Chapter Twelve
Charlie opens the door before Simon’s even finished swiping his key card. He’s wearing sweatpants and no shirt. His hair is
wet like he just got out of the shower.
Charlie steps aside to let him in but then stops him with a hand on Simon’s shoulder. He’s staring at Simon so intently that
Simon wants to look away. “What did he say to you?”
Simon takes this to mean that Charlie knows where Simon was.
“That’s from talking to Jamie,” Simon explains, waving a hand at his red eyes. “I told him I’m leaving the show.”
Something complicated happens on Charlie’s face, and Simon realizes too late that he just confirmed that he’s leaving the
show, not merely thinking about it. He’s ready for an argument—about Dave, about Simon leaving the show, about Simon monopolizing
the bathroom counter, about anything, because that would be normal. But Charlie doesn’t look upset. Slowly, he lifts a hand
to touch Simon’s face.
“Everything go okay with Jamie?” Charlie’s hand is big and warm and shocking.
“Yeah, very.”
Charlie’s thumb strokes Simon’s cheekbone in a way that makes Simon’s brain white out.
He was so ready for Charlie to be annoyed, and this is so plainly the opposite of annoyance, that Simon is flooded with relief.
Only when the relief hits him does he realize how very badly he didn’t want Charlie to be upset with him.
Simon’s spent seven years accepting Charlie’s annoyance, Charlie’s dislike, as the baseline standard state of affairs between
them. At some point in the last day—maybe before that, maybe a while before—Simon started wanting something else, and now
he has it in the form of Charlie’s hand on his face.
“So. Dave called.” Charlie’s voice isn’t any louder than it needs to be, with Simon just a few inches away. “He apologized. What did you say to him? Were knives involved? What did you do?”
Simon swallows. There is no way to tone down what he said to Dave. No way to make it sound like anything other than what it
was.
“I told him he was lucky to have you and should stop being an entire bag of dicks about it.” He swallows again, makes himself
blink, tries to focus on something other than the blue of Charlie’s eyes. “And he basically told me that he’s trying to forcibly
stop you from worrying about him because you’ve exceeded your lifetime quota of worrying about people. He is, obviously, a
moron. But I don’t think he’s actively trying to hurt you.”
Charlie’s other hand settles on Simon’s face, and Simon thinks he might die. There’s no way he’s breathing right now.
“Thanks,” Charlie says, almost a whisper.
“It’s nothing,” Simon says. Or tries to say. He’s a little distracted by the half step forward Charlie just took. The edge
of Simon’s cardigan is touching Charlie’s bare chest.
Simon could move away if he wanted to, but he can’t imagine wanting to, not when Charlie’s leaning in, not when Charlie hesitates just a fraction of a second, his lips millimeters from Simon’s. They’re so close, breathing the same air, the space between them warm and heavy with anticipation.
When Charlie’s lips brush against his, Simon makes a sound. Not from surprise—he knew what Charlie was doing—but because he
doesn’t expect it to feel so immediately good. Kissing feels good; this is not news, even to Simon, to whom first kisses primarily
feel anxious, like impromptu performances you can’t rehearse for.
Kissing Charlie feels like he’s finally let go of something heavy. Like he’s filling his lungs after holding his breath. Charlie’s
lips are warm and a little chapped, and his beard is much softer than Simon thought it would be, and his hands are cupping
Simon’s face, and Simon’s been waiting for this.
There’s nowhere for Simon to put his own hands other than the naked skin of Charlie’s back, so that’s what he does, and now
Charlie makes a sound, groaning against Simon’s mouth.
Simon pulls back, just enough to talk. “Are you kissing me because I was rude to an old man? Is that what does it for you?”
There’s probably a less unhinged way to ask if Charlie’s doing this out of something as unsexy as gratitude, but Simon’s nowhere
close to hinged at the moment.
He’s near enough to feel Charlie smile. “Simon, I’m kissing you because I ran out of reasons not to.”
That’s insulting, Simon’s sure of it, and later on, when his brain is back online, maybe he’ll figure out why. For now, he
presses in for another kiss.
When Simon’s thought about how Charlie might kiss—in real life, not on camera—and Simon’s maybe thought about this a nonzero
number of times, he figured Charlie would be all in, right from the beginning. Teeth. A well-placed thigh. Definitely some
groping.
But this—Charlie’s hands cradling his jaw, Charlie’s lips barely tasting him—is not that, not at all, and the gulf between expectations and reality is making Simon feel off-balance. Dizzy.
