29. Abbot
ABBOT
It’s late when Abbot finally unlocks his door. Baxter hurries in like always, heading straight for his bowl in the kitchen, familiar with the darkened rooms even as Abbot flicks on the light.
Ned hangs up his coat. “I didn’t pack anything.”
“You have some things here.” Abbot unzips his jacket and the ring feels odd on his hand. Heavy. He’s never worn more than a watch and the weight on his finger is a change he noticed again and again through the evening.
“Dog food?” Ned asks. “Sorry, I should have sent him back with my parents and Peggy.”
“I have some.”
“You do?”
“I thought it would be good to keep on hand.”
Ned looks up from unlacing his shoes. “Knew I married you for a reason.”
The warmth that’s sat in Abbot’s chest all evening grows brighter. “Oh, is that why?”
“That and the cake.”
“It was quite good.”
“I didn’t think Liesl could eat that much.”
“Impressive, I know.”
And their father hadn’t said anything, just watched as Liesl cut another piece for herself, larger than the previous, and then set about devouring it.
Even Peggy had left the last of hers half eaten on her plate, a smudge of frosting on her cheek, when Dan had finally bundled her into her coat and carried her to the car.
The evening had been…fun. Strange, to have his father there with Ned’s family, different parts of Abbot’s life together in that one room where he used to stop for a cup of tea and today found himself married in.
But enjoyable, if odd. It went by quickly until the late hour finally scattered everyone, the Coppolas back to Boston, his father and Liesl off to Chris’s and Susan’s for the night, and he and Ned shooed off to his house by Pat with a waggle of his eyebrows.
Ned catches his eye now. “Should have carried you over the threshold.”
“We still can.”
“Nah, too cold to go back outside. We’ll have to make do.”
“If only there were other wedding-night traditions we could entertain ourselves with.”
“M’gonna get Baxter a bone.” Ned jogs to the kitchen.
Ned’s murmur to the dog is familiar, as is the sound of the freezer door, and then Ned is coming back, wiping wet hands on his slacks, Baxter behind him.
He trots with the bone in his mouth, his head held up, clearly proud of his treat, and when Ned points to his bed in the corner of the living room, Baxter obediently sets his bone on it before folding down around it.
“We’ll need more of those for this weekend,” Ned says.
It’s so easy to tease him. So fun, too, a lightness between them that Abbot hasn’t felt in longer than he realized. “Will we?”
Ned crowds him towards the stairs. “I don’t know about you, but I have the next two days entirely planned out.”
I get her until Sunday, Susan had said, holding Liesl in a long hug. You can’t have her back until then. And Dan and Cheryl had taken Peggy with them, no mention of Ned following them back to Boston anytime soon.
And his father in town—no, Abbot doesn’t need to interrupt his time with Ned to see him. “Why, do you have a lot of grading to do?” Abbot asks blithely.
“If that’s what the kids are calling it these days.” Ned grabs Abbot’s hand and hurries them up the stairs.
Abbot goes willingly, stopping only to turn on the lamp on his dresser, and the other on his nightstand. He wants to see Ned. To know this is real, after the flurry of today.
He feels real, when Abbot puts his arms around him and finds his mouth in a kiss.
Feels like he always does, solid and warm, Ned’s hands falling to Abbot’s waist and gripping there.
Abbot revels in it, the answer in Ned’s mouth as it moves with him, the strength in his hands that slide up his ribs, down to his hips, and then press flat to his back, bringing their bodies close.
Ned touches with such confidence, and that certainty passes through him to Abbot, grounding him as it always does.
Ned’s the only and the last person Abbot will ever be intimate with again, their mouths working together, his fingers in Ned’s hair, the shape of his body held so close against him.
There’s so much relief in that, the sure end to any searching, to the years of dissatisfaction and disappointment with other men.
He hadn’t even known this was who he’d been waiting for, couldn’t have conjured up the idea of Ned because he’d never been able to guess at who he truly wanted.
A crush, he’d told himself when his skin tingled anytime Ned was in the same room, sure even then that he ought to look for someone more like himself, not this friendly, funny man he’s holding now.
