran through the list.
The ‘yes’ would be easy, right up until it wasn’t.
So that left…
“I don’t have room in my life for anything else right now,” Joe said. “It wouldn’t be fair to you—”
Quentin stepped forward. “Maybe I should be the judge of that.”
“Or me, or Tess, or the kids,” Joe finished as he lifted his hand.
His palm flattened against Quentin’s chest, and he had not thought that through.
He could feel the warmth of Quentin’s skin through the thin cotton and the soft, steady thump of his heart.
His fingers might have curled a bit. “Just let me pay for the shirt.”
Quentin looked like he was going to argue, but then shrugged. He fished in his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a business card.
“Call me when we get back,” he said as Joe took the card. “I’ll let you know what it cost…or anything else you might want from me.”
Joe knew he shouldn’t smile. It would just encourage Quentin. He did anyhow, despite biting his lip to try and keep it in check.
“It’s not that I don’t…this?” he said. “I’m just not ready.”
He’d said that a lot over the last two years since Alan died. It had fended off people who thought he should do anything about his grief. This was the first time it had felt like an excuse and not an explanation.
“I can wait,” Quentin said.
“I don’t want you to,” Joe lied. Said. He said.
Quentin exhaled and quirked his mouth in rueful acknowledgement. When he nodded, Joe felt a selfish little jag of disappointment that it was this easy after all.
“I get it,” Quentin said. He put his thumb under Joe’s chin and tipped his head back so their eyes met. “You can’t stop me, but I get it.”
That was–
Quentin was–
Joe kissed him. There was no thought involved, nothing as elevated as words or reasons anyhow. It just felt like the only natural thing to do in this situation was twist his hand into Quentin’s undershirt and pull him into a kiss.
How else could he have responded to that?
Quentin tasted like crab dip and milkshake. It should have been gross, but Joe leaned into it. He caught Quentin’s lower lip between his teeth and tugged gently on it, the flesh warm and firm as he bit down.
Surprise pinned Quentin in place for a second, frozen as if he wasn’t sure how to react.
Then he took a quick, shaky breath, the intake of warm air stolen from Joe’s mouth, and grabbed Joe’s hips in his hands.
The shirt, already stained, dropped to the ground in a pale flutter.
Quentin stepped on it as he pushed Joe back against the wall and kissed him back.
It was rough and hungry, with Joe’s mouth crushed under Quentin’s. It was a kiss that had been building for all of four hours, but the pent-up hunger in it felt like they had been waiting months for this.
Years.
The heat of it scorched over Joe’s tongue and singed the back of his throat.
He reached up to grab the nape of Quentin’s neck, fingers dug into the tight bands of muscle and tendon as he dragged the other man closer.
The graze of warm fingertips across his side as Quentin slid a hand up under his shirt sent prickles of pleasure zapping between his ribs.
He arched into the touch. It had been—
Joe caught himself. He knew where that train of thought went, and it was nowhere good.
The guilt would catch up with him eventually, no matter what he did, but just this once, he wasn’t going to help it along.
He had gone all in on this bad decision…
well, as all-in as he thought he could manage…
and he was going to enjoy it while the enjoying was good.
A knee nudged between Joe’s legs, a lean thigh pressed up against his balls, and Quentin deepened the kiss. Joe groaned around Quentin’s tongue and felt the other man’s mouth tilt in a pleased-with-himself smile. He supposed he couldn’t even blame Quentin for that. He was doing a good job.
Joe made a rough noise of protest as Quentin’s mouth left his.
He shouldn’t have bothered. Quentin laid a trail of wet, chewed kisses along Joe’s jaw, teeth scraped over light stubble, and down the line of his throat.
The breath squeezed in Joe’s throat as he tilted his head back against the wallpaper and ran his arm over Quentin’s sharp, wide shoulder and down his bare arm.
His elbow clipped the frame of one of the professionally soulless commercial prints that hung along the hall, knocking the image of a desaturated, scrapbooked family biking holiday crooked.
The sound of a chime registered vaguely with him.
He knew what it was, his brain just didn’t want to process the information when it had six foot and a bit’s worth of pilot to catalogue and index instead.
It was only the sound of a scandalized gasp that pushed the information—that was an elevator—to the forefront of his brain.
“Well, I don’t think this hotel is for us, Mary,” a man said, his voice leaden with disapproval. “Not if this is the sort of thing that goes on.”
Shit.