One of Charlie’s hands disappears from Simon’s face, and Simon doesn’t like that, not at all. But then that hand lands on
Simon’s hip, and he’s being steered backward until he hits the door. And that’s—that’s perfect, because it turns out that
what Simon wants more than anything is to have the door behind him and the solid bulk of Charlie in front of him.
“Why do you taste like beer?” Charlie murmurs. “I’ve never seen you drink beer.”
“I had to be super butch, so I drank two molecules of Heineken,” Simon says into the corner of Charlie’s mouth. He can feel
when Charlie smiles.
When Charlie leans in again, Simon feels the muscles of Charlie’s back shift under his hands. It jolts Simon’s brain into
remembering that he doesn’t have to keep his hands politely at ten and two o’clock on Charlie’s back. He’s allowed to touch.
Encouraged, even, if the way Charlie bites Simon’s lip is anything to go by.
Simon is not unfamiliar with the shape of Charlie’s body. He’s not unfamiliar with how Charlie’s body feels against his own
or the smell of his skin. He knows what Charlie’s shoulder blades feel like, the nape of his neck, the curve of his shoulder.
It’s different, obviously, like this, but the collision of familiar and brand-new is electricity under Simon’s fingers, and
he wonders if Charlie feels the same way as his hands map out the terrain of Simon’s hips, his ribs, his shoulders.
“Fucking layers.” Charlie pulls at the hem of Simon’s shirt, sliding a hand underneath.
“Get rid of it.” Simon could do it himself, but it’s better when Charlie does it.
Simon starts in on his buttons but only gets the first two open before Charlie’s pulling it over his head, throwing it on the floor next to his sweater with the kind of disrespect fine fabrics don’t deserve and which Simon is not prepared to do anything about.
Then they’re skin to skin, and it’s a shock, new in every way.
Charlie’s mouth is hot and urgent on his neck, his body big and warm and heavy.
Simon’s thoughts are honey-slow, and it takes a minute before he remembers he can put his mouth on Charlie too. So that’s
what he does, kissing Charlie’s jaw. Simon is slightly obsessed with the place where the scratch of Charlie’s beard meets
the softness of his neck, the way Charlie’s body goes taut at the contact, the sound he makes.
“We should get dinner,” Simon says, feeling like somebody ought to make an effort to hit the brakes.
“Yeah, sure,” Charlie agrees. “Just give me ten minutes.” He presses his palm over the zipper of Simon’s jeans. “More like
five.”
Simon, torn between arguing and the need to push into Charlie’s hand, decides to split the difference. “Why aren’t we on the
bed? It’s right there, for God’s sake, Charlie.”
The room is cramped enough that the bed is, in fact, right there. Two uncoordinated steps, and Simon’s on his back, Charlie on top of him. Simon could stay like this, Charlie’s weight
pinning him to the bed, but he needs to know what’s next. He’s no good at surprises.
“What do you like?” Simon asks.
“Right now, I like kissing you.”
It’s a non-answer, and Simon could be annoyed that Charlie’s missing the point.
It’s also not something Simon needs spelled out for him—obviously Charlie’s enjoying this, because Simon’s never been kissed so thoroughly in his life.
But for some reason, Charlie’s words send a warm rush of pleasure racing down Simon’s spine.
“I like it too,” he says. It feels like the darkest confession, something whispered and secret.
“I can tell.” Charlie rolls their hips together.
“That’s not what I—”
“I know. I just mean I can tell when you like something. All the rubber bands holding you together aren’t strung so tight,
just for a minute. That’s how you get when craft services has those muffins or when someone brings their dog to set. Or when
I kiss you right here.” He kisses a spot under Simon’s ear.
Simon can feel it, can feel himself slacken in Charlie’s arms, then shivers when he thinks about Charlie noticing, knowing
what it means, cataloging the things that make it happen.
“I like it,” Charlie says. “It’s one of the things I like the most about you. I just really do,” he mumbles into Simon’s neck,
and Simon can’t figure out how that relates to anything Charlie’s been saying, so he puts two fingers in Charlie’s mouth to
shut him up, and also because he wants to, and things escalate from there.
Well, by escalate, Simon means Charlie pulls Simon’s fingers out of his mouth and presses his hand to the bed, says, “For
fuck’s sake,” and kisses him some more. Tomorrow, Simon’s going to be red with beard burn and the thought makes him squirm,
makes him think about even more places Charlie could mark him up, even more ways.