“Remember that first time up here?” Abbot asks, pulling away to tip their foreheads together.
Remember? Ned had asked him just hours ago in Pat’s apartment.
Abbot grips the back of Ned’s neck, his body alight with how Ned’s hands draw slowly down his back to rest low on his waist. Abbot remembers.
He remembers all of it, everything from that fall.
That first time he’d gone to Ned’s apartment, nervous and excited all at once at the chance to be in Ned’s space.
The first time they’d kissed, which Abbot had been certain would be their last, wanting to memorize the brush of lips and the scent of Ned’s skin, just as surely as his mind spun and his heart hammered and he could focus on nothing at all in the rush of the moment.
Making Ned laugh, not the uncomfortable sound he’d heard so often, but a true, genuine note of delight.
Taking Ned out to dinner after his dissertation defense with the sure knowledge that it was a date, and the calmness and thrill that thought had been.
“The first time?” Ned asks. “Hell yeah I do. You invited me upstairs and I nearly died right there.”
“Really rather fortunate that you didn’t.” Abbot drops his hand down Ned’s side, tracing light over the ladder of his ribs, the dip of his waist. “I thought you were going to say no.”
“Me too,” Ned says and laughs, a puff of air against Abbot’s mouth. “And then you told me to shut up and stop talking.”
“Self-preservation. I could only handle so much.”
And it had been, the very thought of Ned in his bedroom overcrowding his brain, so that Abbot could barely stand the fact of him, the sight of his chest and shoulders that Abbot had spent so long trying not to imagine, and then quickly the rest of his body too.
Turning away from him had been the only choice, a matter of steeling himself against the sight of the man he’d wanted for so long, and so surely couldn’t have for more than that one night.
Now, Abbot gets forever. He presses Ned back to the bed, kissing him again as he climbs over his body, Ned laid out beneath him.
Abbot rises onto his knees, unbuttoning his shirt, intent on baring them both down to skin.
He gets this. Gets Ned. Not just once, the shock that first night had been, and not twice, following Ned up the narrow stairs to his apartment, desperate to be together again and pained with the knowledge that if once was sheer luck, twice was so impossible it had to preclude anything more.
But more had come, more and more and more, and he has Ned beneath him, his eyes dark, his mouth opening for another kiss.
He works Ned’s shirt off, sliding his hands greedily over his pecs, tracing the muscles in his shoulders, the line of his collarbone, hungry for the feel of him.
Abbot backs off the bed to kneel on the floor, Ned scrambling to help him with his belt buckle, to open his pants and shove them and his boxers down.
Yes. This. Ned up on his elbows, his mouth slack as Abbot takes his cock in his hand, and then his mouth, earning a deep rumble of sound from the back of Ned’s throat.
“That’s so good,” Ned whispers as Abbot bobs down and back up, his hips rocking, his hand gripped hard on Abbot’s shoulder. “That’s—ah—like that, exactly like that.”
Abbot could bring him off like this, working at him, Ned’s taste leaking onto his tongue, and he’d gasp and his body would tense.
Instead Abbot pulls off of him and strips off the rest of his clothes, throwing them after the pile of Ned’s on the floor.
Ned scrambles up the bed on his back, heels pushing, his long torso turning as he fumbles at the nightstand drawer.
Yes, they understand each other. Hasn’t that always been the crux of their connection?
As different as they are, as separate as their lives, they’ve always been able to find in the other that deep patience and acceptance, more intimate than anything they could do with their bodies.
Not that they can’t try to match it. Abbot had always preferred sex on his knees, only the mattress and pillows to look at, his hands bracing his weight, any pleasure and the touch of another as distant from him as he could manage for such a personal act.
He sits on Ned’s legs, letting him look his fill, and looking in return.
Ned’s skin is golden in the lamplight, his cheeks flushed and eyes bright.
Abbot slicks Ned’s cock with lube, enjoying the fingers that dig into his thigh, the way a twist of his fist can get Ned’s body to twitch, and the slow drag of his thumb, Ned’s breath to come harder.
“C’mon,” Ned urges, a tremble of eagerness in his voice, a hastiness in his hands when he grabs Abbot’s waist.
He doesn’t make Ned wait, just shifts forward. Ned helps guide him, and Abbot pauses for a moment, adjusting to the stretch. Ned stares up at him, eyes blown wide.
Abbot moves, rocking slowly. Ned’s body is so familiar now, the ways he reacts and what he likes most. Sex has never been so easy or so fun, wringing such delight out of his partner as its own enjoyment, the pleasure building in his body second to the flush on Ned’s face, the desperation of his gasps.
“Is that good?” Abbot asks.
He knows it is, can already tell Ned is past the point of joking conversation, his focus drawn to their bodies moving, his mind right here and here only.
“No…” Ned manages. “Talking.”
“Ah, so it just took you a year and a half to agree.”
Ned’s cheek bulges as he clenches his molars and his mouth works, silent, as Abbot shifts the angle slightly.
“You’re. Funny,” Ned gasps. “Oh.”
Abbot watches Ned, and lets Ned watch him, his gaze on his body, snapping down to his cock when Abbot grips himself.
Yes, there, the glassiness in Ned’s eyes, the looseness in his face, before he sucks down a gulp of air and his body strains taut, hips rising up, hands grinding Abbot down onto him with a deep moan.
Abbot brushes Ned’s hair back from his forehead as he starts to breathe again, as his grip eases and the tension in his body does too.
“Fuck, Abbot,” Ned says, succinct and profane and perfect, his voice a rough rasp, his chest still rising and falling rapidly.
“That was the idea,” Abbot agrees, and as he eases off of him, Ned gasps again.
Yes, he likes Ned like this too, likes all of it, him gasping at the movement of their bodies and him now, pliant and loose-limbed, rolling onto his side to face Abbot when he lays down next to him, their kiss a soft one, and the next and the next gentle as well.
And then Ned gets onto his knees, and there’s the sound of the cap coming off the bottle of lube, and the shift of the mattress as he moves—
Abbot presses his palm to his face as Ned swallows him down, fingers slipping inside of him.
He’s still wearing his glasses, he realizes only then, fingers shaking as he tries to take them off, nearly missing the nightstand when he shoves them in that direction.
Let them fall to the floor. He hardly cares, gripping at his own hair, Ned’s fingers skilled and his focus pointed again.
Centered on Abbot, he knows, and that had been the intoxication of their first time together, Ned’s attention on him. He’ll never grow used to it, the potency of his touch as overwhelming now as it has always been. It’s Ned, his mouth warm and wet, his finger finding—
“Oh.” Abbot nearly levers off the bed, stomach tightening, catching himself on one hand as he half sits up.
Ned hums, which does nothing to ease the sudden grip of pleasure.
Abbot sinks onto his elbow, his other hand finding the back of Ned’s head.
Abbot’s world narrows to the stroke of Ned’s finger in him, the rhythm of his mouth.
Abbot’s thighs shake and his orgasm wells up all at once, sudden and shocking in its strength, leaving him writhing both away and into Ned’s touch as he rides it out.
It’s impossible that sex is this good. That his mind can blank out so thoroughly, that his body can be played so expertly.
That Ned cared enough to learn how to wring this from his body, and then has set about applying that knowledge.
That he’s here at all, and that he’ll keep being here forever more.
Abbot folds himself into Ned, his skin tingling, his breath gasped against Ned’s chest. Ned strokes his hair, his back, lifts Abbot’s limp hand and kisses it.
The ring on his finger glints in the lamplight. Ned holds his wrist, turning his hand this way and that.
“Are you happy?” Abbot manages when he finds his voice again.
Ned hugs him. “Yeah. You?”
“Yes.”
Ned’s fingers sift through his hair. “Maybe not what I figured we’d be doing today, but we’re good.”
“We are,” Abbot agrees.
Yes, they are. Of course they are. They’re together, and that’s been the best version of both of them, and in the end, all that matters. An official piece of paper, rings on their fingers, none of it is as important as this, laying pressed together.